I have no idea what other graduate work is like in Med School, Law School, or practical fields like Engineering, or Biology, but I can sum up a humanities/liberal arts education in 4 letters. Or I can use a nice 4 letters: read.
For the past 4 years, I kept talking about how I really, "wanted to get back into reading." Whenever I did pick up and obsessively devoured a novel, I'd think, "this really is fun, I should do this more often."
Well it's not like that.
I've gone from reading 2 novels a year (summer and christmas breaks) to an average of 2 full academic texts per week plus articles, something on the order of 700 pages per week.
But hey, it's just a function of time. And for the honor, I am going deeply into debt. No complaints there, at least that part I entered intentionally. But I can't just sit on my hands - I've got to fight economic ruin as best I can: hence, Federal Work Study.
I've never done FWS before, and it has been a fascinating experience. Not the work itself, that's simple and repetitive (see below), but the scenario. I'm a former radio station manager working on an advanced degree in Islamic Studies, and I'm making copies. OK, I'm also a classics major - perhaps we should have seen that coming, right?
But what about my "peers?" A lot of the doctoral candidates get to do cool things (so called only because I don't have to do them) like teach classes. But there are a fair number of bright, even brilliant, scholars and professionals of much higher calibre than myself grinding out a living (or at least spending coin) running faxes and retyping end notes.
Personally, I assist two different profs, and my duties are:
1) Prof A, gofer: run to one of Columbia's 15 libraries (or off-campus) and bring books back for a prof's research; about 7-10 books/week.
2) Prof B, scan texts. Not articles, not chapters. Full books. 300+ page books.
The first part is not challenging, but gets me familiar with campus, and lets me set my own hours, so it's OK.
The second is a real mind job. I'm conflicted. You see, I get paid $12/hour for however long it takes to do these scans, so the more the better. But I'm also in that prof's class, which means eventually I have to read whatever I scan, and his expectations are high even for Columbia standards. One of my other teachers declared, "at Columbia, we generally prefer not to give more than 100 pages per week for each course..." Well, bully for him. But Prof B (who is still awesome) expects all students to read 2 full books each week, after I scan them in first.
So I spend 2-4 hours standing over a copy machine, scanning in page after page, re-assembling the files, and posting them for the class. Then I spend 5-10 hours reading the stuff I just "created."
On the plus side, it puts me in an opportune position to overhear office gossip. Of course, in the office I work in (Department of Middle Eastern and Asian Languages and Cultures), that gossip is as often in Arabic, Turkish or a variety of other tongues I cannot follow.
Mostly, I think about that which is closest at hand - Am I really going to read this entire book I'm scanning? Is it even legal to be digitizing on this scale? These are expensive books ($35-$125 for most), aren't I disrupting to global academic industry somehow? I don't care - the juciest detail is that by scanning a $35 book, I profit $24 in payment for the 2 hours it takes, and I save the $35 I would have had to spend - but I wonder how widespread this is. When I tell the office staff that I need to scan in the full book, they look at me like I'm crazy, so maybe it's not too common. And hey - why would they assume I'm the crazy one? I'm just FWS, I obviously didn't come up with this idea on my own.
When life gets too dull, or I get frustrated with what's coming up, I just back off for a moment and shuffle papers. Sooner or later, some aspiring scholar of classic Hindi literature is bound to come in and get ambushed by a paper jam. The real world inevitably thrusts itself back into my line-of-sight.
Ah, Refreshing.
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Friday, September 26, 2008
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Scanning whole texts (like copying whole books) is widespread enough so that it's not shocking, and unlawful enough so that people can still be "shocked" by the practice because they "believe in the copyright system."
ReplyDeleteThe thing about the economics of it is that some texts are priced so high because they are expected to have limited demand but some are priced higher because they are expected to be textbooks marketed to a captive audience that will have a guaranteed return. Now, in the case of the former, scanning the text in will at the least perpetuate the prices and at the worst exacerbate the situation. But of course, if you scan in one of the latter, you're actually taking a stick to a monopoly. Of course, the real catch is when you're copying something that's still under copyright but is out of print. What's the obligation to a copyright holder who either won't or can't make their material available?
As for the economics of being overeducated and making copies--well, I was reminded the other day that St. Paul had to keep his day job as a tentmaker--which admittedly sounds like a more interesting job now than standing over a xerox machine, but I can only imagine that making tents was the 1st century equivalent of making copies.
"You need to redo that tent for Quintus Marmitius. He wants it taller."
"Aw man, I was almost done with this letter to my friends in Phillipi"
"Do it on your own denarius, Paul, now get back to work and stop slacking."
I gotta say that I think the prof. who said 100 pages per week is probably off-base. It's depressing to admit, but 700-100 per week was often pretty standard for my first couple of years. You do get used to it. And better at bull****ing. As for the work, it could be worse. Teaching sounds great in theory, but really sucks the hours out of your life. At least this way you are actually getting paid for every hour you work, which is definitely not true for many graduate assistant positions!
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