grad student strike at Columbia
I waited until this morning to read the article Nat suggested. And, lo and behold, it's about the grad assistant strike at Columbia. What I appreciate about the article is that it doesn't zero in on the isolated instance of what's going on Columbia, but uses this as an opportunity to examine the problem as a whole:
Grad students have always resigned themselves to relative poverty in anticipation of a cushy, tenured payoff. But in the past decade, the rules of the game have changed. Budget pressures have spurred universities' increasing dependence on so-called "casual labor," which damages both the working conditions of graduate students and their job prospects.
The first sentence of this paragraph is the one that bothers me, and which I mentioned in my last post. Unlike med students and law students who put themselves through crap and poverty which will be made up for in their salaries, there's not even a promise of a job for humanities students.
"Average teaching loads for grad students have increased, while benefits are often cut off after five years. Humanities TAs are paid stipends ranging from less than $10,000 at a public school like SUNY-Buffalo to $18,000 at unionized NYU."
Thankfully, now I have spouse who works outside of academia which provides us with decent health care benefits. When he was still in grad school, though, we got grad student health insurance from Tulane, and it was awful. It was so expensive, straining his already meager stipend. And the potential pool of doctors we could see using this insurance was scary...it was worse than just going to charity. I went to one doctor for a check-up, and I almost ran out of the place afterwards. I couldn't believe this could actually be a health-care professional. I didn't even let him touch me. His white coat was dingy and carried the ink stains of years of exploding pens. The office was cramped and tacky. The secretary seemed to be in the throes of some kind of substance. The only sane person around was the nurse, who looked to be my age. Since I just needed a prescription refilled, and didn't need serious medical attention, it turned out okay. I just never went back. But what if something had happened to either of us, and that was our only option. It's inhumane.
And then the whole stipend thing. I fit in the category of less than $10,000 at a state uni, at least that's what it is because I get the tuition I have to pay deducted, wh. continues to blow my mind. I absolutely could not be doing this if I didn't have a working spouse. I have considered getting a part time job, but there is no way I could seriously do what I need to do and work. My stipend runs out next year. That's right a 3-yr stipend of less than $10,000, and that's the "enhanced" package. Those of you who don't understand how universities work may be wondering why I'm complaining at all, but you have to understand is that grad school is basically a job, and you should basically expect a salary. That's just how it works. If you don't get into a PhD program without a stipend package, the program doesn't really want you. An average grad student package is $15,000 for five years. Maybe not that much, but at least for 5 years. So my package is definitely on the very low side.
I guess I'm not complaining so much as stating the situation and responding to the article I read. My situation is working for me at the moment, but only due to a large variety of factors, mostly including that I have a spouse with a job and benefits. (And our combined meager salaries we've been able to live on so far.) It's also kind of scary.
But I naively troop along hoping that I'll be the 1 in 10 that'll get a job, because I love what I'm studying so much that I can't imagine my life without it or doing something different. I really can't think of anything I'd rather be doing. Perhaps my youth helps, but I feel pretty good generally about where I am and how I'm doing. Why worry about a whether I'll get a job now? There's plenty of other things to worry about. So in my second year, I got a conference paper in and enough travel grants from the school to make up for the fact that they pay me crap.
I'm no economist, but I really think a lot of the problem lies in capitalism...
Something I've mused before. The economics of capitalism basically work in a market situation with everyone playing in this market somehow. Being a scholar is not a market job. There is not a place in our society that has a valued position for the kind of work that historians, artists, and other non-profit people want to do. Academia has managed to carve out a niche with the "education is a social panacea" rhetoric. Thus meager funding can be claimed. Just enough to perpetuate itself with other meagerly funded jobs. But I think part of the problem is the lack of value society as a whole places on higher education.
One morning on NPR they were reporting some education legislation that was being discussed in DC. And a Congress member (from Delaware, I think) actually said that it was a waste of time and resources to have small classes and deplored the situation where there could be graduate seminars with only 4 or 5 people enrolled. I just guffawed right there in the car. To me that seemed to be a blatantly devaluing of the work of scholars and blatant ignorance for how grad programs in the humanities are most successful. I find the smaller the group, the more I learn, esp when you get as small as the one-to-one student-teacher situation.
This Congressman's comments seemed as ridiculous as that silly email that gets circulated about how if Schubert had used his resources better, he could've finished the "Unfinished" Symphony. I.e. "if the violins didn't have to repeat those notes for so many measures, just played them once and moved on" or "the oboe just sat there for the first 2 minutes!"
Anyway, enough of my inarticulate polemic. Back to studying my esoteric subject...
Comments
Yeah, we talked about this before. I stand by my previous assertion: if your career of choice doesn't create wealth, you don't really have any reason to expect to be able to make a living doing it. Teaching does kind of indirectly create wealth, when you consider the fact that we need to know things to be active in an economy, but notice that the professors teaching business and engineering tend to make a far sight more than the ones teaching English. But music, literature, history, philosophy, and to a lesser extent the social "sciences" don't actually make anyone money. Thus, choosing them is choosing financial hardship.
This being said, I do think that there's something exploitative about the current academic setup. There has always been a kind of understanding in which you have to pay your dues through a few years of drudgery before you're allowed to earn anything, but it's getting a bit out of hand. Consider, for example, the fact that most "internships" are probably illegal. This seems to me to be moving away from initiation and towars cannibalism: one generation is eating the next one to preserve their position. Even worse, the old ways of earning your position by going through the same kind of experience-building activities that your mentors did before you has been replaced by an increasingly meaningless series of hoops to jump through. Count me out.
Posted by: ryan | 01.05.04 15:17
Comments
Do you mean "you don't really have any reason to expect to be able to make a living doing it" by principle or by reality? Because I'm saying that if society valued history, philosophy, lit, music, etc. it would create the possibility for some to make a living. I'm not asking for millions. I just want enough to pay my bills and go to a few movies. I want to be able to buy green peppers and meat at the grocery store. I want to live on the same block as my washer and dryer, and be able to turn on the air in the summer and heat in the winter.
You're right. Current academic practices suck and are cannibalistic. But enough people love what they do enough to put up with a lot. For many their final words are: Count me in anyway. I just love the fifteenth century inexplicably so much.
Posted by: Jeannette | 01.05.04 18:18