Scabs, Scantrons, and Strikes at the University of Oregon

“Now when I was at Yale leading the TA grade strike at the end of the fall semester in 1995, the university ran into this problem, too. They solved it, in a bunch of cases, by having students simply write on a card the grade they thought they should get…”

This is a somewhat selective version of what occurred. It would be more accurate to say that many TAs thought that GESO’s approach was foolish and unlikely to win anything except the anger of students and parents. The administration, who certainly had their own follies and faults, had to do very little but wait for the grade strike to fall apart as reality became ever clearer.

Actually, I was one of those TAs – and I remember the events of the strike with considerable clarity. I also remember your “leadership” and the way that GESO went about relentlessly pestering grad students, even after you had been told by multiple people to stop calling them. You’ve never faced up to just how unpopular GESO was with grad students – and it’s time you recognized your own culpability in this matter. Creating narratives of how GESO was perfectly virtuous and wise do no-one any favors, especially future activists.

If you can’t face the fact that you and GESO screwed up on this one, at least have the decency not to accuse other people of lying or being misinformed as a way of covering your own ass.

p.s. I remember Robin Brown with some respect because she at least knew when to back off. She also shot a good game of pool.

All this because grad students want two weeks paid leave for illness or childbirth? Wow.

I’d like to know which “consultants” the university has hired. Academics have a huge capacity for assholery, as witnessed by the diversion above, but the memo from the University of Oregon seems to have been crafted by management professionals of a truly low-life kind.

Corey, I suggest being strict on both the ‘no Yale’ and general ‘Unyonz Iz Evul’, assuming that you’d like to keep this thread in the same universe.

Is there a significant difference? Labor struggles at universities, as at other bourgeois institutions, pit workers against management and owners. The latter, having the wealth, social status, and connections, have the use of the boss media, the government, big money, lawyers, and paid and voluntary shills. And they never forget, as we have just observed. Today’s labor struggles, like yesterday’s and tomorrow’s, tend to be variations on a theme, and reference to other such conflicts may add an informative dimension to consideration of the present one, although from what I read above the preparations for strike-breaking seem pretty run-of-the-mill.

How come all the Harry Bennett clones are showing up on this thread? You on a watchlist or something, Corey?

When I was trying to help organize a staff union on my campus 30 years ago, it was expected that the administration would behave like dicks toward staff and students, but the war on grad assistants and adjuncts was just beginning, and not everyone understood that it was all part of the same struggle. Now that we’ve finally gotten down to confirming the University of Phoenix as the template for the whole of higher education, the end game seems a lot clearer….

Shorter version: give ’em hell, Corey. Whatever the outcome, it’s a fight worth taking on.

William Timberman@15: what you said. I’d love to know what is really going on here, and where these previously unseen herds from the right are coming from. Is it just chasing Corey or is there actually a theme server somewhere that sends them out to do battle with unions, grad students, whatever? I wish one of you dark trolls would tell me in what way grad students are not employees, and entitled to any benefits other employees receive. Oh, I forgot, you think nobody should get any benefits whatsoever.

JG

The heartening part here is that (most of?) faculty seem to be on the right side.
The disheartening part is that the TAs are basically fighting for breadcrumbs. That there is even a fight about 2 weeks sick leave and pregnancy (!) leave is just pathetic.

(And what @15 & 19 say — I’m not a big believer in conspiracy theories, but once you hire union-buster firms, I do believe that absolutely everything is possible, including hiring actual people & sock puppets to try to attack the poster and/or derail the post on popular academic blogs and fora, likely to undermine above mentioned support among faculty)

NickT and BenK – same naming model, repeating the same line. Reminds me of JQ’s thread a couple of weeks ago decrying the ‘branding’ crazy taking over University administrators, where his post was quickly denounced as stupid by someone who was quickly revealed to be a uni. administrator.

Who knows what NickT and BenK are all about, but I find it highly unlikely, given the sentiments that they have expressed above, that they are highly attentive CT lurkers or avid readers of CR’s work. So how did they swoop in so quickly and get the first non-OP comments? Funny how that happens.

