It is both impressive and depressing how frequently scholars of color are Othered by anthropology. For many, the tales of alienation are too numerous to count; we are made to feel strange so regularly that the process becomes disquieting in its familiarity. Sometimes subtly, sometimes conspicuously, all the time we are reminded that we don’t really belong here.

During a roundtable at one of my first non-biological anthropology conferences, I was drowned in the creeping feeling of “otherness” that until that point in my graduate studies had only been an insidious “drip, drip drip,” of “you don’t really belong here.”

In a session ironically dedicated to the issue of “Diversity in Higher Education,” I listened to a room full of white anthropologists lament the dearth of people of color in anthropology. There were multiple presentations on student demographics, barriers to success, potential support systems, and other staple topics. Nevertheless, most of the scholars in the room were disappointingly oblivious to the barrier they were constructing around that very table. Otherwise well-educated people questioned why “they” (people of color) just don’t seem interested. “We” (but definitely not I) wondered out loud with palpable bewilderment at what could possibly be keeping diverse scholars out of “our” field.

The absurdity of the situation was maddening.

I knew the answer. My heart raced, and I could feel it beating in my chest. My face got warmer, and my mouth ran dry, and though I couldn’t see my own face, I’m sure my pupils dilated. I silently reflected on the cruel joke that I, an Indigenous biological anthropologist studying race-related psychosocial stressors and their long-term biological consequences, was once again suffering the very phenomenon I study.

The subject turned specifically to Indigenous students in anthropology. My heart rate spiked further. An old white man remarked casually, “I just don’t understand why they don’t want to leave the reservation and better their lives.”

What. The. Fuck.

“It’s you.”

I spoke up before I could stop myself. Quietly, and deliberately, I spoke up.

“It’s this. This is exactly why there aren’t more students of color in anthropology. We don’t feel welcome here.”

It was like my rapidly beating heart left no room in my chest and forced those words out of my lungs so that I had more room to breathe. The pervasive and yet subtle racism was suffocating. Staring down a room full of white eyes, I began attempting to make space for myself and for others like me.

“You other us; you act like we aren’t in the room, like we aren’t anthropologists too. I am literally right here. And you wonder ‘Why don’t they want to leave the reservation and better their lives’? Really? Isn’t cultural relativism a thing in our discipline? Some people value community over abstract research. And to be clear, only about 20% of Indigenous Americans live on reservations…”

There were many more issues than the lack of reflexivity. I touched on some of the subjects that the presenters had hypothesized about earlier, such as the lack of support that many POC have just getting into graduate school. But I went on. I talked about how little support there is even once we manage to secure admission to Masters and PhD programs; how our departments can treat us more like informants who have “gone anthropologist” than like the researchers that we are; how we fight daily to educate not only ignorant peers but also ignorant professors and mentors, often about things as ridiculous as whether or not Native Americans can vote in presidential elections (spoiler alert: we can).

After my impassioned but civil intervention, there was a moment of silence and then an older white woman across the table from me continued the conversation as if I hadn’t spoken at all.

Shit. There goes my almost-career in anthropology. All these older white anthropologists in the room had some measure of power, probably over future hiring decisions and article publications, and whatever else moves a career forward and I just pissed them all off by calling them on their bullshit. Well, Anthropology, it was nice. Hvm’-chi’.

I listened quietly for the remainder of the session, the corpse of my newly dead career hanging over my head like a cartoon rain cloud.

The roundtable ended, and everyone quickly gathered their things to leave the room, hurriedly scampering off to other panels and presentations. I collected my belongings with the same energy and futility as a sloth stuck in quicksand, pessimistic about what the next room full of anthropologists might have to offer my conference experience. My dejected inner monologue was interrupted by a tall, older white man holding his hand out to shake my own.

“Here we go…” I groaned inwardly, ready to be scolded for daring to challenge my more established peers. I forced a polite smile as I looked up and shook his hand.

“I just wanted to introduce myself and say thank you so much for speaking up. What you said is really important.”

Holy fuck. I envisioned little defibrillator pads being charged and heard an authoritative “Clear!” as my anthropological future was revived by the electric shock of white approval. I hadn’t fucked everything up! His validation comforted me more than it should have, but in a world where making the wrong impression on an influential scholar can slam so many doors, and where so many of those door-slamming scholars are white people who might not take kindly to being called on their racial biases, it was nice to know that at least one old white dude had my back. Maybe he could talk to his friends.

The lack of scholars of color in our discipline is due not only to the “Other”-ing nature of the hyper-Western canon from which we learn and teach, but it is also due to the colonial, racist history of our field, and often even (or perhaps especially) due to the alienating behavior of anthropologists themselves.

As a biological anthropologist, I was surprised by the aloofness and the lack of reflexivity that the cultural and applied anthropologists in the room demonstrated that day, though I shouldn’t have been. I had expected better, but this unchecked ignorance is one of the most pervasive problems in anthropology.

Brodkin et al. said it best in 2011: “Perhaps the biggest attitudinal barrier to ethnic diversification [in anthropology] is a belief that being an anthropologist inoculates one against racism…”

Clearly, it doesn’t. Anthropology has a lot of work to do.

Works Cited: 
Brodkin, Karen, Sandra Morgen, and Janis Hutchinson. 2011. “Anthropology as White Public Space?” American Anthropologist 113 (4): 545-556. doi:10.1111/j.1548-1433.2011.01368.x.

Such work can be challenging, personally and politically. Current development paradigms which fetishize market forces and the unfettered private sector as an engine for positive social transformation are laying the foundations that consolidate the entrenchment of  new kinds of inequalities on an  unprecedented scale.  At the same time, financial transfers from richer countries to poorer ones provide much needed subsidies for improved public provision of essential basic services. Understanding where policies have traction,  and for whom,  is a critical part of the contested politics of development practice, within and between development organizations.

The politics of development knowledge and what  is prioritised as  relevant at a particular time mean that  knowledge work in development not only has financial implications in potentially influencing the direction of agency support. It is explicitly and self consciously relational. The credibility and status of development knowledge generally depends more on the social and institutional relations which position the researcher and the knowledge product than the content of the knowledge itself.

The development sector has undergone substantial changes in the ten years since I first wrote   about   how  knowledge is done differently in anthropology and in development.   The increasing privatization of aid and the growth of subcontracting between development organizations affects the ways in which development knowledge is produced, as well as how it is used and valued.  A greater proportion of development knowledge than previously is now the commercial property of the organizations contracted to produce it and those for whom it is commissioned.

Undertaking commissioned research for a public agency is now likely to be mediated through an intermediary organization which has won a competitive tender, whether a think-tank, a university, a not for profit or a commercial company. Development has long been recognized as an industry. It is also a marketplace in which  diverse actors situate themselves in order to capture business at different scales.

Although many anthropologists continue to have a problematic relationship with development both as an industry and as a post colonial project, the precarity of the current academic  jobs market  or a personal commitment to  some, at least, of the aspirations of  progressive social change promoted by development actors  from social movements to   state wide  programs mean that perhaps a greater number of us will find ourselves working with, not merely on,  development interventions and organizations.  While this kind of rapid and responsive work can be very different from the practice of academic anthropology, it is my experience that core principles and skills foundational to my anthropological practice inform my approach to development knowledge work.

Anthropological holism, the recognition that everything is connected, is an essential counterfoil to the silo-ization orientation of policy work and the politics of relevance based on sectoral framing.  Second, anthropology takes as its starting point the insight popularised through STS scholars that all knowledge is situated. Third, emotions and relationships structure all social worlds, including policy worlds.  As David Mosse shows in his ethnography of a development project which transitioned rapidly from success to failure in the eyes of funders, generating attachment through affective relations plays an essential,  albeit under acknowledged role, in  sustaining policy  traction. Last,  but not least , are the practical skills we pick up through our  research on sources and our  dialogical engagement with people in the field.   The ability to use search tools to rapidly scour multiple databases, being able to read and take in large amounts of information quickly,  and knowing how to create rapport in an interview while asking the right questions are extremely important in this kind of work.

Not all of the practices we strive to become proficient in  while doing extended projects in anthropology are as transferable.  Working outside the academic sector means learning different ways of communicating knowledge through different styles of writing within shorter time-frames. It has made me more aware of how anthropological knowledge is produced, the specialized work which goes into its production and the economies of university enterprise which enable these long drawn out and labor intensive endeavors. It’s also made me far more conscious of the disciplinary practices we routinely use to  maintain the boundaries between anthropological and other kinds of knowledge and what are constituted as the professional capabilities necessary for its production.   Situating knowledge is an active process.  The social construction of  relevance and authority  is  not confined to the development universe.

This Anthro Life – Savage Minds Crossover Series, part 1
by Adam Gamwell and Ryan Collins

This Anthro Life has teamed up with Savage Minds to bring you a special 5-part podcast and blog crossover series. While thinking together as two anthropological productions that exist for multiple kinds of audiences and publics, we became inspired to have a series of conversations about why anthropology matters today. In this series we’re sitting down with some of the folks behind Savage Minds, SAPIENS, the American Anthropological Association and the Society for American Archaeology to bring you conversations on anthropological thinking and its relevance through an innovative blend of audio and text.

You can check out the the first episode of the collaboration titled Writing “in my Culture” here.

If you’re interested and anthropologically inclined you may know that the theme of the upcoming annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in November 2017 is “Anthropology Matters!” This theme is stirring conversation among working anthropologists in and out of the academy, professional and in-training. For a seemingly light statement, Anthropology Matters! has strong gravity, and begs the question, to whom does anthropology matter? Who can it matter to? What makes anthropology relevant? Where does anthropology take place? And who is taking it there?

To begin exploring these questions, we were joined by Savage Minds writers Alex Golub and Zoe Wool in our first episode. With Zoe and Alex, we found ourselves digging into what anthropology as critique looks like in the era of blogs and podcasts. Early in the episode several key questions came into focus: what does anthropology, as a discipline, have to offer in terms of critical thinking? Is open access through Academia.edu a good thing? And how does one effectively engage someone who thinks differently from you?

Where do the anthropologists talk?

Today, anthropological conversations can be widely accessed through podcasts and blogs, video series and popular books, or in the more traditional settings of a university classroom, library, and online journals. The latter traditional conversations, accessed from a university setting, take time to produce, must endure a peer-reviewed process and are also restricted to specific audiences, often behind high-priced journal or university paywalls. Despite the flood of more open-access and informal media, this issue still poses a challenge for anthropologically minded audiences in and outside of the academy today.

When Savage Minds was founded in 2005, the issue of access was even more problematic. Blogging was a fresh and exciting form of online discussions. For Anthropologists like Alex Golub, Carole McGranahan, and Kerim Friedman blogging was an opportunity to have ungated conversations on anthropological subjects, theories and theorists, and the discipline. 12 years later, the blog is bigger than ever and one of the longest running anthropology sites on the Internet. In short, they were on to something.

One of the benefits of blogging anthropology is a faster turnaround for written works that are not subject to the traditional peer-review processes for journals. Blog pieces can be reviewed much quicker for style and content. This quicker turnaround means that posts are released at the same time as issues are happening, whether in the field or elsewhere. This can be critical for anthropological interventions to provide context for events. An added benefit is that readers are able to interact with the author’s arguments in the comments section, allowing for critical conversations to take place, almost as quick as the blog is posted. But the digital challenge is it can be all too easy to cut and copy a pithy statement or idea, or grab a nice sounding quote to back up or refute an argument. As Zoe cautioned, “We want to keep knowledge embedded in the context of its production, so we can critically approach it,” highlighting the importance of preserving both the context surrounding a pithy quote and an author’s intended meaning. Without context, critique has little meaning. Or, with great open access comes great responsibility.

What do anthropologists say when they talk?

Anthropology is a critical discipline that constantly analyzes the structures behind cultural norms and places local events in broader geopolitical and historical contexts. Zoe said it best: critique “is not about judging something or assessing something as good or bad. It’s about bringing into relief the structures through which something is evaluated in the first place.” The role of anthropology is to critique, not denunciate – perhaps best illustrated by the image of the Internet troll. Bringing these points together, as Alex articulated, the point of conversation is to change minds, not call something out or judge unduly. We’d further that another point of conversation is to open minds. And critique – through putting context before events – is one of our most effective tools for doing so.

Channeling Ruth Benedict, Alex offered a way of nudging this idea to fruition: add the words in “my culture” to the end of every sentence you say (i.e. this movie is great in my culture, we wear socks in my culture, blogging works like this in my culture, etc.). Doing so helps when trying to understand that an individual view is but one of many.

The process of coming to know one’s social world is inculturation. It takes place consciously and unconsciously, implicitly and explicitly. Acculturation, on the other hand, is coming to learn another social world, a meeting between multiple cultures. This isn’t easy; like learning a second language it takes time, patience, and critical thinking. And learning to think critically involves learning to work across these two social forces.

One of the aims with This Anthro Life’s Conversations series and Design + Applied minisodes is to promote actionable steps to further critical thinking. For example, during the divisive 2016 US election, we produced an episode on Myths of American Democracy, to help foster critical thinking about elections and how people think democracy should work. Likewise, on an episode with Jara Connell on recent protests, we directed our attention away from particular events to critically engage the question of what makes a protest successful? With corporate anthropologist Dr. Andi Simon we took a direct approach to actionable steps in our Applied + Design minisode series. In our first minisode, Dr. Simon shared wisdom on critically considering stagnation and embracing change even though we may resist it, whether in the workplace, the university, or elsewhere.

Yes, it’s a tall order for a 30 minute podcast or a 5-10 minute minisode, but we love the challenge. And this is the challenge present for all critical thinking forums, balancing content, context, and conversation. This challenge is what makes collaboration so important.

With this series one theme we aim to explore more deeply is this deceptively simple sounding, yet complex idea: anthropology matters because it shows us how to have productive critical conversations in times of conflict.

Check out the  first episode Writing “in my Culture” with Zoe Wool and Alex Golub, subscribe to the podcast (iTunes, Stitcher, Android or by email), and please join us for a conversation in the comments below or on thisanthrolife.com. Stay tuned for next week’s conversation with Leslie Walker and Ed Liebow from the American Anthropological Association.

In this series I’ve written a lot about education, its constraints, the pressure we all feel to compete in the meritocracy, and some possible ways out. Much of this came from my reflecting on the fact that the financiers I study make use of university credentials to speak to their own worth in ways that are far from what we would like to do in our classrooms and in our research. I’ve distinguished assessments that are supposed to speak to essential parts of a person (GREs, SATs, GPAs and so on) and mark them as special, from feedback on particular work that is often offered open-endedly and in a pass/fail format (on, say, a thesis), as in a model of apprenticeship. I’ve also suggested that the more we get in the business of assessing the worth of someone’s character or the potential of someone’s soul from our various course and research offerings, the less we know what we’re doing, and the more we play into our current, meritocratic modes of anointing elites. In this last post I want to offer some thoughts on what academia might look like if somehow we were able to strip away the meritocratic ranking, the obsession with grades and league tables, and focus on the substance of teaching and growing what we know. So in the grand spirit of comparison I want to compare the student’s path in a university to the novice’s path in a Catholic monastery.

