Mentors, Managers, and Menstrual Marxists: The Academic Plantation and Its Grant-Eating Girlbosses

Introduction: Neoliberal University as the New Factory There was a time when universities were imagined as sanctuaries of critical thought. Today, they resemble logistics centers of intellectual output, administered by a legion of coordinators, project managers, and “mentors” who recite HR scripts disguised as pedagogy. At the center of this transformation is a new working class: overeducated, underpaid, grant-dependent intellectuals, many of whom were students just yesterday, and who now serve as adjuncts, mentors, or coordinators with no real power, but plenty of bureaucratic affect. This essay investigates the rise of what I term the grantariat — precarious intellectual workers, often young, often women, tasked with enforcing neoliberal productivity and inclusivity discourses while themselves subject to economic and institutional fragility. Far from an attack on feminism itself, the essay offers a critique of how institutional feminism has been co-opted into the very systems of control it once sought to dismantle.