TIMES are tough for Debbie, a prostitute in western England who runs a
private flat with other “mature ladies”. She does two or three jobs a
day. A year ago she was doing eight or nine. She has cut her prices: “If
I hadn’t, I wouldn’t still be open.” She says that she can now make
more money doing up furniture and attending car-boot sales than she can
turning tricks.
George McCoy, who runs a website reviewing over 5,000 massage
parlours and individuals, says that many are struggling. Sex workers
tell him they have been forced to hold down prices. Like other
businesses, massage parlours and private flats are suffering from rising
rents and energy costs. Even Mr McCoy’s website is under the cosh:
visitor numbers are down by a third.
In part, this reflects the sluggish
economy. Overall consumer spending at the end of 2012 was almost 4%
lower than its 2007 peak. And Vivienne, an independent escort in the
south who works part-time to supplement her income as a photographer,
says paying for sex is a luxury: “Food is more important; the mortgage
is more important; petrol is more important.” She is offering discounts
out of desperation, reckoning it is better to reduce prices by £20 ($30)
than to have no customers at all. Another woman says that some punters
are just as anxious to talk about the difficult job market as they are
to have sex.
The days of being able to make a full-time living out of prostitution
are long gone, reckons Vivienne, at least in larger towns and cities.
“It’s stupidly competitive right now,” she laments. More people are
entering prostitution, agrees Cari Mitchell of the English Collective of
Prostitutes. Some working women in Westminster say they have halved
their prices because the market has become so saturated. In London, and
increasingly elsewhere, immigrants provide strong competition. But
Sophie, an expensive escort in Edinburgh, says she is seeing an influx
of newbies including students and the recently laid-off, many of them
offering more for less.
Parts of the sex trade are comparatively hale. At the top end of the
market, Marie, another escort in Scotland, says custom has not dried up.
Girls increasingly report requests for discounts, she says. But those
who lower their prices sometimes swiftly raise them again, deterred by
the kind of customer who is attracted to bargains. The market for
dominatrices is holding up well, too, according to Mr McCoy. Some of the
cheapest massage parlours, such as Club 25 in Sheffield (the price is
in the name), attractive to the skint, are busy. Some newcomers are
offering cut-price services such as webcams and phone sex.
On the streets, where prices are lowest and life is harshest, things
are more desperate. Georgina Perry, the service manager for Open Doors,
an NHS centre in east London that offers health services to sex workers,
says that in the past few years some former prostitutes who had found
low-paid work, for example as cleaners, have returned to the sex trade
as other jobs have become harder to find. The women are back on the
streets, charging £20 at most.
Many of these changes reflect broader trends in Britain’s unstable,
part-time economy. But the danger in sex work is greater than in other
industries. Newcomers advertising on websites include photos of their
faces, their e-mail addresses and offers of risky services in their
profiles, says Sophie, the Edinburgh escort, aghast. Moving around in
search of clients, prostitutes must deal with unfamiliar and potentially
dangerous men. Since July 310 have contacted Ugly Mugs, a scheme that
encourages sex workers to report violence, although only around a
quarter went to the police. Sex workers are taking greater risks for
smaller returns.
ON THE evening before All Saints' Day in 1517, Martin Luther nailed
95 theses to the door of a church in Wittenberg. In those days a thesis
was simply a position one wanted to argue. Luther, an Augustinian friar,
asserted that Christians could not buy their way to heaven. Today a
doctoral thesis is both an idea and an account of a period of original
research. Writing one is the aim of the hundreds of thousands of
students who embark on a doctorate of philosophy (PhD) every year.
In most countries a PhD is a basic requirement for a career in
academia. It is an introduction to the world of independent research—a
kind of intellectual masterpiece, created by an apprentice in close
collaboration with a supervisor. The requirements to complete one vary
enormously between countries, universities and even subjects. Some
students will first have to spend two years working on a master's degree
or diploma. Some will receive a stipend; others will pay their own way.
Some PhDs involve only research, some require classes and examinations
and some require the student to teach undergraduates. A thesis can be
dozens of pages in mathematics, or many hundreds in history. As a
result, newly minted PhDs can be as young as their early 20s or
world-weary forty-somethings.
One thing many PhD students have in common is dissatisfaction. Some
describe their work as “slave labour”. Seven-day weeks, ten-hour days,
low pay and uncertain prospects are widespread. You know you are a
graduate student, goes one quip, when your office is better decorated
than your home and you have a favourite flavour of instant noodle. “It
isn't graduate school itself that is discouraging,” says one student,
who confesses to rather enjoying the hunt for free pizza. “What's
discouraging is realising the end point has been yanked out of reach.”