As for the OP, obviously it is outrageous. The bit about ‘volunteers’ is especially ugly. The hypocrisy looks bad, but – of course- this is not about the particular demands, it is about the power relations themselves, the fact that they feel so emboldened to be making demands.

Just my scattered thoughts.

Kevin Anderson the climate scientist posted on his blog last year about something similar, but more about pay issues. He said as a union member he would support the union’s actions, but really thought they should be pursuing systemic reform of remuneration at universities.

I am not sure of the etiquette about copying this as it says it was a temporary post, but it has been up a year, so I will just copy the first section and hope that is okay (?):

“As a union member I will be taking part in the strike, but wish to emphasise that from a financial perspective it is the distributional issues that are important and not that all academics etc. are inadequately rewarded. Personally, I consider that professors and other senior members of staff are more than adequately remunerated – and actually some are overpaid by a considerable margin. At the same time many of my colleagues who are on short-term research contracts remain financially undervalued and with very uncertain job security, as indeed are many support staff, from P.A.s to technicians and cleaners. I would very strongly favour action that recognised and sought to address such distributional unfairness, and certainly I would support an absolute pay ceiling for anyone working within the university system.”

http://kevinanderson.info/blog/email-to-the-ucu-about-striking-and-academics-pay/

“Who knows what NickT and BenK are all about, but I find it highly unlikely, given the sentiments that they have expressed above, that they are highly attentive CT lurkers or avid readers of CR’s work.”

Google says NickT and BenK have been commenting on Crooked Timber for quite some time.

@27

source plz

In the present case of the UO grad students, which I believe is the topic of this thread, there was an overwhelming mandate by its membership to strike. Nonetheless, no individual GTF is being required to participate in the strike in any particular way, or even to participate at all.

Two weeks off to have a baby! And they have to fight for that. It’s like that Ghandi line when asked: ‘what do you think of western civilization?’ ‘It would be a good idea’.

Val, + 1! to both your comments.

And I don’t much care for conflating maternity and paternity leave here, but that’s a subject for a different thread.

What this union is fighting for is pitifully little.

Lynne, also from a different country

Thanks Lynne @35!

Novakant from your link:

“Paid parental leave has been available as a legal right and/or governmental program for many years, in one form or another, in most countries – with the exceptions of the United States of America, Papua New Guinea, Suriname, and Liberia.”

Unusual collection of countries.

“The United States is the only high income country not to provide such leave. “

Somebody should note that denying maternity leave is a specific blow at equalizing opportunity for women in academia, at a crucial point in their lives – the key bottleneck IIRC, as women score roughly equal up to first degree level. Any institution serious about gender equality in faculty would be offering six months.

We currently have a situation where tenured faculty in the humanities encourage 7 years + of graduate study for students having little to no chance of obtaining tenure track employment. Bully for you that you support a union. Solidarity. Blah, blah, blah. When you start accepting the number of grad students that might actually get jobs we’ll see some real solidarity. But then you’d have to grade your own exams.

WL@42

I’m with you. 7 years + of TAing and no job prospects should come w/health insurance, parental leave, safe working conditions and min wage. Just thinking the bigger picture gets lost. Yes, they should soak your stale bread in milk. Just don’t forget, tenured faculty is management.

Mdc @44

There is considerably more prestige to be a prof at a Ph.D. granting institution including higher pay and more mobility. There is a smaller class load at Ph.D. granting institution. There are more TAs to grade papers and teach sections at a Ph.D. granting institution. It’s in tenured faculty’s interest to have grad students around although the faculty knows that the vast majority of new humanities (and certain social science) Ph.D.’s are unemployable in their field due to lack of tenure track positions. Their class interests are different because they have employment for life. The interests of tenured faculty and grad students are just not aligned. The administration has less control of the tenured faculty than the tenured faculty has over graduate students (and the non-tenured). Seriously, what kind of person encourages someone to sign up for 7 years of minimum wage work as an apprentice knowing full well they will be unemployable in their chosen field?

Isn’t the unemployment rate for humanities PhDs something like 1or 2 percent? Some of those jobs are underpaid and miserable, ie, adjunct teaching. But that’s because of budget cuts that faculty neither advocated nor defend now. I’d bet adjunctification has been held most at bay where faculty is strongest in setting policy.

