Teaching Precarity (Graduate Education Committee)

This panel aims to open a frank conversation about, and recommend concrete proposals for, improved educational infrastructures at the graduate level.


Graduate programs tend to operate under a myth of certainty. Curricular designs, passed on from year to year, reflect received ideas about which skills will best position students to embark on successful academic careers. The "success" that beckons in these inherited curricula is measured according to a narrow set of disciplinary requirements. Operating following the logic of a zero-sum game, graduate educational structures-the cycle of seminars, seminar papers, qualifying exams, introductions to the discipline, and mentorship protocols-are meant to ensure mastery in a field that is understood to be as strictly organized as it is competitive. The myth of certainty rests on several foundational assumptions that the ubiquitous signs of precarity do little to dislodge: that disciplinary coherence is pre-given, that the system will be kind to those who conform to it (while paradoxically also valuing radical upheaval and disobedience), that a relationship with a single all-knowing advisor produces best results, that the pressures of the job market are best answered with specialization, and that "the funnel" is all there is. A single-track/tenure-track mentality prevails.  


We mean that phrase "teaching precarity" to refer as much to the situation of faculty teaching graduates, as to the situation of the precariat themselves: students consigned to below-minimum-wage teaching, often justified as "training" for post-graduate tenure-track positions in which they will be appropriately compensated. The numbers of graduate programs in music and the numbers of students admitted to those programs continue to grow, even as hiring priorities at institutions of higher learning shift away from ladder positions and towards contingent labor. At stake here is the wider adaptation of university systems to conditions of uncertainty and the contingencies of part-time labor, short-term contracts and temporary teaching gigs, internships and job insecurity in the concierge economy. 


If old curricular structures are ill-suited to these conditions, it is in part because of the persistence of the assumptions-the infrastructures-that undergird them. How, then, might we build new infrastructures, and what would they look like? Questions for the panel include, but are not limited to:


What kinds of graduate courses are useful/advisable to program now?How do we mentor for positions outside of academia? When does labor in the sonic disciplines qualify as "precarious"? How do we – and should we – negotiate the neoliberal conversion of universities from "ivory tower" institutions (fighting over the structures of knowledge) to utilitarian accreditation agencies (training for the instrumental purposes of the market)? What does a "defunneled" curricular structure for graduate students look like? What systems could be put in place to better address student/instructor anxiety? How do we mentor in times of precarity? 

The panel, proposed in order to share resources and practical ideas about preparing graduate students for a wider set of employment options, looks forward to wider "beyond academia" initiatives at our AMS Chicago meeting in 2021.