New York Times - December 28, 2005
When Scholarship and Politics Collided at Yale By KAREN W. ARENSON
David Graeber pulled a green object shaped like a Champagne cork out of his pocket.
"Do you know what this is?" he asked recently. "It's a plastic bullet." The bullet, he said, was fired by the police in Quebec City during a protest against globalization in 2001, grazing his head.
Battles with the police are a fact of life for Dr. Graeber, an associate professor of anthropology at Yale and a self-proclaimed anarchist. It was his battle with Yale that surprised him.
The university notified him in the spring of 2005 that it would not renew his contract next year. Yale gave no reason, and officials said they could not discuss the dismissal because personnel matters were confidential.
But to Dr. Graeber the reason was obvious: his politics. He appealed, and supporters around the world wrote letters on his behalf, some calling him one of the most brilliant anthropologists of his generation.
This month, Yale, which says that personal political beliefs "are not a consideration" in appointments, amended its decision; it offered Dr. Graeber a paid sabbatical if he would drop his appeal. He accepted.
"So many academics lead such frightened lives," he said. "The whole system sometimes seems designed to encourage paranoia and timidity. I wasn't willing to live like that."
A Yale spokesman and three of Dr. Graeber's colleagues declined to comment about Dr. Graeber, repeating that personnel matters were confidential.
Dr. Graeber said that criticism of his behavior - like coming late to class and turning in reports late - did not surface until his politics became visible.
"They couldn't criticize my research or my teaching, so they talked about my community work," he said.
In theory, Dr. Graeber agrees that an anarchist professor might have problems in establishment institutions. In a online article, "Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology" (www.prickly-paradigm.com), he declared, "Being an openly anarchist professor would mean challenging the way universities are run."
But Dr. Graeber, 44, a slender man with tousled hair and a chipped front tooth, says: "I'm not really an anarchist as a professor. I'm a very conventional professor really. I do much more lecturing, for example, than sitting around doing free egalitarian discussion."
Known in anthropological circles for his work on value theory - how societies determine what is important - and anarchism, he said he had tried to compartmentalize the two sides of his life: "I figured I'd be a scholar in New Haven and an activist in New York."
Over barbecued beef wrapped in grape leaves and jumbo shrimp on chipped ice, he described his path from a teenager who translated hieroglyphic passages that had never before been translated to a scholar whose books and articles are used in college classrooms around the world and an anarchist who is a card-carrying member of the Industrial Workers of the World.
Dr. Graeber said his comfort with anarchism stemmed, in part, from his family - his father fought in the Spanish Civil War and his mother was a garment worker. "Anarchy wasn't dinner table conversation," he said, "but it was on the horizon."
And as an anthropologist, he said, he realized that "throughout most of human history, people got by without centralized governments."
In Madagascar, where he worked on his doctoral thesis, he lived in an area where "state authority had effectively disappeared," he said.
He began his anthropology studies at Purchase College of the State University of New York.
Judith Friedlander, an anthropologist who taught him there and is now at Hunter College, said he was "hands down, the most brilliant student I ever had."
At the University of Chicago, he won a Fulbright fellowship and completed a Ph.D. thesis on magic, slavery and politics in Madagascar. Two years later, in 1998, he joined Yale as an assistant professor, even though junior professors there were not on a tenure track.
"I figured it was the best temporary job you could possibly have," he said. "For 10 years, you don't have too big a teaching load. It had lots of prestige. And the pay was O.K."
He added, "I'm up to about $63,000."
He was by many accounts a prolific writer and popular teacher. Although he sometimes came late, his classes were crowded.
Joseph Hill, a Yale graduate student in anthropology who supports Dr. Graeber, described his classes as "highly interesting and provocative."
He added: "They are all over the map, which makes it hard for some students to follow. But students who like to see how diverse little facts and grand theories come together actually find his lectures very well put together and easy to follow."
Dr. Graeber's first three years went well, and he was given a second three-year contract. By then, he had become captivated by direct political action. He said he found the large protests against globalization in Seattle and Washington "transformative - 30,000 people and no leadership. People coming to a consensus without anyone running the show. You wouldn't think it could happen, but it does. And it's compelling."
He joined groups like the Direct Action Network, and his political activity became more visible. He was an organizer and spokesman for the protest against the World Economic Forum in New York in 2001. And he was one of several hundred people arrested during a protest against the International Monetary Fund in Washington in 2002.
When he returned from a sabbatical for his second three years, he said, some colleagues would not talk to him. Three years later, he was given two years instead of a standard four-year contract and told to contribute more and be more careful about things like arriving at class on time. "I was told I was unreliable," he said.
He said that after that critical review, he directed a colloquium series, took part in more meetings, taught more and was more careful about promptness. But he also had disagreements with senior colleagues, including defending a student active in the graduate student unionization movement.
Yale decided in the spring not to give him two more years, prompting outcries. More than 4,500 people signed petitions in his support. Maurice Bloch, a noted anthropologist at the London School of Economics, who says Dr. Graeber is "the best anthropological theorist of his generation," called on Yale to rescind the dismissal.
"I know nothing about the circumstances which have led you to your decision," he said, "but I cannot believe that a university such as yours cannot cope with erratic behavior or that it can afford to lose so extraordinarily talented a colleague."
But some of his colleagues say it was not really about Dr. Graeber's politics. Linda-Anne Rebhun, an associate professor in anthropology at Yale who recently failed to win tenure, said the problem was "the Yale system" that has forced many junior faculty to leave.
"It says something about Dr. Graeber's sense of politics," she added, "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."
Mr. Hill said that while politics may not have been the overt cause for Dr. Graeber's dismissal, his anarchistic manner was undoubtedly a factor.
"I don't think senior faculty sat behind closed doors and actually adduced the fact that he's an anarchist in making the case against him: 'All in favor of the anarchist say aye,' " Mr. Hill said. "But it seems to me that he was fired at least in part for being who he is, a large part of which is his egalitarian philosophy and practice of life, his contempt for authority."
Others said they were not surprised that Yale did not want to keep him. "I actually think places like Yale are not for people like David Graeber," said Stanley Aronowitz, a left-leaning professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. "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."
Dr. Graeber said he planned to use his paid sabbatical year for research, writing, activism and a job search. He said that he had already had some nibbles and that he was leaving Yale with his "integrity intact." He says with some satisfaction that while his department did not renew his contract, "I'm better known than most of them."