There's so much wrapped up in this I don't know where to start, and I think it's a great piece from you. To give some insight of my perspective, I work as a science communicator whose mission centres on critique of academia from the understanding that it's primary function is to serve the interests of all people through education, and the development and dissemination of knowledge. I concede this is idealistic and that the reality is somewhat different in it's foundation really being enabled by concentrating an excess of resources in a small demographic (by way of patriarchy, colonialism, slavery etc) who conducted research according to their own interests and curiosities. Nevertheless, since academia is enabled by the surplus value produced by working people, I think it should be held accountable to them.
Just a little more context here, particularly in relation to the exchange with Katie here, my background is in molecular cell biology, where I had a 20 year research career including time as a PI. My work was medically relevant, although basic science in principle, which meant my collaborators, colleagues and I tended to seek funding from CIHR primarily, although NSERC was an option too. Obviously the latter is involved in funding very large projects, particularly in Big Science from hard disciplines like physics, and more commercially focussed engineering projects, but in general funding levels for disciplines I'm knowledgeable about tend to be obviously higher from CIHR. I'm quite naive to scientific disciplines involving field work or are adjacent to that, in terms of their culture, but expect the budgets I'm familiar with to be grotesquely large in comparison. This is a substantial factor in me leaving my research career, or as I see it, reconfiguring it.
Now to address the issue under discussion. It seems quite clear to me that UBC is actively misrepresenting things in that piece. I don't think I've ever seen a student funded primarily as an employee of any kind, although it has happened where they've done that work as an employee outside the research related to a degree. I gather this is not as clear cut in less well funded areas, and might be best expressed as a privilege of those who work in areas with more funding like I used to. That people might do this strikes me as people making do within unnecessarily restrictive bureaucratic circumstances, and with scant resources. This situation seems very much to me the university administration's doing, given the funding situation. If only they saw themselves as operating with a mission to facilitate researcher's activities directed at generating knowledge, rather than seeing itself as an authority on what's appropriate, this work would at least be categorised appropriately (employment Vs education).
It's also so telling how far university bureaucracy is from its mission that it's seeking to prevent people organising under any technicality manufactured by the state. It's like a symbiotic relationship between government and university aimed to parasitise broader society. If they make it much more explicit people won't be able to ignore it at all.
Radical politics aside, there does need to be some consideration put into the structure of research and how labour is allocated. Certainly from my area of interest, there's some writing on this-- many more research degrees are granted than there's really room for in terms of employment, and that considers a significant commercial and industrial sector. Very few older heads like mine occupy stools at lab benches, because they cost so much, and instead almost all labour comes from people with less experience, and a real diversity in success (measured in actual findings, not career progression) results. There's an element of exploitation here to be sure, but it's not well enough considered to lay the blame on conscious design. It's more cultural norms emergent from broad alienation. People, especially academics themselves, are so bogged down with extensive bureaucracy that even if they identify these problems, it's truly heroic to both find the time and courage to push back against them.
Again, thanks for writing this blog. It constantly provokes thought, informs and inspires.
One thing I am learning more is about how colleagues in STEM fields conceptualize graduate student funding. It seems that they see this as (1) fellowship to do a degree (2) that it will include some work in the PI's lab (not always clearly defined) and (3) an ideological sense that what is done in their labs is something 'more' than plain work - it has some 'purpose.'
This ideology (or we can call it 'culture') allows folks -including HR Lawyers- to obscure the 'work' involved that is productive to the research enterprise and configure it instead as 'learning' which is itself characterized (in classic ideological inverse fashion) as something being a net benefit to the student rather than an expropriate of labour time from the worker. This parallels the ideology (i.e. culture) of capitalism in which bosses give workers jobs as opposed to stealing labour value from workers.
So well put. I'd put most of my former contemporaries, politically speaking, right around the centre (here in Canada, Liberal or NDP) and their takes on these things would be some combination of naive and reactionary. I especially like you saying that some people see their work as having 'purpose'. That any former contemporary of mine might have seen what they did as more important than the custodial staff disgusts me. I'm sure many did. The distinction I made between employment and education was in the current operational context of academic operations, with the latter(stipend/scholarship) being income tax-free to my recollection, which is foggy due to the passing of time and possibly confused with with other nation's systems. I'd hope more money could make it into the hands of students by stipends being tax free rather than working as a conventional employee (RA). UBC might not allow this nowadays anyway...
