In America, a nation was divided by a sandwich. Across the world, people are dying because of a Z-grade film trailer. The battle lines of free speech are often drawn over the banal. One strategy of those who seek to minimize the argument of the offended party is to scoff at what inspired it. It’s only a restaurant, only a movie, only a cartoon—why the outrage? they ask.
But such conflicts are rarely about the object in question. They are about the participants and their culture, their ideologies and their faith. They are about sanction and censure, about whose dignity can withstand whose degradation.
Freedom of speech is protected by law but guided by emotion. We should not mistake legal sanction for personal approval, but we should also not mistake personal disapproval for a rejection of free speech. In free societies, people have the right to say hateful things. And those offended have the right to oppose and condemn them.
—Originally published September 25, 2012
PART IV
Higher Education
The Closing of American Academia
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.
My friend is an adjunct. She has a PhD in anthropology and teaches at a university where she is paid $2,100 per course. While she is a professor, she is not a Professor. She is, like 67 percent 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 that 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 $5,000 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 $2,000 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 only days or even hours in advance, so most people book a conference 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 the 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 $1,000 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.
* * *
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.
* * *
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 $3,000 per article. Without an institutional affiliation, an academic cannot access scholarly research without paying, even for articles written by the scholar herself.
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, which 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, D.C., one of the most expensive cities in the country. Even law, once a safety net for American strivers, is now a profession which pays 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 academia’s reliance on adjuncts makes it no different than fields 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 “reevaluate 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.
—Originally published August 20, 2012
Academic Paywalls Mean Publish and Perish
On July 19, 2011, Aaron Swartz, a computer programmer and activist, was arrested for downloading 4.8 million academic articles. The articles constituted nearly the entire catalog of JSTOR, a scholarly research database. Universities that want to use JSTOR are charged as much as $50,000 in annual subscription fees.
Individuals who want to use JSTOR must shell out an average of $19 per ar
ticle. The academics who write the articles are not paid for their work, nor are the academics who review it. The only people who profit are the 211 employees of JSTOR.
Swartz thought this was wrong. The paywall, he argued, constituted “private theft of public culture.” It hurt not only the greater public but also academics, who must “pay money to read the work of their colleagues.”
For attempting to make scholarship accessible to people who cannot afford it, Swartz is facing a $1 million fine and up to thirty-five years in prison. The severity of the charges shocked activists fighting for open-access publication. But it shocked academics too, for different reasons.
“Can you imagine if JSTOR was public?” one of my friends in academia wondered. “That means someone might actually read my article.”
Academic publishing is structured on exclusivity. Originally, this exclusivity had to do with competition within journals. Acceptance rates at top journals are low, in some disciplines under 5 percent, and publishing in prestigious venues was once an indication of one’s value as a scholar.
Today, publishing in an academic journal all but ensures that your writing will go unread. “The more difficult it is to get an article into a journal, the higher the perceived value of having done so,” notes Kathleen Fitzpatrick, the director of Scholarly Communication at the Modern Language Association. “But this sense of prestige too easily shades over into a sense that the more exclusively a publication is distributed, the higher its value.”
Discussions of open-access publishing have centered on whether research should be made free to the public. But this question sets up a false dichotomy between “the public” and “the scholar.” Many people fall into a gray zone, the boundaries of which are determined by institutional affiliation and personal wealth. This gray category includes independent scholars, journalists, public officials, writers, scientists, and others who are experts in their fields yet are unwilling or unable to pay for access to academic research.
This denial of resources is a loss to those who value scholarly inquiry. But it is also a loss for the academics themselves, whose ability to stay employed rests on their willingness to limit the circulation of knowledge. In academia, the ability to prohibit scholarship is considered more meaningful than the ability to produce it.
“Publish and Perish”
When do scholars become part of “the public”? One answer may be when they cannot afford to access their own work. If I wanted to download my articles, I would have to pay $183. That is the total cost of the six academic articles I published between 2006 and 2012, the most expensive of which goes for 32£, or $51, and the cheapest of which is sold for $12, albeit with a mere 24 hours of access to it.
Since I receive no money from the sale of my work, I have no idea whether anyone purchased it. I suspect not, as the reason for the high price has nothing to do with making money. JSTOR, for example, makes only 0.35 percent of its profits from individual article sales. The high price is designed to maintain the barrier between academia and the outside world. Paywalls codify and commodify tacit elitism.
In academia, publishing is a strategic enterprise. It is less about the production of knowledge than where that knowledge will be held (or withheld) and what effect that has on the author’s career. New professors are awarded tenure based on their publication output, but not on the impact of their research on the world—perhaps because, due to paywalls, it is usually minimal.
“Publish or perish” has long been an academic maxim. In the digital economy, “publish and perish” may be a more apt summation. What academics gain in professional security, they lose in public relevance, a sad fate for those who want their research appreciated and understood.
Many scholars hate this situation. Over the last decade, there has been a push to end paywalls and move toward a more inclusive model. But advocates of open access face an uphill battle even as the segregation of scholarship leads to the loss of financial support.
