Responding to a Problem: A W.P.A. for Ph.Ds?

That a crisis exists in the production of humanities Ph.D.s hardly seems worth restating. With the widespread use of adjunct professors and overworked graduate students, fewer and fewer Ph.Ds are finding full-time gainful employment. We have all heard the stories of part-time professors rushing from campus to campus, hoping to paste together a living. Few of them have health care benefits; rarely do they receive administrative or institutional support, let alone offices. With 60 percent of college teaching in this country done off the tenure track, the word “crisis” hardly seems an overstatement. There’s now a union movement swelling around these issues. Graduate student teachers and adjunct faculty are starting to fight back. In doing so, they define teaching, researching, and writing as forms of cultural work. This might not seem so significant, but it challenges some preconceived notions and stereotypes of academics as overfed, underworked individuals incapable of understanding the realities of most working Americans. Academic labor organizing is premised on the fact that white-collar, highly educated people can be exploited just like other workers. A poster from the graduate student organizing drive at Yale University a few years back showed a harried graduate student huddled over a stack of exam papers. She sweats and thinks to herself: “This isn’t work, this isn’t work, this isn’t...” We all know, of course, that it is. As someone inspired both by this new labor movement and by history—what I went to graduate school to learn—I am reminded of the Great Depression, a time when America’s overall labor crisis and the drive to organize for union membership reached their greatest heights. In retrospect, what seems remarkable about the New Deal’s response to unemployment is not THE NEA HIGHER EDUCATION JOURNAL 17