Putting the Passive-Aggressive in Ph.D

Today in “Duh:”  A study of graduate students at a major Western U.S. university discovered that over half of the graduate students surveyed had experienced major emotional stress.  Over half also reported knowing a colleague who had experienced major emotional stress.

Today in “DUUUUUHHHH!!:”  experiencing emotional stress was correlated with have a dysfunctional relationship with one’s advisor (also, precarious financial status, lack of contact with friends and family, being single, and being female).

Graduate students–and probably females in particular–spend an absurd amount of time worrying about what professors think of them.  This is not just because they are insecure, needy little babies.  It is because the academic survival and career outlook of a grad student depend significantly on the quality of her relationships with senior faculty.

As such, I was intrigued to hear that faculty in my department have been doing a bit of bitching about graduate students during Graduate Program Committee meetings, an issue which prompted one of my fellow grads on the Professional Skills Committee to organize a session on Faculty/Grad Student Relations for younger graduate students.  Now, some of the faculty’s complaints were entirely legitimate.  Students who wait until the very last minute to request job recommendations or feedback on materials rightfully deserve to be admonished.  I gave my reccommenders 8 weeks, so I don’t think I am one of the problem students, but no one has ever told me one way or the other.

But that’s actually sort of a problem in itself.  One would sort of hope that faculty members could tactfully tell their students that they need X number of weeks notice on a recommendation or a request for feedback on a chapter or article themselves, rather than making it a topic for committee gossip.  One would hope.  Yet the colleague who ran the Professional Skills session reported that pretensions about openness and honesty between faculty and grad students followed by confessions about dissembling and manipulating in touchy situations was sort of a theme.  When she asked each faculty participant to talk about how they wish to be addressed by grad students, one faculty member declined to answer.  I am, as of this moment, now obsessing about the fact that I once called this same faculty member “Matt” in an email, thinking I remembered him introducing himself that way, only to go back and realize he signs all of his emails with an ambiguous “MC.”  How can something as simple and straightforward as “How do you like to be addressed?” become such a locus for anxiety and misunderstanding?

Later, when they were discussing the need for directness and openness when setting the terms of an advisor/advisee relationship (how often you expect to meet, what kind of turn around time the advisee can expect for feedback, when the advisee feels they need to finish, how long it usually takes students of that advisor to finish, etc.), one distinguished professor admitted that when he doesn’t wish to work with a grad student, he becomes “really busy all of a sudden.”

From the safety of my pseudonymous blog:  that’s fucking ridiculous.  I am gradually–as professors begin to seem a bit less like towering, impenetrable monoliths and more like human beings–beginning to realize that many faculty members are as socially awkward and terrified of confrontations as their students are.  But really, the standard needs to be a bit higher.  Given the enormous amount of power an advisor has in a grad student’s life, the refusal to honestly negotiate the terms of a relationship and occasionally have difficult conversations about the student’s performance or etiquette  isn’t really a simple personality quirk.  It’s downright passive aggressive and detrimental to the grad student’s academic development and overall well-being.

Graduate students often feel as if they are constantly breaking rules and failing to live up to standards that no one has ever spelled out for them.  Worse, the rules and etiquette change depending on whose class you’re in or who is conducting a particular meeting or workshop.  Graduate students also frequently feel like they are imposters, as if someone at the university is going to realize that they do not, in fact, belong there and immediately send them packing.  But even worse is the sense that maybe you don’t belong here, but no one is ever going to tell you one way or the other.  All you will know is that the faculty members who work in your sub-field won’t return your emails, and the Graduate Advisor refuses to look you in the eye.

Ok, that’s not my situation, and I do know of excellent faculty members who were able to sit down and honestly tell them that things just weren’t working out.  I’m reminded of Notorious Ph.D’s excellent post about having that very conversation with two grads in her own department.  She describes that conversation as “difficult,” but I guarantee you that it was also compassionate.  Grad school is too huge of an investment of time, money, and energy, and faculty are being downright disrespectful if they allow grads to simply flounder through the process with no clear signals about their progress or their future in the field while complaining about them to the colleague down the hall.

