by Sarah Jaffe
As for results, J-F himself, Education Minister Roberge, said in 2018 that the then-new provincial government would move to address the intern problem. Interns were granted bursaries or stipends, Marcoux said, rather than a wage. “After a year, the main comment I have heard was that it took time to receive the money that was promised. The amount is split in half, and the second half is only given if you pass the internship, so people still needed to get indebted before they would receive the money.” The lack of a real wage meant the interns were still not covered under labor law. “They want to reinforce the separation between your education and your work so that the internship is not full work, it is really something you do when you are in training,” said Marcoux. “They want it to be more supervised, but they still want it to be something separate from the labor law that we know right now.”40
The COVID-19 pandemic, she said, “amplified the hypocrisy of school administrations who severely punished interns for striking their internship.” Some of those interns had been forced to retake a full year of school to complete the internship, but when some of them had to miss interning time because the pandemic closed many of the businesses, she explained, “the non-completion of their internship was not deemed to compromise their professionalism or ability to start working.” When their free labor was not as necessary to the businesses, in other words, the internship was deemed unnecessary, making it clear that completing the internship was not, in fact, an essential part of their education.
Still, she noted, despite the fact that the government’s response was not what the movement demanded, it was a step up from nothing. “It is always going to be a big thing after a strike, like, ‘What is a win and what is a loss?’ but we didn’t have anything to lose. We all worked for free.”
CHAPTER 8
PROLETARIAN PROFESSIONALS
Academia
KATHERINE WILSON HAS AN INTENSE GAZE; WHEN YOU FIND OUT SHE’S spent much of her life in and around the theater, it comes as no surprise.
Sitting in her small, spare office at Fordham University’s Manhattan campus, just steps from Lincoln Center, she explained to me that soon she would have to give up the space. She’s not a full-time professor but an adjunct, which means that she’s paid by the class, not a full-fledged university employee. That gig doesn’t come with permanent office privileges.
“Open an old encyclopedia and it says, ‘Academic’ or ‘Professor.’ What does that look like?” she asked. “It looks like an office lined with bookshelves, supplies, paper—nowadays, their own printer so they can print twenty-five copies if they need to or something. It has the desk surface. This is what academic work is. Suddenly, they are expecting over 50 percent of their teaching faculty to work as if that is not how this labor was designed. For some reason, we can all work out of our cellphone or we can all work out of a satchel and we can do our grading on the subway.”
And the subway is where she spends no small amount of her time. Besides Fordham’s Manhattan campus, she also goes to its main campus in the Bronx, and then there’s the class she teaches at Hunter College of the City University of New York (CUNY), also in Manhattan but on the other side of town. She’s taught at other schools, too—in every borough of New York City except for Staten Island, and in New Jersey and on Long Island as well. Given that travel schedule, necessary just to cobble together a living, she’d have to grade on the train even if one of those jobs did give her a proper office. “Sometimes it was LaGuardia, which is in Queens, out to Brooklyn College on the same day,” she said. Another time, it was Hunter up to Fordham in the Bronx, shifting from the mostly working-class city kids at the CUNY schools to Fordham students who lean more well off—and whiter—sporting Fordham gear and spending their weekends at sports games.
This has been her life since 2002 or 2003, when she returned to academia. It took her a minute to recall all the different places she’d taught since then, in multiple departments. For an adjunct to teach in multiple schools isn’t rare, particularly in New York, where there are so many universities from which to choose. But, Wilson noted, “I teach three unrelated classes in three distinct departments. That is not so common.” Much of her bread and butter has been composition courses, a core requirement nearly anywhere, but the semester we were discussing also had her teaching Arabic cinema in translation and a course she designed that she described as the anthropology of fashion. Fridays were her rough day, with her first class at Fordham at 8:30 a.m., and then another class later in the day, and then a double session on Saturday. “The point for the adjunct life is you take what you can get,” she said.
The grading, course preparation, and any other work she needs to do happens at home. Where a full-time professor would be paid a salary that was expected to cover teaching, course preparation, and advising students, plus their own continuing research and publishing, adjuncts are paid by the class. That pay structure leaves Wilson falling well short of what a full professor would make even with three different jobs, and on top of that she still has to cover more of her own supplies. “A lot about the pay structure and the resources is designed as if we appear in class and God had given us all our materials for that lesson,” she said. “It just emerged from nowhere.”
Wilson grew up with a single father who was an English professor at CUNY, and he encouraged her and her twin sister to follow their dreams. “It was not the right spirit for the age, for the post-Reagan society I was living in,” she said. She studied philosophy as an undergraduate, and then, like many a liberal arts grad, spent a bit of time figuring things out—time further complicated by a chronic illness. “I was groping toward art,” she said. Landing in Boston, she “fell into theater quite accidentally. I never took a class. It wasn’t on my horizon.” The theater she did was politically radical and experimental but humorous, something she described as the “feminist granddaughter of Brecht.”