There’s also something sort of incoherent in claiming that what’s in the true interest of grad students is that they not exist at all.

Mdc

Below is a quote from an article encouraging people to get a humanities PhD (yes, encouraging)

“For most graduate students in the humanities, the relevant data points are well known: In any given year, there are significantly more Ph.D.s than available tenure-track jobs. The median time-to-degree for Ph.D.s in the humanities is nine years. A third of all humanities doctoral students drop out before completing the degree. Of those that do finish, only around half, depending on the discipline, are tenured professors within 10 years.” http://www.psmag.com/education/why-you-should-go-to-graduate-school-in-the-humanities-59821/

I suggest you read the articles by William Pannapacker writing as Thomas H. Benton. He’s not so encouraging.

What’s in the interest of graduate students is that departments continuously graduating under- and unemployed PhDs to accept less grad students or become an M.A. granting department. That is definitely NOT in the interest of tenured faculty. Don’t hold your breath.

@39

The gender issue has indeed been underscored, and it is one of many reasons the UO grad students voted overwhelmingly to strike. It simply isn’t fair to expect women to put off childbearing until graduation, when they face even more uncertainty. But this is exactly what the UO administration expects, as encoded in their “GTFs are students first” rhetoric.

Arguing that grad students would be best served by departments accepting and funding fewer teaching fellows seems kind of like saying autoworkers are best served by owners shutting down auto plants. How many actual grad students would rally behind a movement to cut their own numbers, making job placement less competitive by making admissions more competitive?

Any department that “continuously” turns out “unemployable” degree-holders has a big problem, and is failing in their mission, I agree. I’d be interested to read about a particular case that fits that description. Most professors are pretty zealous about placement for their advisees, in my experience (that’s one source of their “prestige,” at least). Many departments very publicly list the placements of their grads.

If it helps to give some perspective, the Yale unionization effort was extremely divisive between graduate students, especially in different disciplines, and it unfolded over many years. The initial TA Solidarity was in 1987, while the big grade strike was in 2005. So anyone at Yale in a period lasting over a couple of decades would have been impacted. In brief, science students were extremely hostile to GESO, while humanities students tended to be more sympathetic. And the whole mess was tied up in the poisonous relations between the other Yale unions and the university; GESO was affiliated with the unions, which again tended to be both militant and with cool to hostile relations to the sciences.

So it isn’t surprising that the whole effort led to long-term bad feelings, sufficient that they manifest themselves from long-time commenters here. I know that we’re in a stage where we’re supposed to be worshiping unions on the left, and that they’ve done real good overall, but the Yale unions left more than few people with very negative real-world opinions about unions.

Arguing that grad students would be best served by departments accepting and funding fewer teaching fellows seems kind of like saying autoworkers are best served by owners shutting down auto plants.

If autos were made to be fixable, we could shut down a lot of auto plants and the autoworkers could have new careers being neighborhood mechanics rather than production line assemblers. The only interest served by keeping the factories running near maximum is Capital.

I hope you will forgive me if I ask a stupid question out of the ignorance which comes from my very spotty knowledge of academic matters. Why, if it’s such a horrible job, do so many people want to be grad students? There does not seem to be much reward these days. One would probably do better as a plumber or a computer programmer.

@Anarcissie

This is a great question. It really gets to the heart of many discussions.

Being a graduate student is not at all a horrible job, particularly at a well-regarded university, but it isn’t for everyone or suitable at every stage of life.

Being a graduate student, one is able to join a community of scholars, at an enormous facility. One can broadly work in various areas of interest without having to raise independent funding. There is immense freedom regarding working hours and pace, topics and so on. In the sciences, in particular, this may be the only stage of your career when inquiry is so loosely tied to the acquisition of funding before starting the project.
You are typically free from administrative duties as well.

It can be an opportunity to enjoy many of the benefits of teaching without the hassle of being the ‘chief administrator.’

There is also a degree of financial support. It isn’t really wages, per se, given how free ones time can be. However, it is meant to liberate one from having to find the rent each month. It isn’t typically enough to set aside for retirement or anything, but that’s hardly the point. It also isn’t often enough to support a family on one income – although I have seen that done.

