We need to talk about work, and what’s not working, in graduate school. Graduate students are instructors, teaching assistants, research assistants, and researchers, but our stipends are often not enough to make ends meet. First, we look back at the Columbia University graduate student strikes with Sourav Chatterjee, a PhD student at the Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies program at Columbia. Then we chat with Dr. Nick Mitchell, Professor of Ethnic Studies and Graduate Feminist Director at UC Santa Cruz, about the jobs crisis, academic labor as labor, the UCSC graduate strike, and what can and needs to change around working conditions in the academy.
Contact us at humanitiesunderreview@gmail.com
Episode Resources:
- Marc Bousquet, How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation
- Nick Mitchell, “Summertime Selves (On Professionalization)”
- Nick Mitchell, “Why Nick Mitchell Is Returning the Chancellor’s Achievement Award for Diversity“
- Nick Mitchell, The University, in Theory: Essays on Institutional Knowledge (forthcoming)
- Nick Mitchell, Disciplining Surplus: Black Studies, Women’s Studies, and the Birth of Neoliberalism (forthcoming)
- Tyler Walicek, “Low Wages and Exploitative Conditions Are Sparking Graduate Student Strikes”
- Kathi Weeks, The Problem With Work: Feminist, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork
- Mairav Zonszein, “In the UC Santa Cruz Wildcat Strike, Class War Meets the California Housing Crisis”
Episode Takeaways:
On Labor and the Institution of Higher Ed:
- Toward the end of my time as a graduate student, me and a few other graduate students at UC Santa Cruz, banded together with a group of really principled undergraduate students there to fight for an Ethnic Studies department at UC Santa Cruz. Santa Cruz was one of the two UC’s without any form of Ethnic Studies Department at the time. And it was, in many ways, sharply resisted by some of the faculty. But I think that we got a lot of successful momentum to the extent that well, eventually I came back to Santa Cruz as the first hire in the ethnic studies program. And now we’re verging on 150 ethnic studies majors.”
- “[The activism around forming an Ethnic Studies department] unfolded against the background of a job market that was already decimated since the early ‘90s, tanking even more, to the extent that it is not nearly recovered to pre-2008 levels today. It just meant that the people who I would have imagined would be the first in line for jobs spent half a decade not getting a tenure-stream job, adjuncting, sometimes leaving the academy. The effects of the financial crisis on the job market compounded year after year, after year after year, when people who didn’t get jobs one year were on the on the on the market with all the people who are still finishing their PhDs in next year. And so any sense that I was involved in an enterprise that could even vaguely claim the title of meritocracy was very quickly dismissed from my sense of lived institutional reality in that period.”
- “The idea of work that sits at the heart of the institution is probably something that needs to be rethought. And so, for me, one of the things that that really necessitates is asking that question, like, what is the nature of study as work and in relation to work? And so much of the the, the the prestige of the institution, so much of the prestige of the degree has to do with the the idea that one is self-sacrificing, one is future-investing, and that’s what makes it noble, you’re giving up the time that you could be waged in the present in order to distinguish yourself toward a stable, society-benefiting profession for the future.”
On Advising Graduate Students:
- “There’s a cottage industry that’s both for-profit and nonprofit in academic advice. It encourages graduate students and casualized academic laborers and postdocs and junior faculty to internalize this idea that gathering any tiny nuggets of wisdom will add up to some form of comparative advantage in the profession or on the job market, and it’s rarely framed as comparative advantage or competition. It’s usually framed as self-making, or profession.”
- “I also think that respecting yourself as a worker also means that you are better in a position to respect your students as workers. And that, I think, is just a first step, those norms of idealized self-sacrifice often take the form of creating an idealized personhood, who has no good work boundaries. And yeah, like then when you get an email from your advisor at 4am, asking you about something like they are telling me you’re communicating to you, what your future labor environment is going to expect.”