Image Credit: Ph.D Comics

Keeping Your Options Open in Grad School

Given the shittiness of the academic job market and the expense of higher education, common sense says that going to graduate school in the humanities is a pretty terrible idea.  Yet there are those of us who, for whatever reason, feel the need to go anyway.  For me, I think it was a combination of stubbornness, naiveté, and the fact that a Ph.D. in English has been a life goal of mine since 10th grade that led me to pursue graduate school and stick with it.  I don’t regret doing it, but I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it to anyone.

That said, I think there is a way of approaching grad school without being taken for a ride.  There is much about the university-industrial complex that is dysfunctional, including a tendency to exploit the labor of wide-eyed idealists.  For every potential graduate student who thinks that living a life of the mind is more important than making a remunerative wage, there is a university willing to milk that person for 5-7 years of cheap (or free) labor without either guarantee of or preparation for a real job at the end of that period.  For every person who wants to be in academia sooooo baaaadly, there is a university happy to pay that person $20,000 a year with no benefits in a one-year non-renewable adjunct or “visiting” assistant professorship.

The key to not getting taken for a ride is to know where your interests lie, to decide from the very beginning what you are willing to sacrifice in order to get a Ph.D. and not sacrifice one inch beyond that point.  For me, it has meant deciding that wherever I land job-wise in the next few years, the Ph.D. was a worthy accomplishment in and of itself, a ridiculously huge bucket list item, if you will, and I refuse to see myself or my time in grad school as a failure if I wind up taking one of the less prestigious but actually pretty appealing alternatives to an academic career, like teaching high school or community college or running workshops on persuasive writing for a branch of the federal government (that is actually a real job, and it apparently pays really, really well).  I have, in effect, taken the words of perennial buzzkill Thomas Benton to heart:

Perhaps members of a generation that enters graduate school with no expectations of an academic position — who never even consider, for one moment, that they will become tenure-track professors — will bring about positive change in the way things are taught. Such students will be less beholden to advisers, and empowered to demand that courses have some relationship to existing opportunities. With an eye to careers outside academe, they will challenge the tyranny of the monograph; they might seek technical skills; they will want to speak to a wider public; and they will be more open to movement between academe and the “outside world” than previous generations, who were taught to regard anything but the professorial life as failure from which one could never return.

While I’ll be applying for academic jobs this year, I’m keeping my options open while doing so.  I’m trying to be a little bit entrepreneurial, a little bit mercenary about the whole thing.  I’m not pretending that money doesn’t matter, and I’ve laid out in pretty specific terms what I am willing to sacrifice lifestyle-wise in order to work at a university.  I am not going forward as if I can write my own ticket, but I refuse to be dazzled by the glamor of the MLA convention to the point that I’ll mortgage my life for the dream of playing in the NBA.

So what does an attitude like that mean for the way you approach grad school, and how can graduate students get through the experience without being psychologically and financially crushed?  If there’s one bit of advice that I could give prospective (or current) grad students, it would be this:

Graduate school is a job.  Don’t do it for free.

When I was applying to grad school in my senior year of college, I received two offers.  The first was from an elite Northeastern institution that wanted to charge me $20,000 a year for the privilege of learning and working there.  I kept their offer letter on my desk for a while, but ultimately I said no.  There was just no way I was going to go that far into a financial hole for this experience.  The second letter I received was from a less prestigious but nevertheless major public university.  They were offering 5 years of guaranteed financial support in the form of teaching appointments, including waived tuition, a living stipend, and state employee health benefits, with the possibility of two extra years of support contingent on performance and budgetary concerns.  I would never under any circumstances advise a prospective graduate student to settle for anything less.  Here’s why:

Graduate school is not worth a crushing debt load. I have a close relative who is now $150,000 in the hole thanks to college and law school debt.  His monthly payment is more than most people pay in rent.  Do not let this happen to you, especially given the earning potential of a fresh Ph.D. on the academic job market.  While even funded graduate students may require some student loans to meet living expenses, there is just no good reason to take out more in tuition loans each year than you will make your first few years as an adjunct or visiting assistant whatever.

Generous support packages indicate pretty good things about the university. As I quickly discovered my first week on campus, the generous support package was due to a strong history of collective bargaining on the part of graduate students and a faculty that “gets it” and is willing to go to bat for them.  The structured way in which graduate students progressed through their teaching appointments indicated a department with a savvy placement committee with a clear sense of what the job market required.  9 of the 12 people on the job market last year got full-time jobs at universities.  That is a ridiculously good record.

