Published Winter/Spring 2009
 
Pack Consciousness
by Heather Steffen | ns 71-72
Quite apart from problems of culture where fissures and dissonances are crucial, in all practical matters too the fate of a class depends on its ability to elucidate and solve the problems with which history confronts it.
—Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness
The history of the graduate student in America is a short one. We've only been around since the turn of the twentieth century, and we've only been used as TAs in large numbers since the 1970s. But our story (like that of adjunct instructors) is one of increasing reliance on our presence as the university's reserve army of labor. In the last few decades, much activism, organizing, and criticism has reflected the ability of graduate students to accurately (and angrily) read and respond to our position as academic workers. But alongside the sort of class consciousness built on the knowledge that "we work,"1 we also need a way to think the articulation of our selves as workers and our selves as students. The line between these two positions is so blurry as to be nonexistent for many of us, and it's further obscured by the mystified way in which labor is divided at the departmental level: one ends up doing more work the better a student one is perceived to be, regardless of whether this work will draw on one's erudition. Having experienced the confusion and competitiveness created by this kind of labor system for six years now, my credo takes the form of a proposal for working against it. So this essay is an argument for developing, as a counterpart to the class consciousness of the contingent (grad or adjunct) instructor, a graduate student "pack consciousness"—a mode of tactical and collective thinking meant as a heuristic for guiding day-to-day actions by cohorts of graduate students against exploitative labor practices at the level of the individual department.
Last semester I was asked by a faculty member from another department to list the committee positions that doctoral students in my program fill annually. She listened to the list and promptly declared that for graduate students this work isn't service; it's how we earn the "privilege of being represented." What is lost in this reduction of service to a form of representation is the simple fact that representation requires work. Committees and governing bodies involve all kinds of it: reading petitions, doing research, attending meetings, and keeping up with tidal waves of listserv email. Saying that grad students are merely "representing" themselves in these instances obscures our labor and teaches that we must donate a steady stream of uncompensated hours in exchange for the right to work or to have a say in determining our working conditions. It's also a symptom of, and training for, the speed-up taking place at all levels of our profession.
Speed-up for grad students is often packaged in a language of opportunity, privilege, perk, or reward. The opportunities offered to add to our workloads come in the form of courses to teach, committees to sit on, and administrative work, including situations in which graduate students are responsible for managing and supervising their peers' labor. They usually include the chance to learn professional skills or to gain experience outside of composition teaching, but they can also interfere with students' plans for managing their time. Because refusing an offer might lead to being passed over for opportunities in future, an understanding of extra tasks and roles as privileges and perks can quickly become a coercive mechanism within the labor dynamics of a department.
Graduate students are vulnerable to this type of coercion in part because it plays on our belief that the institution in which we work and study is structured around meritocratic principles. We get into a graduate program because our academic records earn our passage there. We are chosen to perform special tasks because we have the special skills required or have proven ourselves a cut above our peers, even if we have no idea when or how or in whose judgment the comparison was made. There is a meritocracy at work in the university, but it is more often than not one of willingness and effective networking rather than any real system of accounting for skill or talent. Set in the world of work, debt, and service we live in, one function of the rhetoric of opportunity and merit is that it produces graduate students as super-flexible laborers.
Here is how the authors of a book on managing knowledge-based corporations define super-flexibility: "It means being 'agile,' able to move rapidly, [to] change course to take advantage of an opportunity or to sidestep a threat. It is also about being versatile, able to do things differently and to deploy various capabilities depending on the needs of a particular situation" (Bahrami and Evans 5). A super-flexible business (or graduate worker) will also ideally be able to do it all "without losing a sense of cohesion, identity and partial stability" (1). When we look at the situation of higher education at this juncture—reliant primarily on contingent, on-demand labor and hiring more administrators than full-time faculty—super-flexibility could be the best skill a newly-minted PhD takes away from grad school.
