Another strike by graduate student instructors in Michigan, looking for better pay and working conditions. The arguments that many professors (and most university administrators) make against graduate student unionization have always struck me as extremely weak. The claim that grad students aren’t actually workers, but instead are the equivalent of apprentices in a guild, simply don’t make sense. Grad students provide cheap labour in the academic system; they aren’t learning by doing so much as they’re providing an essential underpinning to cash-strapped universities’ teaching programmes. The fact that a very large percentage (perhaps the majority?) of teaching grad students don’t then go on to become professors suggests that they don’t derive all that much benefit from their experience – and certainly nothing that would make up for the miserable pay and poor working conditions they have to put up with. Before coming to the US system, I spent two years in University of Toronto, where grad students were unionized, and the system seemed to work very well. While issues that US departments can resolve by fiat had to be resolved through (sometimes tedious and lengthy) negotiations, the university system didn’t come crashing to a halt, and grad student instructors got a manifestly better deal. There’s no reason in principle why the same shouldn’t be true in the US. Of course there are practical difficulties, which in large part stem from the National Labor Relations Board’s disgraceful decision of last year that grad students don’t have the right to unionize. However, this decision was less a reflection of the underlying principles of the matter than it was of the NLRB’s transformation from one of the key components of the New Deal into an organization that systematically takes the side of the bosses in labour-management disputes.
Update: Lemuel Pitkin suggests in comments that my post misunderstands the law here – I should have more correctly stated that the NLRB has ruled that grad students at private universities don’t have the right to unionize. As Lemuel notes, the basic point (there’s no good principled reason to oppose graduate student unionization) still stands.
{ 78 comments }
lemuel pitkin 03.28.05 at 9:30 am
Your post suggests a misunderstanding of the law here.
The NLRB has no jurisdiction over grad employees at public universities (or any other employees of state and local governments.) Basically all unionized graqd employees are at state universities — NYU is the single exception (and the union there is going to have a tough time getting a second contract.) Yes, there have been high-profile campaigns at places like Yale, Cornell, Brown and Columbia, but they have fialed pretty decisively (well, there’s still a smidgen of life in the Columbia campaign.) Meanwhile the Universitie of California, SUNY & CUNY, UMass, Iowa, Michigan, Washington, even the University of Florida have strong and active grad unions. And yes, Henry is right that the impact on grad students’ working & living conditions is very positive and the impact on teaching and researh is nil.
The larger point , to the extent I have one, is that people’s thinking about grad uions, as about almost all other aspects of the acadmic life, is disproportionately domnated by a handful of elite private institutions even tho public universities are fa far bigger part of the higher-ed landscape.
jet 03.28.05 at 9:38 am
“The claim that grad students aren’t actually workers, but instead are the equivalent of apprentices in a guild, simply don’t make sense.”
How is this so? Grad students don’t even bring to the table the ability to replace a trained adjunct as they require training. Almost every grad student is required to take a class/seminar on how to teach. So since they are being instructed on how to educate, this would seem to be an apprentice system.
Then when added in that grad students get a stipend, and some sort of tuition help (almost always full tuition paid for), I’m gonna have to chuckle at them and move on. For some contrast, my wife gets “paid” 30K a year in tuition and stipends. And while most of that is in free tuition, it is certainly compensation. A more than fair deal.
But I don’t know much about the University of Michigan, so perhaps the great bastion of Northern liberalism treats their grad students worse than the schools in the South that I’m more familiar with. But if that’s the case, they might want to think about finishing up their degrees someplace more accommodating.
Andrew 03.28.05 at 9:45 am
“Then when added in that grad students get a stipend, and some sort of tuition help (almost always full tuition paid for), I’m gonna have to chuckle at them and move on.”
Cool. I’ll just flip you the bird here Jet, and move on myself.
Tom Hudson 03.28.05 at 9:54 am
Jet:
When my colleagues who leave with a M.S. could pull down $70k/year in industry, yet I who stayed for a Ph.D. and worked longer hours at my department assistantship than they did in ‘real jobs’ got $20k/year with worse benefits, I suspect there’s something wrong. I was doing the same things they were in industry: supervising junior employees, planning projects, writing up reports.
But that was at a Southern research I school – now that I’ve escaped (with diploma, thanks) I’m teaching at a Southern liberal arts school that wants to pay grad students $8k/year (not including summers).
Matt 03.28.05 at 9:58 am
Lemuel,
For the record, Penn has a quite active union movement and has one more than one union vote, by a significant margain. So, not all the successful unionization moves have been at public univsities. Those moves, as well, were done largely in the 70’s.
Jet- I’ve been a grad student at two quite different institutions. At both, the amount of “training” we received on teaching was significantly less than any decent firm would give their junior hires on how file papers. I’d be surprised if this were out of the norm, though of course I can’t say for sure (and I suspect you can’t, either.) But, if this is the norm (my discussion w/ other grad students seems to indicate that it is) it’s silly to say this makes grad student apprentices, unless you want to stretch the term to apply to every junior hire at nearly every sort of firm, making the term meaningless.
fs 03.28.05 at 10:04 am
Things could well have changed, but a while back in order to pay my way through film school at a Californian university I taught a couple of courses in the math department. At one point I realized that being a T.A. was a better deal – the stipend plus the free tuition was more than my pay, with the workload being equal or even less.
The moral being: ok grad students may benefit by unionization, but it’s really the part-time professors who are the worst off.
Locutor 03.28.05 at 10:08 am
If grad students ever unionize on a national basis, then higher education would be in for a serious hit. Virtually all universities and even some community colleges profit from the miserable wages and compensation given to grad students who teach classes. Of course higher ed authorities fight tooth and nail to keep their grad students from unionizing: they would have to raise tuition way up if they were required to start paying their teaching assistants decent living wages.