So that’s the first aspect of not doing this job for free, or more to the point, not paying for it out of your own pocket.  Once you’re in a program with decent support, don’t sign up for stuff that isn’t in your job description unless you’re making more money for doing it or there is a clear career reason for jumping at the opportunity.  Committee service and conference organization looks pretty good on a c.v., but it doesn’t look nearly as good as a finished dissertation or an article in a major journal.  If you want a shot at a job in academia, concentrate on the activities that are going to really help you:  writing, publishing, and teaching.  Everything else is extra.

I have, however, found that it can be both rewarding and beneficial to pursue paid work outside of your department.  In addition to teaching for English, I have worked as a research assistant in an interdisciplinary program without its own grad students, a freelance editor, a tutor in the Undergraduate Writing Center, a teacher in an outreach program working with underperforming high schools, and an application reader for an Honors program (that one paid ridiculously well, and I got to do it at home on my own time).  Each one of those represented two things:  1)  Extra income, which meant I could take a lower paying but less time-consuming job during the summer rather than teaching summer school in order to work on my dissertation.  I could also afford to go to 5 conferences this year.  2)  Exposure to alternative career paths in editing, writing center administration, high school teaching, and university admissions, and credentials in an interdisciplinary field.  I do not yet know if these are going to pay off in some way, but there is value in learning that you are good at things other than writing papers, that you can thrive in a variety of job situations, that there are, perhaps, other things you can see yourself doing after grad school.

There are, however, going to be numerous people at your university–administrators and faculty–who want you to do stuff for free, who will insist that it benefits you in some way to, for example, take on additional teaching and mentorship responsibilities with no extra pay.  Do not take these claims at face value.  Weigh your interests against theirs in the equation.  It is in their best interest to guilt you into doing more work for less money, to keep you around for as long as possible doing stuff for free and then paying them tuition when your funding runs out.  It is in yours to concentrate all of your energy toward finishing your dissertation, publishing stuff, and eventually getting a job.  While you can listen to advice from outside parties, you and only you can decide whether or not volunteering for extra stuff is going to be a good choice.

Finally, remember that leaving graduate school is not an admission of failure. In many cases, it is evidence of nothing more than unimpeachable common sense.  I know many people who left after the first two years for jobs that sound pretty awesome, and you are allowed to be one of those people, no matter what the bitter people who are determined to tough it out despite their misery or the shaming influence of a university-industrial complex whose interests are not aligned with yours.  When it comes to the decision to finish or not to finish, only one person’s opinion matters:  yours, not your advisor’s, not the department chair’s, not your parents’ or the people who attend your high school reunions.  If you come to the conclusion, at some point, that you would rather be doing something else or that you are the victim of a giant racket, GTFO.  Your career, your life in fact, is not a fraternity initiation procedure to see who can withstand something unnecessarily painful the longest.

Is this sort of depressing?  Ok, kind of.  But it’s important to know up front that graduate school can be a devastatingly disempowering experience, shockingly unlike college.  The difference is like that of a minimum wage worker at a retail outlet versus that of a customer at said retail outlet.  As a college student, the faculty and administration were collectively working together on your behalf. As a graduate student, you are a laborer–a laborer whose primary goal is to finish graduate school–and the key to having a rewarding experience is thinking of yourself as such, as someone who deserves to benefit from the work that you do.  Furthermore, if you are able to think of yourself as going to work every day rather than going to limbo, it can actually make the long run seem bearable.

Grad Student Employment and Institutional Batshittery

As often happens in the careers of graduate students and academics, I encountered a bit of institutional batshittery at my university this summer, institutional batshittery that I was going keep off this blog, because some part of me felt that complaining about it was inappropriate, but Tenured Radical’s brilliant post (via Historiann) on overwork and exploitation within the academy has inspired me to put this turd of a situation right out there and call it what it is.  TR and the blog commenters highlight the pressure to overextend oneself, a pressure that tends to be particularly acute for vulnerable employees from underrepresented fields:  the adjunct who takes on more than her fair share because there might be a full-time position opening up next year, the instructor in Native or Queer Studies who feels the need to allow more students into his class or take on more advisees because he’s one of only two professors doing what he does, or the “girl” at the committee meeting who volunteers for every project in order to avoid the awkward silence and the disappointment of the chair.

