-------- Original Message -------- Subject: Re: [naspir] in support of David Graber Date: Thu, 12 May 2005 11:32:48 -0400 From: david.graeber at yale.edu To: Jamie Heckert <jamie.heckert at gmail.com> CC: naspir at yahoogroups.com, David Graeber <david.graeber at yale.edu>, Andrej Grubacic <zapata at sezampro.yu>
(please feel free to circulate)
Many people have asked for proof that I was fired for political reasons. This is the best response I can make in this matter:
1) There is no way to produce "proof" of what was in the minds of those who voted to terminate me. In fact, there's no way to produce "proof" of anything they said. All the meetings were conducted in secrecy and all participants are forbidden, by Yale rules, to reveal anything about what was discussed in them. This means: if accusations of any sort were made against me, not only was I not allowed to reply, I'm not even allowed to know what those accusations were, even after the fact. Thus the whole system is constructed so as to ensure no one can prove anything, know anything, at all. One can only speculate. And then of course anything one comes up with can be written off as "only speculation". Still, some facts are undeniable:
2) What happened to me is extremely unusual. This should have been a routine promotion. (It's getting tenure at Yale that's usually difficult.)
3) Normally one can expect to be given some sort of reason for non-renewal. I was, very unusually, given no reasons whatsoever.
4) All this happened despite the the fact that I have by now enough publications accumulated to get tenure two or three times over in any normal university. For example I have two books already published, one in press, and a fourth already written and under consideration. The first two are being assigned in courses in anthro departments around the country (Chicago, Columbia, Brown...) and receiving attention internationally. My essays have been translated into something like twelve different languages by now. My name (jeez, this is so immodest - I'm really not normally a person to boast like this but I've rather been driven to a position where I don't have much alternative)has appeared, or is appearing, in series and collections alongside names like Marshall Sahlins, Bruno Latour, Jacques Ranciere, Hans Joas, Donna Haraway, Alain Badiou... To give you some idea, here are a couple quotes about my book from the publisher's web page:
(blurbs from the palgrave web page:)
'I have not enjoyed or been so inspired by a work in anthropological theory for quite some time - I am convinced that this book is extremely important to the field of anthropology and to social theory more generally, offering alternatives to the relentlessly bleak theorizing of most post-structuralist and postmodernist critical theory - I think this book might well become a classic.' - Thomas Abercrombie, NYU
'David Graeber is probably the most exciting young anthropologist in the field today.' - Judith Friedlander, Dean of Social Sciences (Graduate Faculty), New School for Social Research
(this one is from the back of the book):
'This is an extraordinary contribution to social science theory. What a contrast to the self-righteous sludge we usually have to endure! It is written with the verve, the clarity and the humour of Swift. It is learned and not pedantic. It is an unpretentious, yet totally committed, attempt to understand the human condition - nothing less.' - Maurice Bloch, LSE
----------------- anyway, you get the idea. It's been fairly well received.
5) My external reviews were uniformly positive.
6) I am one of the most popular undergraduate teachers in the department and have strong support from the graduate students, who produced an unprecedented volume of letters on my behalf and are now campaigning to have me reinstated.
7) I am one of the only declared anarchists currently active in American academia, and probably the best recognized one.
8) Starting in 2001 my name began appearing in the papers as a spokesman for activist groups in the global justice movement - particularly the Direct Action Network in New York. also the ACC, Ya Basta!...
9) During the protests against the World Economic Forum in New York in 2001, I was widely quoted (actually, misquoted mostly, but that's another matter) as an anarchist spokesman. Certain right wing Yale alumni began a letter-writing campaign demanding I be fired.
10) When I returned from my 2001-2002 sabbatical researching a book on direct action and direct democracy in the global justice movement, some of my senior colleagues were no longer speaking to me. Some have continued to refuse to say hello to me in the hall or speak to me in any circumstances not required by their official functions ever since.
11) The anthropology department is wracked by notorious and bitter divisions over graduate student unionization and the same small number of senior faculty who seem most publicly hostile to me are also notorious in their hostility to the union. This year one of them led an attempt to expel a very brilliant and accomplished graduate student, who also happened to be a major union organizer, from the department. I was the one member of her committee who openly stood up to those demanding that she leave the program, and aggressively defended her. With the help a number of other decent and principled faculty members we were successful, despite tensions surrounding a week-long strike that was being called at that time. The student - who is soon going to be going public with this story - and the union are convinced this was the primary reason I was targeted.
You can put the pieces together as you care to. But when a popular teacher and extremely well-recognized scholar who happens to be an anarchist is suddenly fired, with no explanation, from an elite university, after defending a union organizer, in the context of a major strike, in an extremely irregular fashion... well, it seems not unreasonable to assume that there might have been a political element involved.
Can't prove it though.
David
--
"The bourgeois want art voluptuous and life
ascetic; the reverse would be better"
-- Adorno Tim http://huh.34sp.com/