Is academia a MLM?
Thoughts on reading Hey, Hun
We are moving this week, and I just sent in an essay for critique in my nonfiction writing workshop, so I don’t have the bandwidth for anything deep. So fluff it is! I hope to get back to more thoughtful content next week.
I have always been fascinated with cult-y cultures. Documentaries about religious cults, White Evangelicals, or the world of MLMs (multilevel marketing) are proliferating on streaming services, and I am here for it.
I just finished reading (actually listening on Audible) to Hey, Hun: Sales, Sisterhood, Supremacy, and the Other Lies Behind Multilevel Marketing by Emily Lynn Paulson. Paulson was a top seller for a cosmetics company for many years, but eventually became disillusioned and quit. While a shallow treatment of the many problems associated with MLMs—the question of "supremacy” get particularly superficial treatment—I enjoyed it immensely.
Obviously, I’m not alone in my love for these swampy stories. So much of US culture is built on a related foundation, including the way that we valorize productivity and monetize the normal human desire for belonging and community, that we all can relate in some way. Anne Helen Peterson wrote about the pervasiveness of MLM culture back in 2019:
“When I first suggested that yoga teacher training was an MLM, someone rightly responded: “it feels like everything today is an MLM.” That’s what happens when an industry is fully enveloped by capitalism: when a hedge fund buys a yoga company — or when universities are figured as money-making businesses, with actual consultants hired to lead them.”
As Peterson alludes to in the quote above, some aspects of academia resemble a pyramid scheme, and I couldn’t help but notice them as I was listening to Paulson read her book. Below I’ve listed three of the points I jotted down while listening and cooking dinner. Let me frontload: OF COURSE there are differences between academia and MLMs. But here’s what sounded disturbingly familiar:
The pyramid part. In a MLM, you get paid not just for selling items (candles, leggings, cosmetics), but also for bringing new sellers into the company. You get a cut of the sales of everyone you recruited, as well as of everyone they recruited, and so on. That’s what creates the pyramid, with the folks who got in early at the top, benefiting from the work of everyone who got in later.
In academia, and especially in the life sciences, faculty get the benefits of the work done by people under them (their “downline”, in MLM speak). The more people in your downline you have, and the harder they work, the more you gain in papers and prestige. Like in an MLM, the overproduction of people at the “bottom” of the scheme
in orderto support those at the top is an essential part of the system. Of course, folks at the bottom are getting training and skills that are real. But the fact remains that grad students are key cogs in the wheel of academic biomedical research and many a grant has been gotten on their backs. And there are far fewer faculty positions than graduate students.Individualizing failures that are in fact systemic. I was struck by the description in the book of a culture where failure—in this case, to make money selling and recruiting new sellers—is firmly established as the individual’s fault. If you don’t make money, it’s because you didn't want it enough. But in reality, the failure of folks at the bottom of the pyramid is a design feature, not a bug. There is absolutely no way to make money if you come in late, are trying to sell and recruit in an already saturated market, and —this really hit me hard—if you aren’t starting with a cushion of funds and a big community of friends and family who have money to spend on your products.
This resonates with many of my experiences as a PhD student and a postdoc, and as a young faculty member. The attitude around failed qualifying exams and floundering 8th year graduate students was to always assume that the student was weak or not trying hard—and rarely to ask what about the program or the advisor might be at fault. If students are terrible at writing papers, it’s because they are intrinsically unable to write well, not because we have no real system for teaching effective scientific writing. I do think things are changing, here, though. In my own graduate program, we’ve worked hard to provide guidance, feedback, and accountability—on the part of the students, the PhD program, and the PhD advisor.
Misleading claims of benefits. According to Paulson, several talking points were designed to attract a certain type of seller, especially white stay-at-home moms. In particular, the idea that you could do the job in the little bits of time around parenting and household chores was attractive, but wholly untrue. She detailed a number of ways that the job took over, rather than fitting around her existing life. She was spending a ton on babysitting in order to attend “business opportunities” that were essentially required part of the seller position!
Academic positions have their benefits, as I know all too well! However, some of the most insistent messaging definitely veers into the “lady doth protest too much” territory. As you will read on #scitwitter occasionally, some faculty (almost always white men, FYI) love, love, love their jobs!! They get to work on whatever they want (I guess just lucky that what they want to study is also what NIH wishes to fund), travel to exotic locales (fantastic if you have no family obligations and are okay with the impact on the environment), work flexible hours (you can choose which 80 hours a week you want to work), and so on.
Discussion Section
Where do you see similarities and differences between academia and MLMs or pyramid schemes or cults?
Where do similarities break down?
I've heard academia be compared to a drug gang, a pyramid scheme, but I think a comparison to an MLM adds something, especially given how pervasive that kind of thinking is in modern corporate business.
I feel the comments about writing, personally. I went to three profs separately after my first semester in an MA, because it was clear that they didn't like my writing, and I asked for help. They offered a couple of platitudes. It wasn't until six years later that I finished my PhD without guidance that they realized that I could, actually, think. But I knew by then that the problem was that, at least in my experience, liberal arts academics tend to be far too fixated on how one says something, about how one proceeds, and on the "hidden curricula" of expectations that I had only recently begun to unravel.
My key insight, then as now, is that being a good philosophy--my field--is not the same as being a good professor. Often, they're opposed, as I see too many people take scholarly positions for the sake of having something to write, of getting attention, even if the argument is facile and anyone of that level of intelligence and dedication should know it.
So, I guess I leave with another thought, the difference between doing well in the field and doing well as a professional in the field.
Where the academia <-> MLM/pyramid scheme parallels *really* started to take off is the trend towards replacing actual faculty positions with low-paid adjuncts with no benefits or security. You're required to have a PhD and formal credentials, but you're literally a GIG WORKER! Of course, this is to allow the tenured faculty to keep doing research (cough, or loafing, cough) instead of teaching undergrad classes, where a large part of university revenue actually comes from
In the "old days", there may not have been ample tenure-track faculty jobs, but at least there were *some* (so I'm told, this pre-dates me). Now, there is literally no place for academic employment for some people who finish grad school. It's not a personal failing to secure a faculty job if those jobs don't exist in the first place!