Tensions with Merging Stanford’s Anthropology Department back
Remember when I brought up the news that Stanford’s anthropology departments were merging back? It wasn’t too long ago, maybe two weeks or so? I bring this up because The Stanford Daily is running a juicy column on the tensions the merger has caused. Most of the complaints are coming from the bio-arch side, such as John Rick and James Fox. Here’s a rather scathing comment from John Rick,
“The administration has shown itself to be idiotic in the way they’ve approached the whole thing…”
The piece mentions how the faculty is still struggling to understand the motivation behind the merger of the two departments, and if you read the comments, so are some of the students. What’s really curious is how James Ferguson was chosen as the new chair of the Anthropology Department. Ever so outspoken Rick comments on it,
“In this case, there were no faculty consulted, and the chair was appointed for five years, which is an unusually long time.”
Well, I wish Stanford the best of luck. It seems like some people gotta just suck it up and deal with all the shuffling. I must say, I also don’t understand why there was such urgency to merge the two back together either. They were working great as separate entities.
