The Philosophers' Cocoon

By Rosa Vince & Anna V. Klieber (Phd Candidates – University of Sheffield)

In this piece we explain some of the barriers to succeeding in academia for people with less money. This is not a theoretical work; we explain some things that students with more money may overlook, and problems that simply may not occur to staff members and institutions. That said, if you are currently, or have recently been, a postgraduate student with limited financial resources, then much of this will already be familiar.

When speaking of ‘low-income’ students in the following, we mean those who do not have a financial ‘safety net’, and who do not have well-off family members to lend/give them money if they do not independently have enough money to pay their fees, rent, or other bills that might come up. This is in contrast to students who do not need to worry if their rent and bills will be met throughout and immediately after their degree – although talking to most academic philosophers, you might get the impression that students who do need to worry about these things don't exist.

This essay does not cover the advantages of private, public, and grammar schools or the advantages of having parents with a university education, though these issues are all important and intertwined. Further, while here we will first and foremost discuss material financial barriers to access, safety, and success in academia, it is important to note that a person's financial and class positions are not independent of other social categories like race, disability, gender or age. This means that the financial barriers described in the following can be worsened, reinforced, or caused, by existing structures of racism, sexism, transphobia, ableism, xenophobia or ageism in, and outside, academia.

In what follows, we will discuss the following aspects: Time, Activities, Health, Teaching Work and Volunteering, Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Committees, and summarize with some notes on Emotional Energy. This list isn’t exhaustive, but rather provides a discussion of a few very common financial barriers that block access, safety, and success in academia. 

Time

If you do not have institutional funding, or if the funding you have is not enough on its own to cover your bills, you might need a job outside of academia. A student working in a bar for 20 hours a week, simply has 20 fewer hours a week available than their more privileged counterparts. That means less time to spend on their work, less time to relax, less time to sleep. Different students will manage the loss differently, but wherever that time comes from, it makes your life, and your academic work, harder. If your job means you are at work until 4am, you will have a harder time absorbing information in your 10am class, if you make it at all. This job might also prevent you from getting time off to go to conferences, or engage in extra-curricular activities which could benefit your career, like socialising with fellow academics (more on that below). Moreover, while other students with enough money are able to focus on writing and publishing peer-reviewed papers (something you’re told from the very beginning to start on right away, because “without papers you won’t get a job in academic philosophy anyway”), a lack of financial security granting you time and energy might mean that you’re not able to finish or rewrite papers as part of lengthy (and often painful) peer-review processes.

In the UK model, a “funded PhD” usually means you’ll receive money for three years (if you’re studying full-time), but there is the option for a fourth ‘writing-up’ year that’s unfunded. Clearly it would be particularly helpful for students who have less time during their first three years to have the option of a funded writing-up year to catch up on work. But if you’re a “low-income” student, an unfunded writing-up year is another resource that you are less able to utilise. Fellow students might be able to continue to pay their bills without the funding, but particularly low-income students who lose funding will struggle to pay rent and cannot continue working on the PhD without getting yet another job (which, in order to be enough hours a week to pay your bills, will prevent you from working full-time on your PhD anyway). However, removing the writing-up year altogether (as some Universities have decided over the last years), so everybody has only 3 years, is clearly not the answer but only makes the situation worse. For all the reasons listed above, low-income students still need any time they can get (For example, if your bills are low enough and you are careful and lucky, you may be able to save a little from your three years of funding to get through a fourth year unfunded). It shouldn't remain unacknowledged by Universities that a “writing-up year” doesn’t just mean “to write up” for many students, they will still need to do a lot of paid work on the side and cannot solely focussing on writing, or they might not even have had the time to complete their main research in their three funded years because of the reasons given above. Academic institutions should find better ways to support students when they need extra time, without reinforcing already existing inequalities.^[1]

Activities

Going to conferences is an important way to get feedback on your work and to meet people in academic philosophy. It should be relatively obvious that many students cannot pay to travel to conferences themselves. Fortunately, many institutions will pay for you to go – hooray! Unfortunately, the way this often works is that you pay for it, and they reimburse you. If you are living paycheque to paycheque, you may not have the few hundred pounds needed to pay up front for these conferences, to be reimbursed later, particularly, if it may take several weeks for the reimbursement to go through, and your landlord is wondering where your rent is. Further, to attend many conferences, and to submit papers to particular journals, you often have to be a member of whichever philosophical society is hosting the event or publication; membership to these societies can cost you even more money that you mostly can't get reimbursed by your institution.

Even if you’re not ‘networking’, simply having friends in academia is a huge benefit to your academic life. It makes being in the institution less miserable, and it means there are people you feel comfortable with whom you can ask questions and swap papers with for feedback and advice. Weekly pub trips, dinners after talks, and lunch trips with colleagues are important social events where you can make and sustain friendships in your department, but if you can’t afford to go to the quirky pub everyone else likes, or the nice lunch place, you miss all of these social occasions. Of course, time plays a role here as well: If you have arranged your working hours so you can go to the weekly grad-seminar, but only have an hour after that before you have to rush off again to your job, you can choose between having a short break on your own between talks and more work and miss out on the socializing, or go, not have a break, and already spend part of the money you’ll have to work for later that evening.

