tam
Nothing annoyed me more than those off-handed, subtly insulting remarks I used to get, and still occasionally get, from friends and family about being a full-time student.
“You’re going to have to get a real job sooner or later,” one friend told me. Am I not “really” working? Am I not writing assignments, preparing presentations, or reviewing literature? What makes a job “real”? Maybe it’s regular pay, or regular hours or business attire. Another friend referred to me as being on a “perpetual vacation.” Who goes on vacation with 150 student essays to mark and 25-page chapters due monthly? My father-in-law called me a “professional student.” Don’t professionals get paid handsomely?
As it happens, my scholarly research explores questions related to work. So I recognize that embedded in these comments are assumptions about what gets recognized as work and what types of work get valued in our society. While I am certain that my family and friends meant no disrespect, nonetheless their comments imply that as a graduate student, I am not as “productive” as Joe who serves coffee or Sally who sells books.
Since, for the most part, I enjoy the conceptual challenges of researching and writing, I really shouldn’t care less about such comparisons -- except that this is a society where working means having a job, and where being employed in a good job confers one’s status as rightful, deserving citizen. Given the meaning of work, or more specifically, of paid employment in North American society, no wonder I feel slighted.
Perhaps what is even more confusing is that people’s acceptance of scholarly endeavors and graduate studentship as a privileged type of work often occurs at the same time that they disparage the actual associated academic activities. The papers, the arguments, the analysis that is at the core of the intellectual work are frequently challenged and even dismissed by “productive” workers as too abstract, too theoretical; and thus, of little practical use.
On another level, the comments suggest that the intellectual work of academics and graduate students does not fit with other types of work, such as physical, manual, skilled trades, professional, service, care, and/or domestic labor. Perhaps people are just not familiar with scholarly work of graduate students and academics. Perhaps I need to explain what is it that I do between the figurative hours of 9 to 5. Some aspects of my work are more obvious than others. People generally accept that graduate students take courses, research articles, or teach, which involves developing courses, preparing materials/lectures, grading assignments, and/or academic counseling of students.
However, most of my time is spent thinking, reading and writing. There is less vocabulary for describing what I actually do when I think, read and write. How do I target what to read, which databases to search, which email lists and professional associations to subscribe to? How do I decide which conferences or lectures to attend, whom to network with, and which journals to submit my articles to? In addition, there is academic grunt work, for example, coffee making for conferences, data processing, transcription and assorted clerical tasks, babysitting professor’s children, or attending academic and community events and meetings to build future research alliances.
All too often, people overlook the fact that most graduate students are not just students, but also daughters/sons and mothers/fathers who juggle intellectual work with care work and responsibilities for family, young children, and aging parents. While some of these activities, like teaching, fall under paid work, many others do not. Yet, all these activities take time and energy and are part of what I do as a doctoral student, and how I strategize as aspiring academic.
In my dissertation research on young women’s work, I use the idea of "provisioning" to encompass a wider range of work activities than paid employment. Feminist economists developed and defined provisioning as the work of securing resources and providing the necessities of life to those for whom one has relationships of responsibility. Provisioning is introduced to make observable a wide range of work and work-related activities that reflect how young marginalized women are creatively surviving by juggling pressures and responsibilities of school, work, and family, while planning careers in an uncertain labor market. In a similar way, provisioning reveals the tasks and details of what I do as a doctoral student.
You might say, it sounds like all activities fall under provisioning, so how is this helpful for understanding work? It is not so such what provisioning is, so much as how it provides a lens through which we can make sense of why we do what we do in our working lives in a way that does not reinforce an artificial division between paid and unpaid work, or intellectual and other types of work.
In terms of provisioning, there are reasons why I can’t just get a “real job” even though I might need the money because having a real job would take time away from my “job” of provisioning as a student. I need time and space to think, read and write. If I get a so-called real job, I am more likely to get trapped in the lala-land of All-But-Dissertation. With incomplete credentials, I’d be underqualified for academic positions, and overqualified for most others.
With no real job, I still need a real income to provide for myself. Thank goodness, my university has a commitment to funding eligible doctoral-stream students for five years. The problem is that on average, according to Statistics Canada, in 2003-2004, doctoral graduates from Canadian universities in humanities and social sciences took 6 years and 8 months to complete their programs. So how do I eat and pay the mortgage after year 5?
Similarly, the young single mothers I interviewed for my research lacked adequate resources to support their families while they pursued post-secondary education. Welfare or student loans just aren’t enough. Note to policy makers -- provide adequate income support that recognizes the wide range of activities, including care labor, that constitute the work of students, and develop social policies based on understanding how they facilitate or hinder provisioning for different groups of students.
Perhaps most importantly, talking in terms of provisioning gives value to the details of our day-to-day work lives. Expanding the notion of work in this way does not separate what we do and where we do it. You see that as an aspiring academic, I have responsibilities not only to produce intellectual and conceptual work, but also to provide for myself, and my family. A comprehensive view of this work takes us outside the walls of the ivory tower into spaces of community, work places and homes where work is also accomplished.
