[warning: unedited]
Academia's been weighing heavy on my mind and I like that I can use space here to dump my depression. It's pretty much saved my outlook about life and it's clear that I want to dedicate in my life pursuing the "life of the mind." I've always wanted to teach. And I've always wanted to pay forward the wisdom and time of the village that guided me to where I was. Years ago I was just working at Publix, queering it up in Atlanta, and as a young adult I never took the time for myself to figure out what lifelong roads I want to travel down. I didn't even know what the hell graduate school was until a uni professor was fairly forceful about me needing to "think about it." And so graduate school happened.
But for me, I've been seeing far too many things slip from the immediate grasp of many folk. Finally (although quite unevenly, and I would never say differently) a range of students of different backgrounds can access postsecondary education. This access becomes even more urgent given the shit-for-education around the country if you don't live in the right expensive housing district. But as numbers for women with degrees, persons of color with degrees, queer persons with degrees, immigrant students with degrees, increases to the chagrin of white folk who see college as only for them, the fucking opportunities and networking possibilities and quality of postsecondary education and economic enfranchising and mental health options are plummeting. Just as I got my Masters in Art History in racist-old Boston, having to deal with being from a household that made 30K under annually among wedded upper-middle class women who vacationed in Rhode Island, the industry for teaching said: no, now you need a PhD to teach. And as I'm getting my PhD and trying to stay cheerful about having to necessarily become a resourceful person because graduate school can fuck you in the ass three times a day, universities are saying now you need two published books to get tenure as tenure options in my field are plummeting and positions stagnate because the whole crystallized idea of tenure has been to protect the job security of old white men whose ability to sit their ass in towers all day comes directly from the domestic labor of their white wives who've they've overlooked because being a house mother or wife or house wife isn't an intellectual pursuit despite domestic labor scaffolding these damned men's abilities to reproduce and work.
Yes I know I'm getting a PhD and right now I refuse to edit.
So. It seems like I'm constantly seeing myself walking down a corridor with the strategies to be secure, only to run into an unexpected: "sorry, we're renovating" sign.
And I'm stressed the fuck out because I've been smart enough, guided enough, and had a "fuck you" attitude since my Masters that means I will be leaving a 5+ year Humanities (OH GOD) doctoral program without any debt. I'm really good at demanding and finding money for my projects. So sue me. Never go to graduate school if you have to pay one dime.
And now I'm seeing that those in power are aware and conscious that they're proactively crippling an entering, specialized workforce that's joining communities on government assistance faster than they're getting jobs. If you're a graduate student in the Humanities for example, your FELLOWSHIP or TEACHING ASSISTANTSHIP money is not considered a wage. Your 15K to 35K annual money is NOT considered a WAGE. Yet you're TAXED on it as if it IS and our state and national governments find that to be okay. That means if you're in graduate school for 5-8 years (average matriculation at Yale for Art History, for example, is 8 years), you're probably leaving the program at 29 years old+ and of those years you're making money and generating money for a university and its "diversity" tax breaks, for example, and your wage labor will not be recognized by any business at all because the money you're making is not money--- say bye to buying a home off of substantial earnings, or say bye to getting a loan for something as simple as a scooter to fucking get around quicker because you're supposed to be a professional because your wage labor is not wage labor-- according to the law, written by people who generally hate the Humanities. And now science people will get screwed even more as underpaid workers, because NOW the TUITION assistance that a university SHOULD PAY in the first fucking place WILL BE TAXED because of this idea that graduate students are thriving and professionals who CAN pay for their education. Obama's administration cut subsidized loans for graduate students with the reasoning that 1) they can pay their loans suitably and 2) the money generated will go to undergraduate students and Pell grants DESPITE the OFTEN PROVED FACT that millions of scholarship dollars go untapped by undergraduate students because they're poorly informed by universities about things other than loans, gender, race, and university-specific funding.
So the graduate professional forces within the last decade who are matriculating now have to fight fiercely among their friends and peers for job opportunities that are fundamentally unstable. Especially for Millenials who refuse to move around every 2-5 years for jobs, this is a really disheartening situation.
It's a pity that the conceit "life of the man" is skewed to the opportunities that are generally squarely within white middle class male heterosexual conditions. And it's pitiful that this professional and personal lifestyle is protected within a growing university complex that's one of the major culprits to surrounding gentrification in urban areas that makes it even harder to graduate-level incoming workforces to buy homes because a 30k house is bulldozed into a 350k poorly renovated home. But you can take out your 20K max unsubsidized loan that lets you rent temporarily in an area that then means you push out a struggling workforce yourself all the while the university gains money from your debt and offshores their interest-bearing accounts while they increase tuition and bloat university costs with bureaucracy!
So I've been thinking about what I can do to stay in Atlanta and refuse an economy of academia. A job in academia would be perfect. I was never an easy person to get along with. But I want to give to students of a diverse university population like that of Atlanta (IE the so-called non-traditional student at other universities ARE the traditional students in this city) all the resources that people gave me: how do you negotiate graduate school from a working class background? how do you arrive at graduate study from a point other than strife? how do you get money from people to do what you desire? how do you build coalitions? how do you design your way about a specialist field? how do you move over and over and over again with l i t t l e m o n e y because you've decided to enter a whirlwind and would not like to leave until you see returns for yourself? why do we keep seeing museums as being for communities when they are fucking businesses that get tax breaks with little accountability and a BUSINESS that BUILDS equity from the shoulders of those who want this tax bill because when you're rich it's easy to be poor and you don't want to have your money taken so take my art because I get a tax break here too? or getting students to ask questions why the fuck do we not see artists as entrepreneurs of creativity whose products do x y and z but ALSO come from labor that's often overlooked because "people don't understand art." Well I don't fucking understand why I need to eat green spaghetti, or why there's green house building but the scientific individuals involved can't figure out how to lower costs. So.
I've been thinking about creating or joining or building a non-university postsecondary educational space for those who cannot attend/afford to attend/prefer not to attend colleges just to receive so-called rigorous training in thought. It's becoming a thing. And I know how to find money. So. I've made my google drive folder for "Project Space." Hopefully it gives me steam while I figure out how to negotiate the very system that seems to infantilize a functioning professional population, once I hit the job market I'm pretty much crippling myself by since I want to stay in Atlanta as long as possible and am only looking there. I just want stability. I've moved too much in my life. And I want others who enter the space I'm navigating to have that too, or figure out how.
Sigh.
