Since becoming a public historian, I have supervised both paid and unpaid interns at two different federal agencies (the U.S. Public Health Service and the National Park Service). Interns are common at the National Museum of American History (Smithsonian) which is where I currently work. However, because supervising interns requires a substantial amount of time and because of several concerns I have regarding internships I have postponed taking on any interns during my two years at NMAH.

In my previous federal positions, supervising an intern and taking the time to teach him or her the skills needed—only to have him or her leave as soon as the skill could be of value to us—was difficult. In fact, in the last year at my previous job (at NPS), we received funding for a paid intern which we then declined because staff did not have the time to supervise the person. This decision also came out of a poor experience we had had with a (paid) intern the previous summer. In that situation, we had had only minimal time to supervise the intern (a graduate student) and the project, as a result, was not well-done. Correcting and re-doing the project took more time than it would have taken had we done ourselves from the start. On the flip side, I have also had interns who became wonderful and accomplished colleagues. In short, the quality of interns whom I have supervised has varied widely.

The growing emphasis on internships, both paid and unpaid, presents problems both for employers and for students themselves.

First, students who are best situated to take these internships tend to come from upper-middle-class families. This is especially true in Washington DC where housing is extraordinarily expensive and where there are many interns (which puts a severe burden on the limited available cheap dormitory-style housing). Some programs do provide financial assistance to students from lower socio-economic backgrounds but these opportunities tend to be limited. Middle-class students are often completely locked out of these opportunities as they are too poor both to pay for DC housing and to take non-paying positions yet too wealthy to qualify for financial assistance. It seems apparent that one of the primary reasons our profession is so lacking in socio-economic diversity stems from the fact that students increasingly need to take unpaid or poorly paid internships before they enter our profession; as student loan debt increases, this is a very serious problem.

The recent Black Swan vs. Fox Searchlight court case promised to address some of the more egregious problems inherent in unpaid internships; a lower court had relied on a six-part test used by the Department of Labor to determine whether an employer gets an “immediate advantage” from their labor.   In 2016, the Second Circuit overturned that ruling, saying that interns could be unpaid if the position is sufficiently educational and if the work “complements rather than displaces the work of paid employees.” However, educational standards imposed by the recent Second Circuit opinion are both unclear and untested. They may also present a slippery slope in which students increasingly find themselves working for free, or even, paying for the opportunity to work. Some universities, in fact, already pay public history institutions to take on interns; this creates a strange dynamic as students, through their universities, are basically paying for the right to learn how to work.

Yet even as students take on internships in the belief that these internships teach them the tasks needed in the workplace, internships are often dissimilar to real jobs, which means that students get an artificial understanding of the workplace (they don’t Xerox; they don’t call the caterer; they don’t learn how to balance multiple projects; they often do projects that are artificially constructed etc.) On the other hand, it’s not clear just what “educational” means in the court’s opinion, or it differs from exposure to typical work.

Aside from the fact that interns cannot (and should not) do the real work of our institution for free and aside from the fact that we spend time teaching an intern only to have him/her leave once the skill is learned, I am deeply concerned that we are creating a situation which is similar to the adjunctification crisis in academia. In various jobs I’ve had, I have seen upper management respond to requests for additional paid staff by suggesting the use of unpaid interns instead. While the recent Second Circuit court decision argues that interns may not displace paid employees, these standards are extremely vague and open to interpretation which may be biased in the employer’s favor.

The problems raised by these issues are complex and there are no easy answers. We need to initiate a national discussion about the how the growing requirements for internships burdens students, who often have massive student loan debt, and disadvantages public history practitioners, who find themselves becoming teachers in addition to their full-time duties.

We also may need to reassess how we approach hiring—both permanent hires and temporary hires. At the Public Health Service, we hired graduate students through the federal hiring system for the summer. Because these students were federal employees, students received a real GS salary pegged to their skill level (GS salaries are adjusted for locational pay which meant that students could afford to pay DC rents).   The positions they held were real jobs—as opposed to summer internships.

Similarly, we need to reassess how we view beginning positions in museums, preservation etc. We now require experience for even beginning positions—ironically, this has occurred even as students’ educational qualifications have risen (jobs which required a BA thirty years ago now require an MA). Given the paucity of paid jobs in these fields, most job applicants take unpaid internships to provide them with the necessary experience.   Constructing jobs to be truly entry-level may resolve some aspects of this problem.

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