Are Students Slaves for Their Professors?
Jan. 20 -- Sitting in her professor's house, supervising workers as they trudge in and out, Lisa B. cannot quite figure the connection between house-sitting and a literature thesis, but she knows there's a link somewhere — and it makes her mad.
A 29-year-old doctoral student at a Northeastern university who asked that her name be changed, Lisa was summoned the day before her academic adviser left for the holidays last month and was asked to "watch over" her house for two weeks.
It was a request, not an order, she affirms. But as her adviser well knew, the doctoral student effectively had no choice. The professor was on her dissertation committee, and in the tough, sometimes capricious world of academia, riling your adviser can be tantamount to career suicide — before your professional life has even begun.
Potential academic disaster averted, Lisa is still fuming.
"I'm an adult, I'm almost 30, but yet you're made to feel so infantile," she complains in a phone interview. It's her lack of power, she said, "coupled with the frustration that there was no other answer I could have given."
They enroll in institutions of higher education seeking wisdom, intellectual stimulation, and a degree that they hope will be their passport to self-reliance in the "real world." But in universities across the country, thousands of graduate and undergraduate students find themselves performing tasks that are on the ethical borderline of what is expected of them as students, research assistants and fellows.
With a growing number of universities facing budget cuts and under increasing pressure to find new ways of making profits, student labor is grinding the wheels of America's academic machinery. They man phones, photocopiers, teach undergrad courses, grade papers, conduct research, analyze data — often at near-subsistence wages.
In a nation that prides itself on its higher education institutions, where cutting-edge research accounts for the lion's share of Nobel Prizes each year and faculty "superstars" secure recognition, awards, funding and lucrative patents for their research, the bulk of the grunt work is accomplished with the help of student labor.
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