Academia is drawing so close to capitalism in so many ways, beyond those you mention related to its role in creating specialised labour for capital. In my area, where ideas can be spun out into biotech commercialisation 'opportunities', the incentives are so warped. It's almost as if the fields supported by the SSHRC are intentionally ignored/devalued so that profit can be pursued from other areas without friction, or cause for conscience.
I think this is one of those areas that is a bit murky and varies among departments (and of course UBC interprets in the light that is most favourable to them). In my department, graduate students are rarely hired for "extra" work--their RA stipends are directly paid for the work that they do for their thesis. On the rare occasion I have an external contract, I would buy a grad student out of their TAship, but again, the expectation is that this work would end up in their thesis.
I think, but could be wrong, that you are in a STEM discipline where the prevalence of 'labs' led by a PI and everyone is working on components of the lab project is the dominant model. NSERC funding is also more expansive than SSHRCC funding and in most social science and humanities disciplines the idea of a big lab with everyone lined up from the PI down in a pyramid is not so common.
Over the years many of my MA students have worked projects linked to my ongoing research. I have in that regard been able to 'fund' their research (travel, materials, stipend) and they produce thesis based on it. PhD studnets working with me may receive funding from my projects, but their work has to be independent in all forms and we often seek separate funding for their actual research. Undergrad RAs are explicitly labour and do not produce research for a thesis of their own.
The problem becomes in those more industrial workplaces (labs) where pressure is applied to go above and beyond, where an ethic of what I would call volunteerism persists, and graduate RAs become a source of cheap labour that is glossed as in their interest, but in reality is simply labour that advances those higher up the pyramid.
I would also say that UBC has used some strange arguments in front of the LRB before. When CUPE was organizing sessionals, they said sessionals couldn't be organized by CUPE because an undergrad can't tell the difference between a sessional and a tenure stream faculty ...
STEM labs themselves also vary--in my department, for instance, it's not uncommon to have students in the same lab work on a wide variety of topics based on their skills and interests (I have students working on boreal defoliators, intertidal mussels, and even machine vision for community ecology). I agree that the ethic of volunteerism is a massive labour issue, and one particular topic I think the union will be helpful for is setting reasonable boundaries around working conditions.
But I think all of these nuances are a bit moot. The argument in my department, which I find persuasive, is that regardless of whether the work is thesis-related or not, students still need to eat. Labour conducted for a thesis is still labour. The hard part is making UBC (and the federal government who funds it) see that.
Totally agree - a living wage in Vancouver is around 45K/yr. A SSHRC stipend for an MA student is about 17K. When I budget for student stipends in my SSHRCC grants I am expected to use UBC's basic rates for MA, PhD students to calculate it. If I put in 45k for an MA and ask the program office they advise me it would likely be seen as unreasonable. UBC could also use funds from the endowment and land lease sales to top up graduate stipends to a living wage.
For sure--even under NSERC, funds are absolutely tight. NSERC MSc stipends are $17,500, and a beginner's NSERC Discovery grant like I have is about $30k/year. As a result our department is seriously reducing the number of graduate students, but I also don't love the idea of graduate education becoming increasingly inaccessible because of few spots. For me, at least, it was one of very few pathways open to the middle class.
One other way UBC could help is to build actually affordable graduate student housing. But no sign of that anytime soon...
I think, especially for master's students, the possibility of unfunded admission is important. My own graduate career would never have been possible if grad schools in the 80s only admitted students they would fund. At the same time I was able to work back home in BC in the commercial fishing industry and make up the funds needed to live.
There is a false 'justice' behind the idea that we must provide a stipend for each student and then reduce the numbers of students because we don't actually have funding. In anthropology that would essentially mean next to no MA grad admissions given the way we are funded for research.