When I was at [a midsized state university] as a graduate teaching fellow, not only did the English department pay us a poverty level wage, but then to add insult to injury, the university still charged us tuition and fees, so we had to pay back a substantial portion of those meager wages to our employer! Luckily for them, we grad students were all too poor, disorganized, and pressed for time to unionize.
mw 03.28.05 at 10:12 am
I was a grad student TA (teaching assistant) at Michigan in the mid 80’s. It seemed like a pretty sweet deal, actually–a 40% appointment (16 hours of work a week) was good for a tuition waver and a stipend. In comparison to having to cobble together tuition and living expenses out of low-paid part-time work, summer jobs, and student loans, the TA deal was very good. In fact, it was good enough that the university had a limit on the number of terms that a student could take advantage of the arrangment, and a lot of people maxed out (as I did).
The work itself (leading a couple of discussion sections, grading papers, holding office hours) was not particularly strenuous and would have been valuable preparation had I ended up going into academia. In fact, when Education students do that kind of teacher training (student teaching), not only don’t they get paid at all, they have to PAY tution during their student teaching. Talk about abuses!
In any case, since the time I was a TA, the value of the tuition waver has gone up a lot and I believe the job now includes medical coverage, so it’s already a better deal than it was then. As far as I can tell, TAs also have a much better deal than non-tenure track lecturers do (which the Univesity would likely use more of if a TA contract makes them too expensive).
Matt 03.28.05 at 10:19 am
I should make clear that while Penn has had a successful union movement in terms of wining several votes and having an active group of pro-union students, the administration refuses to recognize the union, and w/ the NLRB decisons does not have to do so. It’s quite strange to think that the work done by the grad students at Michigan is so different from that done at Penn that different rules should apply, to my mind. Additionally, since the start of the unionization movement at Penn, stipends have increased significantly and seem to be more farily distributed. That there is a connection with the unionization drive seems hard to deny.
(None of this is meant in any way to imply that adjuncts don’t have terrible conditions- they do. Unionization is probably even more important for them.)
jet 03.28.05 at 10:22 am
Well to be fair we should look at the trade off between labor and pay. It would appear that grad students have it much better off than adjuncts for the most part in that they usually teach fewer hours yet get paid similarly. So if you are going to cry for someone in the graduate education system, lets start with those who really need it, like adjuncts. I just have trouble finding pity for those working on their Ph D’s, who after a few years, will graduate and move into an elite class with options, like tenure, that most people will never see. These “under payed” grad students are going to move into one of the more privileged sections of society. And they should be paid more than adjuncts for doing the same work?
And Tom Hudson, your friends at their “real jobs” probably devote something like 50-60 hours a week to work. I’d be more than surprised if many grad students spent anything on that order of time teaching, at worst case, 9 hours. And Tom, if you received your PhD, why are you still a grad student? Going for number two? If so, right on brother.
Henry 03.28.05 at 10:29 am
Jet – you’re being a jerk. Desist.
profsynecdoche 03.28.05 at 10:31 am
A quick response to Jet on one point; I do not know exactly what grad students teach in other disciplines, but in literary studies we give grad students the most difficult, time intensive teaching assignment: composition. When I was a graduate student, I spent at least 20-25 hours a week per composition class; teaching two would have definitely equalled the 50-60 hours a week Jet mentions. In my department, most faculty never teach composition because it is too labor intensive.
Zehou 03.28.05 at 10:46 am
Jet writes, “So if you are going to cry for someone in the graduate education system, lets start with those who really need it, like adjuncts. I just have trouble finding pity for those working on their Ph D’s, who after a few years . . . are going to move into one of the more privileged sections of society.”
But, as Henry pointed out above, a great many of those graduate students wind up not as tenured members of “one of the more privileged sections of society,” but rather as adjunct. And the situation of adjuncts is even worse than reported above, since many have huge amounts of educational debt, which they incurred while struggling through graduate school.
If universities are going to work so hard to make sure there are fewer and fewer tenure-track jobs available each year, then the least they could is make sure their graduate students don’t have to incur debt in order to, e.g., pay rent and health insurance.
lemuel pitkin 03.28.05 at 10:58 am
fs, mw and even jet are right that adjuncts’ working conditions are even worse than grad students’, and the pretext that they are not “real” workers even flimsier.
This is a false opposition if ever there was one tho: the impact of grad student unionization on adjuncts is entirely positive. Obviously to the extent that grad students and adjuncts are teaching the same kinds of classes, raising pay for one group will tend to raise pay for the other; and where adjuncts have been able to unionize, it has been through the same organizations as grad students. At NYU, for instance, the UAW successfully organized the adjuncts immediately after the grad students, and the same people worked on both campaigns.
mw, tho, seems to be committing the fallacy (so common there should be a name for it) of pointing to a movement’s successes as evidence that it wasn’t needed in the first place; and jet, as usual, has no idea what he’s talking about.
Aeon J. Skoble 03.28.05 at 11:15 am
I don’t know why everyone is piling on Jet; perhaps he has a history here I’m not familiar with, but in any event, his main point is correct: TAs are receiving free tuition for grad school and stipends for work which is their on-the-job training. Of course they’re not as well compensated as professors, but they’re hardly exploited/oppressed. As many other commentators have noted, adjuncts are screwed in more substantial ways, but that’s apples/ornages: TAs are grad students — presumably then they’re learning how to be profs, and will in a few years stop being TAs. Anyone who gets a teaching assistantship should be grateful for the opportunity to go to grad school for free, not whining about they’re being oppressed.
mw 03.28.05 at 11:21 am
I just have trouble finding pity for those working on their Ph D’s, who after a few years, will graduate and move into an elite class with options, like tenure, that most people will never see.
Actually, quite a number of those PhD student instructors are in no hurry to leave because most aren’t going to be moving into an elite class of tenured faculty–they’re going to move either to the even worse off class of adjuncts or have to fend for themselves in a real world that’s not necessarily engaged in a bidding war for people with their form of expertise. In some fields, of course, high pay in industry does await, but for many of the liberal arts PhD students, a teaching assistantship offering health benefits, a low living wage, and free tuition is as good as it’s going to get. Given their choice, quite a few of these people would NEVER leave.
GZombie 03.28.05 at 11:38 am
1) Jet writes, “Almost every grad student is required to take a class/seminar on how to teach.” This is not true (unless there’s data out there I’m unaware of).
