Unpaid Internships and the Politics of Privilege

Posted on May 4, 2013 by

At Al Jazeera English, I have a new article about the alleged auction of a UN internship for $22,000, and on unpaid internships in general. An excerpt:

UN internships may not be up for auction, but they are, in essence, for sale. The United Nations does not pay its interns, making it very difficult for someone who is not independently wealthy to take an internship. The only thing that distinguishes the alleged auction from the UN’s normal practice is that the unspoken class discrimination is made blatant.

“Given the high cost of living in key UN cities, such as New York and Geneva, undertaking a UN internship is an experience that few can afford, especially those from the very developing countries the organisation strives to serve,” wrote the group UnPaid Is Unfair in a 2012 petition calling on the United Nations to stop using free labour.

Their call went unheeded. The United Nations’ website includes a form for calculating the personal expenses an intern incurs – expenses the UN conservatively estimates at $2500 per month, not counting travel to New York City or health insurance. The intern is forbidden from taking other paid work during their two-month term, and they not allowed to apply for jobs at the UN for six months following the internship. “A possible source of employment would be the United Nations Volunteers Programme,” the UN website suggests. This programme pays no salary.

“For an organisation that prides itself on inclusion, diversity, and equality, the UN’s refusal to compensate its interns has created a system that counters those very ideals,” writes former UN intern Matt Hamilton, noting that only 5% of UN interns come from the least developed countries. Young people who care about international justice – including those who witness firsthand its erosion in poor, repressive states – cannot afford to work jobs structured on noblesse oblige.

The United Nations is far from the only organisation refusing to pay its interns. Most human rights, policy and development organisations pay interns nothing, but will not hire someone for a job if they lack the kind of experience an internship provides. Privilege is recast as perseverance. The end result hurts individuals struggling in the labour market but also restructures the market itself.

Read the whole thing, Meritocracy for Sale, at Al Jazeera English.

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments

Terrorism and Ethnicity in the American Media

Posted on April 21, 2013 by

I have a new article for Al Jazeera, The wrong kind of Caucasian, on the long history of the American media blaming an entire ethnicity for the violent acts of an individual:

It is easy to criticise the media, and after this disastrous week , there is much to criticise. But the consequences of the casual racism launched at Chechens – and by association, all other Muslims from the former Soviet Union, who are rarely distinguished from one another by the public – are serious. By emphasising the Tsarnaevs’ ethnicity over their individual choices, and portraying that ethnicity as barbaric and violent , the media creates a false image of a people destined by their names and their “ culture of terror ” to kill. There are no people in Chechnya, only symbols. There are no Chechen-Americans, only threats.

Ethnicity is often used to justify violent behaviour. But no ethnicity is inherently violent. Even if the Tsarnaevs aligned themselves with violent Chechen movements – and as of now, there is no evidence they did – treating Chechen ethnicity as the cause of the Boston violence is irresponsible.

One hundred years ago, the violent act of one Polish-American caused a country to treat all Polish-Americans with suspicion. Now, the Poles have become “white” - which is to say they are largely safe from the accusations of treason and murderous intent that ethnic groups deemed non-white routinely face. When a Polish-American commits a crime, his ethnicity does not go on trial with him.

But this change is not a triumph for America. It is a tragedy that it happened to Poles then, and a greater tragedy that we have not learned our lesson and it happens still – to Hispanics, to Arabs, to Chechens, to any immigrant who comes here seeking refuge and finds prejudice instead.

Read the full article here.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | 15 Comments

The Adjunct Crisis Continues

Posted on April 13, 2013 by

I have a new article on Al Jazeera English about adjuncts in academia, but maybe you already knew that. Since it came out on Thursday, it has been shared by over 14,000 people on Facebook and remains the most popular article on the site.

For the uninitiated, an excerpt:

“Is academia a cult? That is debatable, but it is certainly a caste system. Outspoken academics like Pannapacker are rare: most tenured faculty have stayed silent about the adjunct crisis. “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it,” wrote Upton Sinclair, the American author famous for his essays on labour exploitation. Somewhere in America, a tenured professor may be teaching his work, as a nearby adjunct holds office hours out of her car.

On Twitter, I wondered why so many professors who study injustice ignore the plight of their peers. “They don’t consider us their peers,” the adjuncts wrote back. Academia likes to think of itself as a meritocracy - which it is not - and those who have tenured jobs like to think they deserved them. They probably do – but with hundreds of applications per available position, an awful lot of deserving candidates have defaulted to the adjunct track.

The plight of the adjunct shows how personal success is not an excuse to excuse systemic failure. Success is meaningless when the system that sustained it – the higher education system – is no longer sustainable. When it falls, everyone falls. Success is not a pathway out of social responsibility.

Read the whole thing at Al Jazeera English. And thank you everyone for the massive response.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | 6 Comments

New Interview

Posted on April 9, 2013 by

To my surprise, this interview with me on the blog From PhD to Life has gone a little viral, and was featured in The Billfold, Savage Minds, and other places. If you haven’t read it, you can find it here. Thanks everyone!

