As many of you may be aware, the Graduate School has recently proposed establishing a firm limit on outside work for graduate students, capping it at 20 hours a semester. Not 20 hours a week, though I can certainly understand how your eye would read that for you. Twenty hours a semester - which works out to around 1.5 hours a week.
A little background: Peter Weber, dean of the graduate school, claims that Brown PhD students receive a generous salary. This is true in the sense that many programs in the country offer no stipend and that ours are comparable to those of our peer institutions. But it isn't, especially for liberal arts PhD candidates, a lot of money.
It is not generous in the sense that car repairs, medical bills or even buying a new pair of jeans are borne with equanimity. We are grateful, and we knew what we were signing up for. But that doesn't magically make the amount we're paid enough. Grad students are, like many people these days, a debt-ridden population. Many of us have families to support. All of us have incidental costs.
This is hardly an uncommon story in America today. We are people typically in our mid-20s and early 30s who are trying to live our lives on a shoestring. Unlike most of the rest of America, what we are facing through this policy is a world in which we will be expressly forbidden from doing what we have to do to make ends meet.
Unfortunately, our cars will not stop breaking, nor our clothes stop fraying, because we're not allowed to make more money. We will not be able to avoid all accidents and injuries. And our kids will need what kids need. Simply put, if we cannot afford that and stay here, we cannot stay here.
We are told that the purpose of this new rule, if and when enacted, is part of Grad School's overarching efforts to keep grad students on track, thereby better utilizing Brown's resources. This is a commendable goal. But there already exists a perfectly good set of objective criteria to keep grad students on track - the failure to meet such has resulted in more than a few expulsions. "Benchmarks" are tracked and annotated every semester, and the consequences are real. What is the point of such a restrictive additional measure other than a very non-Brown paternalism?
The thing is, we are not talking about full-time jobs here. We're not even talking part-time jobs. We're talking about being allowed to work more than 1.5 hours a week, which is a part-time job in the sense that taking a shower every other day is a part-time job. We're talking about being allowed, when we need to, to bring home a little extra money. And we're not talking about a lot of hours.
In my experience, many grad students work at the Writing Center or the Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning, which typically employs them six to nine hours a week. Six to nine hours a week for a job that is skill- and resume-building, that contributes enormously to this community and that still leaves 159 out of 168 hours available for whatever else needs to get done every week. It also exceeds the proposed limit on outside work by 7.5 hours a week. Do you see what I'm getting at here?
This new rule, which would not govern our experiences at the Grad School, but would dictate how we may conduct our private lives, is the most invasive measure I've seen proposed in my eight years at Brown, both as a undergraduate in the class of 2007 and as a PhD candidate set to graduate in 2014. It states clearly and unequivocally that grad students are not to be trusted to find a way to balance what they need at home with what they need to do at school.
More than that, this rule would erect a dramatic barrier as to who will be free to imagine themselves getting a Brown PhD, costing the University top applicants. For who, with options, would choose Brown over a school where, when life demands it, they'll be able to make a little extra cash to survive? And who can stare down the barrel of five to six years with no additional income, other than those with independent means? Is that who we want to be? A school whose PhD programs boast one of the highest bars to entry of any comparable school?
Bottom line: If we allow the Grad School to so severely constrain not only our graduate school experience, but our own private lives, our PhD programs will become places not simply reserved for those few who can afford it, but for an even rarer group, those who know they'll be able to afford it for the next half-decade, no matter what happens. And all to achieve a goal for which structures already exists, for which punishments are already firmly in place.
We are not asking for more vacation days, we're not asking an ice cream sundae bar in the grad lounge. We're not asking for anything we're going to enjoy all that much. We're asking for the right to earn extra money when we have to, and the right to occasionally add lines to our resume in advance of an overcrowded job market.
Andrew Tobolowsky GS likes to while away the hours with dead Semitic languages.
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