As higher education reels from the effects of the coronavirus pandemic, graduate students say they face a unique set of challenges, including difficulty getting access to research materials, concern about finishing their degrees on time, and pressing financial troubles. Administrators are focusing attention on faculty members and undergraduates, some grad students complain, reinforcing the feeling that they are second-class citizens.
Anna Meier, a fifth-year doctoral candidate in political science at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, said her peers are preoccupied with paying their rent and the fees graduate students pay each semester for the use of campus facilities. The supports her department has announced thus far — doubling conference-travel funding for 2021, extending deadlines on papers — are, she said, “missing the point.”
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.
“They feel a lot more like hand-waving at real problems, which are that graduate students don’t have enough money right now. Trying to give them very small chunks of money or small deadline extensions in the future,” Meier said, “might not be relevant if they can’t make their financial circumstances work right now.
“A lot of the work that I’ve been seeing that departments are doing to try to help graduate students, it’s all about their futures,” she continued. “But they might not have a future if they can’t pay their rent in the next couple of months.”
A Wisconsin spokeswoman wrote by email that the institution was making additional financial aid available to graduate students, including international students and others who weren’t previously getting aid. “Graduate students are a critical part of our educational and research missions, and we will continue to support them,” she wrote.
Meanwhile, the Wisconsin graduate-student union has set up its own mutual-aid fund, which has raised nearly $10,000 in a GoFundMe campaign.
Meier said that responses by some administrators to graduate students’ appeals for more funding or deadline extensions illustrate a systemic inequity that has dogged grad students for decades.
“A really common response to graduate students is that ‘We’re all struggling right now,’ and that’s very true,” Meier said. “It’s very different to struggle when you make a six-figure salary versus when you make $20,000 a year, which is my guaranteed stipend rate. It’s very different to struggle when you don’t have the three months of savings that every financial adviser says that you should have.”
“I would just really encourage people to remember,” she said, “that graduate students are struggling and precarious in the best of times, and these are not the best of times, and we need help now and over the summer, not a year from now.”
Life Factors
Alejandro Guardado is a case in point. He was slated to finish his master’s degree in history at California State University at Los Angeles in May, but had been counting on being able to consult sources from Mexico for his research on state violence and religious activism in Mexico during the 1960s and 1970s.
Now that he’s unable to have those materials transferred to his institution’s library, Guardado finds himself in a difficult position. “I’m either forced to ignore significant scholarship that I feel like I have to speak to, to be honest with my readers, or I’m really just forced to buy everything,” Guardado said. He’s been looking on Amazon for used books.
Guardado works 35 hours a week at a local supermarket, and has been consumed by worry about his possible exposure to Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. His mother has diabetes, and he doesn’t want to infect her.
Those issues, and working from home, have made it a struggle to focus on his scholarship. One of eight siblings, he said he’d slept in the living room his entire life, and had grown accustomed to doing his schoolwork elsewhere.
“I am used to working at coffee shops or libraries,” he said, “so it’s hard to put together thoughts, along with the stress financially, to formulate something that’s supposed to be competitive intellectually or something that I’m proud of.”
He planned to start a Ph.D. program in the fall, but doesn’t know if that’s still economically or logistically feasible.
Travel and Research Delays
Alice Wolff, an archaeobotanist and second-year Ph.D. student at Cornell University, has done fieldwork every summer since 2012. While the sample collection she’d planned to do abroad this summer won’t happen, she considers herself lucky — she still has some material to work with at home. Many of her peers, she said, aren’t in that position.
“If you’re at a stage when you need to be able to fly to this place in Europe and get dirt from this particular place to do your experiments,” Wolff said, “your research kind of gets halted and you’re not going to be able to get back there for potentially another year. There’s this year gap where it’s sort of like you’re spinning your wheels.”
The pandemic’s interruption of research has already led many colleges to grant tenure-clock extensions for faculty members. But graduate students have not won similar grants of extra time-to-degree and funding.
Wolff’s adviser has been writing clauses in each of his advisees’ annual progress reviews about the pandemic’s effect on their studies, “so that in the future, if we’re having time-to-degree issues, we have this on record.” But Wolff said she hadn’t gotten any broader assurances from Cornell about how it plans to help graduate students.
Wolff worries about whether the research material she and her peers have on hand will last the rest of the pandemic. “If we’re only shut down for maybe two to six months, then that’s fine,” she said. “But after six months, it starts to get into ‘OK, what do we do now? Physically, what do we work on?’”
The Student-Worker Divide
The pandemic has shined a light on the odd, hybrid position that graduate students occupy: sometimes treated as students, other times as employees. Jeffrey Letourneau wasn’t sure what that meant for him when Duke University’s president emailed two weeks ago that “all undergraduate, graduate, and professional students who are currently out of town for Spring Break should NOT return to the Duke campus, if at all possible.” Would he, a third-year Ph.D. student in molecular genetics and microbiology, be allowed to return to the lab where he works?
Letourneau said a series of phone calls to various offices at Duke had helped him assemble “bits and pieces” of information, but communication from Duke to graduate students has been inconsistent and infrequent.
