I was born in Brooklyn at the end of World War Two, grew up on Long Island and went to the University of Pennsylvania just as the Vietname War was escalating. After perilous dancing with my draft board, I ended up in graduate school in anthropology at Columbia, did two years of field-research in the Peruvian Amazon and, in the years after getting my doctorate, taught in various places, including Mount Holyoke College and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. In 1980, I moved from there to Britain, where I spent the next 12 years, finally ending up directing an undergraduate program in human ecology at Huddersfield University in West Yorkshire. In 1992, I joined the faculty of the Institute of Social Studies (ISS) in The Hague, The Netherlands, where (after years of political conflict with the management) I eventually became an Associate Professor and Chair of the MA in Development Studies, the core academic business of the ISS. My children, Mimi (18) and Reuben (20) largely grew up in Holland, in an international community. I left Holland two years ago and currently live in northern Virginia, teach part-time at The George Washington University, edit my on-line political magazine, The Porcupine, and am finishing my novel. Reuben is studying film at The University of Kent in Canterbury, England, while Mimi completed her GED and lives with me. My books include: Death, Sex and Fertility: Population Regulation in Preindustrial and Developing Societies and The Malthus Factor: Poverty, Politics and Population in Capitalist Development.
Events over the last two years in Knoxville, Tennessee, confirm that the world of academics in the contemporary United States is as…
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