The anthropology department at the University of California at Berkeley has long been an esteemed center of scholarship, if also a contentious place. Next year it’s going to be run by a historian.
The decision to appoint an interim chair from outside the department has angered several of the department’s most senior and respected members, who describe the move as an affront to departmental self-governance—and a slight to them personally.
The move, however, also has strong support within the department, reflecting a generational rift, or at least a generational shift in power.
Mary Elizabeth Berry, a former chair of the history department and a Japan specialist, will serve as interim chair of anthropology next year while Cori Hayden, an associate professor of anthropology, finishes a book on the emergence of generic drugs in Mexico. Ms. Hayden is slated to take over as chair in the fall of 2014.
The decision to appoint Ms. Berry was made by Carla Hesse, dean of the social-sciences division of Berkeley’s College of Letters & Science.
In a brief interview, Ms. Hesse described the arrangement as entirely routine. Ideally, she said, she would have chosen a former anthropology chair to take over for a year while the best choice for chair, Ms. Hayden, finished the book, but the professors she approached who had that credential weren’t able to take on the duty, for various reasons.
Nonetheless, three of the most well-known anthropologists in the department took umbrage at the decision, about which they were not consulted and which was announced in an e-mail sent out by the departmental manager as the semester was winding down.
‘Kind of a Shock’
“The way it was done and what was done was unprecedented and kind of a shock,” said Paul M. Rabinow, a professor in the department. “This is another big step in the disenfranchisement of the faculty in general, and it’s part of a general change in the regime of how this public university is being governed.”
In particular, said Mr. Rabinow, who is the author of such books as Marking Time: On the Anthropology of the Contemporary (Princeton University Press, 2007) and French DNA: Trouble in Purgatory (University of Chicago Press, 1999), the appointment represented “a strong statement on the part of the administration” that the department’s senior members were “not considered to be reliable stewards of our affairs.”
His concerns were shared by Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Laura Nader, who, at 82, is the longest-serving member of the department. Last March her 50 years of work at Berkeley were feted at a symposium titled “Anthropology in the World.” (Ms. Scheper-Hughes and Mr. Rabinow are both in their late 60s.)
Ms. Nader stressed that her complaints had little to do with the people who were appointed. “It’s about departmental independence and democratic governance,” she said, although she expressed disappointment at younger colleagues who were content to go along with the administrative plan.
She and the other critics of the decision said Stanley H. Brandes, another senior cultural anthropologist and a past chair, would have been a sensible choice for a home-grown interim chair. Mr. Brandes could not be reached for comment.
Most members of the department appear to be unmoved by the arguments of the senior cultural anthropologists. “I find it to be a petty academic quibble to think that a department name difference should matter in the choice of this one-year interim chair,” wrote Terrence Deacon, the current chair of the department, in an e-mail, “particularly given the intellectual overlaps involved in this case.” He was referring to Ms. Berry’s writings on culture in early modern Japan and her authorship of such books as The Culture of Civil War in Kyoto (University of California Press, 1994).
Lawrence Cohen, a cultural anthropologist, echoed that position and added that tight budgets and significant responsibilities among the department’s members limited the pool of possible chairs. “So,” he wrote in an e-mail, “for a year we have someone from a much larger department helping.”
Nor is every member of the senior generation in agreement with the dissenters. Nelson H. Graburn, a professor emeritus, said that he strongly supported Ms. Hayden and that Ms. Berry struck him as “very straightforward and on the level.”
The Dean’s Role
At Berkeley, deans have the authority to appoint department chairs. That is done in consultation with the faculty members, but because anthropology is unusually factionalized—with archaeologists and cultural anthropologists essentially running parallel operations within the department, for instance—administrators have for years played an outsize role in such appointments. In more-homogenous departments, professors present their own candidates for ratification. Administrators have selected the three anthropology chairs preceding Ms. Berry, after soliciting nominations, Berkeley professors said, but this is the first time they’ve gone outside the department.
Ms. Hayden, the anthropologist who will become chair in 2014, declined to comment, and Ms. Berry, the historian set to run the department starting in the fall, sent an e-mail saying she looked forward to serving the interests of the “luminous department.”
The critics aired their concerns at a meeting with Dean Hesse last week. They have gone so far as to use the word “receivership” to describe the situation, a hot-button term typically deployed when administrators bring in outside leadership to rebuild basket-case departments. Ms. Hesse and most professors in the department completely reject that characterization, but critics of the appointment see a slippery slope. Ms. Nader asks, “Can a nonanthropologist represent anthropological interests to the administration?”
Berkeley was rated third among graduate anthropology departments in 1995 by the National Research Council and highly—if not quite that highly—in the more-opaque 2010 rankings, with the decline possibly due to a number of early retirements.
In recent years, Berkeley anthropologists have been active in protests over rising tuition, and last year they assisted with a student occupation of the anthropology library, successfully fending off cuts in the library’s hours. Ms. Scheper-Hughes sees the chair decision as of a piece with a host of unwelcome developments at Berkeley. “This is what neoliberal is—nontransparency, ‘top down’ rather than ‘bottom up,’ and deciding that consensus is what the dean decides it is,” she said.
She looks back to a time when department members would have fierce intellectual debates and yet present a united front to the administration. “When you saw things happen, like a hire, that perhaps you wished didn’t happen, everyone felt a little burned, but you came back in the fall and literally everyone had their arms around people’s backs,” she said. “That kind of sociability seems to be destroyed.”
Tim D. White, a paleoanthropologist who moved his lab to the department of integrative biology in 1995, along with other biological anthropologists, argued that this notion of a golden era of rough comity “is a historical fiction.” In his view, after all, his own subfield was disowned by the department.
Jonathan Marks, an anthropologist at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte who spent three years at Berkeley, said that tension is a productive part of the DNA of Berkeley anthropology. “There are a lot of very brilliant people, and it’s kind of sad that they can’t all get along,” he said. “But if they ever did, they might lose the magic that is that department.”