If one wants to continue in this relatively idyllic lifestyle of unbounded exploration, working idiosyncratic hours on topics of personal interest, one must typically find grant funding and start paying overhead to an institution. It is a kind of franchise, if you will. Not many people can find that funding and those that do generally accept relatively low salaries – in part because they would prefer to fund their own work than their own salary, but also because it is part of the trade (liberty and prestige vs income). Security used to be part of the package, but it is less so now. Institutional funding streams have been largely replaced by ad hoc project funding; that’s a subject for another debate.

If one looks at it in this light, the essence of graduate school is becoming part of this community, however temporarily, with a relative degree of liberty. Postdoc is perhaps an extension of this state; with more opportunity for supervision, but the increasing weight of deferred income potential. When one moves on to a job in government or industry, all that freedom is given up in return for a better salary and so on.

There is, in my mind, a very clear distinction between proper graduate school – with its intellectual freedom and slight stipend – and medical school, law school, any of the professional schools or trade schools, which have no such freedom and a high price tag. In law school, if future law jobs fail to materialize, all is lost. In graduate school, the education is very much its own reward. A professional student is an education customer; a graduate student is a very junior community member. Neither are a typical ’employee.’

I hope this explains why I think that graduate school is a great thing to do, not a horrible job. It can, of course, be a horrible experience, just as climbing Everest or a six-month tour of Europe can be a horrible (even fatal) experience.

Why, if it’s such a horrible job, do so many people want to be grad students?

Well, being a graduate student isn’t a horrible job – in fact it’s not a job at all. One can after all imagine a set up where grad studies are fully funded and one is simply a student. It’s just that the way things are set up, being a graduate student typically requires taking on a horrible job as well. People do it because in addition to what Rich mentioned, people expect to get less horrible jobs once they’re done with grad school.

To the extent that that expectation is unreasonable, certain reevaluations would have to be made. But this point is utterly irrelevant in the current context, because whatever one thinks of that, it’s perfectly right and fair to demand better conditions for the jobs one has to take on while in grad school.

BenK @ 60 valorizes the same thing that I decry @ 59. Having any degree of enjoyability in a job precisely and negatively reflected in its remuneration seems to me like a kind of negative utilitarianism — how can we make everyone equally and maximally unhappy.

@Rich Puchalsky

We basically agree, as you pointed out, but I am less grim.

However, if you take a bunch of jobs with different non-monetary rewards and give them equal salaries, all you do is create excess competition for the windfall. Suddenly, irrelevant gates are required to keep people out of the more desirable job and in the less desirable one. This happens despite all sorts of other important phenomena in the background (supply, demand, comparative advantage, differences in taste, imperfect information, etc).

I think my original answer was sufficient to address the question as posed (‘why would people choose to be graduate students?’) by exploring some of the non-monetary virtues that the experience can have.

“seems to me like a kind of negative utilitarianism — how can we make everyone equally and maximally unhappy.”

Rich I am going to steal that line and I am not even going to feel bad about it.

Thank you.

“If autos were made to be fixable, we could shut down a lot of auto plants and the autoworkers could have new careers being neighborhood mechanics rather than production line assemblers. The only interest served by keeping the factories running near maximum is Capital.”

If only those fools at the UAW could realize that…

Being a tenured academic at a research institution can be a great job. You get to conduct research in your area of interest. You get to attend conferences in nice places and often get to be a visiting scholar in a cool location if you make the right friends and have a successful research program. You get a sabbatical. The downside can be the pay in urban areas but the upside is that you’ll do fine in many non-urban locations. And you can’t be fired except in very rare circumstances. A job for life is pretty hard to find.

To get this brass ring you need to get a tenure track position and then get tenure. My point is this has become really difficult in the humanities especially if you do not attend a top tier institution — and even then it’s a crap shoot. Nonetheless, as discussed above, it is in the tenured faculty’s interest to keep this ruse going. Unfortunately, many prospective humanities grad students do not know it will take 9 years to complete the degree with no job at the end or they are convinced that they will be the exception in the job market. Tenured faculty should disabuse them of that fantasy.