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

How Academic Paywalls Kill Research Funding

Posted on April 2, 2013 by

Several months ago I predicted that the academic paywall system – which cuts off scholarly work from ordinary people unwilling to shell out hundreds of dollars for a few articles — would ultimately lead to a loss of funding down the road. When the public has no ability to see the work their tax money is funding, they are unlikely to protest when funding is cut – and they are more likely to believe politicians who claim that work is worthless.

My prediction came true with the passing of the Coburn amendment, which prevents the National Science Foundation from funding political science. The move leaves the discipline’s future in jeopardy, but, to some extent, academics themselves are to blame. I wrote for Al Jazeera English:

The loss of NSF funding is a loss for American political science and for Americans. But it is understandable that most Americans do not recognise the significance of this loss. Academia rewards social scientists who prohibit the spread of knowledge more than those who share it. From paywalls to jargon to a tacit moratorium on social media, academics build careers through public disengagement. They should not be surprised when the public then fails to see the relevance of their work. […]

There is no doubt that defunding disciplines like political science means we will lose research of value. There is also no doubt the government will seize any opportunity it can to axe programmes it deems of little significance. What is in doubt is the willingness of academics to forestall budgetary cuts by allowing the public to see the value of their work.

When scholars and society are considered separate, it is politicians like Tom Coburn who benefit. Politicians are able to exploit stereotypes of academics because academia blocks access to its best line of defence: its research.

There is no excuse, in the digital age, for continuing to suppress ideas and insight behind jargon and paywalls. We cannot debate what is in the public interest if the public has no way to discover what interests them.

Read the full article, Academic funding and the public interest: The death of political science, at Al Jazeera English.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

What We Lost When We Lost in Iraq

Posted on March 24, 2013 by

For Al Jazeera English, I reflected on what we lost when we lost the Iraq War:

“Without evidence, confidence cannot arise,” Hans Blix declared to the United Nations in the run up to the war. He was wrong: confidence, like evidence, could be created. The warnings of Blix, Anthony Zinni, Mohamed ElBaradei, the liberal columnists called out as fifth columnists and the hundreds of thousands of protesters around the world changed nothing. When revelation hit, it was with a sense of helplessness that defined the decade to come. Confidence, like evidence, could be destroyed.

The Iraq war is notable not only for journalistic weakness, but for journalistic futility: the futility of fact itself. Fact could not match the fabrications of power. Eventually, our reality shifted to become what they conceived. “I could have set myself on fire in protest on the White House lawn and the war would have proceeded without me,” wrote Bush speechwriter David Frum.

That was the message of the Iraq war: There is no point in speaking truth to power when power is the only truth…

Ten years after the Iraq war, we continue to live in an era of hysterical panic about invented catastrophes and false reassurances about real catastrophes. We laugh bitterly at the ”Mission Accomplished” sign raised nearly a decade before the war ended, but the Bush administration did accomplish something. They accomplished the mission of persuading everyday Americans that the unthinkable is normal.

Read the full article, Iraq and The Reinvention of Reality, at Al Jazeera English.

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Money Money, Ride the Pony

Posted on March 12, 2013 by

In a new article for Al Jazeera, I discuss how Americans – especially young Americans — are being conditioned to accept unpaid labor as normal. This is particularly true in journalism, as the recent debate over the Atlantic reveals:

The news that the Atlantic - one of the oldest and most venerated publications in America – paid its writers little or nothing came as a shock to many, but not to journalists struggling to make a living in the post-employment economy. Freelance rates have plunged over the past decade, a decline tracked on the crowd-sourced website Who Pays Writers? (the answer: hardly anyone).

Some journalists say this is not a big deal. Unpaid labour should be expected, even treasured. In an article called “People Writing for Free on the Internet Is an Enormous Boon to Society”, salaried Slate columnist Matthew Yglesias argued that if people demanded money for their labour, the world would be deprived of important works. “This Nine Inch Nails/Carly Rae Jepsen mashup is amazing, for example,” he wrote.

 Atlantic employees say they feel the freelancers’ pain, but there is nothing they can do. Editor James Bennett apologised for offending Thayer and added that “when we publish original, reported work by freelancers, we pay them”. This claim was dismissed by Atlantic contributors who were paid nothing for their original, reported contributions. In a lengthy defence of the Atlantic’s publishing practices, Technology editor Alexis Madrigal argued that while the game of journalism “sucks”, it was too late to change the rules: “You still have limited funds. You still can’t pay freelancers a living wage.”

But then where is all the money going? “The Atlantic is two things every legacy publishing company would like to be: profitable and more reliant on digital advertising revenues than on print,” writes Forbes magazine. 2012 brought theAtlantic a record profit, beating out the record profit of 2011, with 59 percent of earnings coming from digital revenues. Not every writer at the Atlantic is suffering for their craft. When the Atlantic recruited staff writer Jeffrey Goldberg, they sent his daughter ponies and offered him a lavish six-figure salary. Thayer had once been offered $125,000 by the magazine to write six articles.

The problem in journalism is not that people are writing for free. It is that people are writing for free for companies that are making a profit. It is that people are doing the same work and getting paid radically disparate wages. It is that corporations making record earnings will not allocate their budgets to provide menial compensation to the workers who make them a success.

