Inside the Current Issue

ACADEMIC REPRESSION IN THE FIRST PERSON Presented here is the third installment in an on-going series which lets professors, students and university employees tell their own stories of being fired, passed up for promotion, suspended or silenced for their political views. If you've experienced academic repression, contact us at gcadvocate@gmail.com

Academic Repression: David Graeber Speaks Out

 

Yale Anthropology professor David Graeber.

This spring, Yale Anthropology professor David Graeber unexpectedly lost his job during a pre-tenure review, normally considered a rubber-stamp procedure. A popular teacher and well-known writer, suspicions immediately turned to Graeber's anarchist politics (which had only a few years before made him the target of right-wing alumni who campaigned to have him removed) and his defense of a grad student union organizer. His case attracted widespread support after his students rallied to his defense: an online petition they set up has been signed by almost 4,500 people and a bill supporting him was introduced into the EU parliament (for more information, see www.geocities.com/graebersolidarity). Here's what Graeber has to say about what happened to him in his own words:

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 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, etc.) and receiving attention internationally. My essays have been translated into something like twelve different languages by now. My work has appeared, or is appearing, in series and collections alongside people such as Marshall Sahlins, Bruno Latour, Jacques Ranciere, Hans Joas, Donna Haraway and Alain Badiou. I think it's fair to say that my scholarship has been well-received internationally.

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, such as the New York chapters of the Direct Action Network, the Anti-Capitalist Convergence and Ya Basta!

9) During the protests against the World Economic Forum in New York in 2001, I was widely quoted (although in actuality I was misquoted) as an anarchist spokesman. Certain right-wing Yale alumni began a letter-writing campaign demanding I be fired.

10) When I returned from my 2001-02 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 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.