Professor-in-Training: Status Control of the Teaching Assistant

I examine the role of apprenticeship status in controlling the labor of unionized graduate student teaching assistants (TAs). In her book Coerced, Erin Hatton identifies status as a basis of labor coercion—particularly in nontraditional labor regimes—in which managers control workers’ access to status-based rights, rewards, and punishments. I expand Hatton's concept of status coercion to status control and distinguish between two types: despotic, in which status coercion prevails, and hegemonic, in which status consent prevails. I argue that status control of TAs is hegemonic, relying on their investment in a system of apprenticeship in which course instructors are a source of professional advancement, opportunity, and support outside of the TA job. I draw on autoethnographic fieldwork to analyze one expression of TA control, participatory management. In this model, the faculty instructor invites TAs to collaborate on course design and encourages routine discussion of teaching strategies, in which hidden labor is made regulable through “confession”. Identification with the instructor limits TA autonomy by disrupting alliances between TAs, and between TAs and students. I conclude by sketching variations in TA management and by discussing status control as a broader mechanism of extraction in the contemporary university.