Health

Obviously, a whole paper could be written just on the issue of health in academia. One problem is that if you do not have sick pay, or your sick pay is limited, you either have to work through illness or just lose that time. Colleagues with money can take unpaid leave, and come back to their degree with the same amount of time left as they started with; they ‘bought time’. If you do not have extra money, you cannot buy that time. It’s clear that the way academia currently works can also have very negative health impacts on those with money, but the impact on both the physical and mental health of low-income grad students is particularly bad and often overlooked. Worrying about money all the time is stressful. Having hardly time to relax, sleep, or do your PhD work in peace is stressful. But add to that all the further stress-factors of writing papers, presenting at conferences, organizing conferences and workshops, doing (often underpaid or unpaid) teaching and admin work on the side of your other job, etc.. This workload will inevitably burn you out. In that sense, academia itself is creating the very health problems it is not allowing you to recover from. Navigating arising health concerns and problems with another job outside academia is an additional problem.

Teaching Work and Volunteering

Administrative and teaching work is important for making yourself employable in the increasingly dystopian academic job market. It can also be really valuable and enjoyable. If, that is, you have the time and money to do it. If teaching in the university is not paid, or not fairly paid, then the only people who are able to do it are the people who can afford (both time- and money-wise) to work more or less for free. If there is no reasonably paid teaching work at your university, then you are at a serious disadvantage later on (and the students don’t benefit from your skills!). Graduate Teaching Assistants who try to advocate for better payment will often realize in the course of their struggle just how undervalued they are: Not only is it likely that you’ll be met with resistance from whole departments and otherwise well-meaning staff members, it could so happen that you’re told that your work just isn’t worth the amount of money you are asking for (despite the fact that those permanent staff will be doing some of that same work, at quite a different rate of pay). While this is devastating for all postgraduate students who teach, it is clear that the financial aspect of this will hit low-income students especially hard.

You may also want to organise a workshop, or a reading group, or a conference. These things are important for your CV but can also be a valuable way of learning about other people’s work, enabling others to get feedback, and having conversations which help with your own work. Organizing conferences can also be fun and a good experience – but it’s often forgotten that this is all unpaid labour. If you are working a second job, or have lost time from being unable to take sick leave, you cannot afford the massive amount of time it takes to organise these things.

Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) Committees

You may want to raise some of these issues, change things, and teach your department how to improve these material conditions for you. This is also work. You do not have the time and money to do unpaid labour, but here you are, taking precious time and energy explaining the current flaws^[2] in the system to the permanent staff, in the hopes that some of these things might change. (They won’t). This is a particularly draining kind of work, as it involves having to come out and justify yourself in a way that is difficult and frightening. You might be lucky – you might point out how something disadvantages poorer students, and the staff believe you, and try to change it. Often, though, you get pushback, and you are forced to justify yourself again and again.

Often, academics on EDI committees treat real equality issues as academic exercises, where you have back and forth email conversations on which policy is truly respectful to working class people, without it crossing staff members minds that they are talking to working class people. You are often forced in these situations to decide between saying “look, I am poor, this is not a game for me, this is informed by and affects my life”, and letting an inadequate policy go through but not aggravating those with power over you.^[3] Well-meaning staff members often fail to recognize the power differences between graduate students and themselves in such contexts as EDI committees, and as a result, do not realize what kind of epistemic and emotional labour they are asking of them, and how much more difficult this is given the institutional power imbalance.^[4] Other staff members do fully recognize the power differences, and take advantage of them when pushing back against student led initiatives or complaints.

Emotional energy and Health Again

So how do we manage? How do we cope when there are all of these things draining our time and energy, and preventing us from having a social life? We often don’t. Our mental and physical health suffers, and often, we leave. We want to do postgraduate degrees, we might want a career in academia, but when the cost is so much higher for some than it is for others, for some of us it is simply not worth it. This means that often the healthiest, safest, and sometimes financially necessary thing to do, is to leave.

What mechanisms can (or, do) departments put in place to offset some of these? Are some places overcoming these better than others? What are other people's experiences?

^[1] Also, removing the writing-up year fails to acknowledge that there are other students who have less time and will be in need of a fourth year; for example, students with caring responsibilities and students with certain disabilities.

^[2] Note: ‘flaws’ is not really the right word here; these are features of a system that was designed for people with money. The system was not designed for working class and low-income students to succeed. The system is working as designed.

^[3] See Kristie Dotson's (2011) “Tracking Epistemic Violence, Tracking Practices of Silencing” for a discussion of situations where somebody suppresses their contribution because they realize that their audience is not capable or willing to take up their point, which she describes as “testimonial smothering”.

^[4] See Nora Berenstain’s (2016) “Epistemic Exploitation” and Emmalon Davis’ (2016) “Typecasts, Tokens, and Spokespersons: A Case for Credibility Excess as Testimonial Injustice” for useful and clear articulations of different kinds of 'Epistemic Exploitation' like this.