When deciding where to go to graduate school, it is common to think of a state’s politics as tangential. You may take issue with those politics on principle, but if you’re really looking out for yourself, you bite the bullet and go with whoever has the best faculty or gave you the best offer. To turn down a school because of who resides in the governor’s mansion is like turning down a school because the weather is too cold—short-sighted. But the insulated world of academia is not immune to state politics. On the contrary, it can be a state’s very target. When applying for graduate school, ignoring a state’s politics is the short-sighted, imprudent perspective.
If you work at a public university, your boss is the state government. In other words, your boss makes the labor laws. This puts you in a precarious position but is not necessarily catastrophic. If attacking higher education is politically dangerous, you’re relatively safe. But if attacking higher education is downright politically expedient, as it is in Florida, you are up a creek without a paddle. As a graduate student at Florida State University, this is my situation.
What does it look like up the creek? My living stipend of $16,250, before taxes, is less than half of the livable wage in the state of Florida, according to MIT. If you secure a summer TA position, that skyrockets up to just over $19,000. My work is technically part-time, but good luck finding time for a side gig. In order to work, I need to be a full-time student. In order to be a student, I need to pay student fees. The astute logician may notice that I’m paying to work. I was required to come into classrooms packed to the gills with undergraduates at the peak of the Covid pandemic, then told that I could not ask them to mask up or ignore a request for in-person, one-one-on meetings. About 30% of students in my class were wearing masks. Even if that number had been higher, it might have been moot, seeing as though buildings on campus had been causing cancer with black mold and radon for over 20 years.
There’s more, but there’s no need to go on and on. These sorts of issues are well-documented and not unique to FSU. We’re all up the creek together.
Some graduate students have got to paddling against the current. Graduate workers at Harvard, Columbia, and NYU have gone on strike in the past couple of years. Notably, these are all wealthy, private universities. The target of these strikes was an extremely powerful entity, surely, but it was a university with cash to spend, not the monolith of a state government pushing to cut public spending. Then, this November, just under 50,000 unionized employees of the University of California system went on strike.
Why not do something similar in Florida? Because we can’t. It is illegal for public employees to strike in the state of Florida. The penalties are harsh. This may seem counterintuitive. What does it mean for an act of disobedience to be disallowed? Isn’t the whole point of a strike that it’s not allowed? In a sense, yes. But typically, strikers do not face legal penalties for participating. Typically you cannot be fired for going on strike (not to mention put on probation, without the possibility of a pay raise, for the 18 months after that firing). In Florida, these are on the table.
For schools with a graduate worker’s union that collectively bargains with the university, like mine, these anti-strike laws are a huge blow to any leverage we might have. So too is the fact that if the union and university fail to come to an agreement, the university has the right to impose whatever terms they desire, even if it violates the most recent collective bargaining agreement. This is what it means to be without a paddle.
All I’ve shown so far is that working as a graduate student at a public university puts you in a precarious position, and doing so in Florida puts you in a really, really precarious position. Not only does your boss make the labor laws for a job that tends to involve low pay and hard work, but you have effectively no recourse if things get dire. Is this only a problem in theory? After all, I’ve said that many of my complaints are fairly ubiquitous among graduate students. While Columbia, the UC system, and others have taken drastic steps to act on these complaints, most haven’t. Is there really a difference between getting screwed over in Florida and getting screwed over anywhere else?
First off, the fact that many don’t fight back doesn’t make the fact that others can’t fight back a matter of mere theory. Philosophy students accept this kind of distinction all the time. When discussing the morality of, say, employing a surveillance state, it’s often accepted that “why should I be worried about a surveillance state? I have nothing to hide” is a weak defense. Even if I have nothing to hide now, losing the ability to ever hide anything is dangerous, especially if the government isn’t trustworthy. Yet still, I’m often met with a tacit or explicit appeals to thoughts like, “why should I be worried about not being able to strike? I’m making ends meet.” The idea seems to be that while having collective bargaining leverage would be nice, not having it is a distant concern. But the need to make use of that leverage is not a distant possibility, it is a growing probability.
Most everything that keeps FSU philosophy graduate students from being in a profoundly bad spot is very contingent. Ten years ago, FSU’s minimum stipend was $8,100. While FSU covers about 80% of our health insurance premium, other public schools cover none. International graduate workers lack access to various ways in which they might blunt the edge of their financial situation—such as declaring residency in the state of Florida—and a loss of position may mean deportation. These are not hypotheticals. They are the near past, the nearby, and the others in our cohort.