TR’s point is that the modern dysfunctional university system thrives on people who are willing to overextend themselves, who are willing, in fact, to set aside the activities necessary to actually building a successful academic career in order to do the work that the university needs done (advising, writing recommendations, serving on search committees, reading applications, etc.) but that holds no opportunities for advancement, prestige, or remuneration:

Worse, the generative political urgency in the various fields that make up American Studies, Women’s Studies and Ethnic Studies often moves us to throw our personal energy at immediate needs that are actually the result of long-term institutional dysfunction that our sacrifices help to maintain. Don’t make up for the deficiencies of the institution by taxing yourself. Don’t. The academic world is littered with broken and bitter people behind who thought that institutional neglect was only temporary.

Graduate students face this dilemma as well.  ABDs in particular are told that their first and primary concern is finishing their dissertation.  But let’s not kid ourselves:  graduate students supply an ample, inexpensive, and often quite eager supply of labor for the university.   Graduate students teach introductory classes, grade papers for the faculty, sit in the archives transcribing stuff for their professors, and checking the mail of advisors who are doing invited lectures abroad.  Yes, this is part of our “apprenticeship,” but it is also a job.  Let me just say that one more time:  it’s a JOB. Yet graduate students are often conditioned to think of this labor not as a job that they may enjoy and for which they will also be justly compensated but a privilege for which they must simply be thankful because we rejected 9 of 10 applicants in the year you got in. And very often we are encouraged to think of this work as something we should be happy to do for free.

Here is one small example before I get to the big one, but I must surround it with layers of disclaimer before we proceed.  I work in an English department at a major state university that is, by the standards of English departments at major state universities, lavishly well-funded and strongly committed to the careers and overall well-being of their graduate students.  We have a Graduate Advisor–who will play a heroic role in the sob story I’ll get to in a little bit–and a group of faculty that are nothing short of phenomenal in their grasp of the issues that graduate students face.  That said, this English department resides within a massive bureaucracy that doesn’t necessarily share their commitments or give them the resources to fulfill them.  In fact, due to a recent budgetary clusterfrack, this massive bureaucracy now taketh away quite a lot more than it giveth at the moment.  There used to be a pedagogy course that first year TA’s could take concurrent with their first teaching assignment, in which they got to work three hours a week for credit with their faculty supervisor, learning methods for leading classroom discussions and grading and developing their own teaching philosophy, and whatnot.  As of this year, that class is being cut, and last May they announced that it would be replaced with a system in which current experienced Assistant Instructors (all graduate students) will mentor new TA’s.  On one level, that sounds like the sort of program that I might volunteer for if I were asked. But I was not asked.  This extra hour or three of work per week was simply added to my job description, and we are not even getting cost of living raises this year. Furthermore, new TA’s will be taking the standard full load of courses and working as a teaching assistant without the benefit of close faculty mentorship.

Now, to the credit of my department, I think someone realized that this was a little effed up, as we’ve been getting emails asking for volunteers for a mentorship program that sounds pretty similar, and no one has broached the topic of required mentoring since that May meeting.  Or that could be wishful thinking on my part.

That’s a small example.  But about a month ago, I was given the sort of reminder about how the university views my status at this institution that made me start perusing Monster.com for full-time jobs requiring editing skills and good time management.  Since last June, I’ve been working as a part-time research assistant for a professor who is very well known in his field.  Some would think of this as a pretty plum job in terms of the c.v. line and the recommendation that I’m going to get for the job market, but let me just repeat:  this is a job.  This is work for which I deserve to be compensated (I have to repeat that to myself like a mantra), not merely another educational opportunity for which I should merely be grateful.  This work that I have done for this professor has been crucial to the publication of a monograph which will confer more status on this professor and this university.

Here’s the thing, though:  research assistants at my university are not given tuition assistance.  During the fall and summer, my tuition was semi-covered because I also had a part-time teaching position.  However, in the summer, most departments employing research assistants do a little trick in order to ensure that research assistants don’t have to enroll for a class and pay tuition during that term.  They appoint them as a Student Technician rather than a GRA.  GRA’s have to pay tuition.  Student Tech’s don’t.  It isn’t really clear why.  Last summer, there was no issue appointing me as a Student Tech.  None at all.  I made my measly $700 a month and got a lot done on my dissertation thanks to the flexible work schedule and the fact that we had enough in savings (my husband, a high school teacher, is paid over 12 months as well) to cover the deficit created by the cut in pay between summer and the rest of the year.

