On March 25, students at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), where I have taught since 2011, erupted in protest over the alleged exploitation of free student labor by faculty, both in their capacities as educators and as architects in private practice. The specific allegations that sparked the protests have been well-documented in RECORD and elsewhere, but in brief, students alleged that certain faculty who wield influence over students’ career prospects—and hold decision-making power over school scholarships—used their power to coerce students into poorly paid or unpaid internships in their private offices. This phenomenon is not unique to SCI-Arc; it is rampant globally throughout architectural education and practice. Dozens of my former students have stories attesting to it. Let’s face it: chances are that if you’re reading this, you have your own personal experience with it or know someone who does.

The United States’ Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 describes labor trafficking as “involuntary servitude” in which traffickers use force, fraud, or coercion to compel a person to work on the threat of serious harm. Federal labor laws in turn define serious harm as encompassing “psychological, financial, or reputational harm, that is sufficiently serious” to compel a “reasonable person of the same background and in the same circumstances” to work in order to avoid incurring it. Of course, coercion in architecture cannot be compared to the plight of human trafficking victims, and unpaid internships remain common in many industries across the country. Nonetheless, when a professor directly or indirectly suggests to a student that they perform uncompensated labor under threat of losing a scholarship or receiving a negative letter of recommendation, they commit a serious ethical breach—and one that comes uncomfortably close to how trafficking is defined.