To reiterate I’m not saying academia is a monastery, or the monastery is a college (though there are similarities). What I am suggesting is that, insofar as we want to get out of the soul-weighing business, and into the work of teaching what we know, monastic formation is worth considering.

Background

Several years ago, I conducted a summer’s worth of field-work with a Catholic Monastery, learning how people become monks and make sense of what God wants them to do.  I lived in-cloister, worked, participated, did interviews, and got into some archival material.

Becoming a Monk

The similarities between monastic and academic life are striking. Most basically, people come in response to a calling. They feel that God has called them to the monastery and a life of prayerful devotion. In turn the potential monk has to take their understanding of that God wants them to do and test it against the understanding of the other brothers. And in turn, the other brothers see it as their responsibility to “form” the raw spiritual energy and personal gifts of the individual in the rock-tumbler of life behind the cloister. As individual as a person’s loving relationship with God is, it must be socially legible, and articulated within the standards of the community.

All of this leads to a series of stages and steps. First a monk comes with informal visits, staying for observational periods, perhaps in a monastic cell, and definitely on the chore-roster. The interested person will participate in all parts of monastic life except department (I mean brother’s) meetings. If, after spiritual advisement and personal discernment, someone decides they want to give monasticism a try, they will enter a one year trial period called the postulancy. At this point, the individual is living as a monk, and trying things out but has not joined the monastery, and certainly not taken any vows. All along the way the postulant takes classes, has spiritual advising, and works on and around the monastery.

If, after a year, the postulant still wants to enter, and if, after a year, the brothers in the monastery still like the postulant and think he’ll be a good monk, the postulant is admitted into the monastery. This is the only time at which the community of solemnly professed brothers get to decide communally whether they will allow someone to enter their monastery. There are other times at which an adviser, or a committee’s opinion can weigh heavily on the living and working conditions of the monk-to-be. But entry to the novitiate is special for it’s formality and its representation of the voice of the monastery.
Should the brothers let the postulant in, he is granted a habit, takes a monastic name, and adopts simple vows–a temporary version of the solemn, permanent vows a monk takes at the end of formation. In this particular monastery, they swore vows of chastity, obedience, individual poverty, stability (staying at this monastery), and conversio morum (allowing the monastic community and the holy spirit to work on their souls).

Simple vows lasted a period of three years and could be renewed three times. This was the period of time over which an individual was meant to truly reflect on their calling in order to decide to enter into life-time vows to the monastery. In turn, in the ideal scheme of things, simple vows would lead to solemn vows which were permanent and only lifted under extreme and unusual circumstances.

All along the way individuals en route to becoming monks are doing work around the monastery, taking classes and studying up on topics of monastic interest, undergoing spiritual advisement, and participating in the regular ritual life of the monastery. Note, too, that classes are not simply in spirituality or theology, but often take a humanistic or liberal arts bent, encompassing literature, philosophy, and history. Too, monks will regularly leave the monastery for parts of their formation, often pursuing academic degree of ones sort or another that match up with their temperament and personal potential. Many also get ordained as priests.

So, just to spell this out, monks become monks via a stepped process of work, scholarship and individual discernment. Formally and substantively this has more than a few echoes to scholarship in which one proceeds, at least ideally, by regular steps and examination to ever higher levels of mastery and community acceptance.

Lifting the Constraints

The similarities to academic life in aspiration and substance make the monastery all the more interesting when one realizes the liberty and hospitality with which monks treat interested comers. First, it’s worth realizing, that this particular order of monks had a commitment to hospitality dating back to the 5th century AD. They treated the stranger as Christ and found space for all visitors. Though they ran a retreat house, the room-rates were suggested. Moreover they welcomed just about anyone interested in their way of life to come and give it a try. All were welcome, even anthropologists.

This hospitality extended to provisioning too. Simply put, if you lived at the monastery, the brotherhood took care of you. They maintained a communal pantry from which you took what you needed. Additionally there was one cooked meal (lunch per day) at which everyone gathered. Individual monks were not meant to accumulate private property, and mostly wore either their monastic habits or used-clothing donated to a community chest. Beyond this the monastery would attempt to assume your debts if you entered and take care of your education and your healthcare, all until your death. One monk estimated
it cost them around $8,000 per year to keep a monk on site. It’s worth noting, too, that they had a wonderful library at the center of things.

Now, given all this, you might expect the monastic life to be overrun with freeloaders and in a constant state of expansion. The monks themselves, when I casually talked to them about their formation process figured that something like one in every two, or 50% of potential-monks ended up staying at the monastery. Since the monastery’s founding in the 1950s, 237 men entered the postulancy. So, if we figure on this notional rate of monastic grown, 50%, we might expect somewhere around 115 monks at the monastery. This would have been something to behold, given that there were only 14 monks (13 solemnly professed and one between the postulancy and the novitiate), 25 monastic cells, and a handful of graves, when I was there doing field work. This brings up a fairly obvious question. Where did those other 223 men go? Why didn’t they remain in paradise?

Leaving Paradise

About halfway through my fieldwork, one of my monk-friends said it might be of interest to look through their “register of religious”, a handwritten notebook tracking the arrival and departure date of all men who entered the postulancy, as well as offering brief biorgaphical information (birthday, place of origin), and, occasionally, reason for leaving. In exchange for access, I agreed not to chase anyone down. Though, I did spend much of the rest of my fieldwork talking to monks about why all those people left, collecting their stories.

The raw numbers were the most surprising. Again, since the 1950s, 237 men had elected to enter the monastery for a postulant period, and only 23 had completed monastic formation and were currently at the monastery or had died, in vows, and in residence. So, roughly speaking, 9 out of 10 people who tried to become monks at some point or another decided that the life was not for them. Put another way, 9 out of 10 people who, at one point, had heard the voice, or at least the push, of a God, into monastic life, ultimately abandon the vocation.

Remember, too, that the material barriers are more or less removed–the monks will provision you (there is no adjunct-food-stamps-scamble here). Moreover, more often than voting people out at the novitiate stage, the monks tend to be pretty forgiving and allow people who really want to stay, to do so. If anything, the monks could stand to be more selective, as, arguably, several personality misfits, have created a considerable amount of heartache for the brothers over the years. So, why did they leave?

Generally, I heard three reasons for leaving: sickness, mismatch, and growth. Sickness was straighforward. Some people had mental problems or enduring trauma, that made the close quarters and solitude and quiet of monastic life impossible. Mismatch happened to otherwise healthy-minded people and was sort of a catch all to not fitting into monastic life. My favorite such story was one man who left not too long before I arrived, and had been there for the better part of a year, one day, decided that he was actually a Buddhist, and therefore should leave the monastery. And finally, the monks had an idea that people grew and developed spiritually while at the monastery. For this reason, they had the idea that often people coming out of the monastery were in a better place than when they started. Moreover, even if it was appropriate for someone to enter the monastery at one point in their life, it might not always be the best place for them. If they outgrow the monastery, they probably should leave, and there are some social scripts for this happening.

One delightful version of this was a longtime, solemnly professed monk fell in love and left the monastery to get married. The monks noted, that perhaps in the past this may not have gone over so well, but now they were just happy for the guy. They missed him, but thought it was probably right that he moved along.

When all is said and done, even given direction from God, a loosening of material constraints and considerations, and a more or less open process that takes all comers, around one in ten people actually make it as monks. Perhaps the vows make a difference. Celibacy, obedience, poverty, stability, close communal life, all these things may strike some as burdens. But it’s worth noting, that, again, everyone who has shown up for the postulancy has thought that all of this stuff sounds great. Everyone more or less accepts the premise of the lifestyle when they start.

One further curious outgrowth of the monastic life is the support and devotional community that has sprung up around monks. Not only are their retreat houses generally occupied, and their services fairly well attended (despite being a few miles up a winding mountain dirt road), but they have developed a network of 100s of oblates, lay-, unvowed-people who admire the monastic life, go to monks for spiritual direction, and participate in retreats. Moreover, the monks manage to support a bit above 50% of their operating budget from donations.

Meritocracy, Inequality, and Monks

With monastic formation we have a process of education that is mostly open, materially unconstrained, individually tailored to each monk, and perhaps functioning as a decent analog to some kind of university education (though at a much lower cost)–book learning, character shaping, lifestyle change, etc. And what happens? Lots of people show up, most stay awhile and learn something or other (the average stay I found was 6 years and 11 months, perhaps exaggerated from some 50+ year outliers), and the overwhelming majority leave because the monastery no longer works for them, or they found what they were looking for.

What do we think would happen if we allowed all comers, perhaps over some minimal competency requirements, to enter our doctoral programs and our professional ranks?How long do we really think people would stay with academia if there weren’t such stigma and cost attached to leaving? What if we could strip away the sunk and the transaction costs from pursuing an education? What would happen to meritocratic elitism if everyone who thought they needed and could do, say, an MBA at Harvard or a PhD at Berkeley, could go and try? Would the education still be a loud proxy for one’s capabilities as a human being? Or would it, perhaps, start to more accurately speak to the mixture of bravado and spreadsheet proficiency one actually learns? How many professors or graduate students would actually remain academics? Perhaps more interestingly, how many undergraduates would study with us in the absence of student debt and our society’s credentialist arms race? How many would care what we have to say if, in some small way at least, we didn’t have our finger on the button that could destroy what they think are their chances of achieving a degree, getting some middle class job, and building a particular life? How many of us are scared of the answer?

Given that we as a discipline seem to feel empowered to develop a foreign policy, I figured I’d offer a few domestic policy ideas, a few resolutions that might take care of some our own local inequities.

The purpose of these resolutions is to suggest some ways out of what most everyone agrees is a generally miserable situation for those currently coming of age or working in academia. More or less, all of us want jobs for scholars and a free education for our students. Repeat that to yourself: jobs for scholars, free education for students. In proposing these, I’m also suggesting that we have some power over our academic, professional and disciplinary destiny and can and should act in concert. I see the decline in tenure-line positions, the specter of academic debt, and even the coercive and jealous guarding of scholarship by publishing cartels, as an invitation to collective action. We already have a communications infrastructure, national and international associations in place, as well as active local chapters across the globe (those hot-beds of activism, academic departments). From this point of view, we’re actually very well organized. All we need to do now is raise some consciousness and come up with a few action items. Should you doubt whether collective action is worthwhile or appropriate, it’s also worth keeping in mind the ways in which activists and unions are making the university a more livable, humane place (one example of each).

Here follow three resolutions. They are drafts. I accept and apologize for their limitations and shortcomings. They don’t talk about all that’s worth fixing (how could they?). I offer them to imagine what collective action on our problems might look like. Interested academic associations should consider them for debate, improvement, and vote.

NB: The preamble portion of these resolutions are going to be much shorter than they might be. There is a tremendous amount of research on precarity in academia and the conditions that creates. I suspect readers of Savage Minds are relatively familiar with this stuff. Moreover, were these to actually go live, they would be worked over, edited, revised, and most importantly, gilded with citations. The most certainly would not be the work of one person.

Resolution on Accreditation Standards and Adjunct Labor

Whereas universities in the United States are accredited by self-governing non-governmental associations and thereby receive legitimacy to generate knowledge and offer degrees;

Whereas universities in the United States are chartered by the states in which they reside and thereby receive the benefits of non-profit and or educative incorporation, and are thereby allowed by their state government to offer degrees and enjoy a variety of favorable tax statuses and state aid;

Whereas there has been a historic shift towards a reliance on poorly-paid, short-term, contract appointments, with no tenure protections to satisfy the research and teaching aims of the Academy;

Whereas these conditions have led to the destroyed lives, thwarted dreams, and unfulfilled potential of thousands of competently trained scholars, our disciplinary children;

Whereas this is no way to treat your children;

Whereas society deserves to benefit from the broadest field of scholarly inquiry possible; and

Whereas students deserve to learn from permanently employed scholars with guaranteed freedom of inquiry.

Now therefore:

We resolve that all states and organizations that offer accreditation or incorporation shall deny accreditation and incorporation to any university, college, and or institution of higher learning that, except in cases of emergency or unanticipated vacancy, and in cases in which a professional practitioner who is gainfully and currently employed in his or her area of expertise would be required for a particular course offering, makes use of any part-time and or non-tenure track faculty to offer courses or conduct research;

We resolve that no university, college, or institution of higher learning shall, however accredited and legitimized, except in cases of emergency and or unanticipated vacancy, and in cases in which a professional practitioner who is gainfully and currently employed in his or her area of expertise would be required to make a course offering, make use of any part-time and or non-tenure track faculty to offer courses or conduct research;

We resolve that no academic shall work in such an institution that has not made such changes, above enumerated; and

We resolve that all academics who are members of and represented by the below-signed academic associations shall immediately cease research and teaching duties, thereby going on strike until such time as the above resolutions on incorporation and accreditation are met.

Resolution on University Governance

Whereas universities in the United States are accredited by self-governing non-governmental associations and thereby receive legitimacy to generate knowledge and offer degrees;

Whereas universities in the United States are chartered by the states in which they reside and thereby receive the benefits of non-profit and or educative incorporation, and are thereby allowed by their state government to offer degrees and enjoy a variety of favorable tax statuses and state aid;

Whereas the standards of accreditation, incorporation, as well as the general norms of university governance expect that trustees or their equivalent shall stand outside of the university community and thereby be “unconflicted”;

Whereas this reliance on outside governance for ultimate budgetary and executive authority in the University has led to a situation in which boards are often made up of people whose professional and personal experience has left them seemingly unfamiliar with the norms of scholarship and university teaching; and

Whereas, due to the nature of university board structures, universities in the United States have increasingly adopted the norms of governance that typify for-profit business enterprises, often referred to as the “corporatization” of the university, or one more manifestation of “neoliberal” ways of running something that is of great public benefit. Such norms include but are not limited to :

Exorbitant executive pay;

Bureaucratic bloat;

An embrace of audit culture;

An efflorescence of debt financing;

An over concern with PR and Marketing;

Prioritizing resort-like amenities over the academic mission;

Prioritizing athletic performance over the academic mission;

A reliance on poorly conceived yet bureaucratically appealing metrics;

A growth of institutes and centers, outside of departmental control, offering instruction;

A disregard for the debt and life possibilities of students, often referred to as “customers”; and

A general degradation of the professoriate.

