Editing Edward Sapir (section)

===At Yale===
From 1931 until his death in 1939, Sapir taught at [[Yale University]], where he became the head of the Department of Anthropology. He was invited to Yale to found an interdisciplinary program combining anthropology, linguistics and psychology, aimed at studying "the impact of culture on personality". While Sapir was explicitly given the task of founding a distinct anthropology department, this was not well received by the department of sociology who worked by [[William Graham Sumner]]'s "Evolutionary sociology", which was anathema to Sapir's Boasian approach, nor by the two anthropologists of the Institute for Human Relations [[Clark Wissler]] and [[G. P. Murdock]].<ref name="Darnell 1998">Darnell 1998</ref> Sapir never thrived at Yale, where as one of only four Jewish faculty members out of 569 he was denied membership to the faculty club where the senior faculty discussed academic business.<ref>Gelya Frank. 1997. Jews, Multiculturalism, and Boasian Anthropology. American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 99, No. 4, pp. 731–745</ref>

At Yale, Sapir's graduate students included [[Morris Swadesh]], [[Benjamin Lee Whorf]], [[Mary Haas]], [[Charles Hockett]], and [[Harry Hoijer]], several of whom he brought with him from Chicago.<ref>Haas, M. R. (1953), Sapir and the Training of Anthropological Linguists. American Anthropologist, 55: 447–450.</ref> Sapir came to regard a young [[Semitic languages|Semiticist]] named [[Zellig Harris]] as his intellectual heir, although Harris was never a formal student of Sapir. (For a time he dated Sapir's daughter.)<ref name="daughter">Reported by [[Regna Darnell]], Sapir's biographer (p.c. to Bruce Nevin).</ref>  In 1936 Sapir clashed with the Institute for Human Relations over the research proposal by anthropologist [[Hortense Powdermaker]], who proposed a study of the black community of Indianola, Mississippi. Sapir argued that her research should be funded instead of the more sociological work of [[John Dollard]]. Sapir eventually lost the discussion and Powdermaker had to leave Yale.<ref name="Darnell 1998"/>

During his tenure at Yale, Sapir was elected to the [[American Academy of Arts and Sciences]],<ref>{{Cite web |date=2023-02-09 |title=Edward Sapir |url=https://www.amacad.org/person/edward-sapir |access-date=2023-05-25 |website=American Academy of Arts & Sciences |language=en}}</ref> the United States [[National Academy of Sciences]],<ref>{{Cite web |title=Edward Sapir |url=http://www.nasonline.org/member-directory/deceased-members/20000941.html |access-date=2023-05-25 |website=www.nasonline.org}}</ref> and the [[American Philosophical Society]].<ref>{{Cite web |title=APS Member History |url=https://search.amphilsoc.org/memhist/search?creator=Edward+Sapir&title=&subject=&subdiv=&mem=&year=&year-max=&dead=&keyword=&smode=advanced |access-date=2023-05-25 |website=search.amphilsoc.org}}</ref>

In the summer of 1937 while teaching at the Linguistic Institute of the [[Linguistic Society of America]] in [[Ann Arbor]], Sapir began having problems with a heart condition that had been diagnosed a couple of years earlier.<ref>Morris Swadesh. 1939. "Edward Sapir" Language Vol. 15, No. 2 (Apr. – Jun., 1939), pp. 132–135</ref>  In 1938, he had to take a leave from Yale, during which Benjamin Lee Whorf taught his courses and G. P. Murdock advised some of his students. After Sapir's death in 1939, G. P. Murdock became the chair of the anthropology department. Murdock, who despised the Boasian paradigm of cultural anthropology, dismantled most of Sapir's efforts to integrate anthropology, psychology, and linguistics.<ref>Darnell, R. (1998), Camelot at Yale: The Construction and Dismantling of the Sapirian Synthesis, 1931–39. American Anthropologist, 100: 361–372.</ref>