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The following paper was given at the Modern Language Association
convention on December 27, 1999. It is part of a panel entitled
Academic
Labor: Key Issues for Graduate Students," arranged by the MLA
Committee on the Status of Graduate Students in the Profession. Daniel W. Kim, Chair of the Academic Labor Movement" Cultural Studies Program George Mason University Part I Unfortunately the title of my paper does not do it justice because I am not actually talking about the labor movement per se. Julie Schmid is covering that in detail in her paper. I will address three key issues today: the origins of the academic labor crisis, how the crisis affects graduate students and adjuncts, and shortcomings of the administrative responses to the crisis. Let me begin by noting that there is a trend in literary studies, related to the advent of cultural studies, to put the text in context. We now often look at literary objects in relation to their moment of production--the social, cultural, historical, and political context in which the texts were created and read. Yet, often, we do not extend that same mode of analysis to our own situations. Today I will be arguing that we need to apply this methodological approach to the academic labor crisis to understand the context in which we labor as academics. I would like put the academic labor crisis in context by presenting an overview of how the university came to be in this state and investigate how a system has developed in which the exploitation of workers is both necessary for the teaching function of the university and commonplace. By doing so, I hope to reveal the fallacy in simplistic answers to the crisis, such as the claim that the crisis is caused by an over production of Ph.D.s touted by conservative commentators such as George Will. This response puts the blame on humanities faculty who "just do not understand the market," and hides the structural changes in the university in which departments replace full-timers with part-timers and meet new teaching demands with part-time instructors, both graduate students and adjuncts. Here let me add that although the focus of this round table is on graduate students, many of these problems and responses also apply to adjunct faculty and FULL-TIME, tenure track faculty as well. Every erosion of fair and equitable working conditions for graduate students and adjuncts, also erodes the job stability and working conditions of full-timers. As full-time lines decrease, remaining full-time faculty have to do more work, since there are fewer faculty to take on the work of advising students, serving on committees, and other administrative aspects of teaching. So I stress here that we need to look at these problems as affecting all teachers on campus--regardless of where they fit on the pay scale. The immediate roots of the academic labor crisis, in its current incarnation, took hold in the era of cuts in public education budgets at the state and federal level in the early 1980s. Cuts were made in college work study programs, student loan programs, and governmental organizations that had funded university research. Cuts weren't restricted to the 1980s, however, there were continued budget reductions in the 1990s. For example, in 1994 the University of Wisconsin received a state mandate to cut $185 million from its budget. It did so by cutting tutorial services, increasing class size, and hiring more part-time instructors. So, one element in the crisis is reduced government funding to universities. As I was writing this, I wondered when this improved economy was going to begin benefitting universities. Just last week The Chronicle reported that state spending on higher education has increased modestly for the first time in years. The article highlighted plans to increase student aid, increase the size and scope of two year colleges, and in states such as Virginia and Connecticut, to give a tuition break to students that would leave university budgets virtually unchanged. So far the increases are not substantial and neither has the money been slotted to improve the working conditions of instructors. Another element in the academic labor crisis is the steady decline in the number of full-time jobs and a steady increase in the number of adjuncts. In 1970 part-timers accounted for about 22% of all faculty members. The Chronicle reports that by 1995 that figure had grown to over 40% of all instructors. Conversely, data from the Department of Education reveals the other side of the trend--not only are part-time jobs growing--full-time lines are decreasing. Tenure track positions fell from 29 percent in 1975 to 20 percent in 1995. This isn't just creating a crisis for departments who have to perform with fewer full-time faculty members, but also for new graduates who are experiencing more difficulty than ever in finding sustaining employment. According to the MLA census of Ph.D. placement, conducted since the 1970s, the 1996-1997 census marked the first time that part-time placements in literature and foreign languages had outnumbered full-time placements. The census found that full-time tenure track appointments accounted for 34%, while non-tenure-track placements were 41%. Additionally, administrative positions and salaries have grown even as faculty positions and budgets have declined. In response to declining budgets and increased financial pressures, administrators have turned to the corporate sector for assistance. This move towards corporatization at universities is another element of the crisis. This development was facilitated by two legislative acts in 1980 and 1981 that made it more rewarding for corporations to work with and contribute to universities. (Soley, 9) As corporate money has become more available and the corporate influence more strongly felt by administrators, there has been a redirection of institutional resources towards projects that meet the needs of corporate donors, including a shift in the mission of the university back towards practicality and away from the