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Here at the @radpedagogy podcast a graduate colleague + listener forwarded us an email sent by a humanities department chair to current doctoral students, explaining why the program needs to drastically cut PhD admissions in the coming years.
Clearly this person is the middle-manager messenger. Still, the claim was that a **multi-billion dollar endowed private R1** couldn't afford to bring in a new cohort. Why? The university extended grad students' healthcare and time-to-degree amid COVID.
Lots of universities and programs are doing this to their humanities and social science programs: claiming that COVID austerity forces them to cut entering cohorts. So let's talk about this. Specifically let's talk about why this is trash.
1/ Recall how contingent + grad workers had to fight tooth and nail for a 1-yr extension earlier this year, so that they wouldn’t lose income + healthcare during a pandemic. Universities didn't want to make these extensions. Many still haven’t done so, and the fight continues.
2/ The universities that did extend funding and healthcare extensions are now acting as if this was a benevolent choice, as opposed to a showdown with organized grad workers.
3/ Having rewritten a labor fight as a story of paternalist generosity, they now address the greedy children who don’t understand endowments: this choice is one with *consequences.*
4/ That is, they couch the extensions in the language of care, and then slam the door shut to show that that "care" only extends to a deserving few.
5/ These university spokespeople gesture to the academic job market and claim it would be irresponsible to admit graduate students right now. They cite the "market" as a thing they're a victim of rather than the crisis they are complicit in creating.
6/ Remember: these same schools led the way with hiring freezes very early in the lockdown. These same schools continue to rely on underpaid graduate + non-TT labor for the teaching they so pride themselves on, deny their workers basic benefits, and shamelessly union-bust.
7/ The message from these elite schools is clear: you better be grateful for what you have because we can and will take it away. Actually, we're already taking it.
8/ This is the same message (threat) all of academia gives us, that we would be better off fighting for crumbs rather than daring to demand a better system of education for all students and all workers.
9/ And yet, as shitty as the PhD program working conditions are, for lots of working-class scholars it’s the first stable income they’ve ever had, or their ticket to healthcare, however uncomprehensive.
10/ So these admissions freezes are cuts to jobs. Not good jobs, but jobs. On that point, this piece by @tressiemcphd. https://tressiemc.com/uncategorized/blanket-dont-go-to-graduate-school-advice-ignores-race-and-reality/
11/ These schools are cutting jobs at the same time as they are relying on underpaid labor. Not only are they complicit as ever in this labor crisis, their cuts to admissions sends the message that the solution to the crisis is MORE MERITOCRACY.
12/ More fighting for crumbs. People compete for fewer spots, and the universities continue to peddle the lie that only the most deserving candidates are admitted (and only the most deserving among those are hired).
13/ Among a whole host of problems, this discourse militates against solidarity. And of course this is not an accident, when coming from administrative offices that shell out millions to sabotage local labor movements.
14/ Here's the message: you’re admitted to grad school because you're special and elite. You deserve a steady wage, or to live without fear of getting sick, only because we decided you are special enough to be here, and only as long as you stay. Don't forget it, because we won't.
15/ So, yeah, that's the university's game plan. What's yours?
16/ As a start, we suggest that academic workers, especially those on the tenure track, not repeat their bosses' lies to their students, or their junior colleagues, or to anyone else. Y'all know better, or you should.