2) The idea that teaching as a graduate student takes only 9 hours a week is laughable, unless said hypothetical graduate student is doing a really lousy job of teaching.
3) In English graduate programs, to take one example, the relationship between what students learn as they take courses or as they conduct research for their theses is only infrequently directly related to their teaching: one does not often feed the other in any productive way. So it’s inaccurate to describe what they get as “on-the-job training.” Most of the training is related to their area of specialization (e.g. Victorian literature) while their job is usually teaching basic composition. I realize that students whose area of specialization is rhetoric and composition are a different case.
3) Although my knowledge of the relevant history is shaky, my understanding is that a guild traditionally assumed that an apprentice would always go on to become the professional artisan in the craft for which they were being trained. Wouldn’t it have been strange for an eighteenth-century printshop, say, to have hired dozens of young people to do the basic work of printing for very little money with the justifcation that they were all “apprentices,” only to do nothing to complete the transition of those apprentices to professional craftsmen? You may say that graduate programs have no obligation to ensure that their students get academic jobs; fine, but stop using the “apprenticeship” analogy.
4) Speaking only from my own experience as both a TA and now as a tenure-track faculty member in English, I’d say that the quality of teaching students receive from TAs is not sufficiently inferior (if at all) to the quality of teaching they receive from faculty to justify the pay differential.
Marc 03.28.05 at 11:39 am
I’m surprised that you’ve missed the single biggest reason why graduate student unionization is problematic: the radical differences between the experiences of students in the sciences and humanities. In the sciences, at least in the USA, both the faculty and students can receive grant support. This means that the teaching loads are far lower for both than in the humanities. In my department graduate student teaching duties are light (typically 10 hours per week) and primarily involve grading and review sessions; no grad students teach courses on their own, and the salaries are respectable.
In the humanities the salaries are much lower and the teaching loads are far higher – I can easily see that there are problems over there. The problem for any unionization attempt is twofold:
1) science graduate students are not interested, since the union is usually advocating benefits equal to or below what they already have, and teaching loads above what they already have. Since roughly half of the grad students are in the sciences this makes it tough to win a unionization vote.
2) department to department differences are very large, so uniform rules are very tough to come by.
It doesn’t help that graduate education is very much a one-on-one relationship very close to an apprenticeship, not an industrial age boss-worker sort of relationship. The student to faculty ratio in our department, for example, is about 3:2. At least in the sciences I don’t think the union model is a good one.
lemuel pitkin 03.28.05 at 11:44 am
Anyone who gets a teaching assistantship should be grateful for the opportunity to go to grad school for free, not whining about they’re being oppressed.
No one’s used the word “oppressed” except you, bub. Project much?
And: something you have to work 20 hours a week for is not free. Are you really so blinkered that you can’t see why someone who works for a living might expect health insurance, even if they also (gasp!) get tuition credit?
lemuel pitkin 03.28.05 at 11:54 am
Marc,
You raise a valid point, but I think you exaggerate. For one thing, “sciences” is over-broad. The experience of e.g. mathematics grad students is quite similar to people in the humanities. Second, unions that include lots of students in the sciences will adapt their demands to reflect that. For instance, when I was active in the UMass grad union, we put quite a bit of effort in contract negotiations into strengtehning IP rights for grad students, which was a non-issue for those of us in the humanities and scoial sciences, but a big deal for some in the sciences. Third, while pay per se is less of an issue in many science departments, other benefits — health care, and even more so things like housing and childcare– are just as important. In fact, they’re often more so because of the high proportion of international students in those departments, who are more likely to have families, live in university housing, etc.
And of course the bottom line is that, as you say, about half of grad employees are in the sciences, and unions cannot succeed without support from a majority of grad employees. And yet in the public sector, grad unions are growing rapidly. So obviously many, many science grad students see value in them, even if you don’t.
Aeon J. Skoble 03.28.05 at 11:59 am
Lemuel, you’re getting awfully ad hominem. I was not disrespectful to you in my comments, so I don’t see why you’re flaming me now.
As to whether I’m blikered, that’s absurd: I was once a TA myself, so it’s hardly the case that I am unfamiliar with what it’s like to be one. My stipend was pretty small, but the bottom line was that I got free tuition for grad school — they don’t offer that in law school or med school. Not to mention the on-the-job training. It really is an apprenticeship, easy as it might be to mock that analogy. I agree with you that TAs should be eligible for some group health plan (as I was when I was a TA).
Tim 03.28.05 at 12:06 pm
At Cornell (where I am a graduate student), a relatively recent vote for unionization failed pretty decisively, for, I suspect, reasons pretty similar to what Marc mentioned above.
I think there is a larger point issue though. In my opinion, graduate school is not (or should not be treated as) a job. It is school. That is why it is called graduate _school_. Now, I realize that just because graduate students are students first does not give universities the right to abuse them. But my distaste for the graduate school unionization movement has always stemmed from the fundamental assumption that graduate students are workers first and students second, not the other way around. I feel very much more like an apprentice in a guild than a ‘worker’ – in fact I think it is one of the essences of graduate school. It is quite possible that my experiences are a reflection of the fact that I am a science graduate student, and if I were a humanities graduate student I would feel quite different. But I have to ask: if not to get training to advance in academia, why do people go to graduate school in the first place?
Perhaps the humanities graduate students will vehemently disagree with me. If so, it is just another reminider that graduate school is a very non-uniform experience, making it that much harder to formalize general rules to cover all graduate students, and raising the internal barriers to unionization.
lemuel pitkin 03.28.05 at 12:07 pm
Aeon, if you want people to be polite to you, you should avoid writing sentences like the one I quoted above.
And:
I agree with you that TAs should be eligible for some group health plan
And if their employer doesn’t offer it, what then? When their kid gets sick and can’t see a doctor, they should just throw up their hands and be thankful they’ve still got that sweet, sweet free tuition? Or maybe they should get organized?
ben wolfson 03.28.05 at 12:08 pm
The notion of tuition credit strikes me as the biggest scam ever. It was once observed on Invisible Adjunct that graduate student tuition is entirely notional, since if paying the tuition were mandatory, the number of graduate students would be reduced radically.
