Twenty years later, a hiring boom is going on, plucking newly minted Ph.D.s from anthropology departments across the country, much to the distress of more tradition-bound academics, who think their graduates shouldn't sully the purity of their field by working in industry.



Stanford graduate Genevieve Bell of Hillsboro, Ore., says that when she left a teaching position at Stanford for a job at Intel, "as far as the faculty was concerned, it was a total sell-out. (Working in industry is) thought of as second tier."