Are Students Slaves for Their Professors?

Jan. 20, 2004 -- 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.

Faking Data

But while formal and informal guidelines often govern the use of student labor in most cases, sometimes the system can go horribly wrong.

In a case that shook the criminal justice system last week, a California judge ruled that the Scott Peterson murder trial be moved out of Modesto based on a study conducted by California State University, Stanislaus, students.

The survey concluded that Peterson, who is charged with murder in the deaths of his pregnant wife and their unborn child, could not get a fair trial in his late wife's hometown.

But in a potentially damaging turn of events, it was later discovered that the study was, in fact, faked.

A day after the ruling, a number of criminal justice students at the university campus told the Modesto Bee they had fabricated answers on the survey.

The project, which made up 20 percent of their final grade, was assigned by criminology professor Stephen Schoenthaler two days before Thanksgiving, said the students, who asked to remain anonymous. Faced with the prospect of falling grades coupled with a difficulty getting through to prospective jurors and having to make lengthy long-distance calls, some students simply "made up" the answers.

Doing a Job Unsupervised

Cheating on school assignments is a serious academic offense and university officials have launched an inquiry. The Stanislaus County district attorney also issued a notice asking students in the class to come forward with information. And Schoenthaler appears before a California court today with records and university representatives for a hearing.

But within the academic world, the incident has raised serious questions about the increasing use of graduate and undergraduate student labor for professional research work by professors.

"Universities used to say that a Ph.D. student would be put through a mentorship process, that students will be learning the craft of research, of teaching," says Kate Bronfenbrenner of Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations. "But these days graduate students work as teachers and research assistants — they aren't being supervised, they're just doing a job. They're not taught how to do it, they just do it."

Although Bronfenbrenner says she has never heard of a case of false research such as the Cal State incident before, she admits it could well be happening elsewhere. "Students have always cheated for generations," she says. "The change we're seeing is that students are taking on more and more work."

While the number of students at U.S. universities has rapidly increased over the years, the number of full-time faculty positions have not kept up, leaving the bulk of the academic work to part-time instructors and grad students.

According to the Department of Education, in the year 1989-90, about 9 percent of the total number of graduate students had teaching and research assistantships under work-study programs. In 1999-2000, that figure had jumped to more than 23 percent.

With the increasing university workload being undertaken by students, there has also been a rise in the student-worker grievances, with more and more graduate assistants forming or joining unions across America.

As the president of the Graduate Employee Organization, a union of graduate employees at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Chris Vials has addressed a number of issues affecting graduate-workers — from getting health coverage and addressing compensation claims and bogus assistantships to securing intellectual property rights for research assistants.

A Ph.D. student at UMass' English literature department, Vials says student disputes over research credits and intellectual property rights are most acute in science faculties such as physics and engineering, which tend to attract substantial government and private research funding. Research patent disputes have sometimes ended up in the courts.

In recent years, university online education programs are especially dependent on graduate student labor in their development and administration, says Vials, and the potential for abuse is especially high.

‘It’s a Question of Responsibility’

But Mark Alter of New York University's Steinhardt School of Education believes it's a misconception to characterize the current situation in terms of student workers.

"It's not a question of student labor," says Alter. "It's a question of responsibility. At a research institute, our primary responsibility is to educate the students on how to conduct research and to provide an opportunity to participate in the collection, interpretation and analysis of data."

Vials does not disagree — in part. "Many of the professors are not raging abusers," he says. "But if you're a research assistant and the professor is a raging bastard, if you were to come forward with your grievance, the professor will retaliate in ways that can't be redressed. He will not write that letter of recommendation, for instance — that sort of retaliation is most common."

Bronfenbrenner puts it down to the "power dynamic" of the professor-student relationship.

"If you have the power of grading students, you have to be careful that you don't abuse that power," she says. "Students are always doing clerical work, they've always done baby-sitting. The change comes when employers lose sight of the fact that they're in power."

From her professor's home, Lisa heartily agrees. "This [house-sitting] is totally just a favor, one that can't be reciprocated because I can't ask her [the professor] to walk my dog, can I?" she asks. "I would never ask my [undergraduate] students to do something like this. They're paying for their education, they're not paying to do me an favor."