humanities--that is--a move towards educating for business needs. And there are many more examples, such as adopting the Total Quality Management approach made famous by Demming in Japan, and Responsibility Center Management. This movement towards a strong corporate influence in universities is chillingly documented by Laurence Soley in Leasing the Ivory Tower. Soley argues that corporate donations to universities actually cost universities money because corporations often pay to start programs that universities then have to keep up--thus diverting money from other expenditures. All of this is bad news for the humanities because we do not produce a tangible product of interest to corporations--we don't develop new fertilizers, gene therapies, or anything that can be patented! So in the last twenty years we have seen a corporate mentality take hold without regard for whether or not this approach is the best one for the universities' educational mission. What we have here is a situation in which public institutions are living with a legacy of drastically cut education budgets, administration is growing and taking up additional resources from cash strapped schools, corporations use universities to save them money on research, public schools become indebted to corporate interests, graduate programs expand to provide research and cheap labor, full-time faculty are replaced with part-timers, and graduating Ph.D.s, who have served as inexpensive researchers and teachers, face fewer full-time employment opportunities. Part II Now that I have outlined the basics of how this situation developed, I would like to describe how this system affects graduate students as employees. Graduate students today are faced with low pay with minimal or no benefits, high debt (which is another outcome of budget cuts--increased tuition costs at both the undergraduate and graduate levels and increased student borrowing), extended terms of study, increased teaching responsibilities, and heightened professional expectations. The following examples of actual teaching assistant and adjunct salaries demonstrates the inequalities of such wages when compared to current faculty salaries. Since so many graduate students end up working as adjuncts at points in their courses of study, I am looking at rates of pay for both adjuncts and graduate teaching assistants, which I have found at most schools to be very similar, often only differing as to whether or not tuition remission is included. As an example, I will use Washington state since they have been in the spotlight recently as the subject of a class action suit filed by their part-time faculty. Based on my research, they are representative of the changes in higher education at public universities. The 32-campuses of the state university system employ 9,000 part-timers and 3,000 full-timers. The part-time instructors teach about 43% of the courses and earn less than half of what full-time faculty members make for teaching for an equivalent numbers of classes. According to The Chronicle one of the plaintiffs in the suit makes $13,000 a year teaching nine courses--that is $1,444 per course. A full-time instructor would receive roughly $36,000 to teach those courses. At George Mason University in Fairfax Virginia the standard pay scale for an instructor with a master's degree and teaching experience is $625 per credit hour. That is $1,875 per three credit course. The standard rule of thumb for graduate students is to expect to spend about 20 per week per course. At twenty hours a week for sixteen weeks that equals $5.85 per hour. If you get good at it and get the course down to 15 hours you can make $7.81 per hour, but all with no benefits. When one compares these figures to the salary of a junior faculty member, who makes in the mid thirties, one can see the unfairness. And if one takes into consideration the high level of education of many graduate assistants, and then compares the per course hourly rate of pay to what Starbucks pays, who is currently paying $7.00 an hour to start, the disparity comes even more sharply into focus. The issue here isn't whether or not graduate students can making a living wage at part-time work. (Although later I hope we can discuss whether it is reasonable to pay graduate students so poorly and expect them to live while they try to complete their dissertations, which are also, after all, a form of work. The idea that graduate students should be assisted in their studies has been lost as graduate students take on assistantships that actually assist the university more than graduate students.) The issue is whether graduate students are being paid fairly for the work they do in relation to what other employees are paid. After all, many graduate students now do faculty work at at least the junior faculty level. They devise and teach classes independently. They advise students. They write recommendations. They serve on university and departmental committees. They make original contributions to their fields through regular presentations and publications. Part III Administrators have responded to the crisis and growing agitation from graduate students and adjuncts in a variety of ways. Some have claimed that graduate students are not employees, but rather apprentices for whom teaching is an integral part of their learning experience. If this were true, all graduate students would be required to teach. Yet most opportunities are linked to budget and enrollment, not students' need to develop their teaching abilities and not all students have the chance to teach. Also, if this were true, all graduate students would receive teaching related training and mentoring--support that is underdeveloped or lacking in many graduate programs. The argument that TAs are apprentices does not hold up either when one considers that in the apprenticeship model, apprentices have a job when they finished their term of study. That cannot be said for Ph.D. students today. Another administrative response to the academic labor crisis is the creation of new positions, such as more postdoctoral