|
|
Newly-minted
anthropology PhD Sarah Kendzior has written a
chilling piece for Aljazeera on what things are really like in academia these
days:
The
closing of American academia
It is 2011
and I'm sitting in the Palais des Congres in Montreal, watching anthropologists talk about
structural inequality.
The American
Anthropological Association meeting is held annually to showcase research
from around the world, and like thousands of other anthropologists, I am
paying to play: $650 for airfare, $400 for three nights in a
"student" hotel, $70 for membership, and $94 for admission. The
latter two fees are student rates. If I were an unemployed or underemployed
scholar, the rates would double.
The theme of
this year's meeting is "Traces, Tidemarks and Legacies." According
to the explanation on the American Anthropological Association website, we
live in a time when "the meaning and location of differences, both
intellectually and morally, have been rearranged". As the conference
progresses, I begin to see what they mean. I am listening to the speaker
bemoan the exploitative practices of the neoliberal model when a friend of
mine taps me on the shoulder.
"I spent
almost my entire salary to be here," she says.
My friend is
an adjunct. She has a PhD in anthropology and teaches at a university, where
she is paid $2100 per course. While she is a professor, she is not a
Professor. She is, like 67 per cent of American university faculty, a
part-time employee on a contract that may or may not be renewed each
semester. She receives no benefits or health care.
According to
the Adjunct Project, a crowdsourced website
revealing adjunct wages - data which universities have long kept under wraps
- her salary is about average. If she taught five classes a year, a typical
full-time faculty course load, she would make $10,500, well below the poverty
line. Some adjuncts make more. I have one friend who was offered $5000 per
course, but he turned it down and requested less so that his children would
still qualify for food stamps.
Why is my
friend, a smart woman with no money, spending nearly $2000 to attend a
conference she cannot afford? She is looking for a way out. In America,
academic hiring is rigid and seasonal. Each discipline has a conference,
usually held in the fall, where interviews take place. These interviews can
be announced days or even hours in advance, so most people book beforehand,
often to receive no interviews at all.
The American
Anthropological Association tends to hold its meetings in America's most
expensive cities, although they do have one stipulation: "AAA staff
responsible for negotiating and administering annual meeting contracts shall
show preference to locales with living wage ordinances." This rule does
not apply, unfortunately, to those in attendance.
Below poverty line
In most
professions, salaries below the poverty line would be cause for alarm. In
academia, they are treated as a source of gratitude. Volunteerism is par for
the course - literally. Teaching is touted as a "calling", with
compensation an afterthought. One American research university offers its PhD
students a salary of $1000 per semester for the "opportunity" to
design and teach a course for undergraduates, who are each paying about
$50,000 in tuition. The university calls this position "Senior Teaching
Assistant" because paying an instructor so far below minimum wage is
probably illegal.
In addition
to teaching, academics conduct research and publish, but they are not paid
for this work either. Instead, all proceeds go to for-profit academic
publishers, who block academic articles from the public through exorbitant
download and subscription fees, making millions for themselves in the
process. If authors want to make their research public, they have to pay the
publisher an average of $3000 per article. Without an institutional
affiliation, an academic cannot access scholarly research without paying,
even for articles written by the scholar itself.
It may be
hard to summon sympathy for people who walk willingly into such working
conditions. "Bart, don't make fun of grad students," Marge told her
son on an oft-quoted episode of The Simpsons. "They just made a terrible
life choice."
But all
Americans should be concerned about adjuncts, and not only because adjuncts
are the ones teaching our youth. The adjunct problem is emblematic of broader
trends in American employment: the end of higher education as a means to
prosperity, and the severing of opportunity to all but the most privileged.
In a searing
commentary, political analyst Joshua Foust notes that the unpaid internships
that were once limited to show business have now spread to nearly every
industry. "It's almost impossible to get a job working on policy in this
town without an unpaid internship," he writes from Washington DC, one of
the most expensive cities in the country. Even law, once a safety net for
American strivers, is now a profession where jobs pay as little as $10,000 a
year - unfeasible for all but the wealthy, and devastating for those who have
invested more than $100,000 into their degrees. One after another, the
occupations that shape American society are becoming impossible for all but
the most elite to enter.