Mark @69 is right on about the employment prospects and graduate experience varying by discipline. While the humanities generally suck, certain social sciences and natural sciences have good job prospects. I’d be interested to be educated by nat sci folks about what prospects look like there. It seems that 9 years of study should produce a job in your field.

This blogger thinks a PhD in econ is the way to go.

http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2013/05/if-you-get-phd-get-economics-phd.html

js. 11.24.14 at 6:52 pm @ 62:
‘Well, being a graduate student isn’t a horrible job – in fact it’s not a job at all. …’

If you can strike (with any effect), it’s a job.

TM

Data from 1978-2003 for time to PhD sliced a bunch of ways. Like you, I’d like to see the series extend back further.

http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/infbrief/nsf06312/

My guess as to the lengthening of PhD completion times:

(1) More graduate student teaching (institutional shift to cheap labor) means more time not doing research/dissertation.
(2) Pressure to publish prior to graduating (looks good on job market) means some students divert their attention from finishing dissertation.
(3) PhD less and less the domain of the elite, more people taking out loans to do graduate work, staying in school means loan deferment.

Marc: ” In the sciences, the odds of a tenure-track position are higher, and the alternatives tend to be more highly paid.”

‘Higher’ means what? 25%

As for the alternatives being more highly paid, I’d point out that many of these fields require post-docs, and can pay jack sh*t for them. If there were good opportunities outside academia, that’d be harder.

@QS
PhD completion times have not uniformly lengthened, at least in the sciences. Yes, before WWII, it seems they were shorter. Part of that may have to do with younger ages of starting families, etc. However, at least in the natural sciences, they lengthened considerably and have actually tightened up a bit since the 1970s and 1980s, as far as I can tell. 8-10 years is less common now.

@Anarcissie
You can certainly look for class struggles if you want. A short discussion will not change a hermeneutic of identity politics and conflict; certainly not enough to replace it with something I find more constructive. To preempt the obvious rejoinder, I find conflicts among individuals and even within individuals, all within the context of a not necessarily harmonious community, which is, on the whole, a positive construction and an advance on the alternatives, such as a Hobbesian bellum.

@Barry
The odds of getting a tenured and funded position from the end of the first or second postdoc until post-retirement as Emeritus in the sciences is much lower than 25% now. The expectation that every lab head in biomedicine will have 2 R01s on a repeating loop is hitting up against a hard reality. Getting tenure isn’t the end of the road, its just the end of the first leg of a marathon. But then again, that is asking society to commit to an individual’s dreams and free inquiry at a very high level of resource allocation, not to mention overwhelming institutional overhead that lines other pockets.

This doesn’t make graduate school a bad thing – it highlights why it is a good thing, a unique privilege, and not simply a stepping stone to high incomes as if it were a professional school.

@MPAVictoria
Grad school was hard, particularly emotionally. I think, probably, that most everyone else had several hard years in their 20s. Grad school was a tremendous opportunity, of which I took some advantage. To the degree that I did, it was great. I hope you are able to enjoy your life – not in perpetual anticipation. Laughter is certainly a good start.

“Grad school was hard, particularly emotionally. I think, probably, that most everyone else had several hard years in their 20s. Grad school was a tremendous opportunity, of which I took some advantage. To the degree that I did, it was great. I hope you are able to enjoy your life – not in perpetual anticipation. Laughter is certainly a good start.”

I think you are looking for justification for your position and will say pretty much anything. Your credibility is rapidly decreasing…..

@Anarcissie:

You’re doing a rather good job of constructing a position that (a) has v little to do with what I was saying, and (b) has v little to do with Corey’s point in the post. I don’t want to derail this thread any more, but please continue.

I note that rated academic blog Crooked Timber has basically no content on #defenduss.

I was so blown away by the phrase “talks left and walks right”–how could I never before have heard something so succinct and helpful?–that I could hardly focus on the rest of the piece.

But I know from my teaching that colleges are becoming increasingly like corporations.

It’s hard to win the battle against money. We need a new Saul Alinsky to figure out a strategy.

“The former construction can be used to obscure the reality of the latter, but one need not be deceived.”

