In Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class, Barbara Ehrenreich uses vertigo as a metaphor for the constant feeling of insecurity at the core of the American middle-class experience. With this metaphor, she addresses the precarity of a position that requires long and arduous investments to be passed on to the next generation. While capital and labor are positioned to own, in the case of capital, and sell, in labor’s case, their ways of sustenance, members of the middle class need to spend years—in schooling, training, competing for internships, and, after that, jobs—to be able to pass on their class position to the next generation. This creates a kind of vertigo, the sensation that a misstep can cause a fall backward or loss in standing, whether social, professional, or economic. For Ehrenreich, this precarity explains the political evolution of the middle class throughout the twentieth century.
Education and training are major factors determining an individual’s access to the professions. The expectation of rewards following a protracted period of education is one of the defining characteristics of the middle class. While the poor and working classes, according to the classist perspective that sustains middle-class ideology, exist in a world of instant gratification, the professional is trained to wait and endure. The idea that self-discipline, sacrifice, and risk-taking will eventually pay off when one attains a distant prize should sound familiar to all of those who are pursuing or have embarked upon a career in higher education.
At the macro level, the institutional and ideological structure of higher education reflects this understanding of the meritocratic middle class. Undergraduates attend college in the belief that the cost of attending will be worthwhile when a degree gives them access to well-paying jobs. However, the dialectics within academia between instant and deferred gratification are baffled by the expectations of professionalism, expertise, and specialization in graduate school. Graduate students who teach, research, and publish are in no way granted a special status inside their disciplines or the professions; they are expected to meet the same standards as faculty members and other professionals who teach, research, and publish. The graduate student is supposed to exist on a timeline, where the accumulation of education and training allows one to become a professional, in the most rounded sense of the word. But the distinction between trainee and professional has collapsed; the expectation of a delayed reward for the effort spent, and the relationship between labor and training, coexist in a confusing space that serves only the corporate structures dominating higher education institutions.
What Makes a Student?
The 2016 decision by the National Labor Relations Board to grant graduate student employees at Columbia University representation rights, and thus to grant graduate student workers at private institutions more broadly the right to unionization, clarified one of the legal sticking points pertaining to graduate student labor: namely, whether students performing services for a university in exchange for grants, stipends, or other forms of payment are in an employment relationship under the National Labor Relations Act. Although the legal recognition of employment hardly determines the true nature of an employee-employer relationship, it does exemplify the complicated status of graduate student labor. The relationship between graduate students and their department or school is commonly understood to look something like this: When someone is accepted into a graduate program, the university makes an offer of payment in exchange for services—teaching, research, or other activities related to the degree. The graduate student then enters a double relationship with the institution. On the one hand, they are situated as “trainees” within the profession and the discipline they study; on the other, they provide services that are expected to meet the requirements of professionalism and quality to which any other worker would be subject, services that are themselves necessary for the profession to continue to function.
Graduate school is the institution that allows academic training and expertise to be reproduced. The main goal of many graduate programs is to train people to join the ranks of academia as future professors and researchers (although universities in recent years have increasingly catered to professionals looking for advancement in their careers outside of academia, leading to a proliferation of professional degrees). Those joining a graduate program as student employees assume that they will be using their experiences as both students and employees as training to become future researchers and instructors. The labor they produce as workers and as students can thus be valued in terms of its incompleteness, or at least as part of the process that will eventually lead the graduate student into “full professionalism.”
There are two main frameworks in which to under stand the relationship between the realities of wage labor and the intellectual development required for the degree: In one, they exist in separate spheres that overlap only in the sense that they involve the same individual; in the other, they are mutually complementary as part of the training of a graduate student. These frameworks correspond to different levels of the administration in universities. The first comes directly from labor relations and central university management. Its structure allows for clear separation between the work that a graduate student worker performs through teaching, research, and service and the research or learning that happens as a graduate student—twenty hours a week of paid work, and the rest a contingency that just happens to take up most of the graduate student’s time and labor. The second interpretation is the one preferred by faculty supervisors: professors, chairs, and principal investigators. Members of this group understand that the training extends beyond the classroom, making the graduate worker a student, first and foremost. The two interpretations of graduate labor coincide in a key aspect: the class component. Graduate students exist as workers precisely because their status is lower than and differentiated from that of the professor or the researcher. Management has drawn the contours of graduate school as a reality separate from the rest of the profession, but at the same time, the reality of the labor performed places graduate students within the academic workforce. This separation has facilitated the positioning of graduate labor at the end of value-creation inside academia—that is, as a more efficient way for the university to extract teaching and research labor while pay and benefits are considerably lower. At a moment when higher education labor has been reduced and deskilled, graduate student labor has become one of the ways institutions can keep offering highly profitable services for a fraction of what much other academic labor costs.
