Graduate unions would help, not hurt, academic research

On Feb. 29, Princeton University and eight peer institutions submitted an amicus brief to the National Labor Relations Board, advising the board to refuse a request made by Columbia University postgraduates to form a union. The arguments in this brief are both wrongly motivated and wrong on the facts. The authors claim that unions would threaten a “graduate student/university relationship … not driven by economics.” If fostering such a relationship is indeed their interest, then the signatories would do well to retract this brief and instead follow the lead of their forward-looking peers, who accept their responsibilities as employers.

From my experience, over six years as a graduate researcher and teacher at NYU and two more as a postdoc at Princeton, I find it difficult to justify the assertion that economics does not “drive” the graduate student/university relationship. Economic factors are a constant, and sometimes debilitating, influence on early-career academics. As a result, economic factors even constrain who has the choice of risking an academic career in the first place.

That postgraduate diversity is lacking is plain: the University’s own most recent report, covering academic year 2015-2016, shows postgraduate diversity is even lower than that of the undergraduate body. One contributing factor is sheer economic infeasibility. Many potentially impactful researchers underperform, drop out or never even begin because financial considerations can make academia more an indulgence than a viable career.

The idea that economic factors limit diversity in academia is uncontroversial: the University and peers have for some time accepted this premise with regards to undergraduates. Bachelor’s degree completion rates are lower for students who do not have outside financial resources. To the extent that elite universities have improved diversity in their undergraduate bodies over the past several decades — and they have, though painfully slowly, from a criminally low starting place and with a great distance left to cross — one factor has been the removal of financial disincentives. They realize that making academia attainable for those who can’t afford the sticker price requires more than eliminating tuition and fees. It’s also necessary to provide stipends to undergraduates without access to the resources necessary to support themselves while fully immersed in studies. In other words, Princeton and its peers have embraced that the undergraduate/university relationship is driven, in part, by economics.

It seems natural to extend this understanding to postgraduates. Most elite research universities offer “full funding” packages, which include healthcare benefits, tuition remittance (a strange sleight of hand in departments where no one actually pays tuition), access to housing support (sometimes) and, critically, a monthly stipend. These stipends are usually contingent on the successful performance of research and/or teaching duties — though universities often employ remarkable legal contortions to avoid referring to the stipends as “wages” or “salaries.”

Unfortunately, regardless of how the remuneration is classified, “full funding” almost never amounts to sufficient resources to live while performing the work. At NYU, “full funding” meant a base stipend of about $26,000, on which to live within commuting distance of downtown Manhattan (with essentially no housing support). Most graduate students I know have taken side jobs and sought various other income sources, myself included. During my six years of Ph.D. work, I supplemented this income, not just with fellowships and extra teaching beyond that required for my base funding, but also via a variety of tertiary employment, such as tutoring, programming, fact-checking, typesetting, even furniture moving. I lived with three roommates and kept fairly minimal expenses. All in all, though, my situation was relatively comfortable because I was also able to draw on savings, built up while working in software before entering academia. I’m not sure whether I would have made it through without that safety net.

Indeed, more than a third of Ph.D. candidates take on debt during their supposedly “fully funded” graduate work. In half of these cases, this debt exceeds $30,000. That statistic obscures those who take on other part-time work — ranging from software to stripping — to avoid falling into debt.

Despite the clear financial hardship required to pursue a Ph.D., the tradeoffs might not seem extremely onerous, but for two additional factors. First, non-academic income is discouraged. The very idea that a graduate researcher would spend time on another job, in addition to their research work, is often anathema to faculty. I know of few instances in which a graduate even informed their advisor about side work. I certainly didn’t. (One can imagine sympathetic responses in many cases, but less-than-helpful reactions are not uncommon: I watched one colleague, when vocalizing her anxiety about rising rents, be told by a senior faculty member, “Why don’t you just ask your parents for some help?”) Professors routinely and proactively discourage graduate students even from teaching any more than the minimum required — let alone taking on work outside of the University.