There's so much wrapped up in this I don't know where to start, and I think it's a great piece from you. To give some insight of my perspective, I work as a science communicator whose mission centres on critique of academia from the understanding that it's primary function is to serve the interests of all people through education, and the development and dissemination of knowledge. I concede this is idealistic and that the reality is somewhat different in it's foundation really being enabled by concentrating an excess of resources in a small demographic (by way of patriarchy, colonialism, slavery etc) who conducted research according to their own interests and curiosities. Nevertheless, since academia is enabled by the surplus value produced by working people, I think it should be held accountable to them.
Just a little more context here, particularly in relation to the exchange with Katie here, my background is in molecular cell biology, where I had a 20 year research career including time as a PI. My work was medically relevant, although basic science in principle, which meant my collaborators, colleagues and I tended to seek funding from CIHR primarily, although NSERC was an option too. Obviously the latter is involved in funding very large projects, particularly in Big Science from hard disciplines like physics, and more commercially focussed engineering projects, but in general funding levels for disciplines I'm knowledgeable about tend to be obviously higher from CIHR. I'm quite naive to scientific disciplines involving field work or are adjacent to that, in terms of their culture, but expect the budgets I'm familiar with to be grotesquely large in comparison. This is a substantial factor in me leaving my research career, or as I see it, reconfiguring it.
Now to address the issue under discussion. It seems quite clear to me that UBC is actively misrepresenting things in that piece. I don't think I've ever seen a student funded primarily as an employee of any kind, although it has happened where they've done that work as an employee outside the research related to a degree. I gather this is not as clear cut in less well funded areas, and might be best expressed as a privilege of those who work in areas with more funding like I used to. That people might do this strikes me as people making do within unnecessarily restrictive bureaucratic circumstances, and with scant resources. This situation seems very much to me the university administration's doing, given the funding situation. If only they saw themselves as operating with a mission to facilitate researcher's activities directed at generating knowledge, rather than seeing itself as an authority on what's appropriate, this work would at least be categorised appropriately (employment Vs education).
It's also so telling how far university bureaucracy is from its mission that it's seeking to prevent people organising under any technicality manufactured by the state. It's like a symbiotic relationship between government and university aimed to parasitise broader society. If they make it much more explicit people won't be able to ignore it at all.
Radical politics aside, there does need to be some consideration put into the structure of research and how labour is allocated. Certainly from my area of interest, there's some writing on this-- many more research degrees are granted than there's really room for in terms of employment, and that considers a significant commercial and industrial sector. Very few older heads like mine occupy stools at lab benches, because they cost so much, and instead almost all labour comes from people with less experience, and a real diversity in success (measured in actual findings, not career progression) results. There's an element of exploitation here to be sure, but it's not well enough considered to lay the blame on conscious design. It's more cultural norms emergent from broad alienation. People, especially academics themselves, are so bogged down with extensive bureaucracy that even if they identify these problems, it's truly heroic to both find the time and courage to push back against them.
Again, thanks for writing this blog. It constantly provokes thought, informs and inspires.
Thanks for your reflections.
One thing I am learning more is about how colleagues in STEM fields conceptualize graduate student funding. It seems that they see this as (1) fellowship to do a degree (2) that it will include some work in the PI's lab (not always clearly defined) and (3) an ideological sense that what is done in their labs is something 'more' than plain work - it has some 'purpose.'
This ideology (or we can call it 'culture') allows folks -including HR Lawyers- to obscure the 'work' involved that is productive to the research enterprise and configure it instead as 'learning' which is itself characterized (in classic ideological inverse fashion) as something being a net benefit to the student rather than an expropriate of labour time from the worker. This parallels the ideology (i.e. culture) of capitalism in which bosses give workers jobs as opposed to stealing labour value from workers.