Now therefore:

We resolve that all states and organizations that offer accreditation or incorporation shall amend their accreditation and incorporation standards to require:

1. That all boards be composed of equal portions faculty, students, alumni, non-academic staff, and community members;

2. That all universities, colleges, or other institutions of higher education shall have democratic processes by which such boards are constituted, and may be challenged and changed;

3. Students shall have a veto over all tuition related decisions;

4. Faculty shall have a veto over all research, academic employment, and tenure related decisions;

We resolve that no academic shall work in such an institution that has not made such changes, above enumerated;

We resolve that all academics who are members of and represented by the below-signed academic associations shall immediately cease research and teaching duties, thereby going on strike until such time as the above resolutions on university governance are met.

Resolution on Student Debt

Whereas many measures of income, for the vast majority of people working in the United States have remained stagnant or declined over the last several decades;

Whereas universities, colleges, and other institutions of higher learning in the United States have become increasingly and relatively expensive;

Whereas American society has increasingly relied on debt and loans to pay for higher education, thereby placing the financial burden of provisioning for an education squarely on the shoulders of students and their families ;

Whereas we feel that it is society’s general and no person’s individual responsibility to provide for education and scholarship;

Whereas education and open scholarship are best conceived of as public goods or public commons;

Whereas student debt unreasonably constrains an individual’s life opportunities, and unacceptably commodifies education,  thereby denying the expression of human potential and flourishing that is one of the aims of higher education;

Whereas numerous public and private universities have historically had far lower, inflation adjusted tuition;

Whereas numerous public and private universities have offered an education at no cost to the individual;

Whereas a measure of the worth of a society is how it treats following generations; and

Whereas by this measure of worth we come up wanting.

Now Therefore:

We resolve that all universities, colleges, or institutions of higher learning shall offer education free of charge to all comers;

We resolve that all universities, colleges, or institutions of higher learning shall develop a plan to go tuition free;

We resolve that all universities, college, or institutions of higher learning shall develop a plan to go student-debt free;

We resolve that all state and private sponsors of universities, college, or institutions of higher learning shall create the conditions under which universities, colleges, and institutions of higher learning shall be able to go tuition and student-debt free;

We resolve that no academic shall work in such an institution that has not made such changes, above enumerated; and

We resolve that all academics who are members of and represented by the below-signed academic associations shall immediately cease research and teaching duties,
thereby going on strike, until such time as the above resolutions on student debt are met.

The things that make academia a metaphor of Game of Thrones are not unique to my profession. There’s nothing unusually terrible or uniquely tainted about academia that makes it worse than any other profession. But it does have certain formal traits — a small number of jobs, bonds that are both personal and yet professional, and high exit costs — that make it analogous to Game of Thrones. I imagine that you could find similar dynamics among professional plumbers of very serious cat fanciers.

What makes academia like Westeros is the way that a certain segment of the people doing it don’t do it just to do it, they do it to win. And winning, for them, seems to necessarily involve other people losing.

Some of us are professors. We’re essentially nobles, trying to keep order in our domain, keep people fed, keep the peace, and so forth. Some of us are minor bannerman at state schools, reluctant to take orders from our lord — at least until the North is attacked by the effete, sun-dappled armies of the Ivy League departments funded by House Lannister and its ridiculous postmodern anti-four field approach. Others are graduate students like Bronn or Jorah Mormont, desperate to make it into the big leagues.

But then there is always a certain segment of people — and they don’t come from any one institutional or theoretical school — who play the game just to win it, and are often unscrupulous about how they do it. Today’s fashion, tomorrow’s scandal — this is their meat and drink. Most professional anthropologists are interested in the state of the art of our discipline. But most of us just get to a point where the latest fad or craze just gets… yeah, it’s just not worth worrying about. But for some people the whole point is to be the person who worries more about this than everyone else.

It doesn’t stop when you get tenure. At the last AAA I was asked by someone ‘where I was applying this year’. My answer was: Apply for what? I already have a job! But for a certain segment of the professoriate the goal is to always be circulating, and for that circulation to always be upwards. Once — back when people remembered the truth about the White Walkers — anthropologists got jobs and built departments. Now they flit between them, and no one is willing to tithe in order to keep The Wall repaired for the common good.

The difference between anthropology and Game of Thrones is that in anthropology there isn’t actually a throne. There’s no way to know you’ve won. You never get to say ‘for today, at least, it’s me on the Iron Throne.” Instead you just get endless circulation and speculation.

But then again, does anyone ever win the Game of Thrones? Being ruler of the Seven Kingdoms just means you have to play to keep them. Perhaps the difference between Westerns and anthropology is that in anthropology, the ultimate futility of the game is all the more obvious.

Or perhaps I shouldn’t be so glum. It’s the game that turns Tyrion Lannister from fop to phronimos. It allows the Brienne of Tarths among us to rise above their station and defeat expectations. And, I mean, you know: THE COSTUMES. Let’s face it, no one gets into this business without loving the game. And I confess I’m a junkie.

This isn’t to condemn Game of Thrones, or academia, so much as it is an invitation to ask you to extend the metaphor and see where it takes you: Which academic experience of yours was the most like the Red Wedding? Which academic entrepreneur is the most like Margaery Tyrell? Will your job search end like Jon Snow’s? Let me know in the comments.

It seems a fair amount of academics, especially women, suffer from impostor syndrome, “a constant fear of being discovered to be a fraud and a charlatan.” Self-doubt is surely a universal human trait, but we vary in our ability to suppress, ignore, and/or manage such feelings. What is perhaps somewhat unique about impostor syndrome among academics is that “it’s the successful who tend to suffer from it: In order to feel like you’re faking it, you need to have already reached a certain level in your discipline.” As Kate Bahn puts it, it’s “a twisted version of the Socratic paradox—the more you know, the more you feel like you know nothing.” I once calculated that for every book I read I find myself discovering at least ten new books or articles I feel I need to read. That means that if I read a book a week there are about five hundred and twenty new books on my list by the end of the year, each of which feels urgent and essential for my own intellectual development. One’s awareness of the vast body of knowledge we don’t know is actually part of what makes us “experts” but the price we pay for this expertise is a kind of self-doubt. It is always possible that the next book will contain the golden nugget we are searching for.

But there is a flip side to this, which is the recognition that when we start off our careers, whether still in graduate school or as junior faculty, we really are impostors. Sure, there’s always someone like Rex, whose parents read Edward Sapir’s A sketch of the social organization of the Nass River Indians to him before bed instead of Green Eggs and Ham, but most of us only become committed to the idea of becoming experts in a particular field during graduate school. While I had studied anthropology in high school, and even wrote a senior paper on ethnographic film in twelfth grade, by the end of college I still was unsure whether I even wanted to be an academic, not to mention having a clear vision of my own academic career. Even once I was in graduate school, I still dithered about deciding on a research topic until quite late in my career. (Now I advise graduate students to pick some topic right away, even if they change it later on – but that’s a subject for another blog post.) This means that there simply isn’t much time between when we decide we want to be experts in something and when we get a Ph.D. which certifies our supposed expertise.

I could easily create a biography of my life that made it seem as if I was born to do what I do now. But, especially after reading Galen Strawson’s recent piece on self-narration in Aeon, I think such narratives might do more harm than good. For one thing, they might discourage otherwise promising students from embracing a potentially rewarding intellectual journey. We can’t all be Eduardo Kohn who met his thesis advisor in his grandmother’s study when he was twelve. Such self-narrativizing also makes it seem as if we must pick a research focus that fits our biography. No doubt that doing so saves you a lot of time and trouble; if you already are familiar with the language, culture, and scholarship around a particular place you save yourself years of playing catchup. Branching out into the unknown makes life a lot harder; but it can also make it more rewarding. After committing myself to a career in Taiwan studies, my first major academic publication ended up being on India. I’m back to working on Taiwan, but that detour was one of the most intellectually and emotionally gratifying things I’ve ever done.

Thinking about my work on India also makes me realize how ethnography has the potential to imbue the ethnographer with a unique form of expertise in a short amount of time. I don’t speak Hindi and I didn’t major in South Asian studies, but spending six years making a film taught me a lot about the history and struggles of one Indian community. It also focused my own studies of India around a specific set of under-researched historical questions derived from what I learned in the field. Viewed one way, expertise in anthropology is impossible: there is an almost infinite amount of knowledge one is expected to acquire. But when it comes right down to it, a well defined research project can make it possible to gain the necessary expertise in a short amount of time.

One of the most frustrating things about academia is when scholars (and I’m afraid this attitude is all too common) dismiss approaches to the subject matter which draw on a whole different bundle of questions, skills, and experiences from those that they themselves have mastered. Academics over-value the particular set of skills and knowledge that they have spent a lifetime acquiring, while devaluing those that they have had to ignore in their own quest for expertise. We could all do with a dose of Socratic skepticism, understanding the limits of our own expertise in order to better value the work done by other scholars who bring an entirely different set of research skills, life experiences, and theoretical questions to bear on the topics we hold dear. By accepting that we are all, to some extent, imposters, we might gain a measure of humility in the face of the tremendous diversity of approaches within our discipline.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Toward Living with (not Under) Anthropology

by Takami Delisle

Looking back on those years when I was perpetually in fear of disappointing my professors, I realize that’s when I began to question the whole point of anthropology. I wasn’t alone; there have been many discussions out there about what anthropology can teach us, what we can do with it, and what anthropological knowledge means (e.g., Anthropologies, Issue 1, and Ryan’s open thread on who owns anthropology). Among them I encountered a handful of anthropologists questioning the validity of academic anthropology. I felt vindicated – I too am in disbelief of academic anthropology, because what it seems to be doing is producing its own kind of species of “anthropologists,” claiming that they are the only real, true, and legitimate anthropologists. If the goal of anthropology is to better understand humankind and help make the world an equitable place, now would be a good time for these academic anthropologists to take a good look in their own backyard. Those who are leading the next generations of anthropologists have to learn not to take themselves too seriously, not to be arrogant. They owe mentorship and respect to their students, the future generations of anthropologists, before claiming how righteous, intellectual, and special they are.

For this, I argue here that academic anthropologists are in dire need of critical evaluation. They must not become or practice what they critique. They must not fall into the delusion of believing that anthropology is a post-racist/sexist discipline. They can’t keep claiming to not be racists or sexists without taking the time to understand their own privileges. As Faye Harrison firmly asserts in her AAA report “Racism in Academy” (2012), academic anthropologists must confront anthropology’s exceptionalism, which is “the common claim that anthropologists make that the discipline is intrinsically multicultural and nonracist because of its cross-cultural orientation and its Boasian tradition of intellectual racism” (17). In reality, as Karen Brodkin, Sandra Morgen, and Janis Hutchinson astutely highlight in their report “Anthropology as White Public Space?” (2011), academic anthropologists “have not done well when it comes to decolonizing their own practices around race … the racial division of academic labor and race-avoidant workplace discourses are key constituents of anthropology departments as white public space” (545).

One of the strikingly familiar results in the report is how often anthropology students and faculty of minority become responsible for “diversity duty.” Not surprisingly, one of the few minority faculty in my second graduate program represented the department in the university-wide “diversity” committee, which was supposedly to promote diversity in the whole university community. What would be the benefit of having such a committee, if a representative from every department is a minority and a bunch of nonwhites get together discussing diversity? Aren’t minorities more than well aware of the importance of diversity, and aren’t the white folks the ones who need to be included in these discussions?

In the end, “students and faculty of color are often hyper-visible as tokens of institutional political correctness but invisible as scholars in their work settings” (Brodkin et al 2011:551). Race-avoidant discourses were prevalent in my second anthropology department. I lost my personal “affirmative action” battle to my white advisor. The department gave no guidance and support to nonwhite graduate students in teaching the topic of racial issues to the mostly white students, who often frustratingly threw dagger-like angry stares at me – some of them even called me “anti-white.” The department gave me no place to express my experiences as a racial minority. I once voiced my concern about why I – as a racial minority – felt forced to suppress my thoughts on racism in our seminars. All the white faces swiftly turned to me with acrimonious glares. The white professor simply carried on, and it was the cue for my classmates to move on as well, without responding to my concern. Just like white professors, white students didn’t want to get involved in conversations about racial issues within our department. Yet they were all eager to discuss race as a theoretical, distant, anthropological topic.

The authoritative academic anthropologists who run departments can become the panopticon, transforming their community into a microcosmic biopolitical society. They do this, ironically, while using these concepts as tools for social analysis and critique. Graduate students in my second department practically had no say in departmental policies, even collectively in the name of our graduate student association. As such, the notes taken by a student representative during the faculty meetings were severely censored by the faculty. Students spent so much time trying to figure out many unwritten, intangible rules; they were constantly riding an emotional roller coaster of panic, thrill, distress, ecstasy, and despair. But they took those rules as they were, even those seemingly unreasonable ones, while quietly complaining among themselves. And they worked hard to follow the rules, often policed each other, and competed with each other under the rules. Some of them even took a great deal of pride in fulfilling the rules, as any positive comments from the professors made students totally high. If anyone challenged the rules, hostility flared up within the students, who were divided by the not-so-subtle color line. After all, students simply did what they were told to do. Just like Michel Foucault described “biopolitical” societies, authoritative power is conditioned into the consciousness and bodies of the population (graduate students). Those rules are a form of power (or “biopower”) that “regulates social life from its interior, following it, interpreting it, and rearticulating it … every individual embraces and reactivates of his or her accord,” as Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt put it in their book “Empire” (2000:23-24). The beauty of anthropological inquiry and knowledge gets lost in this.

I am not getting into every detail of my experience in the department here, but towards the end of my career there, I just felt so bullied. I could feel that the program was destroying me – it depressed me, controlled my life, and emotionally tortured me. The only good thing I had in the department was my good friend there, who happened to be another minority student and shared many struggles with me. My husband wanted me to pull the plug way before I realized I should have. But the big turning point was a meeting with my advisor to discuss my leave of absence. “You’ve already asked for delaying your progress three times,” she declared in the beginning of the meeting. I felt so angry that I could feel my heartbeat in my face. Yes, the “three times” part was absolutely correct, but no, the “you’ve asked for it” part was unequivocally wrong. The first time was when one of my dissertation committee members left for another institution, as I was nearing the time for my proposal defense. She loved my project. She was the only one who patiently helped me go through the writing process. But some of the materials in my project were outside of the expertise of her replacement, who of course pushed my project into her direction.

Soon enough, I was rewriting my entire proposal. The second “delay” was when another committee member just quit, out of the blue, with no clear explanation, just a few weeks before my qualifying exam. Her replacement wanted me to add more materials on my exam bibliographies, almost a dozen books, which made it impossible to prepare for the exam within such a short amount of time. The third time was when Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami happened. I had to go home abruptly, knowing that the whole disaster devastated my sister-in-law’s family in Fukushima and my mom’s relatives up in the north. So, let me ask again. Did I ask for delaying my progress under these circumstances? Are they all my fault? I dare anyone say yes.

