Other schools are canceling searches and imposing hiring freezes, but not my mala mater. Yale, instead, has decided to hire war criminal and death squad pal John Negroponte to join union-buster Paul Kennedy's grand strategy program along with John Gaddis and fellow neocon iran contra figure Charles Hill.

This despite a 25% drop in the university's endowment which has led administrators to impose a freeze on salary increases and swear to continuously trim budget costs from employee benefits. So is Negroponte, who holds no PhD, whose hands-on experience should land him not in front of undergraduates but rather in front of the international criminal court, worth it? Or, put differently, what does this say about the "scarcity" dynamics of university job markets (academic and otherwise) and what does it tell us (as if we didn't already know) about the priorities of the "global" university?