Whining PhD students are nothing new, but there seem to be genuine
problems with the system that produces research doctorates (the
practical “professional doctorates” in fields such as law, business and
medicine have a more obvious value). There is an oversupply of PhDs.
Although a doctorate is designed as training for a job in academia, the
number of PhD positions is unrelated to the number of job openings.
Meanwhile, business leaders complain about shortages of high-level
skills, suggesting PhDs are not teaching the right things. The fiercest
critics compare research doctorates to Ponzi or pyramid schemes.
Rich pickings
For most of history even a first degree at a university was the
privilege of a rich few, and many academic staff did not hold
doctorates. But as higher education expanded after the second world war,
so did the expectation that lecturers would hold advanced degrees.
American universities geared up first: by 1970 America was producing
just under a third of the world's university students and half of its
science and technology PhDs (at that time it had only 6% of the global
population). Since then America's annual output of PhDs has doubled, to
64,000.
Other countries are catching up. Between 1998 and 2006 the number of
doctorates handed out in all OECD countries grew by 40%, compared with
22% for America. PhD production sped up most dramatically in Mexico,
Portugal, Italy and Slovakia. Even Japan, where the number of young
people is shrinking, churned out about 46% more PhDs. Part of that
growth reflects the expansion of university education outside America.
Richard Freeman, a labour economist at Harvard University, says that by
2006 America was enrolling just 12% of the world's students.
But universities have discovered that PhD students are cheap, highly
motivated and disposable labour. With more PhD students they can do more
research, and in some countries more teaching, with less money. A
graduate assistant at Yale might earn $20,000 a year for nine months of
teaching. The average pay of full professors in America was $109,000 in
2009—higher than the average for judges and magistrates.
Indeed, the production of PhDs has far outstripped demand for
university lecturers. In a recent book, Andrew Hacker and Claudia
Dreifus, an academic and a journalist, report that America produced more
than 100,000 doctoral degrees between 2005 and 2009. In the same period
there were just 16,000 new professorships. Using PhD students to do
much of the undergraduate teaching cuts the number of full-time jobs.
Even in Canada, where the output of PhD graduates has grown relatively
modestly, universities conferred 4,800 doctorate degrees in 2007 but
hired just 2,616 new full-time professors. Only a few fast-developing
countries, such as Brazil and China, now seem short of PhDs.
A short course in supply and demand
In research the story is similar. PhD students and contract staff
known as “postdocs”, described by one student as “the ugly underbelly of
academia”, do much of the research these days. There is a glut of
postdocs too. Dr Freeman concluded from pre-2000 data that if American
faculty jobs in the life sciences were increasing at 5% a year, just 20%
of students would land one. In Canada 80% of postdocs earn $38,600 or
less per year before tax—the average salary of a construction worker.
The rise of the postdoc has created another obstacle on the way to an
academic post. In some areas five years as a postdoc is now a
prerequisite for landing a secure full-time job.
These armies of low-paid PhD researchers and postdocs boost
universities', and therefore countries', research capacity. Yet that is
not always a good thing. Brilliant, well-trained minds can go to waste
when fashions change. The post-Sputnik era drove the rapid growth in PhD
physicists that came to an abrupt halt as the Vietnam war drained the
science budget. Brian Schwartz, a professor of physics at the City
University of New York, says that in the 1970s as many as 5,000
physicists had to find jobs in other areas.
In America the rise of PhD teachers' unions reflects the breakdown of
an implicit contract between universities and PhD students: crummy pay
now for a good academic job later. Student teachers in public
universities such as the University of Wisconsin-Madison formed unions
as early as the 1960s, but the pace of unionisation has increased
recently. Unions are now spreading to private universities; though Yale
and Cornell, where university administrators and some faculty argue that
PhD students who teach are not workers but apprentices, have resisted
union drives. In 2002 New York University was the first private
university to recognise a PhD teachers' union, but stopped negotiating
with it three years later.
In some countries, such as Britain and America, poor pay and job
prospects are reflected in the number of foreign-born PhD students. Dr
Freeman estimates that in 1966 only 23% of science and engineering PhDs
in America were awarded to students born outside the country. By 2006
that proportion had increased to 48%. Foreign students tend to tolerate
poorer working conditions, and the supply of cheap, brilliant, foreign
labour also keeps wages down.