And I eventually did leave the program with full of guilt, self-blame, and shame. My therapist once asked me, “Do you really want to go back to the burning airplane? It injured you so badly, but just because you spent so much time, energy, and money to get on it, you’d want to get back on that burning airplane, knowing you will get injured more?” “It’s not that simple,” I bluntly responded. “I know, but I want you to think about it,” he shot back. The metaphor turned out to be quite effective. One day I said to myself that it was the time for me to learn to be gentle and merciful to myself. So the recovery process began, and oddly enough, anthropological knowledge has helped me through all of this.

Some people may say that my passion for anthropology wasn’t strong enough to put my personal difficulties aside and still pursue the degree. Others may say that I wasn’t intelligent enough to complete the program after all. And still others may tell me to stop being so much of an idealist and accept the reality: everyone is a hypocrite, teaching something while practicing the opposite. But at least I am not engulfed in the biopolitical, institutionalized world of anthropology. I didn’t let it take over me. I am getting myself back. I get to be me again. I would rather live my life with anthropology in my pocket than live my life trying not to drown in the middle of a massive ocean of anthropology.

To those who are out there thinking about going to graduate school for an anthropology degree – Be wise and selective about the culture of the anthropology department you want to be a part of, especially if you’re a minority student. You need to know about your prospective advisor, talk to current and former students, and figure out how/whether the department as a whole is engaged in communications about its own gender and racial issues. Doing all this is that important because it will determine the course of your life for the following 7 to 10 years. And if you make it to the end, stay humble and worldly, be true to anthropology.

To those who are happily doing their graduate studies in anthropology: Remember, complacency with the status quo can be your worst enemy. Keep in mind that people with more power are less aware of the power relationship than people with less power are. And,

…. practice what [you] preach … to do the same with those [you] see as a part of [your] own culture (department) – particularly if they may see themselves as part of ‘the Other’ themselves. To not do so is hypocrisy. To do so creates real understanding, acceptance, and diversity in a department (Brodkin et al 2011:546).

To those who had limited choices of graduate programs and are finding yourself burned out in academic anthropology because of your department’s oppressive power structure – If you’re looking for advice, I’m afraid I cannot offer any, except that it’s worthwhile identifying and communicating with faculty and fellow graduate students with willing ears. But I’m not the one who stuck around to finish the PhD. All I can say is that I still love anthropology, and I still call myself an anthropologist, whether some of the academic anthropologists like it or not. I don’t think I have ever lost my appreciation for anthropology, even in the midst of the craziness at my second graduate program. I simply couldn’t take the authoritative academic anthropology, and I didn’t want to use it as a vehicle to do anthropology any more. If I had stayed there longer, I could have started to dislike anthropology. In retrospect, I left academic anthropology to preserve my passion for anthropology, and I think it worked for me. But I cannot tell others like myself to do the same.

In the end, the intel turned out to be incorrect and we all let out a collective sigh of status-quo-preserving relief. For a minute there we thought we might have to get all up in arms and start checking the oil in our X-Wing fighters and such to fight the big Open Access battle of the century. No need. Stand down folks, stand down.

But the false alarm got me thinking of the time that Elsevier issued more than 2,000 take-down notices to authors who had illegally posted articles on Academia.edu. This was back in 2013. Remember that? You might not. But. It. happened. That was the time that a bunch of scholars get all bent out of shape at the Big Evil Publisher that had committed the dastardly act of exercising its legal rights! The nerve! The gall! What right does that Big Evil Publisher have over work that authors freely and willingly gave away via signed author agreements? I mean, seriously, what those publishers are doing is an outrage. Right? Who has the time to read the author agreements? Is there even any text on those agreements? Who reads any fine print these days?

Here’s what Barbara Fister had to say about the whole Elsevier fiasco:

HAHAHAHAHahahahahah . . . whew, that was funny. (Wipes away tears of laughter and frustration.) Those chickens finally came home to roost. All these years librarians have been saying to scholars, “uh, you realize what happens when you sign away your rights, don’t you? You just gave your copyright to a corporation. We have pay them to get access to that content, and anyone who can’t pay can’t read it. Is this really what you had in mind when you wrote up that research?

As Fister explains in her post, the usual response she gets when she tries to bring up these issues is something along the lines of: “ZZZZZZzzzzzzzzz snort, snuffle. Huh? Did you say something? Oh, yeah, tenure. Promotion. Don’t be silly. I’m working on a review article, can you get these articles for me?” But when people get take-down notices, suddenly they wake up and get outraged about their articles and their rights. Here’s her response:

While in a way I find this outrage a little funny, I can’t indulge in “I told you so.” This episode once again shows that librarians are not the change agents we want to see. We can’t get scholarly authors attention quite the way a publisher can when it actually uses the all-rights-reserved copyright that authors have willingly given them.

Fister’s post ends with some suggestions: read some Peter Suber. Take some time to learn a bit more about the rights journals are asking for, and the kinds of waivers you can request that help you retain more of your rights. Browse the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). She lists a few more suggestions as well. The main problem persists though. Despite the options that exist, many scholars keep doing the same old thing and signing away the rights to their work. Sure, the Elsevier take-down created a stir…but it was short-lived. Now most of us are back to the grind–publishing and signing away our rights faster than you can say “Hey what the hell are those folks at Cultural Anthropology talking about with all of this ‘publishing otherwise’ business?”

Rex here at Savage Minds also wrote about the big Elsevier shocker:

When you publish with Elsevier, you sign an agreement with them called a ‘copyright transfer agreement’. Guess what it does? That’s right: It transfers control of your creative work to them. In many important ways, your work no longer belongs to you. You may be the author, but you are no longer the owner.

Rex wrote that “Elsevier and other publishers have quietly tolerated the tremendous traffic of PDFs that happens both in public and private on the Internet.” They do this because it’s in their best interest, as Rex explained: “if most people realized the way they had signed away their rights to publishers, the open access movement would double or triple in size overnight.”

Did you see that? Let’s recap: If most people realized the way they had signed away their rights to publishers, the open access movement would double or triple in size overnight.

This mass realization obviously hasn’t happened yet. And so the screwed up world of corporate academic publishing keeps grinding forward. The worst part, as Rex points out, is that so many of us are surprised–if not shocked–when publishers actually do what they told us they were going to do in the first place. This, he says, is like being upset at Jaws for eating people in questionably accurate 1970s films. Of course the shark is eating people! It’s the 1970s! And, duh, look at the poster for the film! Likewise, of course the massive corporate publisher is gobbling up and controlling all of our academic output! We went swimming in their ocean, after all.

Like Fister, Rex has some advice to help soothe our wounded souls. There are ways to make the world of scholarly communication a better place. Publish in gold OA journals. Publish in green OA journals. Alter the terms of your author’s agreement. He ends with this:

But there’s one thing I don’t think it is fair for us to do: complain about the way the world is because we lived under the impression that it was something else. Especially if we are actively engaged in reproducing it. So if you are pissed off about the Elsevier takedowns, then please join our rebel alliance now — because guess what? Darth Vader actually is out to get you.

Jason B Jackson made a similar argument at the time:

While I am a Elsevier boycott participant and cannot ever imagine publishing with them, I 100% support the rights of Elsevier and other publishers to fully and legally exercise the copyright that they legally hold and to protect their property from illegal misuse by third party firms and from their author agreement-disregarding authors who mistakenly believe that because their name is on the byline of an article that they can do whatever they wish with value-added property that, despite their authorship, they do not own.

Self-piracy is wrong and it is not helping build a better scholarly communication system. Instead, it further confuses the already confused into believing that [pseudo] open access is easy and it leads to painful ironies such as scholarly society leaders setting publishing policies that they do not understand and that they, even as they make them, are out of compliance with.

Jackson’s final argument is that breaking contracts we signed by essentially stealing articles and posting them on for-profit sites “is not the way to do it.” There are other options. Plenty, he reminds us. He also says that it is our obligation as scholars to know how to modify author agreements. This is one step in moving things forward (and something that has been suggested by all three authors I have cited so far–probably good reason to pay attention).

Gavia Libraria also chimed in on the matter right around the same time. For her, much of it comes down to mass ignorance of the issues:

The great mass of those who publish in the scholarly literature are pig-ignorant about how scholarly publishing works. If they weren’t, we wouldn’t have to worry about scam open-access journals or journal impact factor, just to offer up two obvious examples, because they would be laughed out of existence.

This mass of people, she says, has an unwarranted sense of entitlement to the scholarly literature and a warped understanding of their own contributions to it. This entitlement, combined with ignorance, works to the benefit of toll-access publishers. How? Because, she argues, people who feel this sense of entitlement yet know almost nothing about the workings of the publishing world are”are easily manipulated into signing contracts they shouldn’t and vehemently defending organizations and processes out to exploit them.”

These are some harsh words. They might hurt–but that’s probably because they’re right on the mark. I’m definitely someone who has been guilty of complaining about Big Evil Publishers in the past–without looking deeper into the issues. This kind of populism is fun and all, but there’s no actual end game. If the goal is to do something about the current publishing regime, then the first thing we’re going to have to do is wise up. Read up. Learn more and listen more when it comes to publishing.

And here I’m not just talking about the usual conversations about publishing–you know, the ones where people tell you to either get yourself published in the usual toll-access journals or watch your career slowly wither away. I’m talking about the kind of “publishing otherwise” that Marcel LaFlamme writes about (not one, but two nods there folks). The kind of rowdy, alternative publishing that Eileen Joy writes about. And after we educate ourselves, well, it’s time to actively take part in building the alternative publishing platforms that will make the current world of pay-walled publishing seem ridiculous, laughable, and, probably most important, completely inept.

Maybe now is actually the time for the big Open Access battle of the century. If not now, when?

*We don’t actually have an editorial office.

Let’s start with education. About 50% of the respondents are either currently attending college or attended during the past year (as of Spring 2015 when we did the survey). About 21% attended college between one and five years ago, 11% between six and ten years ago, and 8% between eleven and fifteen years ago. A final 8.6% attended college sixteen or more years ago (see Chart 1). Of these, 56% said they teach at the college level, while 44 percent do not. We also asked whether people plan to continue formal studies in anthropology or a related field. About 44% said they are done with formal schooling, while another 34% said they hope to get a PhD in anthropology. Another 11% said they plan on getting a Master’s in anthropology.

We also asked about employment–we divided this up into those who teach (or taught) at the university/college level, and those who do not. Let’s start with the latter. For those who do not teach, 37% have a full-time job, 35% work part-time, and 27% reported being unemployed. Another 1 percent are retired (see Chart 2).

For annual income (again, we are talking about the non-teachers here), about 78% of the respondents make $30,000 USD or less (I converted all non-US currency). Another 14% make between $31,000 and $60,000. Approximately 6% make between $61,000 and $100,000, and a final 3% makes $101,000 or more. Next we asked whether or not people are using their anthropology skills in their current job. About 64% said that they are using their anthropology training either directly (28%) or indirectly (36%) in their current job. About 18% said they are not using their anthropology training at all in their current job. When asked if they would prefer to be teaching at the college/university level, 43.1% chose “That’s my dream job,” 16.4% said “No way!” and 42.3% were neutral. Overall, when it comes to job satisfaction, 30.7% were satisfied, 22.8% were not, and 46.6% were in the middle. When we asked people to provide some more detail about job satisfaction, here’s what some of them wrote:

1. “I enjoy using my anthropology background on how information is used in my job, even though it has nothing to do with my master’s thesis (primate-parasite interactions). It allows me to exercise my cultural anthropology muscles I would otherwise neglect.”
2. “I’ve had a major in visual anthropology thus my anthropological training helps in a way in my current job but I would prefer to work in a field more related to anthropology and more intellectually challenging.”
3. “My goal was to continue my research and teach at the University level. Lack of funding, getting in the field late, and mounting debt forced me to re-evaluate this goal and return to my previous job.”
4. “I am a broke graduate student trying to fill the gap between my fellowships and reality with part-time work. Some has been decently lucrative but right now it is tough.”
5. “I love my job and love the ability to apply my anthropological training.”
6. “I aspire to academia, but have been unable to secure a postdoc and with a family to support, I can’t afford the asceticism that would allow me to spend the necessary time reading researching reflecting writing reviewing rewriting revising and resubmitting to return to the fold of academia. Nor am I really sure I want to anymore, but I do miss the collegiality and conversation.”
7. “It’s hand-to-mouth and there are still embedded cultural expectations of doing a lot of work for no pay.”
8. “I’d like to work somewhere where I’m being challenged.”
9. “I’m interested enough in computers that I don’t hate this line of work, but I’m not talented enough for it to be anything more than a way to get by. My passion is in educating people about anthropology.”
10. “Incessant mindless desk work.”
11. “As an undergrad there aren’t many opportunities to build or use Anthro skills. I did apply for a summer research assistantship which has a stipend. Waiting to hear back about that. I can’t work as an unpaid intern because I have bills that need to be paid. Work-study makes $500 a month max and this is just not sustainable.”
12. “Well, I do need money to sustain myself. When I returned to the US I did not have any luck finding a job as most employers said I was over-educated. I returned overseas when offered a scholarship for my MA degree, but also face issues of unemployment being overseas. “
13. “Happy to be employed full time, but miss being in the field, and I am one of the few qualitative folks in a sea full of economists/statisticians.”
14. “Financing for my research is on the verge of finishing. In 10 days I ll be all unemployed with part time job non related to anthropology.”
15. “I am currently a graduate student in anthropology, but prior to it I worked as a research assistant and consultant for NGOs (based in Mumbai, India – because context is important!)
    In my experience, anthropological (and qualitative) research needs more space to contribute to existing social programs. In a way, the research “industry” is myopic and often fails to use data and evidence efficiently to contribute to better programs.
    The fact that ethnography – which can greatly contribute to this largess – rarely is at the fore of research (or is badly implemented) is disappointing.”
16. “I am doing mainly administrative and logistical work. My employers also value quantitative skills over qualitative skills, which can feel frustrating when my anthropological and ethnographic experience feels undervalued.”
17. “I get to do research, help design things, use my anthropology and make money.”
18. “I get to travel from place to place and learn about different cultures, and I’m paid handsomely to do so.”
19. “I have a good job with a good employer working with mothers and their babies…what’s not to love?”