Grad students could become fantastically well off if only their tuition were $100,000. Except the amount of money they actually have to live on would still be at most $18,000/year.
Zehou 03.28.05 at 12:12 pm
Regarding Mark’s problem #1 (“science grad students are not interested”): Graduate student unionization needn’t be an “everyone or no one” thing: the proposed bargaining unit in a number of recent cases excluded most graduate students in the hard sciences, for example. Some science students favor unionization as well.
Regarding marc’s problem #2 (“department to department differences are very large, so uniform rules are very tough to come by”): Can you cite some examples from the 35 yr. history of graduate student unions which suggest this has, in fact, been a problem? Also, can you give some examples of actual “uniform” rules from that history that, in your view, are so clearly less than just?
MCMC 03.28.05 at 12:17 pm
The thing about the apprenticeship/guild idea is that those relationships typically presume some plausible guarantee of employment comparable to the “master.” Most grad students in arts and sciences are a long way from that type of security; if anything we have future in non-unionized, non-tenure track adjunctship ahead of us. If my state uni wants to guarantee me a tenure-track professorship after the PhD, I’d be a bit more forgiving about the stipend and benefits levels.
One of the unfortunate conditions of grad student unionization is that it responds to a problem that it cannot hope to otherwise influence: the amount of money being dedicated to arts and sciences programs is being squeezed. Like most union movements, grad students probably can’t help those who need help more (adjuncts, unsupported grads, etc) they can only fight narrowly for their own interests.
MCMC 03.28.05 at 12:19 pm
Ben:
That assumes all grads get full tuition waivers, and they don’t.
ben wolfson 03.28.05 at 12:57 pm
That’s true, they don’t. But if none of them did, ever, because the notion of waivers was abolished, how many would there be?
joel turnipseed 03.28.05 at 1:00 pm
I don’t want to butt in where I (more-or-less) don’t belong, but isn’t one of the unmentioned variables here the (and is it a?) fact that there are just too many grad students–especially in the natural sciences/humanities?
If there were fewer graduate students (and, agreeing w/all on this post, fewer trained adjunct faculty–who are, with a few exceptions for professionals who teach in MBA/Law/Journalism and similar programs as much for professional development and stimulation as for cash, screwed) wouldn’t a) the university be willing to pay TAs more to teach introductory courses (cheaper than hiring additional faculty) and b) the risk-factor of getting a PhD decline to a rate at which the short-term sacrifice of (subsequently less) lowly-paid TA work (though, w/tuition and benefits, it’s not that bad: go look at Statistical Abstract of US to see where, say, 13K/year + 20K/tuition puts you, especially if you toss in fully-paid benefits–something less than thirty-percent of corporate jobs do) was worth it?
As for graduate school without tuition waiver/teaching assistance combination (or fellowship): just. shouldn’t. happen… in fields in question.
Uncle Kvetch 03.28.05 at 1:31 pm
When I was a graduate student, I spent at least 20-25 hours a week per composition class; teaching two would have definitely equalled the 50-60 hours a week Jet mentions.
The inequities are a big part of the problem, IMHO. I TA’d for several years in my field, cultural/linguistic anthropology, and it was a relatively light load; maybe 10-15 hours a week. A friend who was doing a joint PhD in anthro & French studies was actually teaching French classes and easily putting in 35-40 hour weeks, for the same exact pay, benefit, & status. Meanwhile, as was hinted at above, TAs in physical (or biological) anthropology typically have even lighter workloads than I did, and they get more money. And that’s all in one (very loosely defined) discipline.
And it was only when the unionization drive got underway that the university showed the slightest interest in even acknowledging concerns like these.
Aeon J. Skoble 03.28.05 at 1:35 pm
“if you want people to be polite to you, you should avoid writing sentences like the one I quoted above.”
Oh, I didn’t realize disagreeing with someone was an adequate justification for ad hominem. Feel free to disagree, but try to deal with the substance of my remarks, rather than assuming (incorrectly, as it turns out) that I don’t know what it’s like to be a TA. The reason I characterized it as “whining” is that that’s what it seemed to me to be even when I myself was a TA. After 4 years of spending, what, 20K/yr to go to college, one gets the opportunity to spend 5,6,7 years more years devoted to study for free. Also, one will receive training in how to be a prof, which may include assiting a prof, or later having responsibility for teaching a class, for which, in addition to the free tuition, one will receive a stipend, and at many institutions, health insurance. But if the stipend isn’t “comparable” to what management trainees at a coroporation are making, then they need to go on strike? I’m sorry if you disagree, but that strikes me as ungrateful. It implies a sense of entitlement which doesn’t accurately map the facts of what a PhD program is about.
Marc 03.28.05 at 1:59 pm
Graduate student tuition is absolutely real money.
Grants get charged cold, hard cash for it at my university, and our department also gets charged real money for tuition out of its budget. I suspect that many of the folks posting about its unreality have not been familiar with the economics of how universities work. Basically, a significant fraction of the teaching time of the faculty at a research university is dedicated to teaching relatively small graduate classes. There is a significant reward in terms of the intellectual life of the university from graduate researchers, but the university bureaucrats tend not to value such things overmuch. Yes, graduate students also teach – but they also get paid for teaching, and not all of them do teach.
As far as health benefits, etc: not to be too unfashionably capitalistic, but not providing them would put us at a competitive disadvantage in graduate student recruitment.
lemuel pitkin 03.28.05 at 1:59 pm
didn’t realize disagreeing with someone was an adequate justification for ad hominem.
You didn’t simply disagree, you characterized support for grad unions as “whining about they’re being oppressed.” If you can’t see why that might be offensive, I doun’t think we’re going to be able to have much of a cconversation.
if the stipend isn’t “comparable†to what management trainees at a coroporation are making, then they need to go on strike?
Now you put the word “comparable” in quotes as if you’re quoting someone, when in fact no one has said anything of the sort. Excuse me if I don’t think you’re interested in discussing this in good faith.
But if you are, here’s a question. You agreed with me above that grad employees should have access to affordable health care. I asked, and I ask again, what if they don’t? is collective bargaining a reasonable response to what we both agree is a legitimate complaint? And if not, why?
