I read the following quip in a discussion thread at Crooked Timber:
"Grad students are of course subject to feudal rather than modern conceptions of authority."
That is so unbelievably true. When I was a first year graduate student, the department chair approached me and asked me to serve drinks and hors douvres at our school sponsored national convention party. For those not familiar with national academic conventions: it's not unusual for schools of note to throw parties for former graduates, friends of the program, etc. A savvy grad student convention goer can avoid paying a single penny on food if he or she concentrates on getting invites to these exclusive gigs. There aren't many breakfast or lunch parties (or any), but if you can survive on cheese, crackers, fruit, and veggies (maybe even a dessert of some kind) once a day, you'll be a frugal traveler. * Yes, many of the parties have a door person who checks your invite. Unbeknownst to me at the time is that it's common practice to have graduate students act as waitpersons for these events. So, I looked at the department chair and said, "Uh, no." I didn't realize it at the time, but saying "no" is something of a faux pas. As I would discover over the years, graduate students are cheap labor for departments.
Grad students often take on a variety of roles: babysitter, taxi driver, mover, and what not. There's always the role of "research team member." What this means is that graduate students lucky enough to be on a research team spend inordinate amounts of unpaid time--as if they don't have their own research and grading--conducting interviews, administering surveys, and coding texts for a faculty member. Said faculty member than takes the work of the graduate students, writes it up, and publishes it. The grad students get a gratify passing mention in a footnote. I even received mention in an "Acknowledgment."
I think my most vivid memory of grad students as beasts of burden occurred, once again, at a National Convention. Dr OneDink and I were trying to rhetoric our way into some of the big parties when we heard quite a commotion from the other end of the hall. Approaching a rather raucous room (the parties are often held in hotel suites), we were almost run down as a rather distinguished scholar did his best Ben-Hur imitation atop a chariot, er, luggage cart propelled by a handful of giggling female grad students. I may be embellishing the memory, but I believe Ben-Hur tossed his head back and howled with laughter as he zoomed down the hall. I'm almost certain there was a drink in one hand. Or did that go without saying?
*If you're lucky enough to smoke and drink coffee, this is no problem.
2 comments:
Ah yes. Apparently this is what I'm signing up for. Is this a little like that scene in Sabrina where Sabrina is told that her supervisor was tortured, which means Sabrina is now being tortured, and if she survives, she gets someone of her own to torture?
Hooray for academia.
Hm.
1) I don't understand why students go to programs like this. When I was picking grad schools, I asked current students about faculty support of student interests, about whether faculty tended to abuse grad student labor, etc. I chose the places where it was clearest that this would not be going on.
2) Frankly after deconstructing my crappy teaching feedback for my Couples class, I'm inclined to think of grad students as childish, entitled, self-centered overgrown toddlers who adopt a consumer/trade school mentality about their studies and tyrranize faculty into dumbing down assignments and lowering expectations out of fear of exactly the kind of flogging I took that can threaten their teachers' job security. The more a program relies on untenured instructors and young faculty, the easier it is for them to act this way.
But I could be biased.
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