Michael Dove - K. Sivaramakrishnan Reflection

Michael Dove
Yale University 

One of those participating in today’s events is our former Provost, and Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge, Alison Richard.  One of Professor Richard’s many gifts to Yale was the founding four decades ago of the combined doctoral program in Anthropology and the Environment – still the only one in existence.  It has produced more than 30 Ph.D.s over the years – most of whom seem to be in the room at the moment! – some of whom have gone into policy work, most into tenure or tenure-track positions, at one of the highest rates in the Faculty of Arts & Sciences.  Our graduates, fanning out across the U.S., Europe, and Asia, have brought the interdisciplinary vision of the program into many departments of anthropology and allied fields.

The program is flourishing: we receive dozens of applications every year; this year we are graduating three students; we currently have nine others in the program – three of whom won awards at the AAA meetings last November! – and we will welcome two new students into the program this coming Fall.  Shivi and I have made an effort to return to the roots of the original program under Professor Richard – two of the students currently in the program are in the biological anthropology division of the department, studying non-human primates.  The students in the program, past and present alike, are all extraordinary scholars!

We have a 20-page, 3300-word Guideline for the program, which Shivi and I have labored mightily on over the years.  It is a lovely document!  No one reads it!  When questions arise about a particular student’s requirements, the default position is, instead, to simply say, “Ask Shivi.”

Which means, ask Shivi not for what’s in the Guidelines, but rather for what’s not in them.  No written set of rules can meet the unique circumstances of individual students, while at the same time balancing the somewhat incongruent administrations of two different departments, Anthropology and YSE.  What the program has depended upon instead is what we might call Shivi’s keen ethnographic insight into the Yale bureaucracy and, especially, his unwavering dedication to the interests and welfare of each student – all of this very much in the spirit with which Professor Richard initially endowed the program.

This is what has made the program flourish, and it is something we will be hard pressed to replace after Shivi leaves.  So hard-pressed, indeed, that I rather think, when issues arise in the future, we will avail ourselves of today’s wonders of global communication and continue to keep asking Shivi for his sage advice!

Thank you.