Letters to a Young Scholar: A Bill of Rights for Early Graduate Students

In this post: As Fred Moten and Stefano Harney make clear: the only ethical relationship to the university today is a criminal one.
Next week: A growing list of peer-reviewed essays, books, and articles addressing neoliberal policy in higher education driven by the need to know how the university got here.
Last week: Author and activist Jessie Daniels joins us to talk about dismantling white supremacy, leaving academia, and more.

Dear co-conspirators,

Academia is burning, and it’s a fire that is consuming the lives, careers, and financial stability of so many of my peers who are subsisting on adjunct pay, precarious contracts, and no health benefits. 

Some of the guidelines are policy-based, like precise definitions of faculty responsibilities that are usually not made clear to students. Others are basic human rights that seem to be ignored in higher ed, like refusing to provide unpaid labor. All of them are about preserving our dignity and sanity so that we can not only survive academia but dismantle it and start over with something better. So that we can do the work of producing critical discourse that the university was supposed to foster but never really did. 

I’m Rebecca Shields, and I’m thrilled to be partnering with Allison to expand Post-PhD into a space for lively discussion and solidarity. We want to push the limits of this discourse on the future of the university. Watch out for posts authored by me in the very near future, and in the meantime, we hope you find solidarity in today’s missive by Allison.

Letter to a young scholar: 

As Fred Moten and Stefano Harney make clear: the only ethical relationship with the university today is a criminal one. Steal from the university. Academia is not "in crisis." Further, we don’t need to burn it down, because it’s already burning. And it’s trying to take public discourse with it. And the people who can prevent this, intercept this, are the people we address now. 

This unsolicited academic advice is offered humbly, and with great hope for what you will do to transform the university. I write to you as an academic fugitive, a member of a lost generation of academics who have either been forced out of academia or are struggling to live as we teach the majority of the nation’s undergraduate courses for less than 26k a year. 

Since I cannot speak for the collective of us, I can speak to a group of us, specifically, you, future scholar, because the path you have chosen requires both compassion and bravery. 

So with great humility, I ask you, the future generation of academia, of education, of knowledge: don’t do as we did, do what we should have done. It is not too late for you, but your battle is almost invariably doomed to fail. Nevertheless, we all must persist, we must all fight for a distant future we will not know, and will not know us. That, after all, is the ethos of the pursuit of knowledge itself. 

The Graduate Student Bill of Rights:

1. Resist the Relentless Insistence of Myopia

Do not bury your head in the sand about the reality of the university. Use your critical and methodological training to examine your discipline, its connection to the university, and most of all, your role within it. Educate yourself early and often.

2. You are the future of academia. Know your rights and safeguard them, if not for yourself, then for the future pursuit of knowledge.  

Know what your university, and department’s graduate student handbook says, specifically your rights as a graduate student, human, and the future of academia. 

3. Fearlessly Defend Your Boundaries 

Keep track of the hours you spend and those you are contractually obligated to spend. Be flava flav. When there is a discrepancy, and of course, this will be at your expense, point it out. Ask around. Your community most likely feels the same way. Coalition building starts small. 

4. Practice Love and Compassion (Stop Being a Capitalist Asshole) 

Banish toxic competition, because it’s only in coming together that we can save the university from itself but for ourselves. 

5. Imagine Differently (because this ain’t it)

We do not know what the future will be, so the most urgent task is to imagine it into existence.

On Monday, paying subscribers will receive a detailed resources list of readings, podcasts, and questions we are seeking answers to. I hope you will join Rebecca and me as we dare to imagine the university differently. And on that note: if you are currently a paying subscriber, thank you for your patience as we got in Formation, your support is what makes all of this possible.

Until next week,

Allison & Rebecca & the Post-PhD Team