For those who do teach, 22.4% have tenure, 19.5% are adjuncts, 14.9% have a full-time, non-tenure track job. In addition, 13.3% have a tenure track job, but not tenure. Another 2% are either emeritus or retired. A final 27.8% answered “other” to this question (see Chart 3 above).** Overall, 81% of teach college students and 43% teach grad students. Another 7% percent teach at community colleges. When asked about job satisfaction, 39.8% say they are satisfied with their current employment situation, 23.2% say they are unsatisfied, and another 36.9% are on the fence. When we asked the teachers to talk more about job satisfaction, here’s what some of them wrote:

1.  “‘You could make more money as a butcher.’ I find myself bogged down with minutia. My job feels very precarious, even if it is the gold standard of academic employment: tenure-track job in an anth department. I worry about getting “stuck” – it’s good to have a job, but lack of mobility in the academic job market means it is difficult to look forward to advancing… I think these are probably good problems to have, but they do reduce job satisfaction.  Finally, in general, I’m frustrated with the priorities of our culture and political system, which do not reward intellectual work, inquiry, research…”
2. “Academia always has its ups-and-downs, but it would be stupid to complain about a tenured job at a liberal arts college.”
3. “Adjuncting is not a sustainable long-term career path and with few TT jobs in the region where I live, I am likely to change careers in the long-term.”
4. “Have a TT position, happy with it and my department. Definitely feelin’ lucky.”
5. “Adjuncts are treated like garbage.”
6. “Adjuncts need better structures and tenure track people are in a position to help this. But they seem to talk the talk in classes about Marxist thought and fair wages, yet they don’t speak up in their own departments to change the status quo.”
7. “All-research museum position, teach when and what and if I want, lots of freedom to travel, write, do research, would be a dream job if the Brazilian bureaucracy weren’t such a nightmare. And if my city had sewage treatment…”
8. “After finishing my Ph.D. coursework, I had to move back home to live closer to my parents who were willing to offer me financial support and were able to help my husband get a job teaching at a local high school.  While working to finish my PhD qualifying exams and apply for grants, I began substitute teaching to earn a little cash and get out of the house. After finally passing my dissertation proposal defense and achieving ABD status, tight on money, I accepted a more permanent position teaching high school mathematics, replacing a teacher who left the local district in November. As college professors are not certified to teach high school, I am actually earning just above minimum wage.”
9. “I am currently on the job market, without much success. The whole thing is a big mystery to me.”
10. “I am extremely, unbelievably, stupendously lucky that when I was writing up my PhD, this university advertized a position in EXACTLY my specialization, and I was far enough along in writing up that they could hire me. (I submitted my PhD diss for examination the day before my job started.) I was the last of 9 tenure-track profs hired over 5 years, before a hiring freeze struck. They had the hiring process down pat and knew I’d fit in. My department is collegial, supportive and altogether a great place to be.”
11. “I am underpaid, under appreciated, overworked– all for no potential job advancement. It’s way more demoralizing than I expected it to be when I signed on. To be surrounded by TT and tenured faculty who get paid 2x more plus benefits and don’t do half of the work I do for students– it’s depressing. It’s making me seriously consider leaving academia.”
12. “I get to do cool research on climate change and anthro.”
13. “I have a low teaching load, and good funding from my university. My colleagues are awesome.”
14. “I have a tenure track position in a supportive department in an area that I like living in. Its academic happiness (a rarity).”
15. “I have a wonderful TT job in an anthro dept with wonderful colleagues.”
16. “I have an office, benefits, and almost enough money to cover the basics.  But I’d like to teach less, write and research more, have permanent employment, tenure, and a higher salary.”
17. “I love teaching at my community college. Great colleagues, love the teaching, and enjoy the students. It feels great to be part of helping those with fewer resources and opportunities get ahead and make their lives better.”
18. “I teach at an R1, state university, tenured senior faculty. Good salaries, good benefits, etc. Livin’ the dream.”
19. “The city in which I live is miserable: harsh winters, very little diversity, and an uber-conservative, anti-science, religious extremist, under-educated and unhealthy population. The students are by and large disappointing. Publication education has let them down, and I struggle to teach them basic skills. They make me worry about the future of our species. There are too many complacent senior faculty, and little energy on campus. There are severe budget cuts, and massive restructuring underway. I am witnessing the erosion of higher education up close, and feel there is nothing I can do about it.
20. “While I have a full time, non tenure track job at the moment (1-year postdoc), I have just accepted an offer for a tenure-track job beginning fall 2015. I am very satisfied with this outcome.”

This brings us to the debt question. The total reported debt from our readers was $8,302,507. The mean for this total debt was about $19,308 per person. The mean debt of people who have at least some debt (i.e. excluding those with no debt) was $38,616. The most striking aspect of the debt stats for me was the number of people who had zero debt. Check out the breakdown (see Chart 4):

• Zero debt: 215 people (50.1%)
• Debt between $1 and $10,000: 55 (12.8%)
• Debt between $11,000 and $30,000: 66 (15.4%)
• Debt between $31,000 and $50,000: 42 (9.8%)
• Debt between $51,000 and $70,000: 25(5.8%)
• Debt between $71,000 and $90,000: 6 (1.4%)
• Debt between $91,000 and $120,000: 12 (2.8%)
• More than $120,000 in debt: 9 (2.1%)

That gap–between those with no debt at all and those with debt–speaks to some of the disparities that exist in academia (for a graphic representation of this debt gap, see Image 1). Explaining those disparities is the hard part. The largest percent of respondents fall within the $11k to $30k range, but a significant percentage of our readership has more than $30,000 in debt.

I compared debt with a few other factors to see if I could tease out any interesting differences. First, I looked at debt and ethnicity. Keep in mind that the responses for ethnicity were a bit unwieldy (as Kerim noted in his summary). What I ended up doing was reducing the responses down to “white” and “non-white.” The average debt for white respondents was $20,852, while the average debt for non-white respondents was $20,272. In terms of percentages, 46.7% of white and 50% of non-white respondents reported having at least some debt. These results do not indicate much of a difference, but considering the complexity of the ethnicity question (and trying to assess it with an opt-in online survey), this is one that could definitely be revisited.

Next I checked debt as it relates to gender. Here there were some differences. Our female readers reported an average of $20,930 in debt, while our male readers reported an average of $17,308. So this means that the female respondents carry about 21% more debt on average. This certainly isn’t definitive, but it points toward some potential differences that would merit greater attention. In addition, two people chose “other” for gender. The total debt of these two was $7,000, which translates to an average of $3,500 per person. Obviously, such a low number of responses for that category doesn’t tell us much. As with the question about ethnicity,  this question could use some greater attention (and a more rigorous sample) if we really want to parse out some of these differences.

Finally, let’s talk about debt in terms of age (see Chart 5). Our readers who are 19 years old and under (4) carry an average debt of $2,500. For those in their 20s (138), the average debt is $16,010, while the respondents in their 30s (162) reported an average debt of $26,755. After that point the debt starts to drop off again: readers in their 40s (78) have an average debt of $18,381, those in their 50s (30) are remarkably lower at $5,501. The average for those in their 60s (15) jumps back up to $10,000, but here it’s important to note that 14 had no debt at all and one person reported $150,000 in debt. Finally, our three oldest readers who responded to this survey, who happen to be women in their 70s, reported having no debt at all.

I know this was a numbers-intensive post. For me the numbers are interesting, but some of the most compelling information comes from the various experiences that our readers shared in the open-ended questions. Perhaps this doesn’t come as much of a surprise, since I’m primarily a qualitative researcher (along with much of our readership). I’d like to find a way to share more of those answers–perhaps in another follow up post, or maybe even via one long catalog of responses. Let me know what you all think, since they are your answers after all. For those of you who made it all the way to the end of this long post: thanks!

UPDATE: I know this is a mass of information. I’ll add in some charts asap to help make some of the data more reader friendly. I’ve added a few already.

UPDATE II: I added some more charts and one image to help illustrate the data. I also added some tongue-in-cheek commentary to the aforementioned image. If you feel I haven’t quite hit the proper chart threshold, please let me know.

*Note: There were 430 total responses to the survey. Many people either did not respond to the ethnicity question, or left answers that were highly ambiguous (often terms of nationality that do not translate to any one particular ethnic group). I was left with 302 usable responses for this question. Answered ranged from “white” to “black” to “Latina” to “Poi dog” to “Pacific Islander,” among others.

**Note II: For this question we asked “Do you work full-time?” Since about 28% of the answers to this question were “other,” this is another question we obviously need to rethink if we end up doing another survey in the future.

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Toward Living with (not Under) Anthropology

by Takami Delisle

I have spent most of my American life doing anthropology. I think about and with anthropology when I observe the world around me, whether watching the news or listening to friends’ conversations. It’s not that someone is forcing me to do so with a knife right at my jugular, but it’s that anthropology has been one of the biggest passions I have ever had in my entire life. Coming home after my very first cultural anthropology class, I felt as if I had just been awakened by something magical. I still remember the sense of thrill when I declared my major as anthropology at my first U.S. university. I sat in the very front row in every single cultural anthropology class like a little kid watching a cartoon right in front of the TV.

What drew me into anthropology is that it opened a door to a wide-open space where I was encouraged to ask questions that I had never felt allowed to voice – like Japan’s appalling gender inequalities, Japanese corporations’ socioeconomic exploitations overseas, and the central government’s ill treatments of Okinawa. Anthropology gave me opportunities to critically and objectively reevaluate the country where I was born and raised, the place I often took for granted. It’s not that anthropology gave me answers to all of my questions, but it did bring me closer to the answers.

My first anthropology graduate program did not betray my expectations of anthropology. The seminar “Poverty, Power, and Privilege” was the most instrumental for strengthening my passion for anthropology. It provided me with theoretical and analytical tools to trace social injustices back through history – to see where they came from and how they changed over time. This seminar taught me to look at the bigger picture when it comes to inequality, and to pay close attention to issues of power. Everything about the seminar blew my mind.

I also learned what it means to be a good anthropologist from this graduate program, which had incredible, worldly-minded teachers who were also good mentors. For instance, after I submitted the final draft of my master’s thesis to my faculty committee members, one of them, who was also the department chair, e-mailed me his comment, which started with, “I want to thank you for teaching me about this important community” – his humbleness taught me to be humble, as I also thanked many of my own students for teaching me things I didn’t know. Another professor, who didn’t believe in the value of testing and grading his graduate students, asked us in his seminar to write what each of us found the most intriguing about the seminar, instead of giving us a final exam – his consistent practice of the principle against the standardized education taught me to be loyal to my principles. When a white student in one of my discussion sections complained about the class materials on racial issues and accused me of being a racist toward whites, the professor whom I was a TA for asked me to let him directly speak with the student to defend me, instead of telling me to ignore the incident – his courage to pursue justice taught me to stand up to injustice. When I brought the dilemmas and difficulties that I had encountered during my research fieldwork to my advisor, instead of telling me to figure them out on my own, she patiently listened, worked out strategies with me, and suggested to incorporate these encounters into my research data and thesis – her mentorship taught me to stay motivated, to keep pushing forward. I was entirely impressed, when another professor, who was often quite harsh on me, stood in front of the whole seminar at the first meeting of the semester and publicly admitted that she was wrong for her vehement disagreement with my argument in another seminar during the previous semester. Her honesty and integrity as an anthropologist taught me to be committed to anthropological inquiries. All these professors helped solidify my deeper understanding of what anthropology should be as a discipline.

My confidence in academic anthropology began to crumble when I joined another anthropology graduate program later on. It was drastically different from my previous program, particularly the relationships between the professors and the graduate students. Some of the professors were obsessed with exerting their authority; this hierarchical pressure permeated throughout the entire department, instilling a cold, sometimes hostile air among the graduate student body. Because of this, anthropology started to take over me, to preoccupy my essence. It consumed every minute of my everyday life, constantly making me question whether I grasped what I was expected to in the course materials, whether I was writing the right things in the weekly reflective essays, and whether I was intelligent enough to be an anthropologist. I had no time to do anything else. I never felt I was doing anything right.

I got so paranoid about falling behind. There were days when I didn’t even see my husband because I sat behind books and the computer in our back room for hours on end. I worked hard, very very hard. But the way I spent my life doing anthropology changed. I was no longer doing anthropology because I was passionate about it—I was doing it out of fear. And out of my fear, I lost interest in everything else. Not only did I have few real friends in the department, but also I had no time, energy, and motivation to make friends outside the department. The result was that I turned into this statue-like apathetic thinking machine with “Anthropology” written big on my forehead.

What was it about the fear that was colonizing my life with anthropology? The truth is that anthropology is not a pure knowledge genre, but it is an institutionalized discipline. When knowledge gets institutionalized, the ways in which the knowledge is practiced and disseminated fall into the hands of the people who run the institution. The materialization of the knowledge depends heavily on how these people carry themselves under the authoritative titles. In other words, the remarkable potential of anthropological knowledge gets filtered through authoritative anthropologists. What is truly detrimental to anthropology is, then, that if they can’t embody the ingenious knowledge to their students and colleagues in everyday life, they also turn anthropology into hypocrisy. This is what was rampant in my second anthropology graduate program. The fear, which consumed my life in anthropology, was of getting disapprovals from those authoritative anthropologists. They scared the hell out of me.

“It’s business as usual at University of Toronto”, the Provost’s messages proclaim. These messages, meant for students and the media, assert that CUPE 3902 Unit 1’s decision to strike has had no impact on undergraduate classes or the daily operations of Canada’s largest university, recently ranked number 20 in the world. This union represents more than 6,000 graduate student employees. The provost’s claims seek to undermine both the value and importance of graduate student labour and justify the administration’s hard line against raising the minimum funding package, stalled at $15,000 per year, to an amount closer to, though not exceeding, Toronto’s version of a poverty line, the “Low Income Cut-Off” (LICO), which is $23,000. However, underneath the calm and unaffected airs of the university administration lies the reality that over 800 undergraduate classes and tutorials are no longer meeting or have been cancelled for the duration of the strike. As finals draw closer, so too does the possibility that students’ graduations may be delayed.

At base, the aim articulated by striking CUPE 3902 members is one of structural change to the funding relationship between graduate students and the university. The guaranteed minimum funding package achieved as a direct outcome of this union’s last strike, fifteen years ago, has dramatically diminished in real wage value thanks to the rapidly rising cost of living in one of Canada’s most costly cities, and has not seen any increase to account for inflation since 2008. Meanwhile, tuition––particularly for international students––continues to climb to the maximum rates legal in Ontario ($8,000-20,000––the highest rates in all of Canada). Combined, it is these two issues that have led to the now 21 day standoff between graduate student contract workers and the administration. If any tentative agreement is to achieve ratification, two core demands must be addressed: meaningful increases to the minimum funding package, and significant reductions in post-funded-cohort tuition.

