Um… I’m gonna gently suggest that those of who pursued a phd DID pay attention in school and some of us still found ourselves living in a tent (a fate I managed to avoid by being lucky enough to be married)… It’s because people believe that creating new knowledge (especially in the humanities) that doesn’t directly make someone rich should be done cheaply or for free, by suckers like me who are fucking disposable.
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I’m sorry, I didn’t think that I’d need a /s there, so I’ll go and add one. As an art college alumni, I like the humanities. 
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Her title wasn’t lecturer but that is what she was doing. The fact that she was also a student just means that the title should be “Students abused by forcing them to work as lecturers for less than subsistence wages”
They literally couldn’t pay people to do that job for that little money of they didn’t hold a promise of a degree and eventually being higher on the food chain over them.
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Yep. As a “teaching assistant” I assisted no one, giving lectures, writing and grading exams, running labs, designing new experiments for those labs, and training others to teach them. The only way the school could get away with paying so little is because they had an effective monopoly; they were the only possible source of income (any other job voided the grad school contract). Graduate students are usually exploited for labor with the argument that they are being paid with a degree.
The job title and the pay might be bullshit, but the work is definitely real
eta: the teaching work of course was in addition to research that if I were not a student would also have been paid (a livable but still lousy wage)
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It sounds like being paid in “exposure”?
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Exposure to ridiculously underpaid exploitation. Exactly.
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And, it should be noted, more work, harder work, and better done than many tenured faculty.
Here’s a game to play for everyone not in academia. Find a tenured professor and ask them “what would it be like to teach 5 classes a semester” and see what they answer. I’d imagine itd be something along the lines of “well, that’s not really possible. Only our lowest-paid people teach that much.” Then ask them how many non-library copies of their most recent book were purchased in the past year.
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Likely reaction?
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What was the name of your band?
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It’s not clear from the article whether the University or the union contacted the students in the closed accommodation and offered support in finding alternatives.
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“Zeitgeist vs Genius Loci” It was very much a conceptual project.
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That it’s unclear at all speaks volumes about our low expectations of university bureaucrats.
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I very much doubt Royal Holloway does any of these things, tbf
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One of the only things I fought to change in my contract for my program was that clause. I wasn’t receiving a stipend or in any comparable program. The admissions person insisted that it was never enforced, to which I said that if it wasn’t enforced then it shouldn’t be a problem to remove. I wanted my degree, but not enough to starve to death.
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Of course it is work, and serious work, but so is undergraduate study - for which no one is paid. Under the current paradigm, being a student is not something for which anyone receives an income. We have come up with extra ways to subsidize advanced study.
This article brings an extreme case to the fore. I’m saying maybe it’s time to rethink the way it is all approached.
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I’ve definitely got a Midwestern US bias. That shit is everywhere. I know nothing of Royal Holloway.
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There is a huge difference. But thanks for dismissing me and the work I did over a decade. Par for the course, though.
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Semi professional university sports are an exclusively American phenomenon. University teams in other countries are normal students competing against other universities for the exercise and the fun of it. No sports scholarships, no TV, no “school spirit”.
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But paying grad students and lecturers like shit isn’t?
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No, unfortunately not in the slightest
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