“You have to wade through information that’s updating constantly, and then pick apart which is the most relevant for you,” Letourneau said.
He pointed out that the Duke Graduate Student Union, of which he is a member, has dealt with the student-worker ambiguity firsthand. “Employees get dental care, but grad students aren’t really employees. But then other times, like if they want us to come into work during a pandemic, then we’re considered employees,” Letourneau said.
Some principal investigators in other Duke labs, he said, perhaps concerned about maintaining grant funding or staying on track for tenure, have ordered graduate students to continue coming to work, even after the university directed nonessential research to stop.
The graduate union at Duke has issued a series of demands to administrators, including the adoption of a standard work policy, a guarantee of summer funding, the creation of paid-time-off and sick-leave policies, and the suspension of such “milestone deadlines” as qualifying exams and dissertation defenses.
In an email to The Chronicle, a Duke spokesman said the institution’s graduate students had been “contacted directly and repeatedly as circumstances have changed and new policies have been implemented to protect the health and safety of all members of our community.”
“The whole coronavirus crisis has been a rapidly changing situation — actions that were inconceivable in the morning became standard operating procedure by the evening,” Michael Schoenfeld, vice president for public affairs and government relations and chief communications officer, wrote. “There have been many times over the past few weeks in which that information has shifted dramatically, sometimes in the space of a few hours. It’s understandable that people are anxious and confused — we all are.”
Departmental Solutions
Some graduate institutions have considered adjusting degree requirements. New York University’s history department, for instance, is changing the format of its doctoral comprehensive exams, said Andrew Needham, the director of graduate studies.
Ordinarily, doctoral students would sit for the exams on three consecutive days, eight hours a day. That practice, Needham quickly realized, wouldn’t be workable this year.
The department considered postponing the exams for all students, but chose not to because, as Needham said, doing so “essentially kicks the can down the road.” In the end, the exams will take place, but students will have the option to take them in August rather than May. “We’ve tried to be flexible while still saying, ‘You have the opportunity to finish these things,’” Needham said.
One option was to give students a month this spring to complete the exams. But after soliciting feedback from students, Needham said, that idea, too, was jettisoned. “Having that kind of thing sitting in your brain for a month could lead to a certain kind of paralysis of anxiety,” he said.
Instead, the department adopted a student’s suggestion: allowing a week to complete the exams. That span will permit students more time than the three-day structure, compensating for their lack of easy access to library materials but not stretching the exam period too long.
“We really have been sure to communicate with the students and the faculty that more time does not now represent ‘OK, we expect some kind of super-polished answer,’” Needham said. The department will maintain standards but make allowances for what he called “this crazy, unprecedented moment.”
With that solution in place, Needham now plans to turn to longer-term concerns, including time-to-degree requirements. He’s observed “broad agreement” among faculty members that those time limits should be extended, and that doctoral fellowships should be prolonged “at least an extra semester.”
“That need will hold for any kind of fieldwork discipline where it’s just not possible to be in the field, however that is defined, whether it is ethnographic, whether it’s archival,” Needham said. “Now that the immediate fire is somewhat under management, I think those kinds of longer-term concerns are the next thing I really intend to start figuring out.”
Questioning Graduate-Program ‘Normality’
Despite her exhortations for graduate programs to offer short-term aid to their students, Anna Meier, the political-science student at Wisconsin, is also concerned about the long-term issues Needham plans to explore.
Meier’s dissertation will compare attitudes on counterterrorism in the United States and Germany, and she completed archival research in Germany last summer. But with planned research this summer in Washington, D.C., on hold, she isn’t sure what path to take.
“If I can’t travel and I can’t find an alternative way of getting the data that I need for my research, either through doing Skype interviews or rethinking this part of my project, then I really don’t have a dissertation, to be perfectly honest,” Meier said. “If I don’t really have a dissertation, then how do I rethink it? How long does that take?”
Meier had planned to go on the job market this fall. While she still hopes to do so, she wonders if she will be a viable candidate.
Of course, as colleges freeze hiring, there will be fewer positions available. That market scarcity, Meier fears, will mean search committees can be choosy.
“There are so many fewer jobs, you’re going to have to be that much better to get them, have gotten many more publications, have gone and collected this much more data, have invented this new methodology for studying xyz,” Meier said. “If you don’t have that, you’re not going to be a competitive candidate because there just are not going to be enough jobs.”
Ultimately, Meier hopes, the pandemic will call into question the accepted norms of graduate education — when students are expected to finish their coursework, to take comprehensive exams, to defend their dissertation.
“Even in the best of times, that schedule really assumes that you have enough money to get by, that your family is healthy, that you don’t have care-giving responsibilities, that you’re willing to sacrifice physical and mental health, to some extent,” Meier said.
These, of course, are not the best of times.
“I don’t think many department leaders realize yet that there was never such a thing as ‘normality,’” Meier mused recently on Twitter. “That illusion was always inequitable. Acting as if it can carry on after this is downright cruel.”
