Recessions do not favor the vulnerable. Think faculty are facing cutbacks? Graduate students are facing more. Across this land’s universities, from California to the New York Island, we’re seeing graduate students’ few existing rights and already low salaries being chiseled away, and their futures compromised.
As AAUP president Cary Nelson notes in Don’t Mourn, Organize, “The only thing the PhD now reliably confers is the potential for lifetime poverty and underemployment.”
That’s why we devoted most of the January–February 2010 issue of Academe to graduate students, their working conditions, and their future in higher education.
In a Q&A that is also on video, Wilma B. Liebman, new chair of the National Labor Relations Board, talks about the future of academic labor.
And, of course, graduate students themselves write about organizing: from the high notes, on reviving the old art of protest songs, to the lows, New York University’s newest labor workaround.
Those are just a few of the pieces designed as a graduate labor tour of this land, from the protests shaking the great, endangered publics in California to the quieter waves being made in South Carolina.
In a departure from the issue’s theme, noted Stanford historian of science and gender Londa Schiebinger and her colleague Shannon K. Gilmartin take the reader into the world of science, gender, and housework—with a proposal designed to spark discussion.
Starting this year, most official AAUP reports will be published annually in a separate volume (to be mailed with the September–October issue of Academe) and on the Web as they are released. They will be both more timely and more accessible.
Respond to Academe articles using the comment function on our Web site, or write to academe@aaup.org.
See the complete contents of the January-February issue.