Marc 03.28.05 at 2:07 pm
Joel: the sciences are, by and large, not where the push to unionization is coming from. There are both more professors and more graduate students in the sciences than you’d expect from student enrollment in science classes because of the availability of grant support. More to the point, the employment prospects of science PhDs are actually extremely good; not all go into academe, but the vast majority do get high-paying jobs in areas at least related to the job skills they’ve developed. Astronomers and physicists, for example, can solve equations on computers to understand nature – or they can solve equations on computers for financial traders on Wall Street, and make much more money than academics do.
lemuel pitkin 03.28.05 at 2:17 pm
Also:
After 4 years of spending, what, 20K/yr to go to college
The vast majority of graduate employees did not pay anything like this for college. Many of them (from outside the U.S.) didn’t pay to attend college at all. That you think that all graduate employees went to elite private colleges is, I suspect, a big part of why you’re against grad unions.
joel turnipseed 03.28.05 at 2:30 pm
Marc –
Yes, I know: one of my best friends got PhD in Theoretical Physics and is now doing private industry research and making a very good living for himself (though others w/o his chops–social or intellectual–who did not get good post-docs, etc., are not faring as well).
“Fields in question” were, specifically, humanities… which is where the issue is felt most-strongly w/r/t unionization and CT readership & where, I think, we’re creating too many PhDs. Someone correct me, but didn’t I see somewhere that PhDs in humanities actually make less than BAs? I can say that, in my hiring experience (software, many positions hired), BAs not only outperformed PhDs and MS/MAs as developers/tech writers, but made better team members. Granted, I’m talking about a small pool (a dozen or so hires in my career), but there was something, well, quite stilted and arrogant in the higher-degree holders that got in the way of creativity/give-and-take/humility/sacrifice required to really make software projects work, where Simon’s “satisficing” is a stark necessity. If you’re used to spending 5-7 years on a 200-page thesis or 20-page analysis of algorithms and then you have to turn around (and these are real-world numbers) manage a million-word online help system over multiple releases a year with a team of three tech writers (including management of third-party translations) or a 200-thousand line software program with a team of five or six, you’re just going to have a very hard time adjusting.
Which is, I suppose, to say: I have a great deal of sympathy for those who work for low wages/benefits and then don’t make it into the greenhouse of academia after adapting themselves to that climate–and it seems to me that while unionizing alone won’t solve this (much larger?) problem, absent a brighter future it doesn’t strike me as outrageous to ask for more up front.
Nicholas Weininger 03.28.05 at 3:46 pm
Note that there are some places where graduate students, rather than having their own union, are represented by the faculty union; I am currently a GA at one of these (Rutgers).
I say this as an informational point only, not to argue for or against it; I have no idea whether it works better or worse by any metric than a separate union. Rutgers grad students in my field (mathematics) live rather well all things considered, and some of this is probably due to the union, but a large part is probably also due to the competitive extra-academic job market for math PhDs (and math-savvy folks w/o PhDs).
RS 03.28.05 at 4:22 pm
Since, certainly in the UK sciences, supervisors are parasitically dependent on the work of PhD students and post-docs in their first and second positions (who will never make it any higher), and apparently much teaching in the US is dependent on arts and science graduate students and adjuncts – why would they be stupid enough to give any power to their toiling underlings?
The ratio of meaningless platitudes to practical measures, to assist those whose labour they benefit from, among academics never ceases to amaze me.
Aeon J. Skoble 03.28.05 at 4:32 pm
“The vast majority of graduate employees did not pay anything like this for college.”
No, most received some financial aid in college (including me). But that should make them more aware, not less, that free tuition + on-the-job training + a stipend is a good deal, not a bad deal.
“Many of them (from outside the U.S.) didn’t pay to attend college at all.”
The fact they didn’t pay for college at all may make them feel as though they’re also entitled to a free graduate degree, but I don’t think this is so. Law and med school isn’t free, why should PhD school?
“That you think that all graduate employees went to elite private colleges is, I suspect, a big part of why you’re against grad unions.”
I don’t think that, and that’s not the main reason. The main reason is that the industrial boss-worker paradigm doesn’t accurately model what a graduate student’s relationship to his or her department is supposed to be.
Tom Hudson 03.28.05 at 4:59 pm
Perhaps “the boss-worker paradigm doesn’t model what a graduate student’s relationship to his or her department is supposed to be”, but in my experience of several hard science departments it *is*.
Some of it is extremely dependent on the personal faculty/student relationship – but given the number of exploitative faculty I’ve seen (the majority), there’s not much control going on for that factor.
Before I catch too many flames, I’m not saying that these faculty are -intentionally- exploitative; rather, that they are rewarded for having their grad students ‘produce’ on grant-funded research, and not rewarded for teaching their grad students any of the ‘apprenticeship’ skills, and incentives lead to behavior.
For example, to the best of my knowledge, none of the students in my grad school department in the decade I was affiliated with it who were teaching courses were ever observed by faculty for feedback on their teaching. Only in the last third of that period was their any training given to TAs. Half the large (10+ researchers) research groups I belonged to had no effective training for their students in how to write papers, write grants, develop research programs, or the other duties of faculty; none of the small groups did.
Sebastian Holsclaw 03.28.05 at 5:00 pm
“The thing about the apprenticeship/guild idea is that those relationships typically presume some plausible guarantee of employment comparable to the “master.†Most grad students in arts and sciences are a long way from that type of security; if anything we have future in non-unionized, non-tenure track adjunctship ahead of us. If my state uni wants to guarantee me a tenure-track professorship after the PhD, I’d be a bit more forgiving about the stipend and benefits levels.”
Speaking as someone with a BA in English Literature, isn’t it possible that the reason PhD track students in the humanities don’t get paid well is related to the idea that there are too many of them?
Colin Danby 03.28.05 at 5:13 pm
1. Conditions for grad students vary from institution to institution and from dept to dept within an institution and often within departments as well. So one can’t work out aprioristically whether grad students get a good deal or not. When I was involved in successful efforts to unionize at UMass Amherst, the key thing we achieved was health insurance. Nor is it necessarily a relevant question whether people are sitting pretty or not: even if one happens to be in a good position, having a union is a way to protect yourself.
