The closing of American academia

[salvorhardin]

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 $1000 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.

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 $3000 per article. Without an institutional affiliation, an academic cannot access scholarly research without paying, even for articles written by the scholar itself.

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."

...

In a searing commentary, political analyst Joshua Foust notes that the unpaid internships that 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 DC, one of the most expensive cities in the country. Even law, once a safety net for American strivers, is now a profession where jobs pay 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.

Full oped: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/08/2012820102749246453.html

[Romulox]

1. By what theory should "the Academy" be immunized from the economics which the rest of us suffer?

This is the "invisible hand" so many of members of the Academy wax rhapsodically about.

[Egalitarian Thug]

2. Go entropy! Civilization bad. Violence good.

You may not be able to fix stupid, but it is a self-correcting problem.

[Trillo]

3. You should have titled your post

[div style="font-size:20pt;font-weight:bold"]The Academic Industrial Complex.

[salvorhardin]

4. The title of the post is the title of the referenced article

Is that no longer the custom here? Just asking.

[Trillo]

5. Consider mine an editorial comment. Sorry for any misunderstanding.

I've noted the second-person "you" is commonly used on DU to reference the author of a piece when the replier is replying to an OP which was composed mostly of excerpt, except in the notable cases of religious and corporate dissent, otherwise known as flame wars, though those replies drill down into subthreads.

As far as I know DU policy, the convention of LBN is that the title must match that of the article. This is General discussion (GD). Your mention of such a custom is the first I've read that LBN's titling guideline also applies to GD.

[KansDem]

6. The Big Lie About the 'Life of the Mind'

I read this back in 2010. The writer is spot on with his observations.

--excerpt--

One reason that graduate school is for the already privileged is that it is structurally dependent on people who are neither privileged nor connected. Wealthy students are not trapped by the system; they can take what they want from it, not feel pressured, and walk away at any point with minimal consequences. They do not have to obsess about whether some professor really likes them. If they are determined to become academics, they can select universities on the basis of reputation rather than money. They can focus on research rather than scrambling for time-consuming teaching and research assistantships to help pay the bills. And, when they go on the market, they can hold out for the perfect position rather than accepting whatever is available.

But the system over which the privileged preside does not ultimately depend on them for the daily functioning of higher education (which is now, as we all know, drifting toward a part-time, no-benefit business). The ranks of new Ph.D.'s and adjuncts these days are mainly composed of people from below the upper-middle class: people who believe from infancy that more education equals more opportunity. They see the professions as a path to security and status.

Again and again, the people who wrote to me said things like "Nobody told me" and "Now what do I do?" "Everybody keeps saying my doctorate gives me all kinds of transferable skills, but I can't get a second interview, even outside of academe." "What's wrong with me?"

The myth of the academic meritocracy powerfully affects students from families that believe in education, that may or may not have attained a few undergraduate degrees, but do not have a lot of experience with how access to the professions is controlled. Their daughter goes to graduate school, earns a doctorate in comparative literature from an Ivy League university, everyone is proud of her, and then they are shocked when she struggles for years to earn more than the minimum wage. (Meanwhile, her brother—who was never very good at school—makes a decent living fixing HVAC systems with a six-month certificate from a for-profit school near the Interstate.)

--much more--

http://chronicle.com/article/The-Big-Lie-About-the-Life-of/63937/

[salvorhardin]

8. Thanks

That was excellent.

[Freddie Stubbs]

7. Teaching Assistants usually get thousands of dollars in free tuition each semester in addition to

a stipend.

[nadinbrzezinski]

9. Really? Not even in the 1990s when I was a GTA

[eppur_se_muova]

10. "Funny money" -- they charge thousands of dollars in tuition, then say you don't have to pay it.

It is NOT cash in hand, and can never be.

When every student in most Depts is getting the same "free" tuition, you can set the "value" of that tuition to anything you want.