5 ms·

Serfs of Academe

41 points by badcede 7y ago

Avicebron 7y ago
appalling lack of public support for educational institutions. I hope the chase for lucre was worth it.
einpoklum 7y ago
Readers who are able - for some peculiar reason - to read Hebrew may also be interested in the book, in a similar vein, edited by Drs. Mishori and Hazan named "Abusive Employment", which has multiple chapters regarding employment, precarity and unionization attempts in Israeli academia, and the rest regards the Israeli economy more generally. The book is made available for public download through this page: http://sea.org.il/he/precarious_employment_book/ http://sea.org.il/he/precarious_employment_book/
lordleft 7y ago
I've heard ghastly horror stories from PhD friends of mine at the Ivy I attended. I don't think the average person appreciate how unbalanced the power dynamic can be for doctoral students. An advisor can exert a fearsome pressure on their subordinates. You can also get lose funding, forcing you to pay an outrageous rate of tuition to the university (100k~ per annum) if you can't find another source of funding.
- sybercecurity 7y ago
  Not just PhD programs, but also masters programs. Especially for foreign students because not only is the pay a factor, but also their visa status can be held over the student's head until one more* paper is published. *it's always "just one more"
- jseliger 7y ago
  Word about these problems has been out for ~20 years if not longer: https://www.chronicle.com/article/So-You-Want-to-Go-to-Grad/45239 https://www.chronicle.com/article/So-You-Want-to-Go-to-Grad/... and yet people keep going. Grad school will change when people stop going.
- einpoklum 7y ago
  ... and this is almost entirely due to the lack of recognition of the employee status of Ph.D. candidates as junior researchers. That is, the assumption that payment somehow naturally goes from the Ph.D. candidate to the university rather than vice-versa. Luckily, there has been a very positive development in this front a few years back - 364 NLRB 90, Columbia University vs UAW: https://columbiagradunion.org/wp-content/uploads/NLRB-Case-02%E2%80%93RC%E2%80%93143012-DECISION-ON-REVIEW-AND-ORDER-20160823.pdf https://columbiagradunion.org/wp-content/uploads/NLRB-Case-0...
  - tnecniv 7y ago
    Also, at least in the state my grad school is in, graduate students are not employees which means that they aren't bound by worker safety laws preventing them from working in a lab setting for over 40 hours a week.
    - einpoklum 7y ago
      Two points about that: 1. A graduate employee/reseacher union can demand a cap on lab hours regardless of employment status. (Actually it can demand anything regardless of employment status if it's capable of concerted action to put pressure on management). That would also be a trivial an extremely justifiable demand, which would make management sound evil if they try to deny it. A media campaign about the poor lab rats might do the trick. 2. "in the state my grad school is in, graduate students are not employees" <- That's probably wrong, in two ways. First there's the question of whether you're an employee as opposed to the question of whether you can unionize and bargain collectively in the framework of US labor law, and those are two different things. Second, the fact that management treats you as non-employees does not mean that that is the legal reality. I mean, NLRB rulings are binding in all states. And regardless of legal issues - at the bottom line it's a matter of organizing yourselves, getting in touch with other organized graduate employees in other universities/states, and educating yourselves collectively (= talks, workshops, rallies, whatever, in which you explain things; print materials; departmental discussion+Q&A sessions; orientation sessions with new graduate employees and so on). The struggle between yourselves and management is first and foremost about your collective self-perception and beliefs.
seibelj 7y ago
When I was 19 I worked at Dominos Pizza, and they offered me a management track position. I would attend Dominos University, a management training course where they would teach me the art of pizza restaurant management and advanced pizza making skills. The starting salary for management back in 2007 was $38k per year with 10% bonus, and included health insurance, paid sick leave, etc. I say this because - why do these adjuncts subject themselves to such torture? If you are smart enough to teach medieval poetry, you can run a pizza restaurant. These people fetishize university life and kill themselves for no reason. It's absurd. Universities get away with paying horrible wages because there is a seemingly endless line of people willing to be homeless in order to teach undergraduates and grade papers. Insanity
- Avicebron 7y ago
  Because some people want to live in a world where we as a society can value things like medieval poetry and have thriving ecosystems around that. There's a seemingly endless line of people willing to enslave themselves to a broken system rather than fold and turn into a Dominos manager like the system wants.
  - nradov 7y ago
    There is no system, it's all just people. If you want academics to study medieval poetry you're welcome to pay them directly to do it, or establish a charitable foundation for that purpose. Personally I have other priorities and don't want any of my taxes or school fees used for that purpose.
  - zozbot234 7y ago
    Except that those same people do a terrible job of actually "valuing" these things. In the absence of things like community engagement/outreach, "society" is not going to care all that much about those topics. Building a "thriving ecosystem" around whatever scholarship/research you're doing can come later, community outreach should be a forefront priority.
  - seibelj 7y ago
    At one point do you get punched in the nose enough times to realize you aren't meant to be a boxer? These people clearly didn't make it in academia. As much as I want to be an NFL quarterback, sometimes you have to accept reality and try for a different goal.
Merrill 7y ago
An acquaintance teaches a course one night a week at the local community college. The pay is really low - $1200 per semester course. On the other hand, he has interned and/or hired some of the best students, so there are other advantages besides spare cash.
gnicholas 7y ago
A warning seen on Twitter today says: don't enter a PhD program unless you are given full funding (or have a trust fund). Honestly, even if you get full funding, you should consider the opportunity cost. https://twitter.com/megankatenelson/status/1231935955701051393 https://twitter.com/megankatenelson/status/12319359557010513...
- pmyteh 7y ago
  I think this is generally excellent advice - and for one reason beyond the obvious 'don't get crushed by massive debt'. In many academic fields, there are many more new PhDs than there are available careers. Just think - in order to maintain a steady academic state each tenured professor needs to turn out only a couple of trained successors over their whole career. But it's common to have several at any given time, and generating dozens of potential academic replacements over the course of a career is not unusual. Competition at the postdoc level is grim, and it gets even more brutal if you try to get on the tenure track. To succeed you normally have to be both excellent and lucky. The competition for PhD funding is a first signal as to a prospective student's place in the career race. It's also a very cheap signal: you get it up front rather than investing several years of your life and then finding out you can't find a post, or falling into a cycle of underpaid and overstressed adjunct appointments resulting in burnout and resignation. So if you can't get PhD funding, you should also be asking yourself 'am I well placed for five years time?' The answer isn't always 'no', but it should prompt some serious thought.
- kiliantics 7y ago
  I had all tuition covered and a guaranteed stipend for 4 years. I was also assured that there would be other ways to replace the stipend after those 4 years, with a last resort being to sustain myself by TAing classes. In the end, I took 7 years, largely because there was no money outside of TA work and that took up so much time I had serious difficulty maintaining a good rhythm to make progress in my research. Not to mention that the money was so little I had a lot of extra stress in life just making ends meet. And as someone in STEM, I was easily on the more comfortable end of the spectrum as regards funding opportunities and teaching responsibilities. I am therefore very excited by the unionising efforts of graduate students across the US in recent years. I find it particularly admirable, given how much extra time and effort such organising takes and which the students are bringing forth in full force despite all of their day-to-day burdens. It's far from an easy task, as the administrations of these institutions are definitely prepared to play dirty.