In June, however, (the day before my sister’s wedding, in fact), I was notified by the admin in the department that was hiring me (not English) that my appointment as a Student Tech did not go through, that the university was forcing me to take the GRA title, enroll in a conference course, and fork over $1500 in tuition and fees.  Let’s run down all of the absurdities of this situation, shall we?

• The conference course that I would have registered for would have been the same conference course that all dissertation writers register for.  It’s not actually a course.  It’s just trading emails and having a meeting or two with your advisor, which I would be doing whether or not I was actually enrolled.  I would be paying tuition and fees and receiving no instruction. I would just be paying to work.
• I was informed of this two weeks after the job had technically begun.  Had I known about the problem ahead of time, I could have applied for a teaching assistant job in my home department, which would have come with tuition assistance (and better pay).  By waiting so long to notify me, they effectively prevented me from obtaining any other employment at the university.
• The basis of the denial was that this work would somehow interfere with my progress toward the degree.  That’s bullshit.  Asking me to pay this much in tuition would have meant getting an extra job at Starbucks or something, which would have interfered with my progress toward the degree a hell of a lot more.
• The university insisted that this had always been their policy, but they had just never audited it until this year.  This is also bullshit.  As it later turned out, three GRAs in the institutionally savvy English department also got screwed.  This end-run around the summer tuition issue had been common practice long enough that new admins in each department were instructed to do it as part of their job training.
  

This was, in every sense of the word, a shake-down, an attempt to avoid paying employees by exploiting the slipperiness of the terms job and education, student and employee as they are applied to people in graduate programs, redefining their status whenever it’s convenient.  As employees with jobs, we would be entitled to something.  As students getting an education, we should merely be thankful for the learning opportunities provided by working with such excellent faculty.  As students, we should me in awe of the opportunities such contacts will give us on the job market (not that I have any illusions that knowing one famous professor is a ticket to a plum job or any job at all for that matter).  I can very well imagine a situation in which a graduate student would be told by her boss, by the hiring department, and her graduate adviser that she should  be so very grateful, that this work she is doing is part of her education, not her job.  Luckily, I was not in that situation.  Luckily, my boss, the hiring department, and the Graduate Advisor in my home department collectively pitched a fit, writing letters to the Dean and getting the decision reversed for myself and the other research assistants who had had the rug pulled out from under them.

I am immensely, indescribably thankful that they went to bat for us, but truthfully, I am galled that they even had to.  I am galled that my subsistence this summer depended entirely on a) working for people who get that graduate students can’t feed, clothe, and shelter themselves with a dissertation, and b) were institutionally savvy enough to fix the problem.  And truthfully, there was a little voice in my brain, the “girl” voice that kept saying that I really should be willing to do this work for free, that all jobs have problems, that I really am very very fortunate to be working with this person and to be in this program AT ALL, and after all I’m not so bad off considering I have spousal support, and OTHER graduate students would probably be thankful for this opportunity, and NO.

If other graduate students are willing to do this sort of work for free and just be “thankful,” STOP.  The truth is that if I hadn’t appealed to all of these people, if I had just sucked it up and worked essentially for free, it would be sending the message that universities can get away with this sort of thing.  NO.  STOP.  Ironically, the most politically significant thing I could have done in that situation might actually have been going and getting a full time job at Starbucks, and screw the university’s time-to-degree and attrition statistics. Now, that might have been a little bit like cutting of my nose to spite their face, but hey, I’d have more money at pretty good health coverage, and knowing myself, I’d probably still finish my dissertation in due time.  The truth is that the academic labor market–and we really need to include dewy-eyed 22-year old grad school applicants (like I was) when we talk about that labor market–is not only oversaturated, it is oversaturated with people who are willing to put up with crap, who are willing to do their jobs for little or no money, who are willing to buy into the idea that they should just be grateful for this opportunity to learn and work in such an enchanted place.  Yes, there are unethical and exploitative and morally horrifying employment situations all over the place, but I’m pretty sure that even Wal-Mart doesn’t charge you $1500 just to walk onto the property.