But it certainly does obscure the reality of the latter, somewhat. They choose to enter and participate in a guild hierarchy. In a sense, they are pursuing a career, climbing the ladder, not surviving by selling their labor. Nothing’s wrong with organizing, but I don’t think the class analysis, as you apply it, is particularly helpful here.

However, there are a lot of other research positions and industry positions; about half will go immediately into private industry. The other half become postdocs

First, “postdoc” is not a good position to be in for the rest of your life, since it offers basically no opportunity for advancement. Second, there are some research positions, but nowhere near enough to absorb all the excess PhDs who don’t go on to academic posts. Third, even people who do go on to lucrative careers in e.g. finance potentially represent a misallocation of resources: they were trained largely at the public expense and wanted to do science, but couldn’t make a living that way, so they went into some other industry instead. That’s obviously not true for everyone, but it’s definitely true for some people, who would prefer to do research but literally cannot afford to.

I really don’t get the “bill of goods” critique. There will always be more apprentices than teachers-of-apprentices: otherwise, the department would be like a summer camp where every camper becomes a counselor. Granted it would be unethical to churn out hordes of miserable, unemployed degree-holders, even if you could hide the fact that this was going on from the next crop of suckers. But in practice, it’s never going to look that simple. *Someone* will always be lucky enough to get a job. So how, in practice, do you know if you’re admitting to many grad students? Seems best to just be honest and public about degree-completion and placement rates, and let the students decide for themselves.

Since there’s been no reaction to this bit, I’ll throw it back out there:

“What I do know is that the system is set up so that faculty are encouraged to take on as many grad students as possible. One reason I learned a few years ago from a message by the Provost: the University was actively seeking to increase the number of grad students because the ratio of grads to undergrads is a metric used in rankings, which means that administrators want that metric to go up just for its own sake, regardless of any educational or research or whatever (even financial) consideration. This is madness, and there is method in it.”

This is an anecdote but it’s true. Is this kind of reasoning common? I’d be curious to know.

@93 @100

You may not have your analysis correct. Maybe the nat sci and some social sci grad students are joining a guild. Not so much for the humanities and soft soc. sci. So given GMs comment @100, maybe the the humanities tenured faculty are the kulaks, serving the czar and helping themselves.

Of people who received PhDs between 1981 and 2003, about one-third had tenure-track academic positions within six years of completing their doctorates. In economics, sociology and political science, the fraction was about one-half. See table 1 here. And as of 2012, only one third of PhD recipients incurred any debt in the course of their graduate work.

I will not speculate on the basis of claims on this thread and elsewhere that graduate school is a scam, “a fool’s errand,” a “bill of goods,” etc. But they are certainly not based on the facts. The truth is, graduate school is a great experience for many people, and the chance of a successful outcome are better than in just about any other professional tournament. Your odds of making a good living as an academic are vastly better than your chances of making a living as a musician, actor, novelist, etc.

If there are any young people reading this thread who are considering graduate school, my advice is: You should go for it. If you care about your field and like teaching, you are quite likely to end up with a satisfying career. And even if you don’t end up with an academic job, there are many worse ways to spend a chunk of your 20s. Don’t listen to the haters.

Looking at the NSF tables a bit more, it turns out that in 2013, 49 percent of people earning doctorates in the social sciences had tenure-track positions within 10 years of getting their PhDs. That’s up slightly from 48 percent a decade ago. Meanwhile, among all non-retired social science PhDs, the fraction with tenure track jobs is 51 percent, approximately the same (and also flat over the past decade). This means that the prospects of new PhDs today are no worse than those of preceding generations. The idea that there has been an expansion in doctoral programs relative to the number of teaching jobs is simply wrong.

I’d view the sciences/humanities distinction on this thread as a matter of degree, not kind. The hard science people definitely have a better chance of getting a tenure-track job and can make a decent living if they drop out of academia. But they don’t do nearly as well as the MBA or elite JD types: either for tenure track or high-paid jobs. There’s a bit of irony here. JD training is largely watered-down humanities, and MBA training, although it purports to be watered-down quantitative social science, is mostly watered-down qualitative social science and cultural socialization. This might be the revenge of humanities majors, if not the humanities faculties.

