First Person

The Hidden Costs of Academic Life

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By Barney Rogers

In June, I wrote in this space about my job search. At the time, I was applying for jobs from the special safety of already having one. I had a tenure-track appointment teaching history at a rural state technical college -- the first job I applied for -- and I had been there four years while I finished my dissertation.

I was lucky in that I could wait until I found my ideal job. Nevertheless, I knew that the job was temporary: My wife and I had been living in two cities for four years.

After months of interviews and negotiations, I finally accepted a position teaching at a college on Long Island, N.Y. I will be moving back home to New York City, and my wife and I will lead a normal life.

The job is ideal. I will have a reasonable workload, teach my specialty and have support for my research. So what's the catch? Money. While my new job pays some 45 percent more than my old one, years of graduate-school living and low incomes have taken a toll.

One thing I find fascinating about the academic world is that we do not share information about salaries and finances nor do we discuss the difficulties of living on such small paychecks. It is all but taboo. Sure, we gripe about the salaries of superstar professors, with their perks and housing. But little is said about the reality most of us will find ourselves in: How will we survive on $31,500 a year and keep up the pretense of middle-class life? We can't. At our salaries, most academics at the start of their careers are working class.

This silence about class and money starts in graduate school. Until recently, graduate students did not talk about money. It was as if the subject diminished our intellectual pursuits. We worried about grades, research, and getting that seminar paper in on time. We loved the life of the mind; everything else was secondary.

We took out student loans, borrowed money from parents, let partners financially support us, and accumulated (sometimes) massive credit-card debt and missed "earning potential." Meanwhile, we watched as our students graduated with B.A.'s and immediately began earning salaries that were 50 percent higher than that for an instructor of English or history.

In short, many of us were -- and still are -- living near poverty. What makes it worse is that some of us had unrealistic ideas about what life would be like when we landed our first job. Some wrongly believed that our lives would somehow start anew, that we would forget about the years of poverty we have endured. Myopically focused on individual intellectual gain, we thought that if we wrote "that big book," all would be right. Now we find that in many cases one book is not enough.

I am one of the fortunate ones who landed a "good" job, and my salary is barely adequate. Most new academics, it appears, will continue to live in poverty. Starting salaries for first-year assistant professors in the humanities are in the low 30's at many colleges, lower at community colleges. Moreover, the average workload is close to four classes per term. Being untenured, we need to make a good impression, so many of us buy new clothing to keep up appearances. A senior colleague told me that since I was no longer in graduate school, I should "stop dressing the part."

We grumble among ourselves about the poor salaries and heavy workloads, but we are careful not to let administrators hear us because we know how "lucky" we are. It is a buyer's market. When I told my dean I was leaving, an ad quickly appeared in The Chronicle, and more than 160 people applied.

With this much competition, salaries will remain low. Only at universities with a larger sense of educational mission, not the bottom line, will "just" salaries be offered. And only when we demand living wages for all university employees will that happen.

We need to raise the issues of salaries, workloads, and benefits not just with university administrators but with students, alumni, and the public. More importantly, we need to support those already struggling with these issues. Graduate students at New York University and other universities have begun to do what we should have done years ago: organize. They are raising important issues and making demands on universities for fair treatment and professional responsibility.

Let's make our support known to administrators and faculty members at N.Y.U. and elsewhere. Let's form alumni alliances. Let's do more than just read the faculty union newsletter. In short, we have the tools and resources to help the grad students.

We owe it to the current graduate students and to our professions to support these union efforts, which will strengthen academia, connect faculty members to larger issues, and help transform universities back into compassionate institutions. I have hope. Recently a vibrant faculty group took over the moribund faculty union at City University of New York. (See an article from The Chronicle, May 12.) Together with the struggles at N.Y.U. we could witness a rebirth of academic labor. We should be midwives to this movement, rather than spectators.