If you did not know, I am currently a PhD student at the University of California. Exactly what a PhD "is" can be murky, and it is subject to wide variation. For some people, a PhD is effectively a 5+-year apprenticeship with a specific person, building skills to carry on a lineage of work. For others, it's the intellectual equivalent of crossing the Pacific Ocean alone in a sailboat: the experience has been done before, but gosh is it lonely. For some, they become a cog in a multi-human machine for turning out research progress. My experience has been light on mentorship but strong on emotional support and material opportunities, and I've benefitted from secure funding and a scholarly community throughout, thanks to a coop program with the U.S. Geological Survey.
Anyway, all PhDs all work a little bit different, often tailored to the person and money available to pay them at the time. The difficulty in how this all becomes standardized is rearing its head in a big way during enormous and ongoing strikes that I am joining in, albeit remotely from Chile. To be clear, there are three unions: one for student instructors, one for academic researchers/postdocs, and (new) one for student researchers. I am in the latter category. We are striking in unison specifically over unlawful bargaining practices, but generally towards a fair contract. The current sentiment is that, as workers, we are underpaid and undersupported, given how much we drive the momentum of the University. To my understanding, universities essentially argue that some invisible elements—the mentorship we (might) receive in a PhD, the classes we (might) take (if we have enough time after research and the other jobs we have to pay the bills), the professional prospects we (might) get with our degrees—are coming out of our paychecks, and that we should expect to live a penny-pinching life during the years in graduate school in exchange for the honor and opportunities.
All of the implicit and explicit expectations around graduate school are kind of a mess, they vary by discipline, and one can argue that the messes and murkiness I've described allow universities to cleverly underpay their employees. California additionally, but not uniquely, suffers from extremely high cost-of-living, so even if the University of California can pay similar paychecks to similar jobs in similar universities, the differences in what those paychecks get you is vast. Graduate schools is, with a couple exceptions, a luxury for knowledge-workers' career advancement, but the fight for better wages (and more) opens up a conversation about how much it can, or should, be an open supportive opportunity for everyone. Is life fair? No, of course not, but that doesn't mean we can't try to make it more so, and especially in education. I would love the University of California genuinely support the people who do the teaching and the research at the university (honestly, including professors), regardless of if they have health conditions, families to support, or, on the flipside, deep money to support themselves through graduate school, and that's why I'm on strike.
Of course, it's not like the University is in charge of everything that has lead to this. It's been decades, if not centuries (!) of poor development planning for affordable and sustainable housing markets in California and underfunding of higher education by the state. (The calculus of all this is a bit different at private universities). There are also elements that have come out of changing perception of what universities are for, at both undergraduate and graduate levels, leading to widespread accretion of various university expenses (middle management, centers for this-and-that, university-included health services and gyms and clubs and ______) , as well as lack of leadership (i.e. clarity) against the "PhD employment crisis."
What is the UC to do? Sell off its campuses to the highest-bidding property developer and build new campuses in less expensive real estate? Pay its employees livable wages via a massive restructuring of financial assets and doubling the price of undergraduate tuition? (UC's budget reports are interesting!) Throw its weight behind lobbying the state of California to adopt equity-focused land-value-taxation and subsidize large zoning & housing projects? Go fully for-profit and laissez-faire, supporting whatever programs the students want to pay top dollar for? Use the time machine hidden under Lawrence Berkeley Lab and send a brave postdoc back in time to kill baby Ronald Reagan? All of the above? Some of the above?
The only completely wrong answer is "none of the above." None of the problems of today are new or unique, and the UC should have been better-prepared and more forward-thinking, but still, there are elements of this gordian knot outside the University's control.
I recently learned the word "polycrisis" from this newsletter called Polycrisis Thinking, and suddenly I'm seeing it everywhere. It might be a new word for an old thing, but it's an apt one to describe the layered, multi-scale, and intertwined problems. The University of California may be undergoing a polycrisis, which is nested inside a polycrisis of academia as a whole, or, nested inside a polycrisis that is the state of California. And those are nested in this big polycrisis thing we call "21st-century Planet Earth" (or however else you'd like to decompose the problems). It's dizzying, and I'm thankful for the union leadership and conversations with people to make sense of where to start. It's also about picking your battles, sadly.
I turned 30 last week, and when I blew out the candles on a cake (thanks to my landlady, Rosa) I found myself wishing I could have a conversation with the recently-passed Mike Davis. RIP. He was hugely influential to me in awakening more class-consciousness and establishing my enduring love for Southern California. I think he could help me make sense of the situation with UC with his cutting and pragmatic words around labor, land, and power. Of course I know which side of the picket line he'd be sitting on, but I'm still curious to see what landscape of forces and players and choices he can see from up there by the pearly gates. Across a few cases, Mike Davis was adept at setting up the mental scaffolding to climb inside the messiness of the big problems in the world and see through to the outside. Of course he never got a PhD.