2. The business about training is a red herring. Not only is there usually zero formal training in teaching connectted with a TAship, but almost any *real* job has a training component to it, not to mention that one typically benefits from work experience. So what? That doesn’t make it *not* work.
3. The weird inflexibility of thinking that insists that because work is connected to something else, it stops being work, never fails to amaze. Tim, there’s a very good reason why grad student unions emphasize one’s role as a worker rather than one’s role as a student, which is that they want to interfere as little as possible with one’s role as a student. First grad student unions are accused of disrupting education. In response, they take pains to confine their attention to that part of grad students’ lives in which they are workers. Having done that, they are *then* accused of assuming that “graduate students are workers first and students second.” Do we see how silly this reasoning is?
4. And yes, Tim, science students at a lot of places get much sweeter deals than folks in the humanities: larger stipends for fewer hours of drudgery. So apparently you’re unhappy that some of your fellow grad students whose conditions are worse than your own wanted their conditions improved, and you voted to thwart them.
lemuel pitkin 03.28.05 at 5:14 pm
“The vast majority of graduate employees did not pay anything like this for college.â€
No, most received some financial aid in college (including me). But that should make them more aware, not less, that free tuition + on-the-job training + a stipend is a good deal, not a bad deal.
So if grad employees paid lots of money for tuition as undergrads, that’s an argument against grad unions. And if they didn’t pay a lot for tuition, that’s also an argument against grad unions. See why I don’t think you’re arguing in good faith?
In fact, the reason most grad students didn’t pay 20 grand for tuition isn’t so much because they got financial aid, as because only a few elite colleges charge that much. E.g. SUNY tuition runs a bit under $4,000 a year. Your blinkers are showing again, I’m afraid.
And you still haven’t answered my question: If (as we agree) grad employees should have access to affordable health care, and if the university fails to provide it, why is collective bargaining an inappropriate solution?
RS 03.28.05 at 5:29 pm
The real question is how much is a PhD student worth to the supervisor, at home (UK) the funding bodies are increasingly keen on fully caculating the cost of research, how much is a PhD student or (to-be-fucked-over) post-doc worth to a supervisor? I think it should be pointed out that, however much people are prepared to (metaphorically) pay for graduate level education, they are, at the same time, foregoing a huge amount of money (graduate stipends suck wherever you’re from).
The real question, is how much is a PhD student worth to the supervisor, at home (UK) the funding bodies are increasingly keen on fully caculating the cost of research, how much is a PhD student or (to-be-fucked-over) post-doc worth to a supervisor?
RS 03.28.05 at 5:32 pm
Oops, redundancy is due to cut-and-paste error.
jet 03.28.05 at 5:40 pm
If money is so important to these graduate students, why don’t we see more of them moving to adjacent fields that pay much better like technical writing? The world has plenty of people who can write on the classics, critique poetry, and philophize the philosophers. But there does seem to be a shortage of people who can create uniform and usable documentation.
As for paying grad students more, I say we pay them less but spread the money over more people. Since there is an over-abundance of people going into fields that don’t have any enticing job prospects on exit, perhaps we should only subsidize those that truly want the degree, not those who are looking to make being a student a paying job.
Either way chools without large endowments won’t put up with grad student unions. They would just cut the assistantships, replace the GA’s with much cheaper adjuncts, and then hand out much smaller non-teaching assistantships. Unions just won’t work with a huge infastructure, already in existance, of non-union workers(adjuncts) to replace the union workers(GA’s).
And Henry, I can only guess that you were responding to my comment to Tom. I was asking an honest question and was sincere in congratulating him if he was indeed working on a second doc. Education is a good thing in an of itself.
RS 03.28.05 at 5:47 pm
Jet, by your reasoning, presumably ‘would you like fires with that’ is the cry of the academically mobile?
RS 03.28.05 at 5:48 pm
fires, fries, let’s call the whole thing off
lemuel pitkin 03.28.05 at 5:48 pm
Either way chools without large endowments won’t put up with grad student unions
Schools that “put up” with grad unions include the Universities of Wisconsin, Michigan, California, New York (State and City), Florida, Iowa, Washington and Oregon, plus NYU, Rutgers, and others. With the exception of NYU none have particularly big endowments.
Jet, I’d tell you to stick to talking about subjects you know something about, but I have no idea what those might be.
RS 03.28.05 at 5:55 pm
I know I’m but a foolish foreigner, but are they major public sector institutions (as opposed to private universiries), obviously I’ve heard of Rutgers and the rest, but it is hard for me to judge.
lemuel pitkin 03.28.05 at 5:59 pm
All public sector. NYU is the only private school that has signed a contract with a gradaute union, tho as Matt mentioned upthread there have been serious organizing efforts at a number of private schools, some of which have led to improvemets in pay & working coditions even if not contracts.
Of course, the vast majority of the graduate students in the US attend public universities.
RS 03.28.05 at 6:02 pm
So, in a purely educating your peers kind of way, what are the restrictions on unionising amongst graduate students in US public and private institutions?
lemuel pitkin 03.28.05 at 6:03 pm
I should add: public universities do have endowments.
The proportion of public university costs provided by government has fallen steeply in recent decades, to well under half (I believe) in many cases today. This is an important part of the context for the grad union movement.
In fact, the effective subsidies — mainly but not only in the form of tax breaks, especially on property taxes for places like Harvard or Columbia — for elite private universities is now often larger than that for equivalent public schools.
RS 03.28.05 at 6:04 pm
I love the ‘slow down cowboy’ message, quality!
lemuel pitkin 03.28.05 at 6:08 pm
rs-
grad employees at public universities are governed by state alw, which varies widely — in much of the south, for instance, unions at public universities are simply illegal. Private university students are, because of the NLRB decision Henry mentioned in the original post, in kind of a legal limbo — they’re not forbidden from striking or unionizing, but their employers are under no obligation to abrgain with them.