41 points by badcede 7y ago

appalling lack of public support for educational institutions. I hope the chase for lucre was worth it.

Readers who are able - for some peculiar reason - to read Hebrew may also be interested in the book, in a similar vein, edited by Drs. Mishori and Hazan named "Abusive Employment", which has multiple chapters regarding employment, precarity and unionization attempts in Israeli academia, and the rest regards the Israeli economy more generally. The book is made available for public download through this page: http://sea.org.il/he/precarious_employment_book/ http://sea.org.il/he/precarious_employment_book/

lordleft 7y ago

I've heard ghastly horror stories from PhD friends of mine at the Ivy I attended. I don't think the average person appreciate how unbalanced the power dynamic can be for doctoral students. An advisor can exert a fearsome pressure on their subordinates. You can also get lose funding, forcing you to pay an outrageous rate of tuition to the university (100k~ per annum) if you can't find another source of funding.

sybercecurity 7y ago
Not just PhD programs, but also masters programs. Especially for foreign students because not only is the pay a factor, but also their visa status can be held over the student's head until one more* paper is published. *it's always "just one more"
jseliger 7y ago
Word about these problems has been out for ~20 years if not longer: https://www.chronicle.com/article/So-You-Want-to-Go-to-Grad/45239 https://www.chronicle.com/article/So-You-Want-to-Go-to-Grad/... and yet people keep going. Grad school will change when people stop going.
einpoklum 7y ago
... and this is almost entirely due to the lack of recognition of the employee status of Ph.D. candidates as junior researchers. That is, the assumption that payment somehow naturally goes from the Ph.D. candidate to the university rather than vice-versa. Luckily, there has been a very positive development in this front a few years back - 364 NLRB 90, Columbia University vs UAW: https://columbiagradunion.org/wp-content/uploads/NLRB-Case-02%E2%80%93RC%E2%80%93143012-DECISION-ON-REVIEW-AND-ORDER-20160823.pdf https://columbiagradunion.org/wp-content/uploads/NLRB-Case-0...
- tnecniv 7y ago
  Also, at least in the state my grad school is in, graduate students are not employees which means that they aren't bound by worker safety laws preventing them from working in a lab setting for over 40 hours a week.
  - einpoklum 7y ago
    Two points about that: 1. A graduate employee/reseacher union can demand a cap on lab hours regardless of employment status. (Actually it can demand anything regardless of employment status if it's capable of concerted action to put pressure on management). That would also be a trivial an extremely justifiable demand, which would make management sound evil if they try to deny it. A media campaign about the poor lab rats might do the trick. 2. "in the state my grad school is in, graduate students are not employees" <- That's probably wrong, in two ways. First there's the question of whether you're an employee as opposed to the question of whether you can unionize and bargain collectively in the framework of US labor law, and those are two different things. Second, the fact that management treats you as non-employees does not mean that that is the legal reality. I mean, NLRB rulings are binding in all states. And regardless of legal issues - at the bottom line it's a matter of organizing yourselves, getting in touch with other organized graduate employees in other universities/states, and educating yourselves collectively (= talks, workshops, rallies, whatever, in which you explain things; print materials; departmental discussion+Q&A sessions; orientation sessions with new graduate employees and so on). The struggle between yourselves and management is first and foremost about your collective self-perception and beliefs.

