I’m continuing to mull over the reaction of academics across social media to the circulation of a job advertisement for a position in the Chemistry Department at UCLA where the ad included the sentence, “Applicants must understand there will be no compensation for this position”.
That’s what drew a lot of angry attention to the ad, and I was one of the angry people. But there were also faculty who suggested that the outrage was misplaced or was just another “easy” social media pile-on that exempted the respondents from doing the hard work of securing better working conditions on their own campuses.
UCLA has withdrawn the ad and has now indicated that they will have a policy of paying all working faculty, so there is that outcome to consider. But what we still don’t really know is exactly what prompted the ad in the first place. That to me is the first interesting lesson of the whole mini-controversy. It was a good demonstration of the ability of academics to guess with great confidence at the depths lying below institutional texts and communications, and also a good demonstration about how contradictory those guesses can be when they’re assembled alongside each other.
My own outrage at the ad was not attached to my guesses, shrewd or otherwise, about its hidden meanings. All I could say for sure is, “Here is an ad asking a highly-qualified job seeker to work without compensation”. I object to that and not just on behalf of whomever might apply at UCLA. Fighting for better working conditions at your own institution requires paying attention to other institutions and to the entire higher education sector. If we ignore, sanction or accept unacceptable standards and practices elsewhere, we are only marking time before they show up in our own institutional backyards. That’s not a hypothetical or a slippery-slope conjecture: it’s happened time and time again, where a policy or strategy or change in one institution that shifts power to leaders and governing boards quickly disseminates to other institutions whose leaders see themselves as needing the same shift, which then in turn normalizes that for the entire sector.
This is not limited to higher education, either. Internships became unpaid exploitation common to many competitive professions and workplaces because nobody called attention to the first employers who made them unpaid. Many buyers of expertly-created art or content in digital environments got used to asking to have work for free on the grounds that it would offer “exposure” and for a while, people bought into that, which established that approach as a market standard. You cannot secure better working conditions one workplace at a time, in isolation.
But what did lie below the surface of the ad? Most academic readers felt that surely UCLA wasn’t really fishing for a qualified Ph.D-holding chemist to work completely for free just to be able to claim the credential of having worked for UCLA. I don’t think that’s entirely implausible: at least some contingent contracts in other institutions have come close to that, and more than a few universities have come to rely on the very low costs of graduate student labor.
The two styles of reading that I saw on social media in the initial response to the ad might be called “the hermeneutics of suspicion” and “the hermeneutics of benediction”. The former style is more familiar in academia, and flourishes where mistrust between faculty and administration is more pronounced (which is increasingly the case across most of higher education). In suspicious readings, when a communication or document invites further interpretation, it is assumed to conceal or harbor some malign or sinister purpose. In this case, suspicious readers saw a possible attempt to do an end run around UCLA’s existing union for adjunct lecturers, UC-AFT, or an attempt to shut down a competitive search in favor of an already-selected inside candidate.
“Benediction” readings, which were echoed in official statements from UCLA after the controversy began, argued that many institutions want to hire a candidate that they already know who has their compensation already funded by some outside source (a grant, a sponsor, etc.) but are forced to comply with policies that require all positions to be advertised for a national search. E.g., nothing to see here, this is all very normal, and nobody’s going to be working for free. Other generous readings suggested that maybe UCLA was hiring a Ukrainian refugee scholar who was being supported by an NGO, or that maybe they were hiring a retired industrial chemist who didn’t ask for or require a salary but who wanted to teach students about the wider professional world of chemistry as a volunteer service.
A few UCLA-affiliated faculty (but not from the department in question) went on social media to affirm that the generous readings were more or less correct, though without specifics. But for the most part the conversation across academic social media proceeded without any direct evidence about what was going on. One of the perverse side effects of the dramatic expansion of compliance requirements in higher education is not just more administrators but also less and less transparency about the relationship between outward signs of compliance and the reality of work and deliberation within institutions.
What I want to suggest is that while I appreciate the generous readings, and think the basic thrust of their interpretation is likely correct, none of them are valid justifications for that advertisement or for any practices elsewhere that might resemble what that advertisement suggested. Any of the generous scenarios are a problem and none of them are acceptable practices.
To wit:
Let us take the “financially secure volunteer who wants to provide life insights to young people, in a sort of pay-it-forward way”. That’s a laudable intention, right? And it’s a once-in-a-while serendipity, so there’s no structural concern here. What kind of left-wing Scrooge could be against that?
In my twenties, before starting graduate school, I worked as a chef in a small restaurant/gourmet food store that served breakfast and lunch and did some catering as well. I was kind of the odd-jobs guy: I baked bread on the weekends, I did some food prep for the head chef, I did some dishes on my own, I made trays of frozen appetizers for the catering jobs, I sold cheese and deli products in the later afternoon, I cleaned the cheese case, etc. I liked my boss and I liked the job, so sometimes I worked past my agreed hours without clocking my time. One day, I poked my head into his office and said I was gonna slip out fifteen minutes early, and he said “sure, just be sure you clock that accurately”. I got mad and said “hey, I give you time for free a lot”. He patiently but sternly said, “Don’t do that. Ever. You’re supposed to get paid for the time you’re working. I’m not a charity, you don’t owe me free work.” I got the point.
