Sarah Kendzior
Sarah Kendzior is an anthropologist who recently received her PhD from Washington University in St Louis.
Sarah Kendzior is an anthropologist who recently received her PhD from Washington University in St Louis.
The closing of American academia
The plight of adjunct professors highlights the end of higher education as a means to prosperity.
Last Modified: 20 Aug 2012 14:36
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| 67 per cent of American university faculty are part-time employees on short-term contracts [AP] |
It is 2011 and I'm sitting in the Palais des Congres in Montreal, watching anthropologists talk about structural inequality.
The American Anthropological Association meeting is held annually to
showcase research from around the world, and like thousands of other
anthropologists, I am paying to play: $650 for airfare, $400 for three
nights in a "student" hotel, $70 for membership, and $94 for admission.
The latter two fees are student rates. If I were an unemployed or
underemployed scholar, the rates would double.
The theme of this year's meeting is "Traces, Tidemarks and Legacies."
According to the explanation on the American Anthropological
Association website,
we live in a time when "the meaning and location of differences, both
intellectually and morally, have been rearranged". As the conference
progresses, I begin to see what they mean. I am listening to the speaker
bemoan the exploitative practices of the neoliberal model when a friend
of mine taps me on the shoulder.
"I spent almost my entire salary to be here," she says.
"I spent almost my entire salary to be here," she says.
My friend is an adjunct.
She has a PhD in anthropology and teaches at a university, where she is
paid $2100 per course. While she is a professor, she is not a
Professor. She is, like 67 per cent of American university faculty, a part-time employee on a contract that may or may not be renewed each semester. She receives no benefits or health care.
According to the Adjunct Project,
a crowdsourced website revealing adjunct wages - data which
universities have long kept under wraps - her salary is about average.
If she taught five classes a year, a typical full-time faculty course
load, she would make $10,500, well below the poverty line. Some adjuncts
make more. I have one friend who was offered $5000 per course, but he
turned it down and requested less so that his children would still
qualify for food stamps.
Why is my friend, a smart woman with no money, spending nearly $2000
to attend a conference she cannot afford? She is looking for a way out.
In America, academic hiring is rigid and seasonal. Each discipline has a
conference, usually held in the fall, where interviews take place.
These interviews can be announced days or even hours in advance, so most
people book beforehand, often to receive no interviews at all.
The American Anthropological Association tends to hold its meetings in America's most expensive cities, although they do have one stipulation:
"AAA staff responsible for negotiating and administering annual meeting
contracts shall show preference to locales with living wage
ordinances." This rule does not apply, unfortunately, to those in
attendance.
Below poverty line
In most professions, salaries below the poverty line would be cause
for alarm. In academia, they are treated as a source of gratitude.
Volunteerism is par for the course - literally. Teaching is touted as a
"calling", with compensation an afterthought. One American research
university offers its PhD students a salary of $1000 per semester for
the "opportunity" to design and teach a course for undergraduates, who
are each paying about $50,000 in tuition. The university calls this
position "Senior Teaching Assistant" because paying an instructor so far
below minimum wage is probably illegal.
In addition to teaching, academics conduct research and publish, but
they are not paid for this work either. Instead, all proceeds go to for-profit academic publishers,
who block academic articles from the public through exorbitant download
and subscription fees, making millions for themselves in the process.
If authors want to make their research public, they have to pay the publisher an average of $3000
per article. Without an institutional affiliation, an academic cannot
access scholarly research without paying, even for articles written by
the scholar itself.
It may be hard to summon sympathy for people who walk willingly into
such working conditions. "Bart, don't make fun of grad students," Marge
told her son on an oft-quoted episode of The Simpsons. "They just made a terrible life choice."
But all Americans should be concerned about adjuncts, and not only
because adjuncts are the ones teaching our youth. The adjunct problem is
emblematic of broader trends in American employment: the end of higher
education as a means to prosperity, and the severing of opportunity to
all but the most privileged.
In a searing commentary,
political analyst Joshua Foust notes that the unpaid internships that
were once limited to show business have now spread to nearly every
industry. "It's almost impossible to get a job working on policy in this
town without an unpaid internship," he writes from Washington DC, one
of the most expensive cities in the country. Even law, once a safety net
for American strivers, is now a profession where jobs pay as little as $10,000 a year
- unfeasible for all but the wealthy, and devastating for those who
have invested more than $100,000 into their degrees. One after another,
the occupations that shape American society are becoming impossible for
all but the most elite to enter.
The value of a degree
Academia is vaunted for being a meritocracy. Publications are judged
on blind review, and good graduate programs offer free tuition and a
decent stipend. But its reliance on adjuncts makes it no different than
professions that cater to the elite through unpaid internships.
Anthropologists are known for their attentiveness to social
inequality, but few have acknowledged the plight of their peers. When I
expressed doubt about the job market to one colleague, she advised me,
with total seriousness, to "re-evaluate what work means" and to consider
"post-work imaginaries". A popular video on post-graduate employment cuts to the chase: "Why don't you tap into your trust fund?"
In May 2012, I received my PhD, but I still do not know what to do
with it. I struggle with the closed off nature of academic work, which I
think should be accessible to everyone, but most of all I struggle with
the limited opportunities in academia for Americans like me, people for
whom education was once a path out of poverty, and not a way into it.
My father, the first person in his family to go to college, tries to tell me my degree has value. "Our family came here with nothing," he says of my great-grandparents, who fled Poland a century ago. "Do you know how incredible it is that you did this, how proud they would be?"
And my heart broke a little when he said that, because his illusion
is so touching - so revealing of the values of his generation, and so
alien to the experience of mine.
Sarah Kendzior is an anthropologist who recently received her PhD from Washington University in St Louis.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.
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