A PhD may offer no financial benefit over a master's degree. It can even reduce earnings
Proponents of the PhD argue that it is worthwhile even if it does not
lead to permanent academic employment. Not every student embarks on a
PhD wanting a university career and many move successfully into
private-sector jobs in, for instance, industrial research. That is true;
but drop-out rates suggest that many students become dispirited. In
America only 57% of doctoral students will have a PhD ten years after
their first date of enrolment. In the humanities, where most students
pay for their own PhDs, the figure is 49%. Worse still, whereas in other
subject areas students tend to jump ship in the early years, in the
humanities they cling like limpets before eventually falling off. And
these students started out as the academic cream of the nation. Research
at one American university found that those who finish are no cleverer
than those who do not. Poor supervision, bad job prospects or lack of
money cause them to run out of steam.
Even graduates who find work outside universities may not fare all
that well. PhD courses are so specialised that university careers
offices struggle to assist graduates looking for jobs, and supervisors
tend to have little interest in students who are leaving academia. One
OECD study shows that five years after receiving their degrees, more
than 60% of PhDs in Slovakia and more than 45% in Belgium, the Czech
Republic, Germany and Spain were still on temporary contracts. Many were
postdocs. About one-third of Austria's PhD graduates take jobs
unrelated to their degrees. In Germany 13% of all PhD graduates end up
in lowly occupations. In the Netherlands the proportion is 21%.
A very slim premium
PhD graduates do at least earn more than those with a bachelor's degree. A study in the Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management
by Bernard Casey shows that British men with a bachelor's degree earn
14% more than those who could have gone to university but chose not to.
The earnings premium for a PhD is 26%. But the premium for a master's
degree, which can be accomplished in as little as one year, is almost as
high, at 23%. In some subjects the premium for a PhD vanishes entirely.
PhDs in maths and computing, social sciences and languages earn no more
than those with master's degrees. The premium for a PhD is actually
smaller than for a master's degree in engineering and technology,
architecture and education. Only in medicine, other sciences, and
business and financial studies is it high enough to be worthwhile. Over
all subjects, a PhD commands only a 3% premium over a master's degree.
Dr Schwartz, the New York physicist, says the skills learned in the
course of a PhD can be readily acquired through much shorter courses.
Thirty years ago, he says, Wall Street firms realised that some
physicists could work out differential equations and recruited them to
become “quants”, analysts and traders. Today several short courses offer
the advanced maths useful for finance. “A PhD physicist with one course
on differential equations is not competitive,” says Dr Schwartz.
Many students say they are pursuing their subject out of love, and
that education is an end in itself. Some give little thought to where
the qualification might lead. In one study of British PhD graduates,
about a third admitted that they were doing their doctorate partly to go
on being a student, or put off job hunting. Nearly half of engineering
students admitted to this. Scientists can easily get stipends, and
therefore drift into doing a PhD. But there are penalties, as well as
benefits, to staying at university. Workers with “surplus
schooling”—more education than a job requires—are likely to be less
satisfied, less productive and more likely to say they are going to
leave their jobs.
The interests of universities and tenured academics are misaligned with those of PhD students
Academics tend to regard asking whether a
PhD is worthwhile as analogous to wondering whether there is too much
art or culture in the world. They believe that knowledge spills from
universities into society, making it more productive and healthier. That
may well be true; but doing a PhD may still be a bad choice for an
individual.
The interests of academics and universities on the one hand and PhD
students on the other are not well aligned. The more bright students
stay at universities, the better it is for academics. Postgraduate
students bring in grants and beef up their supervisors' publication
records. Academics pick bright undergraduate students and groom them as
potential graduate students. It isn't in their interests to turn the
smart kids away, at least at the beginning. One female student spoke of
being told of glowing opportunities at the outset, but after seven years
of hard slog she was fobbed off with a joke about finding a rich
husband.
Monica Harris, a professor of psychology at the University of
Kentucky, is a rare exception. She believes that too many PhDs are being
produced, and has stopped admitting them. But such unilateral academic
birth control is rare. One Ivy-League president, asked recently about
PhD oversupply, said that if the top universities cut back others will
step in to offer them instead.
Noble pursuits
Many of the drawbacks of doing a PhD are well known. Your
correspondent was aware of them over a decade ago while she slogged
through a largely pointless PhD in theoretical ecology. As Europeans try
to harmonise higher education, some institutions are pushing the more
structured learning that comes with an American PhD.
