Note that teaching your own courses can be highly desirable. E.g. if you’re a grad student aspiring to a teaching-centric job—a post at a liberal arts college, say—then you want as much real non-assistant instructor experience on your CV as possible, and this can be worth taking on a higher workload to get.

Rather, I take it, the point was that some critics of grad unions seem to think that grad students don’t do what course instructors do—rather, they merely “assist.” Of course, some grad employees at some schools start out teaching their own courses right away. And some never teach their own courses—instead assisting or doing office work. But many will do a little both (or a lot of one and a little of the other).

For the record, most of those striking at Michigan are teaching assistants—they handle discussion sections, office hours, and grading but typically are not responsible for teaching courses independently.

First of all, there is no credible evidence that unionization typically harms the “apprenticeship relationship.” Which is totally unsurprising, since anything vaguely resembling an “apprenticeship relationship” would be a relationship between you and one or more of the faculty members in your dept., not a relationship between you and the employer (administration) that is desperately trying to avoid helping you pay your rent.

Graduate employees (not “teaching assistants”: we teach our own classes) are de facto adjunct instructors at every big university in the United States. And you’re right, they definitely need to unionize. Sounds like we’ve reached agreement.

Grad students are not hired to perform essential labor???? WTF? Jeez, what a surprise that some think you don’t argue in good faith!

OK, let’s put some numbers on this. In my dept (English) at my public university, Teaching Fellow grad students teach ALL of the english composition courses, in part because they are highly labor-intensive and none of the tenured professors are willing to teach them. These are by far the most numerous English courses, since every undergrad has two take two of them to fuflill core curriculum requirements. Sure sounds like essential labor to teach these required courses, huh?

So, I looked at the Spring 2005 class schedule, and there are about 100 english comp courses that need someone to teach them. So the university looks at this equation: they can pay a grad student about $2000/course, with 2 courses being considered a “full load” for a full-time grad student, or they can pay a professor anywhere from $40k (starting salary for tenure-track) to $70k (for an experienced, tenured professor) to teach 2-3 classes per semester.

You can see where this is heading. The administration will always choose to pay a grad student $10K/year to teach 5 courses of composition, rather than pay $40K-$70K/ year to a tenure-track or tenured professor to teach those same 5 classes. Cost savings to the university: anywhere from 30 to 60 thousand dollars.

There’s a lot more in your last post that I could take objection to, Aeon, especially your comment that grad students are getting their PhD “for free,” but I think everyone else gets the idea.

Oh, and once again, I’ll mention that as a grad student, I had to PAY BACK some of my meager 10K earnings for my graduate tuition. My school did NOT give tuition waivers to its teaching fellows. So no matter how you slice it, I didn’t get anything “for free.”

When offered a TA position, the decision to take it was an easy one for me. I worked out what I was being paid as a part-time employee elsewhere in a real job, and with the stipend and tuition, it was clearly a better deal to become a TA. It wasn’t “funny money” from my perspective—I am still paying off the loans I had to take to pay for my first year in school.

The arguments here seem to be at cross-purposes: what the labor of graduate students is worth (determined in part by an abundance of adjuncts available) and what it should be worth. The two numbers are not even in the same ball park. Providing more benefits for teaching assistants—who are already in a privileged situation in comparison to both unfunded graduate students and adjunct professors—only adds to the problem. A more workable solution is to encourage unionization among adjuncts, and allow them to be paid more reasonable wages for their work.

I agree with much of what you say, but why assume that the problem is overproduction of Ph. Ds. There is no shortage of teaching work, there is a shortage of good teaching jobs—along with a surfeit of insecure, underpaid adjunct positions. Nor is there a shortage of people who would love to take classes with a humanioties professor but lack the money, the time or the credentials. Artificailly restricting the production of something that is obviously highly desired—look what people pay for it!—doesn’t strike me as the best solution for anyone.

More broadly, I would hope and expect that as a society grows richer a greater proportion of its resources wll go into higher education. It’s a superior good in the economic sense and a hard area to substitute capital for labor.

Your rage toward others’ excepted, I have sympathy for you & that’s why I think part of any sound unionisation measure should be to regulate the production of PhDs—meantime, you may, in your long years with the Classics, have come across this as something to think about regarding your anger at others concerning your PhD and current job situation:

“tous mên goêteuthentas, hôs egôimai, kan su phaiês einai hoi an metadoxasôsin ê huph’ hêdonês kêlêthentes ê hupo phobou ti deisantes.”

This is insulting and disgusting. I tried for four years after graduation to find work more permanent than a one-term adjunctship, and couldn’t.

Why not bring back indentured servitude? I suppose that’s not harsh enough for our pet libertarians. How about cutting pieces, since many graduate students in the humanities incur serious student loan debts?

One who knows something of Roman law or The merchant of Venice will know what I’m alluding to.

Because some people think there’s more to life than fulfilling the demands of the market.”

But therein lies the problem. Those same people apparently want to get paid as if they were fulfilling the demands of the market.

As for the idea that TAs are somehow in some kind of apprenticeship, I was TAing the same class as an undergraduate being paid minimum wage that I was given a TAship for as a graduate. The pay was better and it had benefits but it wasn’t somehow training for a later career.

The idea that the pay is fair because the TA position is only 20 hours a week is neglecting that those are the required teaching/grading/office hours. On top of that is responding to email, helping struggling students, rescedualing labs and tests. This is then combined with the need to take classes and complete research leaving most students with 50-80 hour work weeks with 18k a year in take home.

Look into the rates of depression in grad school and ask yourself if grad students are getting a fair deal.

Unfortunately I really doubt that unionization will make a difference either way since the school just don’t have the money.