Such theater, of course, didn’t lend itself to a stable income. Alternative theater is rarely celebrated at the time of its creation, Wilson noted. What the theater world celebrates from times past, it mostly ignores in the present. After about a decade of doing work that didn’t make money, she decided to pursue a master of fine arts (MFA), hoping it would lead to something more stable than the ad hoc jobs she was pulling together. That was 2003, and it was then that she began teaching, but the MFA didn’t satisfy her.
“I realized in the MFA that what I was, was an intellectual, and theater had been my vehicle,” she said. But the theater world no longer felt comfortable to her. “The university looked like a haven.” Much of her social circle and even her family consisted of academics—besides her father, her sister had gone straight through school to a PhD and become a (twice) tenured professor.
Hoping for a career in academia, she enrolled at CUNY’s Graduate Center. But, she said, the program didn’t really prepare her for the academic job market she’d be turned loose into. Some of that was timing, of course—while she was working on her PhD, the 2007 economic crisis hit—but the field had been changing for a while. “We would start to get these emails saying, ‘Alt Academic,’ like ‘Market yourself, brand yourself for an alternative academic career!’ ‘Oh, you can try nonprofits!’ and it was very frustrating for me because anything they named, and then some, I had done that before,” she said. “I came in saying, ‘This is certainly the best fit in contemporary United States society for me.’ To have all that discourse of ‘Branding yourself, get your website, and be something besides what we have been educating you to be’ was very, very demoralizing and painful.”
Despite the struggles, she said, “I loved being in the classroom. It was challenging, but I like teaching a lot.” She’s never taught anything related to her dissertation, though—a study of the way a play script moves in the world—and only twice taught in theater departments. Her focus was Arabic theater in translation: she laughed, “I thought that after September 11, that theater departments would snatch up Arabic. Right.” Her varied background gives her more options for d
epartments in which to work, but the variation becomes just one more thing to juggle, one more gear to shift between classes. Between schools, her students vary: at the CUNY schools, she’s often teaching them “how to be a student,” while the Fordham students approach her very differently: “It is more litigious. A lot of them run to authorities here. An adjunct lives in terror of the student evaluations.” Because, of course, bad evaluations could mean not being asked back. This is the kind of thing, she noted, that also leads to grade inflation: to many adjuncts, there are more incentives to make students happy than to grade accurately—though, she said, “I try to hold out and I think I pay the price for it.”
Besides the different student bodies and the departments, there are also small yet frustrating differences from school to school. “Everything now is privatized,” she explained. “For a grading system, it is not an internal university program. It is a rented program and they all have their own little names. You have to learn those programs.” She has multiple email addresses, too, one for each of the different schools. Two or three of those a semester add up. “Mentally it is very challenging, and I think for most of us, our instincts would be to blame ourselves. For example, I will be in University A and I need to enter into the system and I will type the password for University B and I say, ‘Oh, Kate, you are so stupid.’” The universities continue to shift costs onto the faculty and students, nickel and diming them for little things like photocopies. “Everything just multiplies about the bureaucracy,” she said. “It is too much bouncing around. I think it is very much characteristic of postmodern life—fragmented, scattered, not coherent. And all of that amounts to—obviously—exhaustion. With no sick days.”
Then there are the little slights of the obvious two-tier nature of the system. Department chairs who have tenure come off as oblivious to the conditions of the people who work under them. Teaching, of course, is hard work whatever you’re paid, but it’s frustrating to hear complaints from senior faculty when the adjuncts constantly have to “do more with less.” For Wilson, it’s an issue that is even closer to home: her partner is tenured faculty at Fordham. Yet that experience has also made it clearer to her that the distinction between tenure track and adjunct track is an accident of timing. “If anything, it has sort of helped me think, ‘Yes, I would at least deserve to be on the pathway,’” she explained. “I think if I weren’t so close maybe I would slide into that paranoia of, ‘Oh, I must not be good enough or smart enough.’”
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit New York, all the uncertainty was magnified. “Fordham faculty were hurtled into ‘remote’ teaching and the school closed. CUNY followed, after wavering uncertainty, a week or so later, though my own spring class had been canceled so I wasn’t personally affected,” Wilson explained. “Those who straddled jobs at different schools had to juggle the different policies and technical parameters of that shift.” How to teach, she said, was left up to faculty members; she opted for the virtual classroom, while others used recorded lectures or just posted assignments online. For adjuncts, too, there was the question of technology. “Obviously with our low salaries we’re not likely to have state-of-the-art, top-of-the-line equipment. In my case, my mouse died, and I prayed my anemic Wi-Fi would endure the session of every class.” And then there was the added burden of emotional labor as she tried to help students navigate the crisis—something, she said, that likely fell harder on women, whether adjunct or otherwise. Tenure-line faculty faced the same issues, but, she noted, “their exertions earn a livable wage, and greater inclusion in university processes.”