Much to the frustration of striking graduate students, the administration has refused “on principle” to negotiate these matters with the union–this language was explicitly written into the original tentative agreement that was struck down three weeks ago. This stance has been hotly contested by members who argue that it is ludicrous to require teaching assistant/course instructor (TA/CI) labour as a condition of the overall funding package, but not allow any meaningful dialogue on the value or overall structure of said package. Beyond this, deploying our collective leverage as unionized workers is the only concrete means at our disposal to engage with the administration on such matters. A refusal “in principle” to negotiate these matters with CUPE is widely seen as a profoundly unprincipled political play at maintaining a highly uneven distribution of power squarely in the hands of high-level administrators, while silencing available channels through which graduate students may gain a direct voice in determining the conditions under which they must live. While not all graduate students are CUPE members, a significant portion of those under the guaranteed funding package are, and have articulated consent to be represented by the union through the establishment of a strong strike mandate built on these core issues.

The ongoing TA/CI strike at U of T has profoundly opened up space for a critical dialogue on a number of simmering ideological questions surrounding access to education, funding, and livable compensation for both contract labour and the full time research graduate students produce. It is irreducibly a political issue that cuts to the heart of the role of the university in society at large, and the structural experience of graduate students as disposable contract labourers who contribute substantially to the overall teaching load, and particularly to the qualitative pedagogical character of overburdened, over-enrolled courses in which few undergraduate students (referred to as “Basic Income Units” in university planning and finance documents) ever have a chance to engage directly with tenured faculty. Contract graduate student educators are the personal face of the university for most undergraduates, especially in the early years of their studies, as class sizes have dramatically risen apace with the cost of tuition. In this corporatized model of university management, undergrad students are increasingly paying more for less, while compensation for TA/CI labour wrapped into the fulfillment of the guaranteed funding package remains frozen.

This battle, as many voices have asserted since the initial strike vote, is fundamentally about the values and the valuation of university education–and the dedicated work through which it is produced. The stakes of this dispute go beyond the personal circumstances of these 6,000 union members––it is fundamentally a rejection of the corporatization of the university and the artificial de-valuing of the research and teaching conducted by graduate students. This is particularly so for graduate students in the humanities and so-called “soft” social sciences, who are most likely to fall within the base funding package, and lack the sort of departmental “top-ups” common (but still not universal) in STEM fields.

PhD students in the Anthropology Department at University of Toronto are guaranteed the baseline minimum funding package of $15,000 per year for four years, owe full tuition and fees for each year they are in the program, and must TA for every year they are in the funded cohort. During the fieldwork year, the subsequent appointment can be deferred to a later date, but that also means that because of the nature of our work as anthropologists, researchers in the field forego $8,500 of their funding guarantee in a year in which reliable financial resources are perhaps most crucial. This, while still paying roughly the same dollar value in tuition for a year in which they won’t set foot on campus.

Throughout the course of the strike, arguments made by unsympathetic parties have asserted that the low funding allocated primarily to social sciences and humanities students is reflective of the disciplines’ value as a whole. The rhetoric used by Provost Cheryl Regehr mimics this rationale: that the few disciplines stuck with the minimum funding package should be grateful they have even that. But is anthropology really so valueless? In the neoliberal university model championed by Dr. Regehr and her counterparts elsewhere, value is determined through numbers––enrollment statistics, production, and profit. A conservative estimate of the Tri-Council external awards brought into the department and university by anthropology graduate students for the 2013-2014 academic year is approximately $700,000. This number excludes any additional external awards that may have been earned by students, such as Wenner-Gren, and it also excludes money that the province provides to the university on a per-student basis.

One might expect, given the department’s apparent success with external funding, that few students would actually be making only the minimum funding package. One would be wrong. Within the Arts and Sciences Faculty, external grants earned by students are balanced by an equal reduction in guaranteed funding provided by the university. In other words, it is impossible for students to “earn” their way out of poverty. This forces even the most “successful” student-researchers to continue to take on teaching duties in order to make enough to pay tuition. Once students move into their fifth year, they are no longer guaranteed the minimum funding, may not apply to Tri-Council grants, and are no longer guaranteed a TAship to help pay for tuition. They must pay for the privilege of working full-time as researchers.

So where does all that money go? The University of Toronto Faculty Association reports document a phenomenon that is common in many universities–departments in the social sciences and humanities generate massive profits, which are often distributed to other departments with smaller undergraduate classes to help achieve parity. In the case of University of Toronto, each faculty must contribute 10% of its budget to the University Fund, which is then redistributed according to the “current goals and vision of the university administration”. What this means in practice is that funds from some of the departments with the least amount of funding available for their graduate students, like anthropology, are redistributed to professional programs such as business, medicine, and law in order to offset their exorbitant costs. At the same time, graduate departments across Ontario are experiencing pressure from the provincial government via university administration to increase their graduate enrollment as a means of artificially lowering unemployment statistics while increasing the provincial funding that flows into the university through graduate tuition.

The push to increase enrollment in graduate programs is a decision that, quite clearly, is not at all connected to a thorough consideration of the academic job market and the difficulties faced by convocating students upon completion of their degrees. The number of tenure track positions has not increased to match burgeoning undergraduate enrollment rates, and universities are cutting costs by using adjuncts and teaching assistants as the primary educators of undergraduate students. This underclass of academics performs 60% of the teaching hours at University of Toronto, and yet accounts for only 3.5% of the budget. If one were feeling particularly cynical, one might wonder if the push to increase graduate enrollment in defiance of a bleak academic job market isn’t a strategic move to ensure a ready supply of precarious, desperate workers willing to forgo security, fair wages, benefits, and the academic freedom of tenure in order to put their educations to use.

While university administrations are coming to see themselves more and more as CEOs of extremely large and powerful companies––and acting accordingly––imagining the corporatization of universities as an invasion of a sacred space by the vulgar shameless scrabbling of upper management suits jumping like fleas from one dog to another elides the responsibility of academics themselves for the current state of affairs.

Universities have welcomed the opportunity to maximize profits in order to offset decreases in government funding for post-secondary institutions since the 1970s, as government funding for universities has fallen from 90% to around 57% over the past forty years. In Ontario, which has the lowest ratio of per student funding in the country, 51% of provincial university operating budgets is paid through tuition. As the university structure as a whole shifts from non-profit services subsidized largely by taxpayers to a corporate model relying on profits generated by a consumer base, so too have those in privileged management and administrative positions seen to it that their personal compensation is commensurate with salaries and benefits in the private sector. University of Toronto staff and faculty garner a significant amount of space on the Ontario Sunshine List of public sector employees making more than $100,000 per year, with the highest salaries going to an ever-increasing cadre of senior administrators. Between 2008 and 2013, the number of U of T deans on the Sunshine List increased from 78 to 98. In that five year period, the combined cost of their salaries rose from approximately $14 million to nearly $20 million, not including benefits packages or housing allotments. While Toronto is an expensive city and talent and hard work should indeed be compensated, the administrative bloat at U of T and other institutions is a slap in the face to those on lower tiers of wealth and power who are told by those same administrators that they must tighten their belts and accept austerity measures for the public good.

Therein lies the rub. Former professors turned administrators who have successfully climbed the newly corporatized ladder within the university to emerge victorious on the higher reaches of the Sunshine List, and who routinely give themselves raises and cost-of-living increases, now peer down at the masses of precarious, poverty-stricken employees beneath them and declare that there simply isn’t enough to go around. University of Toronto administration is fighting tooth and nail, with ugly, shameless tactics more at home in corporate warfare, to avoid giving its teaching assistants and course instructors a cost-of-living raise to address the serious depreciation of value of the funding package over the past seven years.

Perhaps the most offensive aspect of the strike and accompanying battle with university administrators, for many, is that the person behind U of T’s intransigence and corporate-style heartlessness is Dr. Cheryl Regehr, a professor of Social Work whose research on poverty, inequality, and stress is foundational in the field. Likewise, Vice-Provost Dr. Jill Mathus, has written extensively on the representation of strikers and the labour movement in literature (for an excellent comparison of Dr. Mathus’ published writings on labour with her pronouncements on the strike as Vice-Provost, see Oliver Lue’s impressive analysis).

The suspension of personal and professional values in pursuit of profit maximization is a painful affront to those still at the beginning of their academic careers, especially since those in leadership positions are expected to maintain the integrity and social justice standards of their discipline (and the academy as a whole). This, almost more than other objectively difficult aspect of the strike, continues to be a source of confusion, indignation, anger, and distress for graduate students who had formerly respected and hoped to emulate the scholarship of both administrators, and of very well remunerated faculty within their own departments, some of whom are unsupportive of their students’ push to earn a living wage and yet built their own careers around studying the very inequalities their students are fighting.

Who is responsible for halting the advance of the corporate model in the university? Ultimately, it should not be incumbent upon the university’s most precarious and impoverished workers to do it alone––we need support. We need our mentors and teachers to stand on the picket lines alongside us and demand that the value of our work––the work that universities are absolutely dependent upon––be compensated fairly so that the future’s scholars, researchers, and teachers are able to pursue their work with dignity and security. We need our faculty members to use the security and academic freedom provided through their tenure to speak out against a university culture that refers to undergraduate students as “Basic Income Units” and views their educations as a means of profit generation that can be outsourced to the lowest bidding contracted labour. Finally, we need our administrators, those fortunate few whose leadership qualities have launched them into new spheres of power and influence, to use that power to influence a better future for our university system that doesn’t require the impoverishment and depredation of an entire generation of tomorrow’s scientists, researchers, philosophers, and teachers.

Let’s get to work.

*Sarah Williams is a PhD student in Medical Anthropology at the University of Toronto.  Her research focuses on the biomedicalization of childbirth in Mexico and the grassroots midwifery movement in Yucatan. Jennifer Gibson is a second year PhD student in social-cultural anthropology at the University of Toronto, and a proud member of CUPE 3902 Unit 1. Her research looks at Wet’suwet’en and Gitxsan opposition to oil and gas pipeline development in British Columbia, and in light of this strike experience she is newly intrigued by the parallels and contrasts in strategic opportunity and practice between the informal grassroots coalition organizing that happens in the field, and the formally organized labour movement in which she has recently received a quick and rather thrilling education. Twitter: @jagbsn

Most importantly, I think, it’s time for those who are doing relatively well, and in relatively stable positions, to think about the current labor situation in academia, and how that is affecting the system as a whole.  As Sarah Kendzior argues, this is everyone’s problem, not just those who are working those low-paying, contingent academic jobs.  If we’re going to do something about this issue, it’s going to require attention–and solidarity–across the academic ranks.  The tenured, the retired, comfortable, and the secure need to pay attention and speak up…right alongside these adjuncts and others who are putting themselves out there to raise awareness.  Now, onto some links and excerpts (from me and others).  Please feel free to share your links, comments, and thoughts below.

From Sarah Kendzior – The Adjunct Crisis is Everyone’s Problem:

Labor exploitation is not the new normal. Adjunct professors are distinct from other low-wage contract workers only by virtue of degree – that is, the Ph.D. Like other exploited workers, adjuncts are told that their low pay and mistreatment are the deserved consequence of poor choices. While low-wage workers without college degrees are told to get an education, adjuncts are asked what they thought all that education would get them. The plight of the adjunct shows one can have all the education in the world and still have no place in it.

Ann Larson – What Comes After the Public University?

A diploma is no longer a path to upward mobility. Maybe it never was. And it’s easy to forget in an era of austerity that education is supposed to be much more than a path to a paycheck. Unfortunately, these days, most colleges operate on vast supplies of cheap labor, including adjunct faculty. They are run as private corporations for the benefit of the investor class. In California, which is leading the trend, universities already pay $1 billion per year in interest alone to Wall Street banks. Could such places ever be reclaimed for the public?

Alex Golub – Obama was an adjunct:

In calling Obama an adjunct, I’m not trying to insult him (that would just be a roundabout way of saying adjuncts status is shameful, which it is not) or suggest that he is duplicitous (since the law school itself has a press release on this topic). What I am saying is that in an era of casualization of the academic workforce, we need to make the public aware of the details of academic hierarchy, and the political economy that accompanies it. So the next time someone dismissively calls Obama an uptight ‘law professor’ let them know that he, like so many others, was off the tenure track and teaching part time. And remind them that for most people in that position, it is not an easy one to be in.

Matt Thompson – Report on the AAA adjunct rights resolution:

It will likely come as no surprise to readers of Savage Minds that the number of adjunct and contingent faculty (a group that includes part-time or adjunct faculty, grad students and teaching assistants, postdoc appointments, and full-time non-tenure track faculty) teaching courses in U.S. colleges and universities has nearly doubled since 1975. The predominance of contingent and adjunct academic faculty has serious implications for the integrity of college teaching and for academic freedom, but for adjunct and contingent faculty members the most pressing issue is often the material difficulties of making only $2500 per course. Teaching a full load—at many colleges three courses per semester—an adjunct would earn a mere $15,000 a year. Sometimes it is far less.

Jason Antrosio, Eliza Jane Darling, Sarah Kendzior & Ryan Anderson – Dear AAA: Sink or Swim:

The resolution of these contradictions is served by neither silence nor sympathy, but solidarity. An academy structured upon the division of a two-tiered labor market discourages such an alliance. Yet we hope that anthropologists will join together to fight for the value of our work beyond the barometer of the bottom line. We must, for the same structural forces that divide tenured and contingent faculty threaten to subsume us all beneath a wave of public retrenchment, whose end game will inter us on the same sinking ship if we do not turn the tide. While the reserve army may constitute the foot soldiers in this battle for survival, the generals are hardly immune to the war on intellectual value.

Karen Kelsky – Adjuncting and the Stockholm Syndrome:

But when teaching well becomes an end in itself, and becomes the goal to which all else is sacrificed, including the adjunct’s economic self-protection and psychological self-care, then something is terribly, terribly wrong. That’s where the adjunct begins a willing participant in the mechanisms of his own exploitation. That is Stockholm Syndrome.

Adjuncts cannot necessarily just walk away from the exploitation of the system at large, when adjuncting may be the best option (at least in the immediate term) to utilize the Ph.D. for pay, keep the wolf from the door while seeking permanent work, and create a record that will help in that search. But adjuncts should never, ever identify with their exploiters. They should never cathect onto or identify with the teaching labor that is being extracted from them. Because that is to identify with, form an identity around, the exploitation itself.

Ryan Anderson – Academia and the people without jobs:

The “people without jobs” aren’t all simply jobless. They just don’t have the right jobs to be included in academia’s big self-promotional story. They are academia’s others. The ones who aren’t working as deans, provosts, and department chairs. They are the adjuncts, the lecturers, the people who work at Home Depot or spend their nights as waiters and waitresses. They ended up switching careers, starting all over, or worse. Their stories give us another view of academia. Another version of events. Their histories—contrary to the shiny pages of university websites—tell us what higher education isn’t doing. Their voices can tell us what went wrong, and what needs to change.