A good source of info on this stuff is here.
RS 03.28.05 at 6:13 pm
Shit, does that make graduate students essentially teaching students? I guess the only option is 1920s style raw union power. Now I remember why I didn’t come to the states for my PhD!
Michael Kremer 03.28.05 at 6:44 pm
“SUNY tuition runs a bit under $4,000 a year.” says Lemuel Pitkin.
Not so.
http://www.newpaltz.edu/financialaid/tuition.cfm
and
http://ws.cc.stonybrook.edu/bursar/grad.shtml
show that at SUNY New Paltz and SUNY Stonybrook, NY resident grad tuition is $3450/semester, or $6900/year, and more importantly, non NY resident grad tuition is $5460/semester, or $10,900/year. Since most grad students study in a state other than the state in which they have their principal residence, the out of state tuition is the relevant figure. Also, grad tuition is typically higher than undergrad tuition.
lemuel pitkin 03.28.05 at 6:48 pm
Undergrad tuition was under discussion, not graduate tuition. Altho I see by your link that’s about $4,300 a year, not slightly under $4,000 as I had thought.
Rachel Barney 03.28.05 at 7:47 pm
I’m at the University of Toronto, which was mentioned in the initial post, and nobody I’ve talked to about it here thinks our unionized system works. I don’t fully follow the math, but it seems that given a reasonably generous hourly wage, and on the assumption that for a TA to attend class or do reading for a course counts as ‘work’ (rather than as itself a contribution to their education), departments generally cannot afford to have TA’s actually attend the lectures in the courses for which they run tutorials, grade papers, etc. That may be viable in Statistics 100, but in the humanities it’s serious malpractice, towards both the undergraduates and the graduate students.
Union drives tend to be a response to exploitation, as I gather was the case here, and it’s hard to know how better to combat it. But in my experience a healthy department is one where pretty much everybody buys into the ‘apprenticeship’ model, with TA wages a more or less derisory, lump-sum supplement to a generous regular stipend. A key condition of that, though, is of course for TA workloads to be light enough and sufficiently related to the students’ interests that the experience seems generally more useful than oppressive. Another is for faculty to take time to make the experience informative for the TA’s as future teachers, eg by taking a fair amount of time to discuss grading and pedagogical issues, having them give ‘guest lectures’ which they get feedback on — which also tend to be unaffordable luxuries once an hourly wage kicks in.
albert 03.28.05 at 9:16 pm
For Jet:
If money is so important to these graduate students, why don’t we see more of them moving to adjacent fields that pay much better like technical writing?
Because some people think there’s more to life than fulfilling the demands of the market.
As for paying grad students more, I say we pay them less but spread the money over more people. Since there is an over-abundance of people going into fields that don’t have any enticing job prospects on exit, perhaps we should only subsidize those that truly want the degree, not those who are looking to make being a student a paying job.
I think we pretty much already do this as far as the large number of schools that offer PhD’s in various A&S programs. I don’t imagine that, other than general capability to finish the degree, there’s much restriction on the number of A&S Ph.D’s that get handed out every year. At lots of second-tier doctoral universities you can get that degree, if you’re willing to pay, but why should every university be that way?
Either way chools without large endowments won’t put up with grad student unions. They would just cut the assistantships, replace the GA’s with much cheaper adjuncts, and then hand out much smaller non-teaching assistantships. Unions just won’t work with a huge infastructure, already in existance, of non-union workers(adjuncts) to replace the union workers(GA’s).
That’s ridiculous. Universities benefit in reputation and in workforce in training graduate students. How would hiring adjuncts for the same positions that GA’s currently have change anything? That group would then have all the unionization rights of current GAs. For other universities or colleges without graduate schools, this has largely already been done.
jrochest 03.28.05 at 9:33 pm
I was at the University of Toronto too, Rachel and I don’t really agree. The union was and is by no means perfect, but it’s much better than the system that was previously in place — under which some TAs were not paid at all (on the grounds that it was ‘part of their education’).
The union is not ideal, but it keeps work and wages at a reasonable level and stops abuses; I was once offered a job at the downtown campus, only to have the course enrollment drop below the threshold, and I was given the marking for three large lecture courses taught by an adjunct. She informed me that I was going to grade all the work for half the students in the 3 courses (about 120), read 15 Victorian 3 decker novels and attend 12 hours of lectures a week — in Scarbourough (a suburban campus 2 hours from downtown by train).
I went to the department, contract and hours limitations in hand, and screamed. They gave me another job. I didn’t ave to go to the union — I didn’t even mention the union. But the union was responsible for the hour limits and the pay scale, and I was in a much stronger postion than I would have been without them.
I was in English, defended 4 years ago, sessional (adjunct) for 4 years and am now Tenure-track, so I’ve done all 3 types of labour. I work harder now than ever, but I’m also in control to a far greater degree — and I’m paid for my research and writing time.
jet 03.28.05 at 10:55 pm
Albert,
Very insightful, thanks for the response.
nic m 03.28.05 at 11:01 pm
Age ranges and time periods would be helpful here, so get a better understanding of the decline of funding in the humanities. In the early 90’s, I applied to several Cultural Studies (PhD) and MA (Eng) programs: Iowa, Kansas State, George Mason, as well as several MArch programs (U Cincy, for Arch Theory & OSU) as well as a smattering of urban studies programs (Berkley, Columbia). In most cases I was accepted and followed through to financial aid packages, and elected to pass on every offer, since the best (Cincinnati) offered only tuition remission, and then only full remission at year two, but with a teaching requirement both years, and no housing benefits or stipend. George Mason could make no promise of tuition remission, even once I moved from a the MA (Soc) to the PhD program. None offered housing or stipend. Kansas State, I believe, came close (lots of room in Manhattan), with a requirement to teach two sections of Comp (45 students each), beginning literally the day I arrived, no training. Being the beneficiary of a private (religious) primary education and narrow interests as an undergrad, I had never been in a classroom of more than 20 students in my entire life.
