Entitled “Is America Actually Woke” and covering al-Gharbi’s book.
https://www.aaronrenn.com/p/is-america-actually-woke-al-gharbi
Al=Gharbi is a sociologist who argues that America has experienced four cycles of ‘wokeness/political correctness’ in the last century and that the current wave began in 2011. Presumably he has some sort of quantitative measure for ‘wokeness’ — he didn’t get into it.
The broader argument was that the elite liberals at and around Columbia University are hypocrites for espousing concern for the working class while they derive many, many benefits from low-paid labor. I don’t really have an argument for that — I find it annoying as well.
My issue is how Renn frames al-Gharbi’s background, or perhaps more accurately, how al-Gharbi frames his own upbringing. He grew up in a working class military family and attended community college before the University of Arizona and graduate work at Columbia, establishing his authority to speak on class dynamics. However, the podcast strongly suggests that al-Gharbi supported a family of four while at Columbia, in part, by working at a shoe store part-time. He uses this as a familiar critique of graduate student stipends from the outside. ‘These kids are getting paid to study!?!’ ‘How dare they have the temerity to ask for higher wages?’
This is directly at odds with my experience in grad school. We were working a more-than full-time job for near-poverty wages. Refer to this comic popular at the time:
https://phdcomics.com/comics/archive_print.php?comicid=1215
Now, many of us in Midwestern engineering programs knew we were quite privileged. We had a steady paycheck and health insurance, after all, and in Champaign that stipend could support living without roommates and a few nights enjoying craft beer each week. However, the stipends weren’t much better in higher cost-of-living cities, and were far below entry-level wages in the private sector. Apart from the best-funded labs, we didn’t have a guarantee of funding 6 or 12 months in the future. Even as a postdoc, I could narrowly afford to live on the south side of Chicago and still didn’t have luxuries like an employer-matched retirement plan or free access to the gym. Nobody was supporting a family of 4 on grad student wages, and I know at least one postdoc who dropped out of the sciences because her salary was less than the cost of preschool.
And the off-hours retail job? A part-time job in retail was not an option for those of us working 60+ h/week in the lab. If it wasn’t explicitly prevented in our contract, it was at least so strongly discouraged by academic culture that any RA position would be at risk if a student were splitting their efforts between the lab and another workplace. Perhaps the humanities are less stringent, but I sincerely doubt it.
So al-Gharbi’s representation of his fellow graduate students is not at all my experience. Either Columbia’s stipends for humanities students were excessively generous or all of his classmates were independently wealthy. Or, most likely, he is deliberately misrepresenting the lifestyles of graduate students to cozy up into the broader conservative critique of higher education.
Later in the evening, I Googled the sociologist out of curiosity. His biography on Wikipedia is unsurprisingly at odds with his portrayal on the podcast:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musa_al-Gharbi
While a graduate student in Tucson, 2014, al-Gharbi was actually the target of right-wing cancel culture after publishing a statement suggesting (though not directly asserting) that US policy in the Middle East contributed to the formation of ISIS. The controversy and death threats sent to the University of Arizona lead to him being fired as a TA and then going on to sell shoes. His retail job did not seem co-incident with his time at Columbia. He spent six years at Columbia, earning a second masters and PhD. He also had a side-gig as communications director for Jonathan Haidt’s nonprofit group, which presumably supplemented his graduate stipend. And, perhaps, he lived in a dual-income household.
All this is to say that I was frustrated by al-Gharbi’s deliberate mischaracterization of his classmates, and graduate students broadly, as well-compensated layabouts who only think they are poor because their peers earn more in the private sector. There are a multitude of problems in higher education. There certainly are a minority of graduate students who can protest on the quad all day and know they have a trust fund back home. But more broadly, graduate students are neither the causes or the beneficiaries of administrative mismanagement or ‘wokeness.’