As with the corporate world with which I’ve have had some experience, expectations set out in one’s employment contract are often more of a rough guide and do not necessarily reflect the reality of the working conditions you will be working under….or even the job description you were originally hired for. Interestingly enough, however, nearly every grad student/academic I’ve known who have had prior corporate experience has actually said corporate employment contracts tended to be far more transparent and open than requirements for completing a Phd….or worse…evaluating one’s eligibility for tenure.

But your story about fighting to have an F changed to an A-, apocryphal though it may be, exemplifies that very entitlement, doesn’t it?

The big difference between those overentitled upper/upper-middle class students and parents browbeating my TA/academic friends and the case with my working class POC friend was that he actually had substantial evidence judging by that calc Prof’s own syllabus along with his saved problem sets and tests which indicated -A level performance along with testimony from him and corroborated by other classmates that the Prof had a substantial prejudice against engineering majors. It was such a blatant display of instructor animus playing an undue influence on the final grade that even the Dean of the Arts & Science division, the one that calc prof belonged to felt the need to strongly cooperate with the Engineering Division dean to fight on his behalf. Not a mean feat when those two divisions had long been at institutional odds with each other.

On the other hand, those upper/upper-middle class students and parents I was referring to felt they can do it without having to show any actual evidence of numerical miscalculation, mismarked exam/essay, or instructor animus from corroborating witnesses. Instead, yelling at the TA/Profs and throwing their socio-economic weight around was the the immediate standard and only response. Saddest part was that those students and parents were not totally delusional about the power of their socio-economic privilege as the higher-ed admins often ruled in favor of the undergrad just to keep the peace and to ensure a future happy alum who will donate lots to the institution.

I cannot believe you can see my friend’s case as one of entitlement when I made it clear that he fulfilled the Prof’s syllabus’ requirements by doing well on the problem sets, quizzes, and exams which all indicated -A level performance. When the Prof overlooked the class grading policy set down in his own syllabus to fail my friend because he had an issue with Engineering majors, he not only violated a contract he wrote himself, but also neglected his academic duty to grade according to that syllabus without allowing any non-academic prejudices to influence that. My working-class friend has done far more to argue his case seriously and convincingly to the deans and many officials overseeing the grading dispute than those overentitled students my TA/academic friends have had to deal with….especially in the years after I graduated from college.

Basic question of my friend’s case is: should we have a Prof. who is so capricious to the point his/her own written contracts can be arbitrarily nullified that his/her trustworthiness and integrity as a Prof is called into serious question??

If you cannot differentiate between a well-substantiated grade dispute case from a student with no socio-economic privilege and a grade dispute borne of upper/upper-middle class entitlement where often the only evidence needed is a temper-tantrum throwing student(s) and/or his/her own parents throwing their socio-economically privileged status around, then there is little more I can say…especially to someone who is educated at a Phd-level and about to embark on a post-doc assignment.

I didn’t forget about liberal arts colleges–I stipulated that I was addressing Research I institutions, and that I thought Girl Detective was too, implicitly. Regardless of what an institution’s “stated mission” is, employment contracts and faculty handbooks set out tenure requirements, which will vary from school to school. Even at liberal arts institutions, tenure decisions are not made on the basis of teaching evaluations alone. For many faculty (though of course not all), teaching, research, and advising are interlaced. Though we may devote more time and energy to one area at certain times, they all energize and reinforce each other.

With respect to your point about entitlement: I absolutely agree that the entitlement bred by a fee-for-service model is noxious. That’s why I think it’s important to acknowledge and educate the public about the many and varied forms of labor that go into the university system that are not covered by hourly wages. But your story about fighting to have an F changed to an A-, apocryphal though it may be, exemplifies that very entitlement, doesn’t it?

That kind of thinking contributes to the perception of academics as lazy, comfortable, heads-in-the-clouds. When you were completing a creative writing thesis, you were being paid to both write and teach, but, crucially, not on a fee-for-service model.

And right here we have an example of someone who most likely has little to no exposure to academia beyond being an undergrad/pre-professional grad student like most of the people outside of academia. Sounds exactly like something the anti-intellectual MBA types in my extended family with no interest in higher-ed beyond what credential will help them earn their next astronomical paycheck upon graduation would say.

Please be advised that the Prof’s/TA’s time is not spent solely in the few hours of classes or office hours held each week. Much time is also spent in creating/revising course syllabi, prep-time for lectures/discussions, counseling academically or otherwise troubled undergrads, prepping TAs if applicable, and grading the mountains of problem sets, essays, tests, and exams….especially in a large survey course of 100+ students per class unless you want them to grade them in such a slapdash manner that the feedback to the students is rendered meaningless.