I found the discussion of money to be a complete insult. Most times I was treated as if I were a uncouth relative attending a dinner party where such matters were not discussed. I never expected to be free of providing my own housing, and many of my living expenses. But to not offer full remission while requiring equivalent teaching loads of full professors — I can’t imagine why people still dispute the exploitative nature of humanities graduate education.
And in the same way that tuition benefits are real money to departments, I took pride in knowing that though grants, scholarships, work programs and loans, I arranged $120,000 of my undergrad education, no mean feat for an 18 year-old with no assets, and family income of less than 20% of that.
Deviant Platypus 03.28.05 at 11:25 pm
I graduated with my masters degree roughly a week ago and my university went though unionization during my time there. I would say that I’m indiferent to the unionizing. My wages went up just enough to ofset the union dues and the healthcare offered was severely cut back. This would have happened either way due to the budget crunch at most public schools.
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.
Sebastian Holsclaw 03.28.05 at 11:58 pm
“If money is so important to these graduate students, why don’t we see more of them moving to adjacent fields that pay much better like technical writing?
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.
sara 03.29.05 at 12:20 am
As a humanities Ph.D. (Classics), I refuse to be lectured by B.A.s (I suppose some Ph.Ds) in Economics, who doubtless went straight to the corporate job after graduation.
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.
joel turnipseed 03.29.05 at 12:49 am
sara –
What is your point? That there is something in Greek or Roman literature that says you should get a job after getting a PhD? That it is the undergraduate in Economics who’s fault it is that you have not?
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.”
lemuel pitkin 03.29.05 at 1:36 am
Joel,
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.
Aeon J. Skoble 03.29.05 at 7:34 am
“See why I don’t think you’re arguing in good faith?”
No. I don’t get it – are you suggesting that I don’t actually believe what I’m writing? I’m not a troll, I just disagree with you that’s all.
“And you still haven’t answered my question: If (as we agree) grad employees should have access to affordable health care, and if the university fails to provide it, why is collective bargaining an inappropriate solution?”
You phrase this in a question-begging way: part of our disagreement is implicit in your characterization of the grad students as “employees” – that’s just what I’m denying. In my view, grad students are students. Undergrads sometimes work as part of their overall financial aid package, but we don’t see them going on strike – that’s because although they are doing some work, they’re not employees, they’re students. TAs are similar in that they are students who are doing some work, only in this case not so much as a component of their financial aid package (although that’s one way to look at it) but as part of their apprenticeship training. As to the commentator who suggested that lots of grad programs don’t really have any actual training or TA mentorship: 1, I don’t know how many is many. Like everyone else, I’m primarily going with personal experience, and we had some (not perfect) TA mentoring – it really did feel like apprenticeship – and 2, any grad program that doesn’t have any TA mentoring is in that respect lame, and should be lowered in the rankings. If I’m wrong to assume that just because my program had mentoring, all do, surely it’s just as fallacious for those commenters who went to programs where there was no mentoring to infer universally from their experience.
But back to this:
“And you still haven’t answered my question: If (as we agree) grad employees should have access to affordable health care, and if the university fails to provide it, why is collective bargaining an inappropriate solution?”
Because I don’t see that they have anything to bargain with. They haven’t been hired to perform essential labor. They’ve been given the opportunity to get a PhD for free and learn their craft. This seems analogous to undergrad work-study students striking because they want better pay. But you had earlier asked me what _is_ the solution. My suggestion would be for the _faculty_ to demand, if necessary through _their_ collective-bargaining apparatus, that their group plan be made available to grad students.
Alex Halavais 03.29.05 at 10:55 am
The root problem here seems not to be graduate funding, but the lack of good teaching jobs upon graduation. That lack may be considered a relative lack (too many Ph.D.s for the number of available positions) or an absolute one (there need to be more professors in society). One of the reasons that law students generally do not receive significant support is because most of them have little difficulty finding a well-paying job when they graduate.
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.
Locutor 03.29.05 at 12:24 pm
Aeon blathered:
“Because I don’t see that they have anything to bargain with. They haven’t been hired to perform essential labor. They’ve been given the opportunity to get a PhD for free and learn their craft. This seems analogous to undergrad work-study students striking because they want better pay. ”
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.”
Aeon J. Skoble 03.29.05 at 1:52 pm
Sounds like at “Locutor”‘s institution, they have found a way to rip off undergrads and exploit grad students at the same time — sounds lousy to me. But this then is not a case of teaching assistants needing to unionize, it’s a matter of de facto adjunct instructors needing to unionize. Are you required to teach those comp classes, or do folks do it because they need the cash? If the former, I’m sorry, you really are being taken advantage of. If the latter, though, I’d suggest just stop signing up! Make the profs do their job, and insist on getting more of a mentoring relationship — the undergrad student govt should be natural allies in this case.
When I said “not hired” I was referring to grad students on an assistantship, with waivers and mentoring, but it looks like your situation really is a “for hire” one, a good counter-example to my model. (Good faith?)
lemuel pitkin 03.29.05 at 2:00 pm
this then is not a case of teaching assistants needing to unionize, it’s a matter of de facto adjunct instructors needing to unionize.
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.
Aeon J. Skoble 03.29.05 at 2:13 pm
Then they’re just employees – why can’t they join existing unions, qua employee, not qua grad students? This wouldn’t threaten the appprenticeship relationship where they do exist.
Zehou 03.29.05 at 4:43 pm
“Then they’re just employees – why can’t they join existing unions, qua employee, not qua grad students? This wouldn’t threaten the appprenticeship relationship where they do exist.”
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.
mw 03.29.05 at 4:45 pm
Graduate employees (not “teaching assistantsâ€: 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.
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.
Zehou 03.29.05 at 4:58 pm
I did not read “not teaching assistants” above as suggesting that only those who teach their own classes are really graduate employees.
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).
Nicholas Weininger 03.29.05 at 6:39 pm
Indeed, the extent to which graduate teaching assistants teach their own classes varies very considerably from place to place and field to field. In math at Rutgers, for instance, TAs are true “assistants”, not full instructors, during the regular academic year, but we can teach our own classes to earn extra money during the summer session. OTOH I know of many places where TAs can teach their own courses during the academic year, and there are probably also places where they never do so.
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.
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