But what is given up in trade for super-flexibility? Because labor conditions tend to condition the knowledge produced by those working within them, the experience of super-flexibility may be a defining force in the kind of research and teaching produced by future generations of scholars. What is lost for the super-flexible are the uninterrupted stretches of hours necessary for sustained reflection and intensive research on a topic, one's dissertation or otherwise. While the internet has made research in the humanities faster, it hasn't erased the need for hours in front of the microfiche machine and the time-consuming multiple readings of a text upon which meaningful close reading depends. Students may therefore gravitate to supposedly "safe" or "marketable" dissertation topics, and ones that can be finished fast. Safety and marketability seem now to be mostly defined by a tendency to complicate and problematize others' ideas, contributing fresh theses only in the narrow sense of multiplying interpretations, rather than doing archival or historical research. Contributing to the pressure on graduate students to choose formulaic research topics and writing styles is the disheartening state of the academic labor system and the contraction of university publishing. Knowing all of that and scurrying about between meetings, student conferences, and our cubicles, there isn't much incentive for apprentice scholars to engage in challenging research or to spend extra time honing our craft as writers by authoring essays that won't appear in refereed journals—the kind of more public or controversial work that many of us hope we'll do as part of our professional lives and identities.
Super-flexibility may also teach us that our own teaching is a chore to be thought of as little and completed as quickly as possible. While most graduate instructors are no doubt thoughtful and dedicated teachers, it's easy to worry that hours spent carefully reading extra drafts, meeting with students, and designing new syllabi could be better used some other way. Long term, this can teach us that our teaching is not an activity to be valued—a lesson our students and the public are already learning from universities' continued use of underpaid non-tenure track or graduate instructors for a majority of courses.
Perhaps the most damaging loss for the super-flexible is a sense of comradery or common cause among cohorts of graduate students. When a department sometimes assigns work and perks based on favoritism and sometimes through open application processes, it becomes almost impossible to see how cooperation could accomplish anything, since even demanding and getting nominal transparency for some positions doesn't prevent deus-ex-machina job offers for the chosen few. In this setting, grad students can develop a culture of competitiveness, worrying about remaining the favorite of one faculty member or committee rather than orienting toward other grad students. When some are left behind in the CV-line chase, these conditions add a further chill to the already isolation-producing quality of scholarly work.
To combat the inhumane conditions some departmental labor practices create and to reclaim the time to be excited about our intellectual production, it seems to me that what we need is more collective self-reliance. We should shift our orientation from faculty to fellow graduate students for mentorship, advice, and creative thinking about our position in the university. Unionization is of course one way to do this and is the best and first answer to improving the conditions of graduate student work, but for many of us (in right-to-work states or at technology-oriented and decentralized universities like Carnegie Mellon) unionization is not a realistic or legal option right now. And even if it is, it requires energy that many of us simply don't have in our super-flexed lives. So I'd like to propose a heuristic for reorganizing our thought about our position in our departments: pack consciousness.
Becoming pack conscious might begin with analogizing the system that produces doctoral degree holders not only to a body producing excrement, but also to an industrial dairy farm milking its producers for all their worth before consigning them to the dog food factory. We're the cash cows. For doctoral students confident in an advisor's protection and mentorship seeing them through to greener pastures, the factory farm image may not fit their experience of grad school. But rather than deny our precarity, we should value the solidarity, collectivity, and capacity for tactical alliance of the pack, over and against the domesticated individuation of the teacher's pet.