In the United States, granting agencies like the National Science Foundation have come under attack by politicians who believe they fund projects irrelevant to public life. But by denying the public access to their work, academics do not allow taxpayers to see where their money is spent. By refusing to engage a broader audience about their research, academics ensure that few will defend them when funding for that research is cut.
Tyranny of Academic Publishers
One of the saddest moments I had in graduate school was when a professor advised me on when to publish. “You have to space out your articles by when it will benefit you professionally,” he said, when I told him I wanted to get my research out as soon as possible. “Don’t use up all your ideas before you’re on the tenure track.” This confused me. Was I supposed to have a finite number of ideas? Was it my professional obligation to withhold them?
What I did not understand is that academic publishing is not about sharing ideas. It is about removing oneself from public scrutiny while scrambling for professional security. It is about making work “count” with the few while sequestering it from the many.
Soon after the arrest of Aaron Swartz, a technologist named Gregory Maxwell dumped over eighteen thousand JSTOR documents on the torrent website The Pirate Bay. “All too often journals, galleries and museums are becoming not disseminators of knowledge—as their lofty mission statements suggest—but censors of knowledge, because censoring is the one thing they do better than the Internet does,” he wrote.
He described how he had wanted to republish the original scientific writings of astronomer William Herschel where people reading the Wikipedia entry for Uranus could find them. In the current publishing system, this constitutes a criminal act.
Maxwell and Swartz were after a simple thing: for the public to engage with knowledge. This is supposed to be what academics are after, too. Many of them are, but they are not able to pursue that goal due to the tyranny of academic publishers and professional norms that encourage obsequiousness and exclusion.
The academic publishing industry seems poised to collapse before it changes. But some scholars are writing about the current crisis. Last month, an article called “Public Intellectuals, Online Media and Public Spheres: Current Realignments” was published in the International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society.
I would tell you what it says, but I do not know. It is behind a paywall.
—Originally published October 2, 2012
Note: Aaron Swartz unfortunately
committed suicide in January 2013.
Academia’s Indentured Servants
On April 8, 2013, The New York Times reported that 76 percent of American university faculty are adjunct professors—an all-time high. Unlike tenured faculty, whose annual salaries can top $160,000, adjunct professors make an average of $2,700 per course and receive no health care or other benefits.
Most adjuncts teach at multiple universities while still not making enough to stay above the poverty line. Some are on welfare or homeless. Others depend on charity drives held by their peers. Adjuncts are generally not allowed to have offices or participate in faculty meetings. When they ask for a living wage or benefits, they can be fired. Their contingent status allows them no recourse.
No one forces a scholar to work as an adjunct. So why do some of America’s brightest PhDs—many of whom are authors of books and articles on labor, power, or injustice—accept such terrible conditions?
“Path dependence and sunk costs must be powerful forces,” speculates political scientist Steve Saideman in a blog post titled “Adjuncting Mystery.” In other words, job candidates have invested so much time and money into their professional training that they cannot fathom abandoning their goal—even if this means living, as Saideman says, like “second-class citizens.” (He later downgraded this to “third-class citizens.”)
With roughly 40 percent of academic positions eliminated since the 2008 crash, most adjuncts will not find a tenure-track job. Their path dependence and sunk costs w
ill likely lead to greater path dependence and sunk costs—and the costs of the academic job market are prohibitive. Many job candidates must shell out thousands of dollars for a chance to interview at their discipline’s annual meeting, usually held in one of the most expensive cities in the world. In some fields, candidates must pay to even see the job listings.
Given the need for personal wealth as a means to entry, one would assume that adjuncts would be even more outraged about their plight. After all, their paltry salaries and lack of departmental funding make their job hunt a far greater sacrifice than for those with means. But this is not the case. While efforts at labor organization are emerging, the adjunct rate continues to soar—from 68 percent in 2008, the year of the economic crash, to 76 percent just five years later.
Contingency has become permanent, a rite of passage to nowhere.
A Twofold Crisis
The adjunct plight is indicative of a twofold crisis in education and in the American economy. On one hand, we have the degradation of education in general and higher education in particular. It is no surprise that when 76 percent of professors are viewed as so disposable and indistinguishable that they are listed in course catalogs as “Professor Staff,” administrators view computers that grade essays as a viable replacement. Those who promote inhumane treatment tend not to favor the human.
On the other hand, we have a pervasive self-degradation among low-earning academics—a sweeping sense of shame that strikes adjunct workers before adjunct workers can strike. In a tirade for Slate subtitled “Getting a literature Ph.D. will turn you into an emotional trainwreck, not a professor,” Rebecca Schuman writes: “By the time you finish—if you even do—your academic self will be the culmination of your entire self, and thus you will believe, incomprehensibly, that not having a tenure-track job makes you worthless. You will believe this so strongly that when you do not land a job, it will destroy you.”
The View from Flyover Country Page 9
