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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 March 2022
Our aim in this article is to foreground the specific role that graduate students play in academia today and some structural issues that are connected with it. As both workers and students, graduate students occupy a unique position within the larger academic system. They work at what for the majority is the beginning of a continuum of casualization, precarity, and adjunctification. Meanwhile, graduate students are educated following an older, apprenticeship-based model proper to a time when a PhD was a more likely bridge to secure employment. To articulate a REEES graduate student perspective, we interviewed eighteen REEES graduate students and recent grads from across the US focusing on these structural problems. At a moment when almost 75% of contemporary academic labor is carried out by graduate students and non-tenure track faculty, we hope to open up a conversation about contingent labor in REEES and to spotlight potential for practical changes.
1 The most cited and accessible primer is: Harvey, David, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford, 2011)Google Scholar. For the earliest full-length studies of neoliberalism and academia, see Slaughter, Sheila and Leslie, Larry L., Academic Capitalism: Politics, Policies, and the Entrepreneurial University (Baltimore, 1997)Google Scholar, and Slaughter, Sheila and Rhoades, Gary, Academic Capitalism and the New Economy: Markets, State, and Higher Education (Baltimore, 2004)Google Scholar. Recently, see Kezar, Adrianna, DePaola, Tom, and Scott, Daniel T., The Gig Academy: Mapping Labor in the Neoliberal University (Baltimore, 2019)Google Scholar.
2 According to economists Lawrence Katz and Alan B. Krueger, the contingent workforce has nationally grown by around 50% in the last two decades: “The Rise and Nature of Alternative Work Arrangements in the United States, 1995–2015,” ILR Review 72, no. 2 (March 2019): 382–416, at doi.org/10.3386/w22667 (accessed November 5, 2021). See Kezar, DePaola, and Scott for an account of the particular mechanisms of de-professionalization and contingency in academia in The Gig Academy, chapter, 2–3; see also Hall, Gary, The Uberfication of the University (Minneapolis, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 Kezar, DePaola, and Scott, 19.
4 Bousquet, Marc, How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation (New York, 2008), 21Google Scholar. By casualization we mean the process by which jobs, in this case academic positions, become less likely to be regular or permanent. On this, see Munene, Ishmael I., Contextualizing and Organizing Contingent Faculty: Reclaiming Academic Labor in Universities (Lanham, Maryland, 2018), 3–60Google Scholar.
5 Angulo, A.J., “From Golden Era to Gig Economy: Changing Contexts for Academic Labor in America,” in Tolley, Kim ed., Professors in the Gig Economy (Baltimore, 2018), 3–26Google Scholar; Williams, Jeffrey, “The Post-Welfare State University,” American Literary History 18, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 190–216CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Melinda Cooper, “In Loco Parentis: Human Capital, Student Debt, and the Logic of Family Investment,” in her Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism (New York, 2017). For a similar set of arguments that are global in scope, see Gupta, Suman, Habjan, Jernej, and Tutek, Hrvoje, eds., Academic Labour, Unemployment and Global Higher Education: Neoliberal Policies of Funding and Management (London, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6 See Kezar, DePaola, and Scott: “By restricting secure and well-paid positions to upper management and a smattering of faculty, while at the same time engineering a surplus of PhDs many times what the job market can absorb, institutions capitalize on the depressed value of labor which they have collectively brought about through systemic overproduction” (26).
7 Teresa Kroeger, Celine McNicholas, Marni von Wilpert, and Julia Wolfe, “The State of Graduate Student Employee Unions: Momentum to Organize Among Graduate Student Workers Is Growing Despite Opposition,” Economic Policy Institute, January 11, 20 www.epi.org/publication/graduate-student-employee-unions/ (accessed June 28, 2021).
8 For example, after the 2016 NLRB decision affirming the right of graduate workers at private institutions to collectively bargain, Columbia University was joined by Brown, Cornell, Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Yale, MIT, and The National Right to Work Legal Defense and Education Foundation (a conservative non-profit) in an amicus brief that argued—against existing empirical data and in spite of the successful existence of graduate unions at public institutions for more than five decades—that unionization would “harm the ‘educational process.’” Columbia Univ., 364 NLRB No. 90, Slip. Op. at *1 n.3 & 9 (Aug. 23, 2016) cited in Kroeger, McNicholas, Wilpert, and Wolfe.
9 One recent, particularly stark case of institutional resistance to graduate worker demands comes from the University of California (UC)-wide campaign for a Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA), which saw the UC’s deployment of riot police at the picket line, resulting in episodes of violence. See L. Summers and K. Gougelet, “Whose University? When Police Pass the Baton to Campuses,” Society for the Anthropology of Work, December 1, 2020: saw.americananthro.org/pub/whose-university-when-police-pass-the-baton-to-campuses/release/1 (accessed February 13, 2021).
10 Tenants are “Rent Burdened” if they spend more than 30% of their income on rent, and “Severely Rent Burdened” if they spend more than 50%. See Frederick J. Eggers and Fouad Moumen, “Investigating Very High Rent Burdens Among Renters in the American Housing Survey” (US Department of Housing and Urban Development): www.huduser.gov/portal/datasets/ahs/2010_high_rent_burdens_v2.pdf (accessed February 8, 2021).
11 Universities serving as for-profit landlords under the guise of providing student housing is a trend observable across American academia. A cursory survey of publicly available cost of attendance data gleaned from their respective websites confirms that at Harvard, Columbia, UC-Berkeley, UC-Santa Barbara, Wisconsin-Madison, NYU, Princeton, Stanford, UChicago, USC, Michigan-Ann Arbor, and Oregon none of the non-loan types of funding offered are enough to take grad students out of rent burden at these institutions, even when the university provides housing.
12 Recent graduate, interview, Berkeley, CA, January 29, 2021.
13 It is worth noting that, for PhD programs in REEES, international rather than domestic graduate students often make up the majority in their departments, with few exceptions like UC-Berkeley.
14 Recent graduate student, Zoom interview, Los Angeles, CA, February 1, 2021.
15 Current graduate student, Zoom interview, Los Angeles, CA, February 9, 2021.
16 Current graduate student, Zoom interview, Berkeley, CA, January 24, 2021.
17 Current graduate student, Zoom interview, Berkeley, CA, January 20, 2021.
18 Current graduate student, Zoom interview, Berkeley, CA, January 25, 2021.
19 Current graduate student, email interview, June 9, 2021.
20 Kroeger, McNicholas, von Wilpert, and Wolfe, 4.
21 Timothy Reese Cain, “Campus Unions: Organized Faculty and Graduate Students in U.S. Higher Education,” ASHE Higher Education Report, vol. 43, no. 3 (September 2017); Kezar and DePaola, “Understanding the Need for Unions: Contingent Faculty Working Conditions and the Relationship to Student Learning,” in Kim Tolley, ed., Professors in the Gig Academy: Unionizing Adjunct Faculty in America (Baltimore, 2018).
22 Current graduate student, email interview, February 6, 2021.