appointments. These are contract positions varying from one to three years intended as a holding pattern for Ph.D.s on the job market. Administrators are also developing more contract, but non-tenure track positions, for faculty. This is a policy recently adopted by Georgia State University which has created 95 full-time contractual faculty positions that are not tenure-track. This provides some job security, higher pay and benefits over the per course wage, but does not offer governance in the university or the freedom of speech associated with tenure. Salaries for these positions range from $24,000 to $30,000. This may sound good to graduate students now, and it is a step up from the per course pay, but it is not on par with tenure-line faculty who are averaging a salary of $36,000 to $40,000 for new assistant professors. These positions have a heavy teaching load, which is turn makes it harder to work towards professional development activities such as researching and publishing, and still offer lower pay than a similar duties for tenure-track faculty. The plan may also serve to create yet another underclass in the university hierarchy. Another response has come from professional associations who have been investigating the situation and issuing reports, such as the 1998 report on the job crisis from the Association of American Universities. The MLA had also responded by issuing a report on the crisis in 1997 entitled "Report of the Commission on Professional Employment of the Modern Language Association." In order to build on the momentum represented by the MLA's report and to provide the solid data that is missing, yet needed to truly understand the scope of the problem, in 1998 the Graduate Student Caucus of the MLA proposed a resolution that would authorize the MLA to survey for the collection of detailed salary, benefit, and course-load data for all part-time instructors, including teaching assistants, in language and literature departments in the United States and Canada. The survey, to encompass thousands of departments at an estimated cost of $91,000, was overwhelming approved. This survey and the publication of the results will give the organization the facts it needs to document the true extent of the academic labor crisis. The Chronicle recently reported that several other professional associations are following the MLA's lead and conducting employment practice surveys. One troubling response has been on the focus on alternative careers for Ph.D.s in the foreign languages and literature. Certainly part of the solution may be an investigation of alternative careers, indeed, for some graduate students a career outside academia is a desirable alternative. While some skills that graduate students acquire in Ph.D. programs are transferable, many alternative careers suggested by the MLA at the 1998 convention have their own academic and job related paths and do not require the expense and time commitment of a humanities Ph.D. Devoting too much energy on this as a solution diverts our attention from the real crisis facing us--the erosion of full-time jobs and the devaluing of the humanities. Conclusion This crisis is a moment of opportunity for graduate students to get involved in institutional power structures and to create a space for their voices to be taken seriously. The days of a paternalistic attitude towards graduate students are over. Through the pressure of hyper-professionalization and the academic labor crisis, graduate students have proven that they are serious players in the future of this profession. A Short Bibliography on the University in Crisis Books and Articles Brucker, Nancy. "BMOC: Big Money on Campus: How Private Funding Undercuts Public Education." The Washington Post. February 22, 1988: C1-2. Eakin, Emily, "Walking the Line," Lingua Franca (March/April) 1996: 52-60. Laurence, David. "Employment of 1996-97 English Ph.D.s: A Report on the MLA's Census of Ph.D. Placement." ADE Bulletin, Winter 1998: 1-12. Courtney Leatherman. "Faculty Unions Move to Organize Growing Ranks of Part-Time Professors." The Chronicle of Higher Education. February 27, 1998: A12. -----."Growth in Positions Off the Tenure Track Is a Trend That's Here to Stay, Study Finds" The Chronicle of Higher Education. April 9, 1999: A14. Lords, Erik. "Part-Time Faculty Members Sue for Better Pay and Benefits". The Chronicle of Higher Education. October 15, 1999: A16. Martin, Randy, editor. Chalk Lines: The Politics of Work in the Managed University. Durham: Duke University Press, 1998. Nelson, Cary, editor. Will Teach for Food: Academic Labor in Crisis. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Nelson, Cary and Michael Be rube , editors. Higher Education Under Fire. New York: Routledge, 1995. Nelson, Cary and Michael Be rube . "1994. "Graduate Education is Losing its Moral Base." Chronicle of Higher Education. (March 23, 1994):B1-3. Ohmann, Richard. English In America: A Radical View of the Profession. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976. Readings, Bill. The University in Ruins. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996. Schmidt, Peter. "As Economy Chugs Along, States Pour Money into Higher Education." The Chronicle of Higher Education. December 17, 1999: A28. Soley, Lawrence. Leasing the Ivory Tower: The Corporate Takeover of Academia. Boston: South End Press, 1995. Temple, Linda. "Debt, Isolation Can Break Grad Students." USA Today. December 9, 1998: (Life Cover Story). Young, Cynthia. "On Strike at Yale." minnesota review. 45-46 (Spring 1996.). Will, George. "Ph.D. Plenty." The Washington Post. April 25, 1999: B7. Reports "Evaluating the Mission, Size, and Composition of Your Doctoral Program." MLA Committee on Professional Employment. December 1997. "MLA Committee on Professional Employment: Final Report." December 1997. Research-Doctorate Programs in the United States: Continuity and Change. American Research Council, 1995. "Responses to the Report of the MLA Committee on Professional Employment." PMLA. March 1999: 229-238 |
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