As the urgency and severity of the coronavirus pandemic have become apparent, universities have rapidly been thrust into troubled — and uncharted — waters. They have required students to evacuate their dormitories, faculty to move classes online, and staff to work remotely, all to prioritize safety while maintaining the educational mission. With the immediate crises of getting students home and classes online now largely behind us, colleges are now starting to focus on longer-term issues.
Across the academy, research has come to a grinding halt. Access to archives, labs, libraries, and field-research sites has been disrupted. Research with human subjects faces new difficulties. In light of all this, dozens of universities have announced extensions of the tenure clock for tenure-track faculty. These extensions acknowledge a new reality: It’s not easy to produce scholarship during a pandemic.
As colleges and universities have struggled to devise policies to respond to the quickly evolving situation, here are links to The Chronicle’s key coverage of how this worldwide health crisis is affecting campuses.
And yet there have been only a few announcements of similar support for graduate students. The University of California at Berkeley is allowing doctoral students to apply for one-semester increases in time to complete their degrees, and the sociology department at the University of Maryland at College Park has extended graduate-program milestones by an additional semester, for instance. But when I ask fellow graduate students what changes their programs have made to accommodate them, the answer, generally, is none.
Graduate students are navigating the same disruptions as faculty members, and generally doing so with fewer resources. Like faculty members, graduate students are still teaching, sometimes as primary instructors. They are on their universities’ front lines of supporting students through this difficult time. And like faculty members, graduate students have partners and families to care for. Some graduate students find themselves thrust into full-time child care — even full-time single-parenting, as is the case for colleagues of mine whose partners work in essential industries like health care. And that’s to say nothing of the grave reality that some of us, or our families, will get sick, if we have not already.
All the conditions that merit tenure-clock extensions for faculty apply to graduate students. And the combination of financial uncertainty, pressure to graduate within a given time frame and before funding runs out, and disruption in our academic work underscores the urgency of our situation. In the rush to move instruction online and undergrads off campus, figuring out how to keep classes going was, rightly, institutions top priority. But universities should delay no longer on attending to the needs of their graduate students, some of whom may find themselves in an impossible situation.
What should this support look like?
An expensive, but necessary start: Universities must ensure all current graduate students receive funding (including tuition and fees, health insurance, and a way to earn a stipend) for at least an additional semester — but ideally, a year, given the timing of hiring for academic jobs. With dissertations hanging in the balance, many students may no longer be on track to graduate within the five- or six-year time frame their funding package covers. Even earlier-stage doctoral students may be facing delays that will affect their ability to complete their master’s papers or other requirements to advance to candidacy. Finding the money may prove a challenge, but departments must at least assure current graduate students that they are willing to go to great lengths to advocate for them. I’ve heard talk of departments not admitting a fall-2021 cohort in order to better serve existing graduate students’ needs. While such a move may not ultimately prove necessary, even suggesting that it is on the table is a reassurance that current students are a priority.
Secondly, departments must centralize and standardize support for graduate students. Many graduate students I’ve spoken with recently have indicated that their departments have instructed students to speak to their advisers, leaving things up in the air. While the adviser-student relationship is important, this approach misses the point. The issues graduate students face are systemic issues necessitating institutional responses, not idiosyncratic personal needs. We’re living in a new norm, and many of the questions graduate students are wondering about — for instance, funding and degree benchmarks — would be better answered by departments.
Finally, I hope departments can begin a dialogue among faculty members and graduate students about how to adjust dissertation formats or requirements. On Twitter, I’ve been arguing for this under the hashtag #GoodEnoughPhD. Inspired by David M. Perry’s idea of a #PassFailNation, the hashtag points to arguments some scholars have made that simply extending tenure clocks is not enough (and may even widen inequalities); we also need to ratchet down expectations given the challenges academics are facing in producing research right now. The same is true for Ph.D. students. Changed expectations may take the form of being more open to three-paper dissertations in fields where monographs are the norm, for instance. As the disruption stretches on, it might also be necessary to be flexible about what constitutes an acceptable dissertation, by relaxing restrictions on co-authored work, or perhaps even shifting the number of interviews or hours of fieldwork expected to be completed for one’s dissertation fieldwork.
These are challenging times for our universities. They didn’t cause these problems, but they’re better equipped than vulnerable graduate students are to weather this storm. It may not be possible to make all these changes immediately, but it is essential universities do not forget about graduate students.
To my fellow graduate students: Now is an excellent time to get involved in your graduate-student workers’ union if your campus has one, or to organize with peers in your department or school, as some of our colleagues at Yale are doing. Our labor sustains universities’ educational mission. Now it’s time for universities to sustain us.