Both strategies to differentiate graduate students from other workers inside the academic industrial complex depend upon the stratification of the work produced, either by separating that labor from the rest of the students’ “full-time” commitment or by characterizing it as part of a “training program.” But the economics of this work do not sustain either model, revealing them instead as class strategies that solidify a preexisting division and hierarchy of labor.
Class Politics Inside Academia
When in spring 2023 the Temple University Graduate Students’ Association, TUGSA-AFT, went on strike, university administrators seeking to shut down negotiations argued ad infinitum that striking teaching and research assistants were only “part-time workers.” Our demands to significantly increase wages and benefits were met with contempt: “You are asking for the world, and you are just part-time workers,” a human resources representative said to a room full of graduate student workers. University administrators around the country are structuring contingent labor as intrinsically interchangeable: Wherever or whenever the labor of faculty serving on contingent appointments decreases, graduate student labor can make up the difference, and vice versa. The reality of these two systems of employment—graduate and contingent—is not, however, as transparent as the labor relations offices would like to think.
The problem with the Temple administration’s argument was that it handled the discontent percolating through the university poorly. Outside the university, for the media and political power brokers following the labor action, perhaps the administration’s argument could be enough to shift opinion against supporting the strike, but professors and staff were aware that the work graduate students performed for the university often exceeded the twenty hours a week that the administration claimed. They told me that the work graduate students performed “wasn’t important”; what was important was the pursuit of the degree, the completion of the dissertation, and finding an academic job once the PhD was finished. From two completely different standpoints, both central management and faculty supervisors were deeply devaluing graduate student labor. What was for human resources too insignificant an employment relationship to bear any meaningful value to the institution was for professors, chairs, and other instructional and research staff just a way to keep us around while their labor of educating us was being completed.
These two lines of argument were halted once the success of the strike became apparent. The withholding of our labor proved a couple of things: Graduate students perform essential work for the university, and the devaluing of that work as “part-time” disregarded that truth. Our strike debunked common myths about the relationship of graduate labor to training and academic reproduction. However, it also proved that the arbitrary divisions and hierarchies of labor imposed upon the different categories of workers—full-time, contingent, tenured, graduate, and so on—don’t correspond to the reality of academic work. At the end of the day, a classroom is a classroom, and a lab is a lab; it doesn’t matter if the work in these spaces is being done by a graduate student, a full-time faculty member, an adjunct, or an administrator. Tuition won’t be reduced because a class is taught by nonfaculty, and extensions on grant deadlines won’t be given if work in labs is performed by graduate students. The strike proved that, even if the deskilling of academic labor has been conducted with the goal of growing the reserve army of workers ready to jump into the classroom when administrators call upon them to do so, it has also increased the intensity of the labor needed to keep daily operations at the university running. In short, the adjunctification of teaching and research has made a bigger labor force necessary. What tenured and tenured-track faculty produced for a good portion of the twentieth century—teaching, research, and service—has given way to a complex system of interconnected positions that take on the many different facets of academic labor. This has resulted in an ever-increasing bureaucracy, but also in the need for an ever-increasing supply of researchers and teachers capable of providing the flexibility the market requires. How this reality affects the specific product that higher education is selling right now— degrees—falls outside of the scope of this article, but it is worth mentioning that in parallel to this process, the alienation of workers from the product itself has increased, making the relationship between the labor input and the output less transparent and, as such, harder to organize around.
Even with the recognition of labor as labor inside academia, the reality of the graduate student experience still plays—and appears it will keep playing—a key role in distributing expertise and “gatekeeping” academic jobs. However, the role of graduate school as a simple “training” becomes less clear every year. While “training” is needed for graduate schools to fulfill their roles of reproducing academic labor, the positioning of graduate students as workers with the same responsibilities in education and research as other academic workers has made the category of “trainee” ambiguous. Administrations have created a problem for themselves that is difficult to solve with the tools they have at hand: They cannot grant graduate students the full-time status that the work they perform requires—that would put their status as trainees in doubt—but at the same time they need cheap labor to be readily available for universities to continue to function. With the expectation that the trainees will provide the same professionalism as the trainers, and without a real training path, graduate labor exists in a confusing space. To return to the metaphor with which I began, although the feeling of vertigo continues, graduate students are put in a position where everything expected from our labor is already throwing us to the ground while the expectations placed upon us—to succeed in future jobs and in our immediate learning—remain high. We experience vertigo once we can no longer distinguish up from down, once academic labor has increased in both intensity and deskilling, once the ability to govern and regulate our own work and lives is outsourced to bureaucrats and administrators. Graduate student labor is more necessary than ever, but it has become unbearable to manage, categorize, and govern.
Jesús Fernández is a labor organizer based in Philadelphia. He recently finished his PhD in early modern Spanish literature at Temple University, where he also was president of TUGSA-AFT for two consecutive terms. His email address is [email protected].