Ryan Anderson: So I just finished grad school, and I’m focusing on publishing some articles. I remember a while back you mentioned that you want to commit to publishing all Open Access (OA) articles, and I am right there with you. I think it’s important to push OA forward through our own work. Have you started looking into this?

Jeremy Trombley: OA is always in my mind, but I haven’t had the opportunity to publish too much yet so it hasn’t been a major issue. I have one co-authored with my advisor in a journal called Estuaries and Coasts, which has the option of publishing OA. But now I’m in the process of writing three(!) articles, and I’m thinking about where to publish them — if I ever get around to finishing them.

So that’s where I’m at, I guess. I think it’s a real challenge as a grad student trying to get publications so that I can get noticed so that I can maybe — if the stars align, and I pick the right lotto numbers, and my I Ching comes out well — get a job when I graduate. At the same time, I’m increasingly wondering if I should even bother with academia or focus on learning skills that might be useful in the “real world” — which I want to do anyway, but it’s hard to balance with all the writing, reading, etc. I have to do otherwise.

RA: I hear that. I spent so much time with anthropologies and Savage Minds during graduate school that I didn’t make much time for publishing in journals. I did have the chance to be the co-author with Jason Jackson on a piece about open access for Cultural Anthropology, which was a great learning experience. Looking back though, I’m actually glad I took the route I did, because being so active with blogging really shaped my thinking and engagement with anthropology. It was a vital part of what I learned and what anthropology came to mean for me. Being connected to all of the people on the Open Anthropology Cooperative and here at Savage Minds really shifted anthropology around for me. I wasn’t just talking to people in my seminars, I was also getting into conversations, debates, and arguments with people all around the world about everything from the role of anthropologists in war to this Open Access business. It was great, really. I think I was so hooked on the anthro blogosphere and all of this online activity because it connected me to these wider conversations and issues that I would never have experienced otherwise. It opened things up for me. Made me rehink a lot of what I was doing.

I did all of that despite all of the pressure to publish in journals and other official venues. For me, the timing wasn’t right to try to send something to a journal at that time, since I still needed to finish my research. The pressure to publish is insane, if you ask me. I’m all for publishing and I think it’s a vital part of what we do — but I think the overarching political economy of academia has seriously warped the publishing process. Sometimes I feel it’s all so overwhelming that we’re all scrambling trying to just get something accepted to satisfy the beast. This is especially the case for grad students and recent PhDs. We’re freaking out about publishing, because, you know, it’s impossible to get considered for jobs without publications. Everyone knows this. But, if you think about it, what’s the point of that in the long run? I’m not sure it bodes well when the primary motive is keeping up with market demands and competition. Somewhere in all of this the actual point of publishing — sharing ideas and knowledge — gets lost, if not outright abandoned.

And then there’s the job thing. The market is pretty grim, just like pretty much every article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed and Inside Higher Ed I read in grad school said it would be. It’s fun to get to this point and realize, hey, well, at least now I know Sarah Kendzior and Karen Kelsky weren’t kidding. I’m being sarcastic, but none of this is actually funny.

I’m not banking on a job in academia. Who knows what will happen? I’m trying, but I feel like I have to look beyond the academy as well. Cast a wide net and all that. Be creative, keep an open mind. That means I have to think carefully about where I focus my time and energy. I know what you mean about the difficulties of trying to balance writing with everything else. There’s the pressure of picking up skills and experience in the so-called real world, and then there’s all the time and energy that’s required to move through the ranks of academia. It’s a total catch-22 situation.

JT: It certainly seems as though the OA issue, and publishing generally is bound up with all of the issues we’ve talked about in the past so that you can’t really fix one without seriously considering and working on the others: the issue of jobs, funding, and debt; the issue of broader relevance outside of academia; even the issue of diversity since publishers and editors are, in a lot of ways, gatekeepers determining who gets published where, which is an essential part of who gets hired where. It’s not to say that OA solves all of those problems, but that addressing access will require addressing those problems and addressing those problems requires, in part, addressing the issue of access. That’s why the OA is important, but also why it’s so difficult.

After I said I would avoid publishing in non-OA journals, a number of issues have come to mind. First, there’s the issue of co-authoring. So much of what we do as graduate students is co-author with advisors — these are generally our first experiences with academic publishing — and we often don’t get a say in what journals we write for as co-authors. There is a degree of recalcitrance — justified, I think — on the part of some established faculty members with respect to OA. They are concerned about the quality of the publications, the notoriety or ranking of the publication, and other very practical concerns — particularly for early career academics. So much hinges, not just on getting published, but getting published in the right journals. It affects our job prospects, tenure, promotions, etc. This is another issue I’ve been thinking a lot about, and it seems that most of the OA journals out there now don’t have the status of the more traditional journals. I think that is changing with HAU and now Cultural Anthropology going OA, but the field is limited and the competition is intense.

Anyway, I don’t think OA will be the solution to all of this. But I think it is part of the process of figuring out a solution. I am also encouraged by many of the para-academic experiments I see around.

That’s a lot to process, and only scratches the surface, of course, but I’d like to hear what you think. I suppose an important question is this: If we agree that OA is an important part of fixing these broader academic problems, how do we promote it? How do we make it so that publishing in OA journals is a good, and viable option for established anthropologists who can afford to take the risk, but also for early career anthropologists, or minority anthropologists who need to work especially hard to be noticed?

RA: There’s the big question. In order to address the problems you mention — and I agree with you that this is about much more than just publishing — Open Access has to work. It has to draw excellent submissions, just as much as it has to pull in readers. I think Hau is doing things right. Hau works. Museum Anthropology Review is another excellent example. Cultural Anthropology is right in there. All of these are good models. But then, all of them also completely replicate traditional journals, and I often wonder if the solution — or, at least, another part of the solution — might be something very different, far more open. We really cling to this model in which we want to see articles posted under the banner of one particular journal or another with a big name, all sanctioned by peer review. Maybe we need something else entirely. I am also concerned about the connection between publishing, status, and getting jobs. In my view one of the goals of open access publishing is to break down some of the hierarchies that permeate academia.

But there’s another issue you brought up earlier — there actually aren’t that many choices when it comes to Open Access in anthropology. There are some, and Matt Thompson here at Savage Minds recently compiled a list. But I don’t think it’s enough to sustain a massive shift. There are a few good venues that I know about out there, but then the herd sort of thins out and it’s hard to tell which ones are running strong and which are, sorry for the extended analogy, infected with some sort of malady and destined for failure. In short, I think we need more places to take our work. But the other issue is that these venues also have to have the infrastructure in place to actually curate this work for the long haul. As Tim Elfenbein reminded me a while back, that’s no small issue. But then, I don’t think that should completely determine how we think about all of this.

In my case I was planning on sticking with all open access publishing, but I’m not sure if that’s actually viable. But maybe that’s just the issue — at what point do we all decide it’s time to really make this work? How will it ever be possible to make a dramatic change if all of us just keep milling around in the lobby waiting for someone else to start the show? Maybe now is the time. And this is where I think your question about “promotion” comes into it, and that may be a matter of finding, sharing, and building upon a core collection of discipline-specific OA venues so that more and more people not only publish OA, but also read it. Maybe part of the solution is changing what we think of as the “right” venue?

JT: I remember something Zizek said in response to Picketty’s Capital. He said that Picketty has it right, but that, if we were to reach a point where the people in power would accept the kind of equality-based measures that Picketty was proposing, then we would have already won. In other words, the structural changes that would be required for them to accept those kinds of policies are the real challenge. Now, you can agree with Zizek or not, but I think something similar may be true for academia and open access. The structural changes that would be required for really good open access to take hold would themselves manifest many of the changes we are seeking through open access. Again, that’s not to say that we shouldn’t pursue open access within the current academic system, but that we can’t expect the high quality open access that we want until some of those broader issues have been addressed. As a result, the push for open access means struggling against the neoliberalization of the University, struggling for employment in academia and beyond, struggling for diversity within the discipline, struggling for better relationships between Universities and the communities in which they are located, and so on.

In the meantime, I think we work on doing open access as best we can, and hope that it pushes those other issues a little further along — as you say, helping to break down the hierarchies that permeate academia. And in some ways I think the fight for open access means acting beyond or outside of academia, and this is why the para-academic projects interest me so much. You and I have both been engaged in academic blogging for a while now, and it has been a formative aspect of my academic career — allowing me to engage with anthropologists, philosophers, and a variety of others at varying stages in their career. Figuring out ways to integrate those activities more into our formal academic lives might be a good start. I am also fascinated by para-academic publishers like Punctum Books — Eileen Joy’s commitment and stamina organizing that as well as the Babel Working Group is inspiring, but not something everyone can do. And then there are models of para-academic — or maybe extra-academic — research. Organizations like the Public Laboratory or the Institute for Community Research are doing great work, and provide great models for others interested in non-traditional research practices.

It’s possible to critique all of these activities by pointing out that they still depend, to varying degrees and in different ways, on the traditional academic structure. But we can’t really know what the academy will look like in 10 years — it could be completely dead, and growing in place of its rotting shell, a number of for-profit colleges whose only interest is their bottom line. Or it could be that some of these para-academic experiments might begin to group together and take on a life of their own — a genuine alternative to the neoliberal University. We can’t know.

RA: It is hard to know where things are going with all of this. I have no idea. But I’d rather not just stand by and watch it all happen. As Phil Ochs once said:

I can’t add my name into the fight when I’m gone,

So I guess I’ll have to do it while I’m here

The time is now. That’s what that song is all about. I get inspired when I see people doing things differently when it comes to higher education — the folks at the Saxifrage school are doing some particularly good stuff. I like the whole idea of paring intellectual learning with the practical skills of actually making things. I also like the idea of taking underutilized spaces and turning them into alternative places for college-level learning. We need more of this kind of thinking. Along similar lines, I also find the folks at Deep Springs College very inspirational — I first heard about them on the CNN documentary Ivory Tower. Granted, Deep Springs is very, very small but I think it’s another example of thinking about college differently.

So the alternative thinking is out there. This brings me to the essay by Eileen Joy that you sent to me. That piece is just brimming with creativity and resistance to the corporatization of academia — and I love it. First, she talks about the idea of “biodiversity” in intellectual matter and media. This is a powerful point that people often gloss over in the rush to innovation and the digitalization of everything imaginable. Joy says we should not just ditch the past and push forward. Instead, we need to grab onto the old and the new in order to create the “most richly tapestried and noisy public commons we can.” We need printed books, we need articles, sure — but we also need all the various forms of illegitimate (or “bastard”) forms of communication she talks about as well. We don’t just need some trickle down knowledge economy in which the authorities (ie academics) preach to the commoners from the mountaintop. Joy advocates a “rowdy democracy,” and Open Access that means more than just allowing people to read the articles we write. For her, Open Access means that more people have the ability to use and take part in the system of publication and production itself.

Beyond all of that, I am especially drawn to Joy’s arguments about authority and prestige. Forget authority and prestige, she says. Stand up for bastard thought — for the kind of writing, communicating, and sharing that is about something more than market demand and competition. She’s openly defiant of the idea that the university should be seen as a business — and I agree with this. Hers is a call to reinvent the academy in direct opposition to the forces of “professionalization,” which reduce the intellectual project to little more than a way of measuring productivity through individual competition (in part via publications). Again, the university has to be something more than a business, she tells us. And publishing is part of that. Joy reminds us that the reason to publish, ultimately, is because we are “existentially obligated to others.” Publishing isn’t just another product. Or, it shouldn’t be. It’s about communicating, which means it’s also about building community.

US academia loves to pretend that community is still at the heart of its mission, but I have my doubts. It’s about exclusion as much as anything else, and the way the publishing system works is just one small part of it. So, getting back to something you said earlier, I think Zizek is right. The problems that Open Access is meant to address do exist at higher levels. It is a bigger fight — and that leaves us wondering what we can do in the here and now. This brings me back to our musings about publishing. We all know we need to publish to be even remotely considered for jobs. But how can we push back a bit? I think a more strident dedication to Open Access can be part of that. I am all for publishing and sharing ideas, but I think the terms in which we produce and disseminate our ideas need to be challenged.

JT: Yeah, I don’t mean to diminish our agency on the issue by calling attention to the broader issues. In fact, I think it extends our agency, while also, potentially, spreading it a little thinly (Where to start? How can anyone do it all?).

To start with, there are things that have to do directly with open access. You and I have both committed to publishing open access, if not exclusively then at every opportunity. I think that’s a great commitment, and I’d like to see more people take that chance — some can’t, some simply won’t. It would be great to get more later-career anthropologists to make that same commitment, but in addition to that, to weigh open access publication, and other forms of “outreach” more heavily in hiring and tenure considerations. Another possibility is focusing on citation practices. Lynne Bolles, for example, suggests citing women and anthropologists of color primarily as a political practice. The same could be done for open access, as long as it doesn’t detract from the politics of race and gender that she and others are working to promote. Then there’s the issue mentioned before of the lack of open access journals for publishing — if more people are going to start committing to open access publishing, these already underfunded and often struggling groups will become oversaturated. So we need to start more of them, and let the options proliferate — creating the biodiversity, as Joy points out. I personally would like to see more student-run and organized journals for students (like Imponderabilia) — that’s not just a call to students to get to work making those journals, but also a call to departments and faculty to support students in that process.

Those are some possibilities in the open access arena, but I think there’s a whole lot more we can do, too, that will not only make open access more… accessible…but also make the University a much better place in general. Things like fighting for better funding of Universities, revising hiring and tenure standards to embrace outreach, engagement, and alternative forms of publishing, and, generally, building community as you point out. I see this as a collective effort, and we all need to support one another and put in our share of the work if it’s going to amount to anything. It’s easy to fall into cynicism, particularly as a graduate student with steadily increasing debt and uncertainty about what comes after, but there is a lot being done, and change won’t happen instantly. I am guardedly optimistic that change will happen, though, and that we’ll have a better University because of it.

There was a lot of data to sift through. In this post I’ll discuss the first survey, which had 285 total responses. We’ll start with the highest level of education attained. Thirty-four percent have completed their MA. Thirty-three have completed their PhD, fourteen percent have completed an undergraduate degree, nine percent have completed “some grad school,” six percent have completed between one and three years of college, and another six percent chose “other.”

Fifty-six percent of respondents said they are not currently enrolled in college or grad school. Forty-six percent are enrolled. Two percent chose “other” when asked if they are currently enrolled.

In terms of current employment status, forty-five percent have a full-time job, twenty-two percent have a part-time job, nineteen percent are unemployed, and fourteen percent chose “other.”

