Serfs of Academe(nybooks.com) |
Serfs of Academe(nybooks.com) |
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
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.
In the long run, medieval poetry PhDs probably will end up in well-paying (if less inspiring) jobs like running pizza restaurants - but don't underestimate the awfulness of the short-term.
Overall, though you are right. There is way too much participation in graduate school in relation to the job market for those skills. However, this fact does not justify treating people poorly and this is where labor market regulation comes into play. Unfortunately we Americans, in the form of our elected officials, have decided that such regulation is too burdensome.
My critique is that adjuncts see university employment as the One True Path when there are a multitude of other careers available, if only they would give up their teaching dreams.
Advisors value academic careers, partly because that is usually the only thing that they know, and look down on PhDs that go into industry or change fields as failures.
Advisors are also judged on the academic success of their graduates, who ideally go on to famous careers at notable universities. There is a branch of academic politics that governs how advisors place their best students where they will reflect well on them.
The net result is that graduate students have few mentors advising them on the possibilities outside of academe. The "failures" are left to make it on their own.
*it's always "just one more"
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-0...
The book is made available for public download through this page:
Honestly, even if you get full funding, you should consider the opportunity cost.
https://twitter.com/megankatenelson/status/12319359557010513...
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.
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.
(I'd argue that even if you have a trust fund, you shouldn't go if they won't fund you. The not funding you is a vote of no confidence in you.)
Yeah, but perhaps TFKs just want the cred of having a PhD, and don't actually care that they won't likely be able to do anything with it afterward.
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.
A friend of mine with a Ph.D. in math and a Master's degree in electrical engineering works in industry in data science. He once told me that he would not want to hire people with a Ph.D. to do non research. He said they just have a hard time fitting into an environment where most other people aren't as insightful/perceptive.
Can people with the minds/attitudes/skillset of adjuncts fit into the workplaces you mention? Even if they could would it be useful? What side effects happen to the less intelligent who also compete for such jobs.
Whatever the answers are to this it does nothing to obviate the need for better labor market regulation.
Does this mean that he considers himself an outlier (assuming he's also doing non-research activities), or that he feels that PhD holders need an extra high "tolerance" for many (most?) of us who don't hold a PhD?
I'm not sure where or how labour market regulation will help in this specific instance.
He considers himself and others with a Ph.D. in non research roles to need extra high tolerance. It's just his opinion and others may have better experiences. I was ABD in math when I quit (All But Dissertation). I spent one year in industry programming and it was hard for me. Obvious solutions were ignored and people tended to make issues seem bigger than they really were. I would be a bad employee and that's why I went to teach at a community college. I'll suffer the lower pay for greater autonomy and be in an environment were it's hard for really dumb decisions to ruin my day. I'm not an adjunct and in my system adjuncts are paid pro-rata and have pro-rata benefits too.