Academe

Recessions do not favor the vulnerable. Think faculty are facing cutbacks? Graduate students are facing more. Across this land’s universities, from California to the New York Island, we’re seeing graduate students’ few existing rights and already low salaries being chiseled away, and their futures compromised. As AAUP president Cary Nelson notes in Don’t Mourn, Organize, “The only thing the PhD now reliably confers is the potential for lifetime poverty and underemployment.”