Graduate workers all over the country are organizing against a fresh wave of austerity that will affect both public and private institutions. At our own university, Brown, the graduate union has released a five-point plan highlighting the most urgent needs, such as extending funding, protecting international-student visas, and guaranteeing no-cost medical treatment for students who contract Covid-19. Graduate workers have made similar demands at many private and public universities, including Emory, Princeton, and Purdue Universities, and the University of North Carolina.
Like it or not, the coronavirus crisis will transform graduate education. University administrations have the power now to move toward greater equity — or to amplify inequality even further. Choosing the path of equity will require democratizing university governance. Otherwise, graduate education will survive but only at the expense of graduate students.
For doctoral students, already facing uncertain futures while surviving on stipends that rarely reflect the cost of living in major cities or college towns, the pandemic and imminent recession have accelerated an ongoing decline. As at many institutions, graduate students at Brown are confronting widespread disruption of research and professionalization, sudden shifts in immigration status, and overnight shuffling of care responsibilities. Students have reported having to return from the field after only one month of research and postponing their dissertation progress indefinitely as funding clocks run out. Others have found it difficult to continue making progress with relatives hospitalized or children at home full time.
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.
Graduate students everywhere are spending more time developing lesson plans for remote teaching without additional compensation or resources. Like faculty members, graduate students are also helping their students navigate disruptions to their own lives. All of these challenges are intensified by the fact that graduate-student stipends were insufficient even before the crisis. What was once a fight for sustainable conditions has become a struggle against impossible ones.
In many disciplines, departments already admit incoming classes much larger than they are able to place in jobs and postdoctoral appointments. As university after university announces hiring freezes, academic-job prospects for graduate students will go from bleak to nonexistent. The polite fiction of graduate school as an apprenticeship for a future academic career, which has been under strain for many years, now faces obliteration. In most cases graduate school is a fixed term of employment offering substantial benefits both to departments, which gain highly motivated and engaged young researchers as well as committed instructors, and to graduate students themselves, who pursue advanced knowledge and original research.
These basic realities should not change. Graduate funding packages should reflect the conditions of this particular employment relationship. This includes clearly communicated expectations about how teaching and research obligations fit into the student’s funding package, and clear lines of accountability and avenues of appeal between graduate students and supervisors. Graduate-student support packages should likewise include 12 full months of financial support, since neither work nor living expenses end in the summer. In many disciplines, expectations for what a dissertation is or should be can be modified or adjusted according to a student’s interests and career plans (at some universities, these kinds of solutions have already been implemented). Finally, if we are going to think realistically about the Ph.D. as an employment relationship (one that offers substantial benefits and incurs substantial responsibilities), then administrators and graduate schools should work with graduate-student unions where these exist or have won elections, and support (or at least not oppose) organizing efforts in places where they are not yet established.
A road map to fixing graduate education is indistinguishable from a road map to fixing the university generally. Such a plan would need to wean the university off of its dependence on cheap and disposable labor, ending not only the widespread reliance on adjuncts to teach undergraduate classes, but also the replacement of tenure lines with postdoctoral and visiting positions. One solution to this problem may well be ending the exceptionalization of tenure and democratizing robust job protections across the university. Such a change would go a long way to ending the brutal bifurcation of outcomes in which a small minority of Ph.D. job-seekers secure coveted tenure-track positions with a promise of lifetime employment, while the majority cobble together a living at or near the poverty line as the price for maintaining a semblance of an academic career. This could likewise have the effect of slowing the productivity arms race, with its perverse incentives and outcomes detrimental to both the lives and the work of scholars.
Any plan to “fix” graduate education must also be a plan to radically democratize university decision-making. The economic disruption occasioned by the pandemic will push universities to socialize the losses, even as the economic gains of the past 10 years have gone disproportionately to a small minority. As Christopher Newfield and others have argued, public universities (and many programs and departments within even the best-funded private universities) exist under conditions of permausterity, in which every expenditure and every outlay must be justified according to budgetary imperatives closely overseen by administrators whose own expenditures go largely unsupervised.
A reorganization of the university would extend power to staff, grad students, and adjuncts.
The conditions of permausterity are exacerbated by a steady upward redistribution of discretion and decision-making power to administrators, who, even when they act with the best of intentions, are responsible to an even higher power: a board of trustees or regents who rule by fiat, asking universities to run leaner and do more with less, irrespective of the human costs of their plans or the harm done to teaching and scholarship. In other words, what gets naturalized as unavoidable austerity is a chosen set of conditions.
Moving toward a democratic university necessitates strategic thinking about how to secure the health of the institution, which is inseparable from the well-being of the people who constitute it. If spending cuts are to be made, there must be a process that allows for real consensus around the institution’s mission, what its core functions are, and how they can best be funded. Consensus from above must be resisted. A democratic university demands the creation of faculty-governance structures that facilitate solidarity with vulnerable workers and permit faculty and workers to stand together and be heard together by the administrative hierarchy. A commitment to democratic self-governance will prioritize issues of equity and diversity, not simply outsource them to viewbooks or already embattled departments like African American studies, Women’s and Gender studies, and ethnic studies. Such an institution must also refrain from colluding with conservative governments to suppress the rights of its workers to organize and demand what they need.
A move toward democratization should enlarge our understanding of the university in and as a community. In other words, we ought to ask: If the university aspires to serve the public, who is the public we imagine ourselves serving, and how can it be expanded? A democratic reorientation of the university would extend real power to staff, graduate students, and adjunct and contingent instructors, minimize the authoritative role of boards of trustees, reduce the outsized salaries of presidents and provosts, offer job security to all workers on campus, and advocate for public enrichment and education. The university could perhaps then serve as a much-needed model for a society which prioritized the public good.
We are convinced, given the multiple crises confronting higher education, that the only way to save graduate education in anything like its current form is to alter the structures of university governance. Whatever happens, graduate schools will likely see an increase in applications as young people seek out relatively safe places to ride out the worst years of the coming recession. It may be tempting to suppose that a continued influx of new Ph.D. students means that graduate education remains robust (irrespective of individual outcomes), or, more cynically, that nothing has to change since graduate school, if it does not offer a good deal, is still offering a better one than gig work or the unemployment line.
What was once a fight for sustainable conditions has become a struggle against impossible ones.
This is a dangerously narrow perspective. Even if Ph.D. enrollments increase, undergraduate enrollments will almost certainly decrease, and many of the institutions that once employed graduating Ph.D.s will be forced to close. Higher-level administration can continue to streamline the university according to even more ruthlessly neoliberal logics, but there is no guarantee that undergraduates will continue to go into debt for the degree such a university confers, nor any indication that universities might begin to move away from their tuition dependence. In this instance, graduate students will simply be among the first of many groups to discover that they have been made superfluous.
In this unprecedented collective crisis, higher education has a chance to remake itself as an institution for the public good. Only a university restructured along radically democratic lines, along with robust state investment in both research and public education, has any chance of fixing the related problems of high tuition, mounting student debt, and exploitative employment. Yet we cannot expect that administrations will voluntarily cede the authority they have painstakingly accumulated: Winning a democratic university will require concerted cross-institutional, cross-rank, solidaristic organizing. Organizing to demand democratization will provoke polarized, politicized fights. Thankfully, groups of academics dedicated to building such solidarities have already begun to emerge. Whether universities will heed their call is another question. Until then, it is not only the future of graduate education, but the fate of the university itself, that hangs in the balance.