And there’s real reason to believe that they’ll soon be every graduate worker in Florida. Now that the state has a Republican supermajority, a number of long-simmering political movements are likely to come to fruition. The successful passage of Senate Bill 520 (now statute 1004.098) earlier this year means that the identities of all candidates for university president positions will be kept from the public until a final group is selected by university officials. Left in the dark, we in the public must simply hope that these officials present a diverse final group of attractive candidates and don’t leave any attractive candidates out, affording us a real choice when deciding who to throw our support behind. This was put to the test in October, when the University of Florida announced the final group of candidates to be their next president. It consisted of exactly one person: U.S. Senator Ben Sasse. State Senator Jeff Brandes, who co-sponsored the bill, lamented that he’d always intended for there to be multiple candidates, and that this was an outlier. But I was there for public discussion of the bill in the statehouse. The concern of single-option final groups was brought up. The astute ethicist may recognize Brandes’s statement as a bogus appeal to the intended/foreseen distinction. Intentions mean little when you’re explicitly told that what you don’t intend is going to happen… then it does.
The Sasse pick was immediately met with a no-confidence vote from the faculty and widespread protests from students. It’s not a strike, but a paddle of sorts. How did the university respond? By enforcing an obscure rule which bans disruptive indoor demonstrations. Who decides if a demonstration is sufficiently disruptive? The president. The appointment being protested against. The same sort of rule is on the books at FSU.
None of this directly affects a graduate student’s daily situation. House Bill 7, which was also signed into law this year, does. (It is currently on pause due to a federal court injunction.) As was widely reported at the time, the bill restricts what educators can say related to issues of slavery and racism. It is part of a larger push against vaguely defined topics of classroom discussion, which includes other legislation—like the notorious “don’t say gay” bill—and insinuating questionnaires sent to students and faculty. These restrictions are now being introduced to the tenure review process. It’s safe to say that when tenured professors are being boxed in, graduate students are entering a veritable straitjacket.
It’s times like these that the ever-more precarious Florida graduate student might want to turn to their union. Sure, it is a fairly defanged union, unable to pull off a California-style strike or even an overly “disruptive” protest. But a union which nevertheless works on behalf of graduate students to, as mentioned before, double stipends over the last ten years or get 80% of health insurance premiums covered. At the least, it seems that it’s the most powerful entity that can be trusted in the midst of these sorts of “we’ve investigated ourselves and found nothing wrong” shenanigans.
For now. House Bill 1197 calls for, among other things, the decertification of any union where less than 50% of represented members pay dues. For many unions, this is not a problem. The nature of graduate school is different. Every year, a sizable chunk of dues-paying members leave and are replaced by a collection of incoming graduate students who tend to spend a majority of their time cordoned off in their specific departments, overwhelmed by their own work. This makes any large-scale recruitment extremely arduous, and staying above a 50% threshold functionally impossible. The bill died in the Senate last year, but very well may not this year.
I’m not normally one to be alarmist about these sorts of things. Leaving New York for Texas to attend college, I was occasionally treated as if I’d put myself in serious danger. I thought it silly that a straight, white man would have his college experience viscerally or materially affected by whatever Greg Abbott was doing, especially when you consider that many major universities exist in liberal bubbles. I was right. I thought the same thing when I decided to go to graduate school at Florida State. I’m not so sure I was right. The recent midterm elections and the University of Florida debacle have made me even less sure. I get that the lives of a majority of graduate students in Florida are currently indistinguishable from those of graduate students elsewhere. But at times it seems that Florida graduate students are like Wile E. Coyote as he runs off the edge of a cliff, knowing that if he doesn’t look down he can stand on empty air, but that, sooner or later, the Florida government will turn on the gravity and send him plummeting.
This is not a normal plea for better working conditions for graduate students. It’s not a polemic. I’m not here trafficking in political principles, and not calling for collective action. This is about prospective graduate students making a decision for themselves personally. In Florida, your financial and academic opportunities are in the hands of a legislative supermajority than gains politically when they directly contradict the demands of workers in higher education, whatever those demands may be, and the collective bargaining safeguards are weak. These are the facts.
That may be a risk you’re willing to take. But it’s not a risk you have to take. Earlier, I referenced the common refrain that you shouldn’t choose graduate schools based on superficial things like location. The idea is that the job market is so tough that you have to make sacrifices in order to give yourself a shot at a career in academia. But the job market in academic philosophy is not tough. It is camel-through-a-needle’s-eye impossible. The benefit you gain from going to one graduate school as opposed to another, with some exceptions, is negligible. And when you consider state politics, differences in location aren’t superficial. They’re tangible. You’re not being frivolous by taking into consideration the issues that I’m describing. You’re being cautious.
**DISCLAIMER: The views expressed in this piece come from the author personally, not as a representative of FSU-GAU.
Gabriel Thomas Tugendstein
Gabriel Thomas Tugendstein is a graduate student at Florida State University, and the Executive Vice President of FSU’s Graduate Assistants United. He studies moral psychology, the philosophy of emotions, and the philosophy of cognitive science.