The organisations that pay for research have realised that many PhDs
find it tough to transfer their skills into the job market. Writing lab
reports, giving academic presentations and conducting six-month
literature reviews can be surprisingly unhelpful in a world where
technical knowledge has to be assimilated quickly and presented simply
to a wide audience. Some universities are now offering their PhD
students training in soft skills such as communication and teamwork that
may be useful in the labour market. In Britain a four-year NewRoutePhD
claims to develop just such skills in graduates.
Measurements and incentives might be changed, too. Some university
departments and academics regard numbers of PhD graduates as an
indicator of success and compete to produce more. For the students, a
measure of how quickly those students get a permanent job, and what they
earn, would be more useful. Where penalties are levied on academics who
allow PhDs to overrun, the number of students who complete rises
abruptly, suggesting that students were previously allowed to fester.
Many of those who embark on a PhD are the smartest in their class and
will have been the best at everything they have done. They will have
amassed awards and prizes. As this year's new crop of graduate students
bounce into their research, few will be willing to accept that the
system they are entering could be designed for the benefit of others,
that even hard work and brilliance may well not be enough to succeed,
and that they would be better off doing something else. They might use
their research skills to look harder at the lot of the disposable
academic. Someone should write a thesis about that.
The law professor implicated in the
sex-for-grades case has been found guilty of corruption after a trial
that spanned five months, from January to May. He will be sentenced on
Wednesday.
SINGAPORE: The law professor implicated in the
sex-for-grades case has been found guilty of corruption after a trial
that spanned five months, from January to May.
He will be sentenced on Wednesday.
Tey
Tsun Hang, 42, was convicted of all six counts of corruptly obtaining
gratification in the form of gifts and sex from his former student
Darinne Ko Wen Hui, in return for giving her better grades between May
and July 2010.
Following the verdict, the National University of
Singapore (NUS) said it has terminated Tey's employment with immediate
effect. It said in a statement that Tey had contravened the conditions
of his appointment.
The Dean of NUS Faculty of Law, Simon
Chesterman, said that NUS staff and students are expected to behave
ethically and responsibly.
The case centred on Tey's relationship with his former student. The defence had argued it was a mutually-loving relationship.
But
in a 200-page judgement, Chief District Judge Tan Siong Thye listed
reasons why it was one-sided and described it as "an illicit
relationship laced with corrupt intent".
He said Tey never once
mentioned in his statements (to authorities) that he was in love with Ms
Ko, nor had he ever referred to her by her name.
Instead, the
judge said Tey would use "female student" and even "star prosecution
witness" when he referred to her in his cautioned statements.
The judge said Tey only told the court they were in a romantic relationship "as an afterthought".
He noted that in the second tranche of the trial, Tey changed his tune and claimed they were in love.
The judge pointed out that in his email correspondences to Ms Ko, Tey was always "terse" and "sometimes even curt".
Pointing
to Tey's Chinese poem and an email on the background of Frederic Chopin
to Ms Ko, the judge said: "When he (Tey) did write to Ms Ko, it was an
anti-climatic copy-and-paste exercise."
During the
three-hour long judgement, Tey was described as not having any "basic
decency" as he made Ms Ko pay his expenses for a trip to the United
States. At that time, Ms Ko was an exchange student at Duke University
and Tey visited her, but only offered to pay his own airfare.
The judge said this happened when the law professor was earning S$225,000 as at February 2010, while Ms Ko was a mere student.
On Ms Ko's pregnancy, the judge said Tey had told her to abort their child when he found out about it.
The
court heard that at that time, Ms Ko was in the US and Tey told her to
have an abortion there and that he had no money for the operation. She
had to pay US$2,000 herself.
And while Ms Ko may have
showered him gifts out of love and affection, the judge agreed with the
prosecution that the 23-year-old was also trying to get into Tey's good
books.
The judge also impeached the key prosecution
witness' credibility on the reasons for getting the gifts -- the
Monblanc pen, tailored shirts, iPod, as well as the payment of a dinner
bill.
He said there were serious discrepancies in these areas between her CPIB statements and testimony.
The
judge said she negated the corrupt intent and told the court she gave
the gifts without intent to seek special favours. This differed from her
first statement to the CPIB.
The judge said he is of the
view that Ms Ko's first and second statements to the authorities were
reliable and her third was not.
"Sometime after her second
statement on 28 April 2012, she realised that her first statement had
incriminated herself and exposed her to possible charges under the
Prevention of Corruption Act.