seibelj 7y ago

When I was 19 I worked at Dominos Pizza, and they offered me a management track position. I would attend Dominos University, a management training course where they would teach me the art of pizza restaurant management and advanced pizza making skills. The starting salary for management back in 2007 was $38k per year with 10% bonus, and included health insurance, paid sick leave, etc. I say this because - why do these adjuncts subject themselves to such torture? If you are smart enough to teach medieval poetry, you can run a pizza restaurant. These people fetishize university life and kill themselves for no reason. It's absurd. Universities get away with paying horrible wages because there is a seemingly endless line of people willing to be homeless in order to teach undergraduates and grade papers. Insanity

Avicebron 7y ago
Because some people want to live in a world where we as a society can value things like medieval poetry and have thriving ecosystems around that. There's a seemingly endless line of people willing to enslave themselves to a broken system rather than fold and turn into a Dominos manager like the system wants.
- nradov 7y ago
  There is no system, it's all just people. If you want academics to study medieval poetry you're welcome to pay them directly to do it, or establish a charitable foundation for that purpose. Personally I have other priorities and don't want any of my taxes or school fees used for that purpose.
- zozbot234 7y ago
  Except that those same people do a terrible job of actually "valuing" these things. In the absence of things like community engagement/outreach, "society" is not going to care all that much about those topics. Building a "thriving ecosystem" around whatever scholarship/research you're doing can come later, community outreach should be a forefront priority.
- seibelj 7y ago
  At one point do you get punched in the nose enough times to realize you aren't meant to be a boxer? These people clearly didn't make it in academia. As much as I want to be an NFL quarterback, sometimes you have to accept reality and try for a different goal.

Merrill 7y ago

An acquaintance teaches a course one night a week at the local community college. The pay is really low - $1200 per semester course. On the other hand, he has interned and/or hired some of the best students, so there are other advantages besides spare cash.

gnicholas 7y ago

A warning seen on Twitter today says: don't enter a PhD program unless you are given full funding (or have a trust fund). Honestly, even if you get full funding, you should consider the opportunity cost. https://twitter.com/megankatenelson/status/1231935955701051393 https://twitter.com/megankatenelson/status/12319359557010513...

pmyteh 7y ago
I think this is generally excellent advice - and for one reason beyond the obvious 'don't get crushed by massive debt'. In many academic fields, there are many more new PhDs than there are available careers. Just think - in order to maintain a steady academic state each tenured professor needs to turn out only a couple of trained successors over their whole career. But it's common to have several at any given time, and generating dozens of potential academic replacements over the course of a career is not unusual. Competition at the postdoc level is grim, and it gets even more brutal if you try to get on the tenure track. To succeed you normally have to be both excellent and lucky. The competition for PhD funding is a first signal as to a prospective student's place in the career race. It's also a very cheap signal: you get it up front rather than investing several years of your life and then finding out you can't find a post, or falling into a cycle of underpaid and overstressed adjunct appointments resulting in burnout and resignation. So if you can't get PhD funding, you should also be asking yourself 'am I well placed for five years time?' The answer isn't always 'no', but it should prompt some serious thought.
kiliantics 7y ago
I had all tuition covered and a guaranteed stipend for 4 years. I was also assured that there would be other ways to replace the stipend after those 4 years, with a last resort being to sustain myself by TAing classes. In the end, I took 7 years, largely because there was no money outside of TA work and that took up so much time I had serious difficulty maintaining a good rhythm to make progress in my research. Not to mention that the money was so little I had a lot of extra stress in life just making ends meet. And as someone in STEM, I was easily on the more comfortable end of the spectrum as regards funding opportunities and teaching responsibilities. I am therefore very excited by the unionising efforts of graduate students across the US in recent years. I find it particularly admirable, given how much extra time and effort such organising takes and which the students are bringing forth in full force despite all of their day-to-day burdens. It's far from an easy task, as the administrations of these institutions are definitely prepared to play dirty.