The majority of responses came from socio-cultural anthropologists (59%), followed by archaeologists (18%), biological anthropologists (13%), and linguistic anthropologists (3%). Eight percent chose “other” when asked about their disciplinary niche within anthropology.

Now we get to the subject of debt. When asked about current student loan debt, thirty-three percent of people said they have ZERO DEBT. Nineteen percent reported debt between $11,000 and $30,000, fourteen percent reported debt between $31,000 and $50,000, twelve percent have debt between $51,000 and $70,000, nine percent have debt between $1 and $10,000, five percent have between $91,000 and $120,000, another five percent have more than $120,000 in debt. A final three percent of people have student loan debt between $71,000 and $90,000. One issue with these numbers is that I asked about current student loan debt—the problem here is that some people who may have had debt in the past could have paid it down (in full or in part). A few respondents did note this issue in some of their comments.

When asked about the types of loans they have, the overwhelming majority reported taking out government loans (180 people or 58% percent). Another sixteen percent took out private loans, five percent took out personal loans, and a final one percent chose “other.” Twenty-one percent of people chose “not applicable” for this question.

Next I asked about credit card debt: “How much credit card debt did you accrue while pursuing your education?” More than half ( 55%) said they did not accrue any credit card debt at all. Sixteen percent reported credit card debt between $1,100 and $5,000, twelve percent were between $5,100 and $10,000, nine percent were under $1,000, and five percent are between $11,000 and $20,000. A total of three percent reported credit card debt of $21,000 and up.

This brings us to the more qualitative responses. Next we’ll look at 15 sample responses of people with student loan debt (approximately a 5% sample). I used a random number generator to choose representatives from the pool of 285 responses. I only included answers from people who submitted responses to every question. For each of these examples we’ll look at 1) education; 2) whether or not they are currently enrolled; 3) reasons why they went into anthropology; 4) student loan debt; 5) credit card debt; 6) thoughts about future career in anthropology; and, lastly 7) Any final thoughts or concerns. Here we go.

Response #216

Has completed PhD. Not currently in college/grad school. Unemployed. Last attended school 2007-2013. Focus: archaeology. Went into anthropology because they had a “passion for the field.” Their student loan debt is between 31 to 50k. No credit card debt.

Feelings about future career in anthropology: “Uncertain but still hopeful.”

Final thoughts: “I probably could have done without so many loans, but it certainly made things easier and sped-up completing the degree within the allotted (funded) time provided by the university.”

#84

Completed MA. Not enrolled. Full-time job. Last attended 2005. Socio-cultural anthro. Why anthropology: “loved anthro.” Has between 51 to 70k in student loans. No credit card debt.

Thoughts about future career: “While the experience I gained in grad school was critical to getting my full time job in so many direct & indirect ways, that job is unrelated to anthro. I do teach anthro courses at a community college.”

Final thoughts: “Anthro as a degree choice, much less a career, is a tough sell post-recession. The field needs to work much harder to sell its practical benefits, which are many.”

#133

Completed undergrad degree. Not enrolled. Unemployed. Last attended university from 2010-2013. Focused in biological anthropology, socio-cultural, and medical. Why anthropology: “I started out want[ing] to study archaeology, go to law school, and work for UNESCO. A biological anthropology class changed everything, I wound up falling in love with genetics, falling out of love with genetics, and falling into medical anthropology. Now I’m awaiting admissions decisions from 8 PhD programs in sociocultural/medical anthropology.” Has between 31 to 50k in student loans. No credit card debt.

Future career: “Slightly optimistic. I’m young, I’m told that I was pretty successful for an undergraduate, I’ve been scouted by top notch anthropology graduate programs, I have a lot of options and a lot of open doors. In the end though, I don’t know. My career in anthropology can be what I want it to be, I’ve learned. It’s my future career in academia that I’m worried about.”

Final thoughts: “Before I went to school, I was an executive chef, and well on my way to making a name for myself. (I quit because I never wanted to cook, I had always wanted to be an anthropologist, and that time came when I qualified for the loans.) As an executive chef, I made about $40,000 a year. I’m concerned that once I get to where I want to be (while I will have a job that I love infinitely more than cooking), I may not make much more money than when I left cooking. I don’t know if that’s as much an issue with anthropology, as it is with academia though.”

#229

Completed PhD. Not enrolled. Full-time job. Last attended 2009. Focus in Socio-cultural anthropology. Why anthropology: “Continue research, teach anthropology.” 31 to 50k in student loan debt. Between 5100 and 10k in credit card debt.

Future career: “In TT job, fearing tenure review, but otherwise stable.”

Final thoughts: “Took out a state government-sponsored loan (non-federal) to pay for four years of undergrad tuition. Loans were deferred over grad school, but they would not change term/duration of loan payback period, squeezing 15 year loan payback period into 5 years: now paying $1,500/month for past 3.5 years, for federal/state loans combined. Went from close to 100k to 40k. More than a third of my monthly salary goes to loan agencies. Pros: Will be done payments in 3 years; Cons: Still living like grad student. I don’t regret my undergrad school choice, but didn’t anticipate going straight into grad school, and having to pay so much over such a short period once finished. Very dodgy loan. High interest rates. Family and I did not know any better… Little college savings. Wish I had that too.”

#3

Completed PhD. Not enrolled. Full time job. Last attended 1988-92. Socio-cultural anthro. Reason: “I loved the field of anthropology, and could not imagine doing anything else. I had the goal of getting a PHD from high school.” 11 to 30k in loans. Under 1000 in credit card debt.

Future career: “Now that i have a full-time (non-TT) job, I feel quite good about it. But immediately after I completed my PHD I had no idea if I would actually ever get a full-time job, and the fact is that part of why I have the job is because I followed my spouse to his TT job, and was then in the right place at the right time when this job came up at our university. I filed my dissertation in 1992, and was not in a full time job doing anthropology until 2009.”

Final thoughts: “It seems to be a problem that is of a piece with student debt generally, not specific to anthropology.”

#4

Completed MA. Currently enrolled. Socio-cultural anthropology. Reason for going into anthropology: “To become an academic.” Between 31 to 50k in student loan debt. No credit card debt.

Thoughts about future career in anthropology: “Pretty good, but only because I can market myself to both STS and environmental studies jobs, which seem to be doing better than anthro.”

Final thoughts: “It is terrifying, and a disaster. None of my advisors have a clue how much debt I have.”

#7

Completed PhD. Not enrolled. Full time job. Last attended college between 2004-2014. Focus in socio-cultural anthro. Why anthropology: “I was interested in learning anthropological concepts and methods to do practical applied work. While I have ended up working in academia so far I thought my degree would help me have better and more expanded career prospects.” Has between 31 to 50k in student loan debt. Has between 5100 to 10k in credit card debt.

Thoughts about future career: “I feel a great deal of trepidation. I never set out to have an academic career but lost sight of that during my training. Now I am trying to find a way of the academic world but feel there are few guidelines or bridges to do so.”

Final thoughts: “I am the first person in my family to graduate from college as well as acquire higher education. As such everything I have learned about the system I have had to learn on my own. I am appalled at the very little guidance available on issues of financial management and debt. I feel that my debt mostly was accrued as a result of how long my degree took me. A shorter time-to-degree and making the process faster, more structured and stream-lined with warnings about hidden costs of graduate school would be tremendously useful.”

#42

Completed undergrad. Not enrolled. Unemployed. Last in school December 2013. Focus in socio-cultural anthropology. Why anthropology: “My last class for a 2 year degree was Anthropology, and I felt I’d found a career that was just being me. I went to university 6 years after that class for the sole purpose of being an applied anthropologist.” Has between 11 to 30k in student loan debt. No credit card debt.

Thoughts about future career in anthropology: “I am very excited to see how the field opens up and moves away from academia. I look forward to being a part of the movement and putting my debt to good work. The hope is that at least somebody will benefit… ‘cause I know I won’t be making my money back anytime soon.”

Final thoughts: “I am devastated that I feel I am being forced into greater debt in the form of a Master’s degree. I think that the field of anthropology should be more accepting of people with work experience or self-education who want to be identified as anthropologists. Thinking like an anthropologist is not just about the training one gets in school, and we all know that sometimes people get advanced degrees in the field who can’t seem to think like an anthropologist anyway.”

#273

Completed MPH. Not enrolled. Last attended college from 2005 to 2012. Focus: Biological anthropology. Reason for going into anthropology: “I was at the end of my freshman year deciding classes for fall and I found an anthropology course I thought would be fun. Half way through the semester I switched majors from psychology to anthropology. I graduated with a BA in anthropology. Then I studied public health focusing on community health education. I plan to go back after my AmeriCorps term is complete to work towards a PhD in applied medical anthropology. I already applied and am waiting. Hopefully, I will attend this fall.” Debt: 51,000 to 70k in student loans. Between 1100 to 5000 in credit card debt.

Thoughts about future career: “With a BA in anthropology, I feel I have little options. Not many people know what an anthropologist is and the few who know, ask me about Bones and Indiana Jones. With a PhD I will be able to conduct research and work for a government agency or teach at university level. a PhD combined with my MPH will open more doors for me.”

Final thoughts: “I am worried the years it takes to complete PhD will push my debt well into the six digits. It’s scary to think I can buy a decent house for the cost of my education. The interest rates are also scary. The lingering thought of employment prospects and a low salary is also concerning. Obviously I am not doing this for the money.”

#44

Completed PhD. Not enrolled. Has a full-time job. Last attended college from 2004–2013. Focus in socio-cultural anthropology. Reason for anthro: “I had spent several years in a well-paying but soul-sucking private industry job. I had done a BA in archaeology and decided I wanted to learn more about culture and representation, so I went back and did a second BA in cultural anthropology. After traveling in the Middle East and Asia, I started a terminal MA program in visual anthropology and went on to complete a PhD in cultural anthropology with a focus on the Middle East and economic development.” Has between 91 to 120k in student loan debt. Between 5100 to 10k in credit card debt.

Future career: “I am lucky because I was able to secure a VAP position while finishing my dissertation and then a TT position immediately after finishing. I am at a small state (teaching) school in an ideal location (in the south, minutes from the beach) and the cost of living is not too high. But the pay is not great ($50,000….I feel terrible complaining about this, though!). But childcare, credit cards repayment, and student loan take a big chunk out of that and my husband is still making very little. I have taken a second job (part time program creation that I can primarily do from home) which helps quite a bit. On paper, it looks like we are doing well but it is still very tight and I am putting in about 60 hrs a week and my husband works about 50–60 hrs/wk. This leaves very little time for writing/publishing and continuing my research can only be done during the summer. It leaves very little time to actually spend with my child or husband. OK, now I sound super whiny! I know I am a lucky one.”

Final thoughts: “There needs to be more of a focus on practical applications in graduate school. For example, in a methods class there should be time spent on M&E. This might increase chances of being able to secure contract work as a way to bolster one’s income. Departments also need to keep an eye on the increasing tuition costs and ensure funding covers this. It would also help to have committee chairs doing everything they can to get their students done and out of the program as early as possible.”

#27

Completed MA. Currently enrolled in PhD program. Full-time job. Socio-cultural anthropology. No reason for going into anthro. Has between 11 to 30k in student loan debt. Between 5100 and 10k in credit card debt.

Future career: “I actively pursued a non-academic career as soon as it became clear just how dire the job market is. Thankfully I’m well-positioned to pursue a career in applied research and should be able to pay off my debt relatively quickly. Currently, my salary exceeds that which is offered to just about any assistant professor.”

Final thoughts: “I hate to waste energy writing about it. We all know what the problems are. The onus is on faculty to reduce the number of admitted PhD students and to get off their asses and learn how to advise students how to pursue non-academic careers. We are also all well aware of the structural problems that will keep them from doing these things.”

#110

Completed MA. Currently enrolled. Unemployed. Socio-cultural anthropology. Why anthropology: “Entirely by accident, if I’m being truly honest. I started my MA in architectural theory (my former profession), and as part of that course read Hugh-Jones and Carsten’s ‘About the house’ which led to wider reading in anthropological theory. This was enough to make me transfer the following year.” Student loan debt: between 11 to 30k. No credit card debt.

Future career: “I feel it is unlikely that my PhD will lead to a career, in the sense of a post-doc/lectureship. It seems unlikely in the context of my home country (UK), and perhaps even more so in the US or Europe.”

Final thoughts: “As with all social sciences/humanities, it seems silly, on a practical level, to pursue even undergrad study without funding these days. It’s a shame that education is now subject to the logic of the market, especially with the social sciences as they’re the few subjects able to seriously challenge the notion of education having more than instrumental value.”

#219

Sixth year PhD. Currently enrolled. Part-time job. Focus in socio-cultural anthropology. Why anthropology: “passion for anthropology and for teaching undergrads.” Has between 91 to 120k in student loan debt. Between 11–20k in credit card debt.

Future career: “hopeful to stay in academia, hopeful that I will be able to finish my PhD.”

Final thoughts: “anthropology as a discipline needs to carve out its significance rather than remain an ‘outsider’ to more prestigious disciplines, this way, more government funds can be made available for anthropology grads. Also, more funds should be made available for anthropologists who study in North America.”

#29

Completed MA. In grad school. Unemployed. Focus in archaeology. Why anthropology: “Tried corporate stuff, hated it.” Has between 71 to 90k in student loan debt. Between 5100–10k credit card debt.

Future career: “I am optimistic, and have a few opportunities developing. I am confident that I will pay off my debt before I die.”

Final thoughts: “I don’t regret taking out the loans or entering this field. I absolutely love what I do, love teaching anthropology, and I have been able to travel and do research all over the world.”

#62

Completed PhD. Not enrolled. Full-time two year position. Last attended college in 2011. Focus in archaeology. Why anthropology: “I loved anthropology and couldn’t see myself doing anything else.” Has between 31 to 50 k in student loan debt. Between 5100 and 10k in credit card debt.

Future career: “Not particularly optimistic. I was always at the top of my field with full funding but my options are limited because we can’t afford to keep moving around while we wait for a tt position to come through. Taking my current position has seriously crippled us financially. Dual career couple makes it worse. Even if the best case scenario happens and both my husband and I get tt jobs, I don’t know that we’ll ever be ok. We’ll have to pay about $2000 a month for paying back debt alone.”

Final thoughts: “Academia is extremely elitist and anti-family. All of the people I know who made it either were either single or had financial support from families or spouses who could support them. Paying for childcare is impossible. As a consequence, I could not be as productive as my childless colleagues. These 1 year positions are ridiculously exploitative—they get cheap labor and put us further into debt just to be jobless again in a year or two. Create tt positions or hire someone locally, the current system is a joke.”

*Compare this post with some of the responses from those who were debt free, here.