Does anyone know why the exceptions to this general rule tend to be economists who are often tenured at an astonishingly young age, e.g. Jeff Sachs, Greg Mankiw.

I guess it makes sense that Yale had to mimic Harvard’s nonsensical junior faculty policies (or maybe it was the other way around?).

It’s just the weird Yale process. “Tenure track” doesn’t exist there; rather, people are “ladder faculty.” After three years or so at the assistant level, faculty are reviewed. Then a few years after that, if they’re still around, they get reviewed again, at which most of them become “term associates,” which is to say untenured associates. Then they have to find a new job, because next to no one is ever tenured from the ranks at Yale. (I hear this is getting better in the past two or three years or so, and I see in my old department, history, there have been more promotions to tenure than there used to be.) What happened to Graeber is that he failed the second review to become an untenured associate. This is basically unheard-of, unless there’s a problem with their scholarly productivity—which I gather for Graeber isn’t the case.

That I’ve been spending the last few days grading papers and haven’t had time to check it out? Seriously – I’m happy to receive suggestions for posts, but please don’t imagine that I’m under any obligation either to take up the suggestion or to post according to your preferred timetable. Not how it works.

See:

http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0520,mondo1,64032,6.html

As I said in my response to one of the comments at Savage Minds, the current state of affairs leaves us in “the unenviable position of defending the already-unfavorable lines drawn in the ‘70s”—that is, to defend our right to academic freedom in the classroom as long as we don’t toe the line outside of the classroom. The “right to be fired” follows directly from our defense of what is, ultiamtely, an untenable position—academics struggling to defend a position in which administrative and state power are a little bit less arbitrary and stultifying. “Sneaky Pete” Bourdieu might have a little something to say about that, too…

It doesn’t sound like any kind of adjunct/non-tenure track position I’ve ever heard of. From the description, it actually IS a tenure track position, albeit with a longer ‘track’ than is typical.

“Graeber passed his first review at Yale, which came at the three-year mark. The review for term associate comes at the end of his sixth year, and normally renews the faculty member for four more years, after which he or she is considered for tenure.”

Sounds to me like the issue at hand here is more of an abuse of the tenure granting process than it is maltreatment of non-tenure track faculty.

What would Sneaky Pete Bourdieu have to say about this?

1) The untenured faculty that I knew understood that you could do and say what you wanted to about national and international politics but you didn’t rock the boat regarding internal departmental and University politics.

2) Yale’s desire to crush the unions (both workers and students) goes way, way back. In fact, I’m hard pressed to think of another issue, besides taxing the University, that so provokes the full fury of the Yale Corporation. The prevailing attitude amongst university officials, adminstrators and many senior faculty when I was there was that unionization of Yale workers and students was immoral and, in a bettter world, would be illegal. Effective participation in local union activities by a non-tenured faculty member has to be considered high risk behavior.

Companies may have shareholders or be owned privately. In the first case, there is a theoretical avenue to address less than justified paybacks. Private universities, such as Yale, don’t have formal shareholders nor are they owned by persons. Such universities are dictatorships run by Presidents, VPs, strong Deans and even obnoxious chairs.

It is time this relic of the past be shown the door and a more inspired, e.g. employee owned private university, system of governance be adopted.

Royalty, i.e. President, VPs, etc., move around from one institution to another while faculty, staff and the student body are the stakeholder and therefore should be the shareholders as well. They should own the place and govern democratically.

This may help the David Graebers.