Most tenure-track assistant Profs I know are required to teach at least three of these classes and oftentimes more which leaves little time for research even if they spend the rest of their waking hours and weekends working on their research. It is one reason why even tenured full Professors require summers off/year-long sabbaticals to conduct research….especially if it involves traveling abroad to conduct the necessary research.

You have also forgot to account for highly reputed Liberal Arts colleges such as Swarthmore, Middlebury, and Oberlin where research is emphasized almost as much as teaching which makes them, in some ways, the worst of both worlds as they expect excellent teaching with heavier courseloads than research universities while the research requirements may be much less than your research U with more access issues to research libraries and other resources than their research university counterparts. I know of several excellent tenure track assistant Profs. in various fields who were denied tenure at these types of institutions despite excellent teaching evaluations because their research quantity was deemed inadequate by the tenure committee. This at a Liberal Arts college where the stated mission of the Profs was supposed to be centered on excellent teaching!!!

Furthermore, my main problem with the commodification of education is the fact it seems to breed a ridiculous sense of entitlement in many upper/upper-middle class students and their parents where paying tuition automatically entitles them to a degree with an unblemished transcript while forgetting that the tuition only entitles the student concerned an opportunity to learn and achieve his/her greatest potential PROVIDED S(HE)’S WILLING TO PUT IN THE TIME AND EFFORT REQUIRED. If the student concerns goofs off and gets a poor/failing grade as a result, student/parent should first ask and carefully evaluate what did s(he)/his/her child do to end up with such a result….not immediately go off tearing into the Prof/TA for giving the poor/failing grade as too many tend to do to my TA/academic friends these days!! :roll:

The opposition set up in your first post between knowledge and action is, of course, a false one, since the two aren’t mutually exclusive. Having experienced both sides of the coin and found one or the other frustrating doesn’t give one the right to be dismissive of those who continue to labor for good and for change in either realm, as some of the commenters regrettably did. Research produces new knowledge across the disciplines–we can and should have lots of arguments about what constitutes knowledge and how to shift epistemological and compensation models so that they’re more equitable. And absolutely, academic salaries must be brought more into line with those of other professionals.

But some historical context is necessary when considering the university as a corporation. Bemoaning the corporatization of the university actually contributes to those troubling salary disparities. As long as faculty are perceived not as professionals but as navel-gazers lost in the reveries of their own little narrow niche interests, salaries commensurate with other professional occupations are hard to argue for. The university has been, from the first, a corporation. Legally, Harvard College was the very first corporation, incorporated back in the 17th century. Have you checked the size of its endowment lately? It was, is, and always will be a business, albeit one invested in collective inquiry. Lamenting the intersection of the university and the marketplace only reinforces the second-classing of university personnel. The university has some important differences from the marketplace, but it is not, nor should it be, a rarefied sanctuary exempt from political economy. To say this is not to argue for the instrumentalization of knowledge, especially not in a knowledge economy, but for a deeper public understanding of theory and praxis converge.

Grad students at this university make $18,000 a year after their fourth step increase. How in the world was this couple going to come up with the money to cover an infant’s health costs?*

I see a lot of discussions of how underpaid grad students are for the work they’re expected to do; one thing I’m surprised not to see discussed more often is the summer funding gap. At all institutions known to me, even the most elite, students only receive summer funding for the first two years at most; after that, they’re on their own for three months out of every year (the famed “summer off”). I can’t imagine what it’s like being a parent and having a 3-month wage hiatus; I don’t have a good sense, though, of what the average grad student does over the unpaid summer. There are teaching opportunities, I know, but can everyone find teaching work over the summer? Is it common for students to wait tables or make lattes, or find some miscellaneous low-wage work around the university? People I know have chosen among those three options (plus applying for summer research stipends or year-round fellowships), but I actually couldn’t tell you what the vast majority of grad students do. I do know that “summer jobs” as such are not easy to find if you’re not keen on being a camp counselor— i.e., summer jobs for adults are not easy to find.

My own answer, fwiw: during my first summer I had a nice, flexible year-round job; during my second summer I had to scrape together a short-term gig through personal connections, and it barely covered my expenses; I’m now on my first of two fully-funded summers as a Ph.D. student, so things are good for the moment, but I’m sort of dreading summers 3 through n…