When people give free labor to an institution that can pay for it and that labor is highly valuable in terms of the skills and expertise of the person doing the work and is highly valuable in terms of what the organization is providing to customers or clients, they’re driving the price of labor down for everyone, whether they mean to do that or not. If that volunteer really is unique, really is purely serendipitous, providing a one-time opportunity for just one group of students, then there’s something unfair about that too in the sense that other students who paid the same tuition and invested the same effort won’t have that opportunity. The institution should want to offer that opportunity regularly—but if they can’t or won’t budget for it operationally, they’ll never get there. Or even worse, they will come to expect that it is given to them as a gift. In a more pervasive sense, that is precisely how faculty workloads (and workloads in many other professions) have increased over time without additional compensation for additional work. Email arrives and suddenly we can communicate much more and do it more rapidly and that changes the pace and volume of work we all have to do, and so on. What seems voluntary and individual at first becomes required and normalized later on.
There’s a place for volunteering in crisis or emergencies, in the way communities band together, or for organizations with crucial humanitarian responsibilities that have very limited budgets. It’s fine in higher education for alumni to appear on a panel or to share their time with current students. But when the labor in question is the normalized labor of teaching, offering courses, serving as academic advisors, and so on, it should be paid for.So how about the “what if it’s a Ukrainian scholar paid for by an NGO?” If that generous reading turned out to be true, I would be 100% behind the intention of that gesture. But this is precisely the kind of thing that we as a country and that our institutions should be consistent about. If we believe that academic institutions should offer short-term contracts to highly qualified refugees fleeing war and persecution, we should do that consistently and in a way that’s transparent. That shouldn’t be secret or require public misdirection. Secrecy is fine if you’re hiding persecuted people from hostile authorities but in an ostensibly democratic society’s public institutions, we should be able to say, “This is what we’re doing”.
If we’re going to do it by fiat, only for particular individuals or favored countries/crises, then even that can be done transparently—it’s more or less the practice of Leon Botstein at Bard College has followed over the years, which is when he sees a writer or intellectual fleeing persecution that he admires, he tries to make a place for them for a while. That’s better than pretending via an ad or a search process that you’re doing something else.Which leads to the really major issue, which is the suggestion that this is just a way to comply with requirements for listing a position while trying to hire a known candidate who has their compensation already provided by a grant or other source of support. The argument here is that the regulations are just a kind of annoying interference with a common practice and we all know that there are situations like this so let’s just be grown-ups and go about our business.
What’s the point of a requirement that a full-time teaching position be advertised for a national search? What’s wrong with just hiring someone you already know well and are certain is a good fit for your department, especially if they come to you free of charge for some initial period while their salary is paid elsewhere?
The “insider candidate” is a frequent presence in suspicious readings of job ads—for example, on the Academic Jobs Wiki over the years. At least in some cases where I have known a lot about the searches in question, those readings are just plain baseless and wrong—I’ve seen people assert that an “inside candidate” is being favored when there flatly isn’t any such person to favor, and other cases where the only person who could be plausibly viewed as an insider ends up not getting the job and was never favored in the first place. But I understand the suspicions. As the number of faculty jobs that have somewhat favorable working conditions and compensation attached to them steadily dwindles, what’s left is the subject of intense scrutiny. Any “tournament economy” drives the competitors to look on the conditions of competition and the standards for judging very closely, and to frequently assume that there is some degree of collusion or unfair bias involved.So part of the reason for having a requirement that full-time teaching or research positions be advertised nationally and that the search process be relatively transparent is to do whatever is possible to reassure all the job-seekers out there that the outcomes are as fair as they can be within the generally unfair structural conditions surrounding academic employment.
It’s more than that. I am not convinced that rigid controls over the consistency of hiring processes are a necessary precondition of equitable outcomes, but it is true that just hiring people you already know, particularly if one of your reasons is that they’ve already got funding and are ‘free’ to the institution, is surely an invitation to reproduce or intensify existing inequities within disciplines and across institutions.
Institutions resist creating trackable, transparent data when they fear being held accountable to what that data might show. National searches matched to the actual person eventually hired are the only way we can see what’s really happening to disciplines and to faculty as a whole. And we can’t accept that if you already have money from somewhere else, you should jump the line or step around the search—that is an endorsement of the casualization of academic labor, it entrenches inequality further by letting outside wealth determine who is most qualified to teach, and it undercuts faculty governance—a hat trick, as it were, for the demolition of faculty work in higher education. If this is in fact a common reality at research universities, it should not be.
I am no fan of rigid rule-based or regulatory approaches to institutional governance and work, but when we want to work around rules, we should do so transparently, as critics of those rules who aspire to change, erode or overthrow them. When we work around them in secret, when we pretend to comply with the letter of the law, we show contempt for the reasoning behind the rules without having to shoulder the burden of arguing for a different way of doing things. And this is a collective action problem: we should be concerned with what is happening at other universities and colleges, because here—as in many other things—we are in fact all in the same boat.
Image credit: "UCLA" by Chris Radcliff is marked with CC BY-SA 2.0.