The right to be fired

Everyone working outside academia–now’s your chance. All together, pianissimo sing “tweedle, needle, weedle” . . .

Seriously, though, I have great sympathy for the two groups Graeber defends: graduate students and non-tenured faculty. In most cases, I think the tenured faculties at most universities actually do hold to high standards in deciding who advances and who doesn’t in academia. However, politics and favoritism does at times play a role that really shouldn’t be tolerated. So why can’t the tenured faculty be made to state their reasons for advancing or not advancing either students or non-tenured faculty? They still have the freedom to decide what reasons are valid in their Departments–they just simply have to be open about those reasons and be consistent in their application of their own standards. If the standards are clear and the reasons for advancement or non-advancement are justifiable, what’s the problem with being open? It’s almost the same argument I’d use about Dick Cheney’s energy task force. If the people on that task force are afraid to state publically their opinions, aren’t we all justified in being a bit suspicious whether those opinions are really not self-serving in some way?

Unfortunately, some people who survive the abuse turn into abusers. It’s not unlike medical residents who are forced to work absurdly long hours just because the attending physicians had to do it when they were young . . .

What senior faculty of Yale are we talking about here? From the articles on the net, counterpunch etc, it appears it was really in the hands of two or three individuals. Which ones?

I don’t know much (anything?) about the climate in Anthropology, but in most fields anyone with outstanding scholarship who was dismissed for political reasons would be picked up by a competing university in a second. So let’s see what happens to Mr. Graeber.

As a former member of the Yale faculty who has gone on to better pastures, I would point out a two things I learned while I was in New Haven.

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.

What kind of kooky position did this guy have anyway?

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.

non-tenure track faculty are fighting for the right “to be fired, but only with just cause.”

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…

thanks for the clarification jacob.

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

We don’t want to be married to people who don’t like us and we don’t want to work for people who don’t like us. If Yale doesn’t like David Graeber, it’s time to move on. Tenure or no tenure, there’s no point in working for people who don’t value you the way you are.

The little bits I’ve heard from private sources tend to confirm David G.’s account of what happened. To my mind there’s no question that his scholarship is some of the best coming out of that department, and his collegiality was one of the few saving graces in my own miserable stint (in a different department) some years ago.