The question of reopening was painful, too. As schools discussed a “hybrid” system for the fall semester—and as the different universities where she worked tossed around different plans—the adjuncts were left feeling powerless. The idea of going back to in-person teaching in a pandemic was, naturally, unnerving, but the loss of the classroom stung because Wilson put a lot of effort into making her time with students meaningful. When we sat down in her office, before the pandemic, she’d just come from her Arabic cinema class, where her students were making animations. Their engagement and pleasure in the material was fulfilling for her, too. “Most of the time,” she had told me, “I leave that class happy. I have that.”
THE WRITER AND PROFESSOR STANLEY ARONOWITZ ONCE CALLED ACADEMIA “the last good job in America.” At its best, the academic workplace allows the professoriat a great deal of autonomy at work, the ability to pursue projects that intrigue and inspire them with single-minded focus and little need to compromise. Historical precedent gives them a great deal of involvement in university governance, and their work has long been seen as more of a vocation than simply a job. In this way, though the teaching part of the job is not actually all that different from teaching a grade-school class, the image of the academic has much in common with the image of the artist as lone genius, though perhaps swathed in tweed in a corner office stuffed with books rather than a paint-splattered garret studio.1
Higher education has a long history as a tiered, hierarchical structure: after all, it’s there in the name. Higher education was, from imperial China to the pre-Columbian Americas, a way to train the upper castes of society first and foremost. Only later did it develop into a place for the kind of intellectual pursuits Katherine Wilson was looking for: independent scholarly work, with knowledge production more or less for its own sake seen as a social good.2
Even when higher education became a place for experimentation and debate, it was still restricted to society’s elites. From India, where Hindu and Buddhist centers of learning also taught arts, mathematics, astronomy, and more, to ancient Greece, Plato’s Academy, and later the Musaeum of Alexandria, where students came from far away to study, the ruling classes were able to pursue knowledge largely because someone else did all the work. Han dynasty China’s imperial academy admitted students based on skills, providing some form of social mobility, but this was far from mass public higher education.3
The university as such was born in Italy in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, an offshoot of the guild system and existing religious education. It taught what were known as the seven liberal arts (“arts” in the original meaning of skills): grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic, along with music, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. In Paris and Bologna, centers of learning expanded and drew students from across Europe. The university developed at the intersection of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish influences, where the resurgence of classical Greek was made possible through translations back from the Arabic, where it had been preserved.4
Still, these universities existed to train the elites, and the intellectual curiosity of the academics was limited by the rules of the church and the state. Some who pressed too far into church terrain were even burnt as heretics. It is not surprising, then, that the academics organized into guilds—in part as a response to the way students also organized themselves, and occasionally raised hell, causing riots that in turn caused scholars to migrate to new towns to set up new universities. The students were roughly equivalent to a guild apprentice in the hierarchy; those who had passed through one level of schooling were equal to journeymen or bachelors (hence “bachelor’s degree”), and those who had studied all the arts became masters. But power struggles continued, between city and university, master and student, church and university, state and university—power struggles that shaped the university as a space of contention.5
Fights between church and state also shaped the early universities: Oxford was opened in twelfth-century England after students returned home from France, driven by a spat between Henry II and the pope. The University of Naples, meanwhile, was founded as a public institution, perhaps the first secular university, though virtually all institutions taught religion as part of their curriculum. The Protestant Reformation hit the universities hard, and the 1600s generally were a low point in attendance and production. Most of the scientific discoveries of the period were made outside of the university’s bounds, in the n
ew (and mostly amateur) academies of science. There was even a lull in student riots.6
The French Revolution’s leveling of French institutions also helped to revive the university as a center of learning—the new government nationalized universities and fired church-backed teachers, with the intent of creating a new state-run system. That system, like many of the plans of the revolutionaries, didn’t quite come to pass, yet it helped clear space for the development of the modern university. The reforms of Wilhelm von Humboldt, who as part of his work in the Prussian Ministry of the Interior revamped the country’s education system, enshrined in the University of Berlin the model that bears his name. The Humboldtian university combines research and teaching, expecting each professor to produce knowledge rather than simply passing it on. With this ideal was born the concept of academic freedom—freedom to learn and to teach. The mission of academe, to pursue truth, was supposed to set the university and its workers apart from the masses.7
By the late eighteenth century there were over 140 universities across Europe, and more and more of them were constructed upon this model. The beginnings of the research journal could be spotted, as academics began to publish their work for broader sharing across the community of scholars. Academic freedom of a sort was guaranteed, and some protection from interference instituted, though it did not, notably, extend to protection for political expression. Professors began to specialize in one subject, and to combine their teaching with specialized research as well; this began as a way to save money, in Scottish and German universities, and then scholars began to make names for themselves—including some we still know of, like political economist Adam Smith. Access to higher education expanded, becoming available to a growing middle class as industrial capitalism developed, and this meant more jobs for professors.8