Division in the Ranks
For my last three years at Yale, I worked at the Yale Writing Center. It was a great job: well-paying, work I liked, good supervisors, a team-like cohort. It was intellectually validating work, the kind that the Yale community values because it is academic, and it was also staffed almost entirely by white women. I would have chosen to take this job regardless of the fact that I had a student contribution to pay, and I might even have chosen to stick with it during the months of junior and senior year when I found myself compromising on my academics and basic self-care and my relationships with other people. It was the kind of job that solidified my sense of belonging in the college world at Yale, reinforcing the identity and academic authority I inhabited as a white woman in the Ivy League, instead of isolating me from people I was supposed to see as my peers.
The problem was that the job of writing tutor gives you a maximum of three to four reliable hours of work a week. Even at a high-wage job like this one, three to four hours a week does not get you anywhere close to the $3,350 I needed to cough up by the end of the year.
A clear division in the ranks of the writing partners emerged. We all had access to a panlist to which any tutor could send an email offering one of their shifts for someone else to cover. Watching this panlist, it became clear that people who worked this job for fun or spending money made very different choices than people who needed to eke out every dollar from it. Some people would offer out their shifts frequently or at the last minute: they would say they wanted to watch a friend’s performance, or their paper was taking longer than they thought, or they were feeling sick and wanted to rest and kick the bug.
People like me, though, would monitor our phones religiously for an email offering another shift. The shifts offered would be claimed within six minutes, so when I saw a notification pop up with a shift, I’d have a snap decision to make: Could I skip the play or poetry reading I’d planned on? Would it be so bad if I turned in my paper two hours late? What if I just slept a little less? Some people would give up their shifts every other week; other people might end up working four or five shifts during reading period. I fell somewhere in the middle, particularly because I had a high school scholarship that created a safety net for the student contribution if I needed it.
As financial aid has moved into the limelight and student power has claimed a stronger voice, I have heard less and less about “gratitude” as the weapon against complaints, but as a freshman and sophomore I felt like I was told frequently that I wasn’t supposed to be angry at Yale because I owed it my gratitude. I have also been told over and over again that students like me should value our work. I did, and it was easy for me to value it because this university easily values white women doing academic work. It has always been easy to be grateful, even when I also was angry. But the work and the opportunities that I found here meant something radically different than it did for many of my peers: they structured my days differently and shifted my priorities, but they also altered the ways I saw myself reflected in the image of the Yale Student. Gratitude should not be a weapon wielded against students who are fighting to see themselves reflected in that image; neither should a $5,950 regressive fee.
The problem was that the job of writing tutor gives you a maximum of three to four reliable hours of work a week. Even at a high-wage job like this one, three to four hours a week does not get you anywhere close to the $3,350 I needed to cough up by the end of the year.
A clear division in the ranks of the writing partners emerged. We all had access to a panlist to which any tutor could send an email offering one of their shifts for someone else to cover. Watching this panlist, it became clear that people who worked this job for fun or spending money made very different choices than people who needed to eke out every dollar from it. Some people would offer out their shifts frequently or at the last minute: they would say they wanted to watch a friend’s performance, or their paper was taking longer than they thought, or they were feeling sick and wanted to rest and kick the bug.
People like me, though, would monitor our phones religiously for an email offering another shift. The shifts offered would be claimed within six minutes, so when I saw a notification pop up with a shift, I’d have a snap decision to make: Could I skip the play or poetry reading I’d planned on? Would it be so bad if I turned in my paper two hours late? What if I just slept a little less? Some people would give up their shifts every other week; other people might end up working four or five shifts during reading period. I fell somewhere in the middle, particularly because I had a high school scholarship that created a safety net for the student contribution if I needed it.
As financial aid has moved into the limelight and student power has claimed a stronger voice, I have heard less and less about “gratitude” as the weapon against complaints, but as a freshman and sophomore I felt like I was told frequently that I wasn’t supposed to be angry at Yale because I owed it my gratitude. I have also been told over and over again that students like me should value our work. I did, and it was easy for me to value it because this university easily values white women doing academic work. It has always been easy to be grateful, even when I also was angry. But the work and the opportunities that I found here meant something radically different than it did for many of my peers: they structured my days differently and shifted my priorities, but they also altered the ways I saw myself reflected in the image of the Yale Student. Gratitude should not be a weapon wielded against students who are fighting to see themselves reflected in that image; neither should a $5,950 regressive fee.