"She could be charged as a
giver who corruptly gave gratifications to the accused. She then decided
to retract the incriminating parts of her statement," said Judge Tan.
But
the judge highlighted that it is irrelevant to determine whether Ms Ko
had breached the Act, and that the court should instead focus on Tey's
corrupt intent.
Previously, Tey had argued that there was
no corrupt intent as Ms Ko was an "A" student who did not need him to
give her good grades.
But the court found that Tey had great influence over Ms Ko and the status of the two were "clearly disproportionate".
The judge said favouring Ms Ko need not be extreme. It could just mean bumping her grades up slightly from a "B+" to "A-".
In
court, two professors were asked of their view of Ms Ko's directed
research paper. One said he would give her a "B+" while the other said
he would give either an "A-" or an "A". Tey had awarded Ms Ko an "A".
The
judge stressed that whether Tey had shown favour to Ms Ko or not was
not vital. What was important was that he could influence her grades,
and showed her he could, in order to obtain the gifts.
As for
anonymous marking practised at NUS to deter corruption and favouritism,
the judge said: "The integrity of the anonymous marking system no longer
applied to Ms Ko as the accused would have recognised her handwriting,
as she had sent him several handwritten love cards.
"When a professor and a student are in a relationship, like in this case, the virtues of anonymous marking no longer existed."
Another point of argument was Tey's claim that he reimbursed Ms Ko for the gifts and dinner bill with a S$2,500 cheque.
But
the judge found this to be untrue -- first, because Ms Ko denied
unequivocally ever receiving the reimbursement. Second, that if Tey had
repaid her, she would have told the court and would have been exonerated
of bribing her lecturer.
On Tey's part, the judge said
this was the key to proving his innocence, but he did not inform the
CPIB of the reimbursement for the gifts.
The judge made it
plain that the defence of reimbursement was an "afterthought" as it was
"impossible to estimate the cost of dinner at Garibaldi on 21 July,
2012, before it happened".
Judge Tan said: "The accused
could simply have produced his bank statements to show his withdrawal of
the money (the $2,500 reimbursement), but he chose not to do so.
"As
he would have produced his bank statements if they supported his case,
it stands to reason that his bank statements would, if produced, be
unfavourable to him."
On Tey's mental condition, the judge
rejected psychiatrist Dr Tommy Tan's diagnosis that Tey was suffering
from acute stress disorder. The judge said it was "unreliable" and "not
objective".
In a report dated 2 May, 2013, forensic
psychiatrist Dr Bharat Saluja said Tey "does not suffer from any
psychotic disorder or any organic brain disorder".
Judge
Tan said: "By a process of elimination, since the accused was not
suffering from severe brain damage, organic disorders, or chronic and
severe psychiatric conditions like schizophrenia, it must stand to
reason that the accused was malingering."
The judge said
Tey was also "dishonest" not only in court, but also to Ms Ko, CPIB
officers and medical experts. He said a "depraved" Tey "clearly took
undue advantage" of Ms Ko.
The judge said secrecy and
serendipitousness are common characteristics of someone with criminal
intent and that "evidence against the accused was overwhelming".
The court also rejected Tey's allegations that his statements to the CPIB were made under duress.
The
judge also took into account that Tey had admitted that he breached the
university's code of conduct, but continued to hide this from the
school.
He also said the university is a public body as
it's an instrument to implement government policy. This meant that Tey
was a public servant and the presumption of corruption applied to him.
Judge
Tan said: "In this case, the presumption of corruption under Section 8
of the Prevention of Corruption Act operated against the accused. In
other words, he was assumed to have received the gratifications in the
six charges as an inducement for showing favour to Ms Ko in his
assessment of her academic performance.
"Even without this
presumption, there was sufficient evidence to show beyond a reasonable
doubt his corrupt intention and guilty knowledge. For the above reasons,
I came to the irresistible conclusion that the accused had the corrupt
intention and guilty knowledge in all of the six charges against him."
In
mitigation, Tey's lawyer Peter Low asked for a stiff fine. He said if
the court had to give a custodial sentence, to make it a short one.
During the hearing, Tey was seen listening intently to the judge as he sat in the dock with his head bowed low.
Once
the session was over, Tey was greeted by his supporters, most of whom
are his colleagues. They were visibly upset with his conviction and
teared when they hugged him.
Tey will be sentenced on Wednesday. He could be jailed up to five years and fined up to S$100,000 on each charge.
