Graduate Students at Work : Exploited Scholars of Neoliberal Higher Ed

Speaking from personal experience as well as reporting research findings, the contributors of Graduate Students at Work illustrate the significant expertise that graduate students are asked to enact in their time-intensive jobs as teachers, researchers, and administrators, even as they are kept in poverty wages for the decade or so it takes to move through a master’s and doctoral program into the promised land of a tenure-track job. While these students are the leaders of the academic labor movement, they have yet to receive as much attention as adjunct instructors and other laborers in the university system. Though they experience harassment, discrimination, and exploitation, graduate students rarely have access to labor protections because they are often misclassified as students, not employees—a key rhetorical strategy universities use to fight graduate student organizing.