The true princes of the academy these days are those from the econ-MBA complex. But then again, that seems to be the point of contemporary academia. It’s a much less attractive place than it used to be. At least the physicists who ruled the roost in the 1960’s and 1970’s pretty much bought into classic academic values of inquiry, despite their intellectual arrogance. Maybe intellectual arrogance is a good thing. The modern ruling class is all about market share and profitability.

“maybe the humanities tenured faculty are the kulaks, serving the czar and helping themselves.”

Wha? Here’s where your class/labor relations analysis doesn’t make sense: some (not all) full-time faculty have an interest in there being grad students, it’s true. But you know who else does? Grad students themselves! Both groups want to pursue advanced studies in the humanities, one from the side of the teacher, one from the side of the student. Faculty’s interests are not opposed to higher pay, better working conditions, and good job prospects for grad students, which is why many of them advocate for these things. At the least, well-funded, well-placed grads add to a department’s “prestige.”

Also, I don’t get your references to “tenured faculty.” Junior faculty also work with grad students. Hell, I even had TAs when I was adjuncting.

@108: It was pretty comprehensive as far as I could tell. It doesn’t account for people who dropped out, which is typically of order a quarter of the incoming class, usually in the first 2 years (e.g. they don’t pass the qualifying exams or a dissertation advisor.)

The hard sciences have a viable non-academic career route post-graduation, which is the difference.

JW @110

Since nat sci PhDs have non-academic employment alternatives in their fields, the comparison is not apples-to-apples. There are private and public sector jobs in the life sciences. Not much need for a used philosophy store. As a wise commentator mentioned above, it also varies by field within the nat sci.

In physics, for example, over 50% of PhDs wind up doing physics in the private sector and have for quite a while. I’d be surprised if entering grad students were unaware of this.
http://www.aps.org/careers/guidance/webinars/upload/PhDs-in-the-US.pdf

Sorry, meant to write “physical science or biological science” in first sentence above.

“Here’s where your class/labor relations analysis doesn’t make sense: some (not all) full-time faculty have an interest in there being grad students, it’s true. But you know who else does? Grad students themselves! Both groups want to pursue advanced studies in the humanities, one from the side of the teacher, one from the side of the student. Faculty’s interests are not opposed to higher pay, better working conditions, and good job prospects for grad students, which is why many of them advocate for these things. At the least, well-funded, well-placed grads add to a department’s “prestige.””

Grad students don’t just “want to pursue advanced studies in the humanities”, they want to do so with a specific goal in mind – usually having a career in the academy. If more PhD students are admitted than can be reasonably expected to find jobs, you’ll have people with PhDs working under horrible conditions as adjuncts. If fewer students are admitted, you’ll have more people disappointed that they didn’t get into PhD programs. There’s heartache and disappointment on either side of the equation.

My university responded to cuts in funding by increasing the number of grad students while cutting the support available to us. The stress of not knowing if I would have a TA position from quarter to quarter led me to develop a health condition that keeps me in chronic pain and fatigue. After wasting 7 years researching things I’m very passionate about, I have half a dissertation, I’m simultaneously over and under qualified for all of the jobs I apply for, and I lack the energy to get out of bed for days at a time.

Do I have an interest in there being more grad students?

TM @ 99:

Yes, this kind of reasoning is common. It’s especially so within university systems. In the University of California, for example, there is a new formula for distributing state funding that strongly favors the campuses with the most PhD students–hence, each campus is trying to expand their doctoral programs, in a kind of insane arms race.

On the other hand, the accreditation process is finally starting to take career outcomes seriously. For our review last year we had to provide detailed accounts of where graduates of our doctoral program are working, and the university is starting to keep tabs on this information on a yearly basis.

Barry@108:
I said “elite JDs”. And I do read LGM. And they’re right, of course.
The undergrads who do elite JDs could mostly have done a rigorous Ph.D. program if they were so inclined, so I thought a comparison would be fair. (Indeed, I know one of them who dropped out of her law firm job after only a few weeks, and went for a physics Ph.D. And she was a sociology undergrad!) The non-elite J.D.s are typically in a different pool, although I have met some awful smart people from the Jesus Barbecue School of Law.