Pack consciousness means changing the way we approach our work and changing our working relationships with our peers, toward the goal of shaping our conditions of labor to be more equal and just. It has the potential, as a model and a metaphor, to help us see the tactical advantages of our position for several reasons. First, because the organization of the pack is one built for and defined by cooperation. While there will always be struggles for dominance and some in-fighting in a group, a pack comes together when it's time to get a job done. Second, the pack is, at least as a cultural image, the opposite of the unthinking dairy herd. Not drawing only from strength in numbers, a pack's coordinated activity is based on agility, responsiveness, and tactical thought. It has a corporate super-flexibility, using a common bank of experience to make intelligent decisions on the fly. And third, when opposed to a notion of graduate school as simultaneously enabling scholarly intellectual growth and domestication into the practices of academic labor, the pack as an idea from the wild is a heuristic for thinking against and beyond the ways our education is training us to later reproduce the competitiveness and isolation of the academic world as it is. Beginning to think as packs of graduate students can facilitate communication between cohorts and enable practical actions currently prevented by the student-to-student interactions our labor conditions tend to produce.
In this issue, John Conley argues for slow-downs and auto-reduction strategies in "Against Heroism." Looking at the rhetoric of political commitment that surrounds teaching and acts as a balm for extra hours spent on it, he observes that to have the energy left at the end of the day to attend a union meeting, grad students need to find ways to work less, "ways that we can at once accelerate and take control of the collectivization of our labor." Conley mentions sharing syllabi as one concrete way to slow down work, and there could be many others once we shed our domesticated fear of sharing. Syllabi, assignments, and other course materials could be kept in a library (filing cabinet), with the understanding that any piece of it could be used by any graduate instructor. That way, the time commitment of syllabus design is a reusable resource. We could help each other with new jobs and tasks by keeping practical information within the group, rather than asking each generation of grad students to learn it anew. This might be as simple as writing out and periodically updating data sheets on things like how to organize and publicize a lecture, the timeline for getting done what you need to when going on the market, or what to do if the university misreports your student status to your loan providers.
Packs of graduate students can also form reading and writing groups in order to broaden our knowledge of areas not taught in coursework or to improve writing skills when faculty take too long returning drafts. One particularly important topic for graduate students to educate ourselves about is the history and current situation of the university and any discipline's position in it. These groups could also perform the function of grassroots professionalization seminars, with advanced graduate students sharing experiences with newer ones. Perhaps the most successful example of tactical alliance in my department is a tradition of mock oral examinations. Before any student takes her qualifying exams, a group of people working in her area gathers to mimic the exam process. These mock exams preserve an oral history of how the exam process works and of what to expect from specific faculty examiners, as well as ideally helping the examinee prepare and gain confidence. Alongside self-help like this, a pack of graduate students could organize to refuse systems of perk or opportunity in their department and to demand more transparent and fair application processes without as much anxiety about individual repercussions. This could take the form of refusing to apply for jobs for which hiring criteria are not public or of forcing transparency by sharing information administrators would prefer to have kept quiet.
The actions outlined here include a mix of strategic and tactical suggestions for grad students to use in their departments. I think this mix is what's needed to continually put up a good fight against the tendencies of academic labor systems at the departmental, university, and professional levels to make us over as super-flexible workers. Because the situation of our labor can shift so rapidly with changes in budget or for no discernible reason at all, and because perks, privileges, and opportunities come up and disappear so quickly, a cohort of graduate students must have the ability to react just as quickly. Pack consciousness, by promoting long-term maintenance of the community through tradition building and by making possible temporary alliances, could help us see around and through our domestication to the tools we already have for making the conditions of our education and our labor more humane.
Note
1. For an analysis of "we work" as the central knowledge of the graduate student labor movement, see Marc Bousquet's "The Waste Product of Graduate Education" or How the University Works. In these places he also elaborates the excrement theory of graduate education mentioned later in this essay.
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Works Cited
Bahrami, Homa, and Stuart Evans. Super-Flexibility for Knowledge Enterprises. New York: Springer, 2004.
Bousquet, Marc. How the University Works: Higher Education in the Low-Wage Nation. New York: NYU P, 2008.
---. "The Waste Product of Graduate Education: Toward a Dictatorship of the Flexible." Social Text 20.1 (2002): 81-104.
Conley, John. "Against Heroism." In this issue.
Lukács, Georg. "Class Consciousness." 1920. History and Class Consciousness. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge: MIT P, 1971.
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