For more, read the full article, Managed Expectations in the Post-Employment Economy.

Note: The original version of this article stated that the Atlantic bought journalist Jeffrey Goldberg ponies as part of his lavish recruitment package – an anecdote I picked up from a widely cited Howard Kurtz article on the Atlantic’s big-spending ways. Yesterday Goldberg contacted me on Twitter to affirm that the Atlantic merely rented the ponies, but did not buy them.

You got that, everybody? The Atlantic only rented the ponies. You don’t need to worry about journalism anymore.

The status of Mr. Goldberg’s ponies has since been updated. I was happy to make this correction. As a writer who came of age during the Iraq war, I know all too well the importance of getting one’s facts straight.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

The Ethics of Military Aid to Uzbekistan

Posted on March 5, 2013 by

For Al Jazeera English, I take on the heated debate surrounding Western military aid to Uzbekistan:

Analysts have long debated the ethical and strategic ramifications of providing Uzbekistan with military equipment - largely unidentified but allegedly non-lethal - in exchange for a transport route to neighbouring Afghanistan. But the heated discussion that has emerged has more to do with the moral anxiety of Westerners than with the rights or safety of Uzbeks.

What is intended as activism rooted in a critique of Western militarism actually amounts to an endorsement of Western effectiveness, because it rests on the belief that the West has leverage, that our opinion matters, that the fate of nations hinges on us. The hard truth is that in places like Uzbekistan, it does not.

This does not mean that Westerners should not question whether taxpayer money should be used to support violent regimes. But that is one issue, and the welfare of those forced to live under such regimes is another. Conflating the two is a problem, because it distracts from the systematic repression that is carried out in authoritarian states regardless of foreign support. Focusing on military aid turns a complex scenario into a yes or no question, an internal crisis into an external debate. It overstates the influence the West has on foreign governments, and underestimates the capacity of those governments to harm their own people.

Read the full article, Does it matter if the West gives military aid to Uzbekistan?, at Al Jazeera English.

In other Central Asia news, I’m going to be speaking about Uzbekistan at a panel at George Washington University later this month. The panel is loosely based on my Foreign Policy article The Curse of Stability in Central Asia. Details to come!

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

The Generation of Lost Opportunity

Posted on February 26, 2013 by

I have a new article up at Al Jazeera about why baby boomers should stop lecturing us about how to live in a world that no longer exists. I wrote this article in response to a letter Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust published in the New York Times, in which she extols us to not worry about jobs but instead pursue higher education for a “a lifetime of citizenship, opportunity, growth and change”.

Sounds awesome if you can afford it! Which most Americans can’t:

What is most remarkable about Faust’s career is not its culmination in the Harvard presidency, but the system of accessibility and opportunity that allowed her to pursue it. Her life story is a eulogy for an America long since past.

Let’s review what life was like for an American of Faust’s generation. In 1968, when Faust graduated from Bryn Mawr, tuition and board at a four-year private university cost an average of $2,545. As the scion of a wealthy political family, it is doubtful Faust had to worry about affording tuition, but neither did most members of her generation, since the cost of attending college was relatively low. Today, Bryn Mawr costs $53,040 per year – more than the American median household income.

In 1968, $2,545 was about the most you could expect to pay for college – most schools cost half as much, and many public universities were still free. Faust’s generation graduated with little to no debt, unlike today’s university graduate, who owes an average of $27,000. After graduating, Faust decided to pursue a life of public service and got a job - an actual, paying job, right out of college – with the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

The hippie movement reached its height in 1968, but it is perhaps difficult for the modern mind to comprehend the desire to “turn on, tune in and drop out” when such a novel option as post-college employment was available. Today’s graduate seeking a career in government often winds up in an internship, where they work full-time for little to no pay…

Read the whole depressing thing at Al Jazeera: The Unaffordable Baby Boomer Dream

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments

Central Asia’s slow internal rot

Posted on February 20, 2013 by

I have a new article up at Foreign Policy about Central Asia. I argue that the greatest threat to the region is not volatility, as is commonly assumed, but stagnation:

The slow, tortuous decline of Central Asia is something we should all pay attention to — not because it will inevitably lead to state collapse, but because it might not. Central Asia shows how a country (Tajikistan) can spend decades sliding toward a failed state, yet never quite arrive. It shows how mass violence can claim the lives of hundreds, as in Uzbekistan in 2005, yet fail to alter the political structure that predicated it. Above all, Central Asia shows how quiet repression can be as damaging as violent conflict — and more difficult to quell or contest. Central Asia’s biggest problem is not conflict, but stagnation: the consistency of corruption, the chimera of change.[…]

The endurance of Central Asia’s dictatorships serves as a reminder that the collapse of an authoritarian state is not inherently imminent, no matter how bankrupt it is fiscally or morally. Corruption, brutality, and censorship are not necessarily signs of vulnerability, but indicators of the lengths a government will go to preserve its power at the expense of its people. Central Asia’s dictatorships are not surviving on luck, as some experts have claimed, but on fear.

Read the full article at Foreign Policy

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , | 6 Comments