Spotlight: Graduate Student Organization

Abstract

Spotlight:Graduate Student Organization Joseph Roskos (bio), Yulia Gilich (bio), David Kocik (bio), Hamidreza Nassiri (bio), and Vuk Vuković (bio) Graduate students sometimes enter academia as starry-eyed scholars, sometimes as skeptics, and sometimes as agents of change, focused on our dreams of a better academy and by extension a better world. Graduate students are indispensable in academia, but since the founding of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies' Graduate Student Organization in 1988, our academic experiences have significantly deteriorated. We are overwhelmingly overworked and underpaid; many of us lack adequate support and mentorship; and gender minorities and people of color are frequent targets of abuse by students, faculty, and staff. Graduate workers around the globe are addressing these issues by organizing protests, going on strike, and fighting to unionize. We advocate for equitable labor practices; highlight intersectional labor concerns; and urge recognition of the valuable intellectual, pedagogical, and organizational labor graduate students perform. As cost of living increases continue to outpace graduate students' funding packages and underemployment in academia worsens, access to graduate-level studies and programs will increasingly become viable only for financially privileged people. University administrators and senior faculty often claim that they know what it is like to be a graduate student. Yet they have failed to ensure that graduate students' stipends and salaries keep up with inflation. Today, financial security for graduate students is wishful thinking. Universities claim that graduate students are in training and they [End Page 4] cannot pay them reasonable salaries. That rationale is spurious. First, such rhetoric encourages graduate students to "power through" years of financial precarity on the premise that, after training is complete, a well-compensated future awaits them. However, becoming a tenured faculty member is increasingly unlikely. As our Northwestern peer Eli Lichtenstein wrote in April 2020, "No, I am not getting a (tenure-track) job. None of us are."1 Second, graduate students who venture into the academic job market are expected to be developing second book projects on top of an already established record of independent teaching, publishing, and presenting research at conferences, which makes us the colleagues of our tenured mentors. Third, adjunct faculty are not trainees; they are accomplished, yet unfairly compensated, scholars and teachers. Like other minoritized students, for international students, graduate school presents additional systemic challenges. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the position of international students within higher education significantly worsened. They are affected by border closures and limited work opportunities and are ineligible for fellowships and government support reserved for US citizens. Many international students cannot access inter-institutional grants due to their visa status, which leaves them behind their peers. Recruiting diverse graduate cohorts—including international students—is insufficient: our institutions must provide adequate support to the students and workers they recruit. Moreover, studies show that American students tend to hold biases against international instructors. While usually considered very knowledgeable, those instructors are rated lower on their teaching abilities due to cultural and communication differences.2 International students' funding often is tied to teaching assistantships, which disadvantages them compared to their US peers and furthers their outgroup status.3 Departments must support their international educators; understand the extra effort they make to earn the trust of their students; and realize biases can worsen based on the instructor's race, ethnicity, or gender.4 We call for a concerted effort to replace such practices and environments with a more just system suited to protect the integrity and quality of education. Departments should understand that such studies point to larger problems [End Page 5] in academia that first include the further marginalization of minoritized academics in an already "hostile" and "contested" environment.5 The application of corporate strategies in higher education, including evaluations, only makes these problems worse, as does a superficial focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion workshops. Representation passes as an easy answer to diversity concerns, rather than making systemic changes challenging the structures that protect gatekeeping and coercion in academia.6 We know that tenured and tenure-track faculty are also overworked by universities, with queer, trans, female, Black, Indigenous, and other faculty of color shouldering a disproportionately large share of service and advising. We see how little...