My neck, my back, I want a fair contract,
Lukas
p.s. I have been shocked to learn that I cannot find any of Mike Davis' work translated into Spanish. If anybody knows any good, friendly, or interested English-to-Spanish translators or would be interested in helping me pay for such, I would really love to get The Case for Letting Malibu Burn translated. Or, if the strike is fully successful, maybe I'll be able to afford it myself.
p.p.s. If anyone knows about apartments less than $1000/mo in the Bay Area (or, hell, I guess I could do a month in LA) starting February 1st, 2023, I am now looking for my return to the USA.
Anyway, all PhDs all work a little bit different, often tailored to the person and money available to pay them at the time. The difficulty in how this all becomes standardized is rearing its head in a big way during enormous and ongoing strikes that I am joining in, albeit remotely from Chile. To be clear, there are three unions: one for student instructors, one for academic researchers/postdocs, and (new) one for student researchers. I am in the latter category. We are striking in unison specifically over unlawful bargaining practices, but generally towards a fair contract. The current sentiment is that, as workers, we are underpaid and undersupported, given how much we drive the momentum of the University. To my understanding, universities essentially argue that some invisible elements—the mentorship we (might) receive in a PhD, the classes we (might) take (if we have enough time after research and the other jobs we have to pay the bills), the professional prospects we (might) get with our degrees—are coming out of our paychecks, and that we should expect to live a penny-pinching life during the years in graduate school in exchange for the honor and opportunities.
All of the implicit and explicit expectations around graduate school are kind of a mess, they vary by discipline, and one can argue that the messes and murkiness I've described allow universities to cleverly underpay their employees. California additionally, but not uniquely, suffers from extremely high cost-of-living, so even if the University of California can pay similar paychecks to similar jobs in similar universities, the differences in what those paychecks get you is vast. Graduate schools is, with a couple exceptions, a luxury for knowledge-workers' career advancement, but the fight for better wages (and more) opens up a conversation about how much it can, or should, be an open supportive opportunity for everyone. Is life fair? No, of course not, but that doesn't mean we can't try to make it more so, and especially in education. I would love the University of California genuinely support the people who do the teaching and the research at the university (honestly, including professors), regardless of if they have health conditions, families to support, or, on the flipside, deep money to support themselves through graduate school, and that's why I'm on strike.
Of course, it's not like the University is in charge of everything that has lead to this. It's been decades, if not centuries (!) of poor development planning for affordable and sustainable housing markets in California and underfunding of higher education by the state. (The calculus of all this is a bit different at private universities). There are also elements that have come out of changing perception of what universities are for, at both undergraduate and graduate levels, leading to widespread accretion of various university expenses (middle management, centers for this-and-that, university-included health services and gyms and clubs and ______) , as well as lack of leadership (i.e. clarity) against the "PhD employment crisis."
What is the UC to do? Sell off its campuses to the highest-bidding property developer and build new campuses in less expensive real estate? Pay its employees livable wages via a massive restructuring of financial assets and doubling the price of undergraduate tuition? (UC's budget reports are interesting!) Throw its weight behind lobbying the state of California to adopt equity-focused land-value-taxation and subsidize large zoning & housing projects? Go fully for-profit and laissez-faire, supporting whatever programs the students want to pay top dollar for? Use the time machine hidden under Lawrence Berkeley Lab and send a brave postdoc back in time to kill baby Ronald Reagan? All of the above? Some of the above?
The only completely wrong answer is "none of the above." None of the problems of today are new or unique, and the UC should have been better-prepared and more forward-thinking, but still, there are elements of this gordian knot outside the University's control.
I recently learned the word "polycrisis" from this newsletter called Polycrisis Thinking, and suddenly I'm seeing it everywhere. It might be a new word for an old thing, but it's an apt one to describe the layered, multi-scale, and intertwined problems. The University of California may be undergoing a polycrisis, which is nested inside a polycrisis of academia as a whole, or, nested inside a polycrisis that is the state of California. And those are nested in this big polycrisis thing we call "21st-century Planet Earth" (or however else you'd like to decompose the problems). It's dizzying, and I'm thankful for the union leadership and conversations with people to make sense of where to start. It's also about picking your battles, sadly.
I turned 30 last week, and when I blew out the candles on a cake (thanks to my landlady, Rosa) I found myself wishing I could have a conversation with the recently-passed Mike Davis. RIP. He was hugely influential to me in awakening more class-consciousness and establishing my enduring love for Southern California. I think he could help me make sense of the situation with UC with his cutting and pragmatic words around labor, land, and power. Of course I know which side of the picket line he'd be sitting on, but I'm still curious to see what landscape of forces and players and choices he can see from up there by the pearly gates. Across a few cases, Mike Davis was adept at setting up the mental scaffolding to climb inside the messiness of the big problems in the world and see through to the outside. Of course he never got a PhD.
My neck, my back, I want a fair contract,
Lukas
p.s. I have been shocked to learn that I cannot find any of Mike Davis' work translated into Spanish. If anybody knows any good, friendly, or interested English-to-Spanish translators or would be interested in helping me pay for such, I would really love to get The Case for Letting Malibu Burn translated. Or, if the strike is fully successful, maybe I'll be able to afford it myself.
p.p.s. If anyone knows about apartments less than $1000/mo in the Bay Area (or, hell, I guess I could do a month in LA) starting February 1st, 2023, I am now looking for my return to the USA.