Seven graduate students from different departments have chosen to deposit their entire stipends into a shared account from which they pay for bills, groceries and other expenses. For two years, the group has pooled their resources as a way to create a culture of intellectual and economic collaboration.
The group has chosen to remain a unified front during interviews and presentations by asking to be quoted as “The Duke Collective” rather than individual members.
The project began in 2012 when a pair of roommates decided to put some of their money into a collective fund to aid friends—most of whom were on international visas and could not legally work, although they needed money—during the summer.
The Collective wrote in a blog post earlier this month that this was just an extension of the wage-sharing the pair already did on a daily basis, such as buying dinner or drinks for friends.
As the project grew, the group decided to move it from a ‘charity fund’ to a full wage-sharing collective with a single bank account. They also share property such as cars and homes.
Members of the collective have not received individual pushback from the administration, but they have been told there are objections to their system of wage sharing—given that individual stipends are a recruiting tool as well as a method of reward for individual students, said Karim Wissa, a member of the collective and a graduate student in literature.
The collective presented at the MLA Subconference in January—a "shadow" conference held alongside the Modern Language Association's annual conference in order for graduate students to express frustrations with the organization and discuss issues of labor and economic precarity. Bennett Carpenter, a graduate student in literature and an organizer for the MLA Subconference, said that they struggled with the group’s de-emphasis on individuals.
“It is a question that those of us organizing… have also been struggling with—how to speak in the name of a collective, not in order to efface individuality, but rather to overcome the individualization of success and failure that is constantly being imposed upon us by the economic and social structures that we live and labor in,” Carpenter wrote in an email Friday.
Wissa noted that wage-sharing is not necessarily unique to the collective. He pointed to families and churches as accepted groups that allow for wages to be pooled and shared.
Carpenter echoed those sentiments. He said that the Collective is challenging the University’s model of "artificial scarcity, competition and fear."
The collective plans to expand with two more members this summer, Wissa said.
Carpenter believes that the Collective can be expanded, but the real push should be for reform in graduate funding and contingent labor at the University level.
As far as the trajectory of the collective is concerned, Wissa has high hopes.
“It's hard to say what the future holds, so let's just be modest— communism,” he wrote.
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