The value of a degree
Academia is
vaunted for being a meritocracy. Publications are judged on blind review, and
good graduate programs offer free tuition and a decent stipend. But its
reliance on adjuncts makes it no different than professions that cater to the
elite through unpaid internships.
Anthropologists
are known for their attentiveness to social inequality, but few have
acknowledged the plight of their peers. When I expressed doubt about the job
market to one colleague, she advised me, with total seriousness, to
"re-evaluate what work means" and to consider "post-work
imaginaries". A popular video on post-graduate employment cuts to the
chase: "Why don't you tap into your trust fund?"
In May 2012,
I received my PhD, but I still do not know what to do with it. I struggle
with the closed off nature of academic work, which I think should be
accessible to everyone, but most of all I struggle with the limited
opportunities in academia for Americans like me, people for whom education
was once a path out of poverty, and not a way into it.
My father,
the first person in his family to go to college, tries to tell me my degree
has value. "Our family came here with nothing," he says of my
great-grandparents, who fled Poland a century ago. "Do you know how
incredible it is that you did this, how proud they would be?"
And my heart
broke a little when he said that, because his illusion is so touching - so
revealing of the values of his generation, and so
alien to the experience of mine.
Some thoughts
Not so long
ago, academia was both fairly wide-open and a pretty nice life. Get a PhD
from a good school in an interesting discipline and there was probably a spot
for you at a decent university. Work hard and publish prolifically for a few
years and you'd be offered tenure, after which life was idyllic by most
standards. You teach a bit, study a subject you love and hang out with like minded intellectuals - all while making acceptable
money and building up a generous pension. It wasn't always this smooth and
agreeable, of course, but in many cases the reality matched ideal.
As the
article above makes clear, today's academia is a very different place. The
reasons are many, but four stand out:
- State and local governments have
grossly overspent and overpromised, and are now almost universally
broke. They can't cover their pension obligations but can't scale them
back without declaring bankruptcy. So they're cutting other things, one
of which is aid to state schools. This widens the gap between tuition
and actual per-student cost, which forces universities to cut costs to
make up the difference. And "labor", i.e. non-tenured faculty,
is a juicy target.
- Schools themselves have made the
same mistakes as local governments, overspending on state-of-the-art
sports facilities and luxurious dorms and rec centers. The resulting
debt can't be managed under the current cost structure, which adds
another impetus for cuts in areas where cuts are possible.
- The idea that a college
education is a ticket to a better life is so ingrained in the
middle-class mind that students and their parents are willing to pay
pretty much anything for a degree. But they haven't learned to
differentiate between degrees that actually lead to good jobs (like
computer science) and those that lead, in today's world, to dead ends
(like history, philosophy and minority studies). A decade ago you could
get a PhD in one of the latter disciplines and hope for a job teaching
the same subject. Now you're either a fast food worker, an office temp,
or - maybe worst of all - an adjunct "professor" who is
effectively a serf in a suddenly-feudal system.
- The federal government's student
loan program offers kids more money each year, which encourages colleges
to raise tuition by a comparable amount, which is increasingly pricing
their product out of the market. The US is full of middle-class families
with kids who are accepted at Purdue or the University of Washington but
who, even with loans, can't cover the $30,000 - $40,000 annual tuition
and instead opt for the home town junior college. The result is a
shrinking pool of students willing to pay to attend a given high-priced
school.
Add it all
up, and what used to be a privileged group in a rich country - US academics -
is suddenly an exploited Third World minority. The life they thought of as a
birthright for being smart and American is gone, with nothing on the horizon
to replace it.
The macro
cause, as in all the other "Welcome
to the Third World" columns published here, is debt. We've kept
interest rates too low for too long, which encouraged too many people to
borrow too much and expand too aggressively, and now that we can't borrow as
freely the choices made in easier times are blowing up. Universities that
spent billions to expand are rapidly going bankrupt. Students who borrowed
tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars for degrees that aren't in demand
are crushed between high debt service and low income. Parents who thought
they'd saved enough to put their kids through college now find that their
interest income is miniscule while tuition is soaring - and that their
college graduate kids still need help with health insurance and rent. The
college bubble and the death of academia, in short, are playing major roles
in the elimination of what's left of the middle class.
|
|
