i’m not money, no i’m stipends

gio, at 6:05 am EDT on July 20, 2007

This is wonderful news because goodness knows we need more adjuncts in the ranks of the faculty. So I say do whatever we need to do to matriculate more grad. students. It’s a win-win, as they say ...

Second Line, Great News!, at 10:25 am EST on February 8, 2007

They decided, didn’t they?

” .. Without comprehensive funding, doctoral candidates in the humanities and social sciences areas are an endangered species ..”

Isn’t that a choice that they made? As in, no one held a gun to their head and made them join up? Their decision — their issue? Did they consult anyone else about their decision?

C. Bigsby, at 11:55 am EST on February 8, 2007

Three comments

I’ve got three comments here.

First, let’s be clear about how graduate students as TAs contribute to the casualization of the academic workforce. As a TA for several years, I’ve allowed courses numbering several hundred students to be taught by a single tenured professor. In a way, my labor as a TA acts as a labor saving device for the academy. The work of TAs and graduate students allows one professor to credibly educate 400 students. None of this takes away from the joy and pleasure I’ve received from teaching section, but even at Yale, whose stipends are equivalent to those of Chicago, a $19,000 a year teacher (even with health benefits) is a steal! Chicago’s decision to increase stipends will make the lives of graduate students more bearable, but it does nothing to address the decision by university administrations to rely on TA and adjunct labor — rather than ladder faculty — to meet their workforce needs.

Second point, this will not drastically improve time-to-degree. Some dissertations simply take longer to complete than others. Disciplines which require significant field work or language preparation like anthropology or some sorts of history are just going to take longer and no amount of extra funding is going to change that. Princeton should offer a case in point here. For several years, Princeton’s package provided full funding for 5 years without teaching obligations applying the logic that graduate students would be able to finish in that time. However, after several years of this program, it was apparent that the vast majority of students were taking 6, 7, or even 8 years to finish. Finally, a couple of years ago, Princeton modified its registration policies, allowing students to register through their 7th year.

This leads me to my last point. Increased funding for graduate students does make sense and does help people finish their degrees, but this funding model cannot be linked to a punitive registration policy. Yale University has over the last 20 years repeatedly attempted to impose a strict 6 year cap on registration. GESO, the union for teachers and researchers at Yale, and their faculty allies have pushed this plan back several times. Without registration, foreign students fall out of visa status and must leave, loans come due, you lose healthcare and library privileges. This is not a way to help people finish their dissertations. It’s a way to weed them out, but only after they’ve provided you with cheap TA labor.

Right now, Yale is trying to link an increase in stipends with a cap on registration, imposing a one-size-fits-all funding model on the entire university regardless of discipline. If you think about it, a six-year cap means that a student spends 2 years on course work, and a year on orals and learning to teach. This leaves 3 years to research and write a book. Out of that, you spend a half year on the job market, leaving you 2-1/2 years to research and write a book good enough to get you a job. How many faculty write a book in 2-1/2 years and how many get kicked out if they don’t meet those expectations?

Gotta get back to writing now ... you know, the clock is ticking...

Jay D, Graduate Student at Yale University, at 12:16 pm EST on February 8, 2007

JayD, many humanities graduate students at Chicago are not expected to TA before their 3rd or 4th year, and then only minimally. Though Yale and other institutions may consider graduate students as an annoying (you have to feed them) source of otherwise cheap labor, not everywhere does. Compare relevant situations, please.

A.T., at 2:50 pm EST on February 8, 2007

Stipends

Who said anything about TAs at Chicago? When I was a graduate student there (okay, it was a long time ago), it was a very rare graduate student who was employed as a teaching assistant. At Chicago, there are three times the number of graduate students as undergraduates. Perhaps in some departments graduate students may teach, but most aspiring teachers had to take jobs outside of the university to get experience teaching.

Lisa J. McIntyre, at 10:35 pm EST on February 8, 2007

A real commitment?

Has anyone else noticed that all of this new funding is going to new incoming students rather than to those current students who are still struggling to complete their degrees while, no doubt, doing the requisite TAing, RAing, scholarly work, job-searching, and probably a few side-jobs as well just to make ends meet? This is a marketing and recruiting campaign by the university—not a serious commitment to helping their graduate students to finish in a timely manner. That would require a lot more than a four or five-year funding increase. How much money have they put towards fellowships or teaching assistantships beyond the fourth or fifth year? How much effort is going in to helping these students find jobs? To what extent are these students being encouraged to take jobs outside of the elite research-university track? Are the departments and faculty being asked to do their part by improving their course offerings, advising, mentoring, keeping up with deadlines, etc.? Are any of the incoming students receiving full disclosure of the placement statistics in their respective departments? Let’s see something other than a carrot being dangled in front of a few eager undergraduates before we pat UChicago on the back for their generosity.

John Edward Martin, at 4:25 am EST on February 9, 2007

I need some funding!

I am currently a doc student at Old Dominion University, where I was offered a stipend and tuition waiver that turned out to be a job monitoring the undergraduate computer lab. I had a baby in December and as a GRA have no health insurance and no access to childcare. They have applied the faculty staff rules preventing me from bringing my infant son, and are unwilling to reassign my duties. I am not considered faculty or staff by any other measure, and only international students recieve health insurance at ODU. My job description was not provided until I arrived on campus, giving me no opportunity to evaluate the situation, and further, the rules were not presented until a few weeks into this semester. They have canceled my assistantship, and while I appeal on the basis of misapplication of policy, I am looking at borrowing to pay for the whole thing- except- my remaining loan eligibility under the NSLD aggregate is too low to cover even this summer — risking my place in the program on the basis of continuous enrollment rules.

I am 38. I have really postponed my family until I was at a point where I should have some control over my time and flexibility. Now I am being told graduate work and parenthood are incompatible — after years and even last semester of students with children in my classes, labs, and other places in the university.

I need to switch schools — but I need the funding to cover everything — including childcare. Someone — tell me this is not impossible! joyess1@gmail.com

Lissa, at 10:50 pm EDT on March 30, 2007