So well put. I'd put most of my former contemporaries, politically speaking, right around the centre (here in Canada, Liberal or NDP) and their takes on these things would be some combination of naive and reactionary. I especially like you saying that some people see their work as having 'purpose'. That any former contemporary of mine might have seen what they did as more important than the custodial staff disgusts me. I'm sure many did. The distinction I made between employment and education was in the current operational context of academic operations, with the latter(stipend/scholarship) being income tax-free to my recollection, which is foggy due to the passing of time and possibly confused with with other nation's systems. I'd hope more money could make it into the hands of students by stipends being tax free rather than working as a conventional employee (RA). UBC might not allow this nowadays anyway...
Academia is drawing so close to capitalism in so many ways, beyond those you mention related to its role in creating specialised labour for capital. In my area, where ideas can be spun out into biotech commercialisation 'opportunities', the incentives are so warped. It's almost as if the fields supported by the SSHRC are intentionally ignored/devalued so that profit can be pursued from other areas without friction, or cause for conscience.
I think this is one of those areas that is a bit murky and varies among departments (and of course UBC interprets in the light that is most favourable to them). In my department, graduate students are rarely hired for "extra" work--their RA stipends are directly paid for the work that they do for their thesis. On the rare occasion I have an external contract, I would buy a grad student out of their TAship, but again, the expectation is that this work would end up in their thesis.
I think, but could be wrong, that you are in a STEM discipline where the prevalence of 'labs' led by a PI and everyone is working on components of the lab project is the dominant model. NSERC funding is also more expansive than SSHRCC funding and in most social science and humanities disciplines the idea of a big lab with everyone lined up from the PI down in a pyramid is not so common.
Over the years many of my MA students have worked projects linked to my ongoing research. I have in that regard been able to 'fund' their research (travel, materials, stipend) and they produce thesis based on it. PhD studnets working with me may receive funding from my projects, but their work has to be independent in all forms and we often seek separate funding for their actual research. Undergrad RAs are explicitly labour and do not produce research for a thesis of their own.
The problem becomes in those more industrial workplaces (labs) where pressure is applied to go above and beyond, where an ethic of what I would call volunteerism persists, and graduate RAs become a source of cheap labour that is glossed as in their interest, but in reality is simply labour that advances those higher up the pyramid.
I would also say that UBC has used some strange arguments in front of the LRB before. When CUPE was organizing sessionals, they said sessionals couldn't be organized by CUPE because an undergrad can't tell the difference between a sessional and a tenure stream faculty ...
STEM labs themselves also vary--in my department, for instance, it's not uncommon to have students in the same lab work on a wide variety of topics based on their skills and interests (I have students working on boreal defoliators, intertidal mussels, and even machine vision for community ecology). I agree that the ethic of volunteerism is a massive labour issue, and one particular topic I think the union will be helpful for is setting reasonable boundaries around working conditions.
But I think all of these nuances are a bit moot. The argument in my department, which I find persuasive, is that regardless of whether the work is thesis-related or not, students still need to eat. Labour conducted for a thesis is still labour. The hard part is making UBC (and the federal government who funds it) see that.
Totally agree - a living wage in Vancouver is around 45K/yr. A SSHRC stipend for an MA student is about 17K. When I budget for student stipends in my SSHRCC grants I am expected to use UBC's basic rates for MA, PhD students to calculate it. If I put in 45k for an MA and ask the program office they advise me it would likely be seen as unreasonable. UBC could also use funds from the endowment and land lease sales to top up graduate stipends to a living wage.
For sure--even under NSERC, funds are absolutely tight. NSERC MSc stipends are $17,500, and a beginner's NSERC Discovery grant like I have is about $30k/year. As a result our department is seriously reducing the number of graduate students, but I also don't love the idea of graduate education becoming increasingly inaccessible because of few spots. For me, at least, it was one of very few pathways open to the middle class.
One other way UBC could help is to build actually affordable graduate student housing. But no sign of that anytime soon...
I think, especially for master's students, the possibility of unfunded admission is important. My own graduate career would never have been possible if grad schools in the 80s only admitted students they would fund. At the same time I was able to work back home in BC in the commercial fishing industry and make up the funds needed to live.
There is a false 'justice' behind the idea that we must provide a stipend for each student and then reduce the numbers of students because we don't actually have funding. In anthropology that would essentially mean next to no MA grad admissions given the way we are funded for research.