On its own, this demand is not unreasonable: research work is meant to be concentrated, requiring effort and focus well above and beyond that of a typical 40-hour work-week. One Caltech professor wrote a now-infamous memo lambasting his graduate researchers for failing to work nights and weekends. This case is extreme only in that the demand was so brazen. Outside work can dilute the necessary effort. Within the current economic context, however, the constraint gives rise to a stark contradiction: researchers are expected to work more than full-time hours, discouraged from seeking additional income that would require any more of their time, but are not provided sufficient financial support to meet their basic needs. This is one reason why gradate degrees are taking longer and longer to complete; a motivation-degrading, career-threatening and potentially financially ruinous stretch that is, again, endured largely by those who had fewer fiscal resources to begin with.

The sheer endurance required to perform meaningful graduate work is the second factor that makes the fiscal tradeoffs untenable. A Ph.D. is not a short stop; graduate and postdoctoral terms most often stretch the better part of a decade, if not more. They encompass one’s late 20s and 30s, a time when most might be building critical early-life savings and starting families — difficult, if not entirely infeasible, on early-career academic salaries. In Princeton, daycare alone can run over $2,000 per month. That single expense is the lion’s share of a postdoc's salary. Even for those without families, an academic career path entails a decade or more of below-sustenance income, as well as very little control over location and almost no job security.

These tradeoffs — and the very notion that the work performed could be classified as wage labor — are sometimes refuted by uniformly characterizing all postgraduate work, from the first year of a master’s, on through the several years of postdoctoral employment, as “training.” In this way, the costs borne are cast as an “investment” in one’s own future earning potential. The tenuousness of this investment is increasingly suspect: it is widely accepted that universities are producing too many Ph.D.studentsfor the jobs available, in part because graduate students and postdocs are inexpensive for the University to produce and hire. As the Economist disapprovingly noted, “universities have discovered that PhD students are cheap, highly motivated and disposable labour.” In other words, universities do not pay full price for their graduate studentsor postdocs.

Forcing some of those costs back onto the University will require leverage. Creating that leverage is exactly the point of a union. With collective bargaining, graduate and postdoc unions have won their members enormous increases in financial support, reduced teaching obligations, expanded medical care and a grievance process for arbitrating exploitative practices. The concern advanced in the amicus brief, and in other communications from the filing universities, is that a graduate union capable of winning these sorts of concessions would damage research by fostering an antagonistic relationship between faculty and their research staff. Of course, if you believe that the demand for fair treatment would result in antagonism, perhaps that says something about the current conditions.

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But we don’t have to resort to speculation. We know that graduate unions do not harm academic research because there are already graduate unions at peer universities in this country and abroad. Highly productive research universities, from Berkeley and NYU, to the University of Toronto, or Oxford and Cambridge, have graduate unions. At Stanford, postdoctoral researchers recently organized to win transit subsidies and an increase in their minimum wage, previously set at the national-standard NIH stipend level and unadjusted for the massively above-median cost of living in Silicon Valley. (One could make a similar case regarding the northeastern metropolitan corridor in which Princeton is located) Johns Hopkins recently doubled its minimum yearly postgraduate salary to $50,000. No one could seriously argue that improving the economic conditions of their workers has reduced the research productivity of these institutions.

What is clearly harming research productivity are the cold economic constraints that threaten to make academic careers simply unviable. Partly for the reasons I described, graduate attrition rates are increasing, rapidly. When graduates leave because they accept the economic undesirability of academic work, the market is, literally, influencing the graduate/university relationship — by severing that relationship entirely.

As someone who hopes to someday enjoy the privilege of employing graduate researchers and teachers, I want to be able to draw my collaborators from the broadest, deepest, most diverse possible pool of talent. I want my colleagues to be provided for so that they can pursue our work unencumbered by basic questions of sustenance and security. I want them to be represented, so that their concerns are heard and their needs are met. As someone who cares deeply about the viability of science and of academic research more broadly, I think the only path forward is to confront with open eyes the ways in which economics is shaping — and threatening — academic research. If Princeton and its peers genuinely wish to resist the influence of economics on the graduate student/university relationship, they should begin by accepting that this influence already exists.

Aaron Bornstein is a postdoctoralresearcher at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute. He can be reached at aaronmb@princeton.edu.