Three years ago, I fought against the tripling of UK student tuition fees. I did so not because it would effect me but because I’m from the US where we pay a premium for education and I know where that road leads: it’s the road to the neoliberal academy. Congratulations United Kingdom, you have arrived. I’m sure the Iron Lady is wetting her armour in excitement over future geology students having their PhDs sponsored by Shell and archaeologists selling artefacts on eBay to pay back students loans. The bottom line is this: the road to wisdom is now paved with barbs attached to financial chains that will enslave you for the rest of your “career”. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle, so it’s time to start thinking about how you will have to play the game differently to cope with a landscape of slashed funding, corporate creep into research (product placement in fieldwork shots, totally cool) and ever-mounting piles of debt. If you’re already in the work force, you’ve got some re-jigging to do as well. Take it from someone who has tens of thousands in student loans from the US government, if you play the new game by the old rules, you will be crushed. Time to fight fire with fire.
Neoliberal academy new rule #1: stop doing stuff for free or for “credit”
You know what credit buys you? Shit, that’s what. Credit doesn’t pay your rent, school loans or feed your new baby. When someone asks you to work for credit, ask them if they do. I’m willing to bet they get a paycheck for their work and wouldn’t be on the other end of the phone if they didn’t. People are used to academics volunteering their time and that sort of made sense when the state was paying for your education or paying a decent wage without the burden of debt. That’s not the case anymore – tell these people to forget about the notion free knowledge or expert opinion, those are now commodities like everything else. I have honestly had people from Condé Nast and News Corporation tell me they have no “budget” and explain how wonderful “credit” will be for my career. I’ll tell you what it will do for your career from experience – it will get you more phone calls from assholes asking you to work for free. For more on this, check out this post by Sharon Hayes.
Neoliberal academy new rule #2: publish early in high ranking journals, then do something more creative, fun or profitable
Publishing in journals is really rewarding, both in terms of peer feedback and seeing your name in print. It’s also a massive time investment if, as Stewart Elden has suggested, you need to review three articles for every one you publish to satisfy the peer review economy on top of revising your paper for years to get it through. Let’s not kid ourselves, if you don’t publish at least two articles in high ranking journals by the end of your PhD, you’re unlikely to find work in academia. So whether you’re at the beginning of a PhD (see this if you are) or the beginning of a REF cycle, just knock them out. When you do, happily do your three reviews for those journals only (yes, turn all the others down) and then go find grant money, give paid lectures, learn how to paraglide, fall in love, try LSD or read more. Seriously – knowledge springs from new experience as much as from reading, writing, revising and publishing.
During my PhD, I published eight articles. Only three really matter, the three in journals that rank in the top five of the ISI ranking that got me the job at Oxford. I wish I had published in only those three and learned to read French or built a robot with the rest of my time. I’ve got three papers already lined up for the next REF cycle. Each will go to top five journals. After they are submitted (and hopefully published), I will go work on a book that will get my ideas out to the rest of the world and actually make me money rather than money for Elsevier or Blackwell. Oh, and, leading into rule #3, if anyone asks you to pay to publish in their journal, print out that email, urinate on it, and put it on a stick for all to see – those people are evil.
Neoliberal academy rule #3: stop paying for conferences
Why on earth we ever bought into a model of paying someone to present at their conference is beyond me. If you are a PhD student, yes, you are expected to attend international conferences and often it’s financially crippling. If you don’t go to these things you will likely be asked why in your first job interview (if you get one). You can either decide it’s worth the £3000-£5000 you will spend (let’s assume one national and one international conference each year of your PhD) or explain to the interview panel that your daddy didn’t buy your first car, nor would he pay for you to fly to Washington DC to watch Richard Florida give a keynote for $60,000 and then crawl back into his home tanning booth. Local conferences, if you are lucky enough to to live somewhere like London, are better for networking anyway and are often free, though we all know they don’t carry the same weight on your CV, even if no one will say that.
Conferences are important for socialising and if you really can’t afford it but can hitch a ride there, make a fake badge and put it in lanyard or jump the back fence or meet everyone at the pub afterwards. The neoliberal scholar shows no mercy: they are going to need to spend those door fees on Gurkha security guards or motion-activated dome cameras next year.
People’s expectation are all out of whack in terms of conferences – I have had numerous people invite me to present at their conference, let me spend two hours making up a title, writing an abstract and exchanging emails only to then tell me it will be £75-130 for registration. I cancel. Those people should have found funding before they decided to put on a conference.
Neoliberal academy rule #4: demand proper payment for your work
What your time is worth is not what somebody is willing to pay you, it’s about feeling good about time invested. If, for instance, I spend a day on something, I will charge my day rate of £250. If someone wants me to do three days of work for £250 (i.e. for teaching a class with prep and marking), that is not reasonable. Can you imagine telling a lawyer “Hi, I know your really busy and charge £500/hour but can you spend a day writing a letter for me for £50?” They would probably punch you. I would. I’ve taught classes for £80 and spent £12 on the train tickets getting there and then had taxes taken out. That’s fucking insulting.
