Links
Archives
Thursday, December 29, 2005
|
UD WAS CHATTING… …while she was up in Cambridge, about a woman who’d been offered a junior faculty position at Yale and turned it down for a fine though less fancy university in the Midwest. Her decision may seem surprising, but many junior faculty offered jobs at Ivy League schools make the same one, because the Ivies tend not to tenure from within. If you’re hot enough to get an untenurable position at Yale, Princeton, or Harvard, you’re probably hot enough to get a tenurable one from another excellent university. UD doesn’t know whether David Graeber, the Yale anthropology professor who’s made a lot of noise lately about his non-renewal there, was offered other such jobs when he was on the market. But then there’s so much one doesn’t know about the murky Graeber story that it’s remarkable people keep writing about it. Final script approval on the Graeber thing involves a man whose wild anarchistic ways were too threatening to staid old Yale, bastion of effete apoliticals like Glenda Gilmore and Bruce Ackerman. "So many academics lead such frightened lives," Graeber says in an interview in the New York Times this morning. "The whole system sometimes seems designed to encourage paranoia and timidity. I wasn't willing to live like that." Yet Yale’s particular junior faculty system, again, is well-known -- if you accept a job there you almost certainly won’t get tenure. You’ll get six years or so of excellent students and colleagues, and time to do the research which will stand you in good stead when you go back on the market. There’s none of the uncertainty and darkness that might encourage paranoia or timidity; everything’s quite open and straightforward. “It says something about Dr. Graeber's sense of politics," a fellow junior faculty member at Yale remarks in the NYTimes article, "that he seems to take this as an individual, personal thing rather than taking a more anthropological view of the nature of the system that affects all junior scholars at Yale." UD figures this vague story remains compelling to newspapers because it seems to fit a perennially attractive conflictual scenario -- the one between bold revolutionary spirits and conventional repressive institutions. At the end of its article, the NYTimes trots out Stanley Aronowitz to announce that "places like Yale are not for people like David Graeber. He's a public intellectual. He speaks out. He participates. He's not someone who simply does good scholarship; he's an activist and a controversial person." But there are plenty of such people at Yale. UD thinks Aronowitz has been as snowed by this grandstander as he was by Alan Sokal. |