Speaking about provisioning as a doctoral student demystifies intellectual work in a way that allows people like my friends and family to see similarities as well as differences between various types of work, whether or not that work is packaged as a job. For those of us who strive to see our ideas and theories circulate beyond own disciplines and beyond the academy, it becomes essential to do away with the separation of those who philosophize in the abstract, and those who toil in the concrete.
- Ethnic / cultural / gender studies
- Social work
- Sociology / behavioral studies
Comments on Demystifying the Intellectual Work of Grad Students
To play devil's advocate, because I am very sympathetic to the problem motivating Ms. Tam, I have to wonder about about how her use of provisioning in place of work to designate the activity of graduate students, and others, overcomes the dichotomy between abstract philosophizing and concrete toil she sees as the source of the problem. The sources of the division between manual and intellectual labor seem to me to lie deeper than it is possible to address through a change in conceptual apparatus only.
Which is not to say that such changes are unnecessary. But it seems to me that such efforts are at best futile if we do not make effort into how those terms disseminate outside the fields in which they are applied. Ms. Tam is to some extent addressing this issue. Indeed, it clearly is a main motivation, I would argue. But how much good can a change in terminology produce that does not address the issue of why the division of manual and intellectual labor exists in the first place?
The deployment of provisioning seems to me here motivated more by the pathos that arises from addressing one's friends/family/potential non-academic employers than from any other reason. That may very well be a product of the structure of the article and its beginning with those questions we've all heard at one time or another, in which case it is perhaps just my idiosyncrasy complaining here. Still, though provisioning makes us aware that there is more to work than meets the paycheck, so to speak, I wonder how it does more than show how work has colonized more and more areas of our lives. What does it show of that other than work? I can't escape the feeling that simply asserting that we all engage in a wide variety of activities to survive (an overly simplistic take on provisioning I admit) misses the point of the dilemma posed by the division of manual and intellectual labor, namely that life is about more than simply surviving or, for that matter, working.
A more effective title for this article would be "The Perpetual Student: Why I Shouldn't Have to Grow Up."
I think most grad students realize that at some point they will have to do something more than "think and read and write." While I enjoy all of the above, the curse of money requires that I do something that someone considers worth paying for.
Sandra has expressed the essence of what most doctoral students experience in varying degrees. As a professor who has directed many dissertations and has been active in research, I can understand the sentiments. I applaud Sandra and all graduate students who are willing to spend several years of their youthful life in the pursuit of higher education. The fruit of their effort and research will make the world a better place to live for everyone. There is a Chinese saying related to this topic (as there is one for every other topic): "Learning is like rowing a boat upstream: not moving forward means regressing backward".
I believe that we are all different in nature, thus some people enjoy intellectual work while others are perfectly happy doing physical work. It takes different people with different interests to meet the society's need. I just wish that more people appreciate those who do research!
Think you catch it from family who think you should get out of school and get a job?
Try being 40 years old and quitting a good job with full benefits so that you can start college as a freshman.
Like a true-blue aspiring academic, the author has neither demystified the intellectual activities nor offered an original retort to the common disparagement aimed at graduate students.
Wait a second, what was the article entitled? Yep, something about demystifying. Seemed interesting; indeed, it could have been.
Instead, the author sought to further aca-dementia by introducing "Provisioning" as the catch-all. Never mind that the author's friends, parents and everyman would chalk this up as another reason for their not unfounded suspicion that these "professional students" are twiddling their thumbs while deciding what they want to do for common employment. Get real!
A basic, cogent analysis of these questions would probably lend some credence to the everyman's stereotype of doctoral students. Now, the question is not one of demystification; rather, it is one of social value being placed on protracted, focused study. Sure, most doctoral students sit around with their feet up in the air, but they can also be a tremendous resource for undergrads.
Graduate students ought not be chagrined at the lack of common understanding of their responsibilities and goals, they would be wise to recognise and defend their privileged position in society with humility and charity to those for whom "Provisioning" means punching a clock.
A portion of the comments are grounded in jealousy. They are the whinings of those who would gladly trade places with you if they could. I must admit that the years spent researching my dissertation were a gift from my spouse and family who supported my work, while I was able to read and write about a subject I loved. I taught full time in a high school during those years, so " I feel your pain," but ignore the derogatory comments. You will soon be entering the the post academic world.
I agree with this article, and especially appreciate the idea about provisioning. As a young married man, I think the pressure is just as great (if not greater) to get out of school, get a "real job". My father-in-law is being a complete jerk about it currently. My wife, however, has been a saint--supportive, helpful, and patient. As a man, and admittedly a little old-fashioned, I really have trouble with all of the implications that "you're in school because you can't cut it in the real world." Glad to know I'm not alone. I see my job right now as one of making good plans for the future, such as getting out of debt and starting a financial plan, so we can be in good shape when I "get a real job."