Now, and this is important, if you are presenting at pretty much anything other than an academic conference, you should be getting paid for it. This includes but is not limited to: corporate speaking invitations, arts festivals and any event that charges an entrance fee (please read Confession of a Public Speaker – it’s incredibly enlightening). My general rule is if someone is making money, I want some of it for investing time in their for-profit venture or bringing in paying audience members. In the interest of transparency here, I would charge no less than £250 (my day rate) plus expenses (transport, hotel, food) and usually not more than £1500 plus expenses, unless the event requires herculean effort. Generally the more I’m paid, the better the talk will be. Getting paid a proper rate simply means I can carve out the time to do the required work or even, in some cases, buy a talented friend dinner to make my powerpoint look really sexy.
Next, if you are making images/audio/text as part of your research praxis and someone wants to use it in a for-profit publication, they must pay for it. I had someone at the Telegraph Media Group sneak these 2013 rates out a back door for me. These are minimum rates for photos this year – do not ever give people photos for less than this: 
Those rates are fine for pictures you took of someone drawing a map or giving a tour of London’s South Bank, but if your pictures are, ahem, unique, you should charge much more than this. Here are minimum magazine rates you should be charging if you’re taking good photos (text and audio pay less, video should pay more, per hour invested):
1/4 page – £150
2/3 page – £280
1 full page – £300
2 page spread – £500
Cover photo – £1500-£3500
One last thing – TV and radio appearances don’t pay much. I sometimes get £150 plus expenses for an interview and they really don’t do much for your career. Unless you enjoy it or are promoting a book or something, turn it down and watch Django unchained with your friends instead.
Neoliberal academy rule #5: your salary is just a base – get other streams of income coming in
A department should get 38-40 hours a week from you. That includes teaching, supervising, research, grant writing, marking, some reading, some writing and some time managing your public image, since that is part of the neoliberal university remit. Everything over and above 40 hours is your time, spent as you wish until the university starts paying overtime. Watching movies at night in a lecture theatre is a good use of off time I find. Or drinking on the roof of your department with friends.
To be fair, what I usually choose to do in that time (like writing this, doing a radio show or taking a photography class) probably benefits the university in some way through exposure or skill advancement – we wouldn’t be academics if we weren’t egotistical knowledge addicts. But those things also get me more money, money that I deserve because I work harder than people with “normal” jobs, despite the opinion of Forbes. I’ll say that again if you like – we deserve more money. Make it your new mantra, say it 100 times a day – it’s true.
The thing is, when my Dad taught at the University of California Riverside back in the 70s, the university (like most employers) paid you enough that you could buy a house, a car, raise a family and save, as any job should. What I get paid now, relatively generous as it is, covers my school loan payments (about £600/month) rent (about £600/month), transportation, bills and food (about £400/month) with just enough left over to drink away the pain. I’m 32 and have a doctorate – that’s ludicrous. So, I make it my mission to spend my free time doubling my base salary every month if at all possible. Not saying it works, or that I even come close but hey, it doesn’t hurt to aim high. Then I blow the money on camera equipment, spa treatments, lawyers and road trips because I might die tomorrow.
Final thoughts
We are all under enormous time pressures these days. A lot of that has to do with technology and social media. There is another blog post to write about how to navigate all that but applying the same ruthlessness outlined here will also free up time in the context of that mess. Generally, get better at saying no and better at doing a really good job at what you say yes to. Getting paid properly helps to follow through with those commitments and do solid work.
With all of this said, if I really believe in something, I will volunteer my time. I have written blog posts for the British Library for free happily, more than once, because I believe in what the British Library does and stands for. The same goes for the BBC. However, that unpaid work must:
1. benefit my career
2. be enjoyable
3. be appreciated
If one of those things is lacking, I won’t touch it, regardless of the high social standing of whatever elite institution wants to give my their cosmic credits or shell currency for my time. And the next for-profit business that asks me to give them a photo or video footage for free is going to get a turd in the post, you lot are unbelievable.
As a reminder, you don’t have that many days to make a mark on the world and I for one sure as hell am not going to spend any (more) of them helping someone else make their mark at my expense, all the while undermining my self esteem by working for free or getting steamrolled by some journalist or corporate scholarly publisher on the back of a specious notion that I’m supposed to be working for the public good on public money. Those days are over and the neoliberal academy has arrived. I say let’s ruin it for everyone and get everyone nostalgic for the good ‘ol days when researchers helped for free. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go win the 2013 Philip Leverhulme Prize like a boss.