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It's my first week as a graduate student, and I sit in the office of the director of graduate studies, telling her that I'm pregnant. I'm twelve weeks along, my odds of miscarriage are decreasing, and I will likely have a baby in my second semester of my master's program in literature. The director is sympathetic. She tells me a baby and coursework will be hard to balance and that I don't have to take any classes next semester if I don't want to-I shouldn't overburden myself. She asks me if I've thought about taking a semester off for my health. I tell her that I can't afford it. My stipend isn't a lot of money, but without it, my husband and I can't make our bills, and I can't just find another job. No one is going to hire a pregnant person knowing they're going to give birth in a couple of months and then quit to go back to grad school shortly after. So, I need my stipend.
It is widely accepted that academia has a labor problem. Over the last hundred years, the university system has gradually adopted a corporate business model in which institutions exploit the low-cost and easily available labor of contingent faculty (a term I use to mean adjunct, non-tenure-track, and graduate student workers). Writing about graduate student labor, Marc Bousquet says "the holders of a doctoral degree are not so much the products of the graduate employee labor system as its by-products, insofar [as] that labor system exists primarily to recruit, train, supervise, and legitimate the employment of nondegreed students and contingent faculty" (21). There is a myth that graduate workers exchange cheap labor for a valuable product (their degree), but Bousquet is right: a PhD has no inherent value in a capitalist market. It may secure you a tenure-track job, but as the academic job market continues to decline, that becomes less and less likely. The PhD is instead the by-product of a system that consumes its young. Yet when it comes to studying contingent faculty, work on the adjunct's precarious and painful place in academia is far more robust than the work on graduate student labor (Boe; Childress; Dubson; Klausman).
That is not to say that...