Yale
Murdock joined the faculty of Yale University in 1928 (his PhD from Yale was in the field of Sociology, as Yale at that time did not yet have a Department of Anthropology). He served as chairman of the Department of Anthropology from 1938 to 1960. At that time, he hit the then mandatory retirement age at Yale. However, he was offered the chair of Andrew Mellon Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh. Leaving his long-time residence at 960 Ridge Road in Hamden, Connecticut, Murdock moved with his wife to 4150 Bigelow Boulevard in Pittsburgh. He taught at Pitt until his retirement in 1973, at which point he moved to the Philadelphia area to be close to his son.
Carmen and Pete had one child, Robert Douglas Murdock. He was born in 1929 and died in 2011 (obituary, Philadelphia Inquirer, July 28, 2011).
According to David H. Price, in a chapter entitled “Hoover’s Informer”, devoted to Murdock during McCarthyism, Murdock had secretly informed on AAA colleagues to J. Edgar Hoover, even though he later served as chair of the American Anthropological Association’s (AAA’s) Committee on Scientific Freedom, established to defend anthropologists from unfair attacks. In fairness to Murdock, it must be added that he was not the only person in his field or at his university to cooperate with intelligence agencies. For much of the 20th century, agencies such as the CIA and the FBI enjoyed a close relationship with American universities. Yale University was especially known (later) as a breeding ground for employees of the agencies. Researchers in anthropology and foreign relations were often debriefed after foreign field trips (see: Robin W. Winks, Cloak and Gown: Scholars in the Secret War, 1939–1961. New York: William Morrow, 1987).
In 1948, Murdock decided that his cross-cultural data set would be more valuable were it available to researchers at schools other than Yale. He approached the Social Science Research Council and obtained the funding to establish an inter-university organization, the Human Relations Area Files, with collections maintained at Yale University (Whiting 1986: 684).
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