Jennifer Dibbern and Michigan Student Unionization

This seems pretty suspect. The first obvious question would be: how often are students kicked out of the program, and how “summary” can these kickings-out be? Any sort of precedent here? I’d be inclined to think this is related to the organizing effort. If it does turn out to be, or even clearly seems to be, I would be very interested to know if there’s anything people (ones not at UMich) can do–even if it’s something as small as signing a petition.

(And completely OT, I’m suddenly a lot more interested in “imaging microstructure” than I ever thought I’d be–those titles are awesome!)

FWIW, it is pretty clear that the student, Ms. Dibbern, was supported by Materials Science research grants held by the adviser, Prof. Goldman. The University did not stop supporting Ms. Dibbern, the adviser did and the Provost had little to nothing to do with it.

The Goldman group has about 12 graduate students working on different projects. This is a very different culture with future support for the group depending on current results and Materials Science is a very competitive, very support hungry area requiring very expensive tools (ever by a Transmission Electron Microscope/)

I’ll throw it out there; there’s no way in hell “non-research related activities” doesn’t mean “union activism.” I’ve worked enough grievances to know when management is trying to lay down a smoke trail, but doesn’t pull it off, and this is one of those times.

Andrew – how do you file a grievance when there isn’t a contract which contains a grievance and arbitration clause? Without a union, all you can do is what she did – take it up with the chair, dean, etc. in a process where you have no rights and where the institution that wronged you decides your fate by itself.

Blimey – there is no way I’d think about doing that to a student in the UK, not without risking a giant lawsuit and a massive payout. Here, if you want to give a student a formal warning, you base it on their progress, not on anything else, and you tell them about the evidence. And if you want to sling them out, you base it on the formal warning. If not, ouch. It must be our litigious culture, not like that American one . . . or perhaps it’s because we still (as of this month) have legal aid.

Does the US have any equivalent to the National Postgraduate Committee (relatively apolitical ‘staff association’ style group http://www.npc.org.uk/) which can advise on legal action in situations like this, or a system of University Visitors who serve (or their representatives serve, in the case of the Queen) as final points of appeal before you take it to the courts?

Eli @9: “Whether you agree or not with the PIs actions in this case, she was the one with the authority to do so and the University (e.g. Provost) had no say in the matter. As these things go if the Provost/Dean/Chair had TRIED to do so, they would have had their nuts/breasts cut off by the faculty.”

Has there been a case in the past decade where this actually happened? That administrative intervention to trash a grad student led to any backlash which actually gave the administration some worry?

Eli it is good to have you here, standing up for the rights of those at the bottom. Kudos sir, kudos…

we still (as of this month) have legal aid

though I’m pretty sure employment tribunals are one of the many things it doesn’t cover.

I have been a professor at large public universities for 19 years and held research grants from various federal agencies in the USA, including the National Science Foundation, NASA, and DoD. I also directed (for 6 years) a large graduate program at an R1 university that, at the time, was ranked number 10 in its sub-field by the National Research Council. The employment status of Research Assistants (RA’s) was one of the major issues I dealt with during that time as Graduate Program Director. There are small but important differences between the actual day to day aspects of holding a grant and having RA’s and the official version.

First of all, even though professors write federal grant proposals, grants go to the professors’ university (this is in contrast to some contracts awards and some foundation awards). Second, even though professors have great discretion in hiring RA’s, the RA’s are employees of the university and have rights and responsibilities as granted by the university. All major universities that I am aware of have formal processes for reviewing and evaluating RA’s in the context of deciding to end funding status. All professors, by virtue of hiring students through the university to work as RA’s, agree to follow such processes.

A very important question, and one where the university appears to recognize its vulnerability, is whether or not its own formal due processes were followed. The professor has a responsibility to follow the university’s formal processes in terminating a student’s support. I have cut the funding of graduate students who were either unable to perform the work or were not spending the time necessary to accomplish the work, and I have great sympathy for faculty who fear being bound by work rules that set an upper time limit on RA’s efforts. That said, a professor who does decide to cut off support has a responsibility (often a formal one and always a moral one) to provide very clear documentation for her or his decision.

Also, the August 8th email linked there looked much more like

“you’re not working hard enough, and things aren’t getting done”

than

“stay away from that union stuff”

e.g. the student in question missed a deadline to submit a presentation for one meeting and was at risk for the same for a second one.

That’s pretty standard stuff.

Only one paper would be trouble in my field, but I know that other disciplines have different rules.

What Marc said

To Marc and others:

It’s a bit unclear from the Monday Aug 8 email whether Goldman was referring to that day’s events (the 8th) or the previous Monday’s events (the 1st). I’m pretty sure she was referring to the 8th, but either way it’s absurd to suggest that Goldman’s comments had only to do with Dibbern’s performance. Take a closer look at Dibbern’s timeline:

If Goldman was referring to Monday the 8th, then Goldman had MET IN PERSON with Dibbern that very morning. In that meeting she clearly told Dibbern that she opposed the union, saying it would ruin the university. Needless to say, emailing Dibbern only 12 hours later to ask her what she did that day seems more than little bit odd. In fact it looks like ass-covering for a union-related firing. Why? Because if Goldman had met with Dibbern only hours earlier, she knew what Dibbern was doing that day! And if she had any concerns about what Dibbern’s afternoon plans were, she could have asked Dibbern in the meeting! August 8th was, in fact, the day MERC handed down its decision against unionization. So it’s likely that Dibbern had some union-related meeting that day in response to the decision, and given her anti-union opinions Goldman likely knew the decision was handed down that day, too. But Dibbern couldn’t have very well told Goldman that she had a union event after Goldman had trashed the union repeatedly!

More significantly, according to the timeline, the previous Monday (the 1st) Goldman saw Dibbern leaving the unionization information session. So her pattern of comments to Dibbern clearly shows that she knew Dibbern was involved with the union and disapproved of it.

Even if the message of the email was “you’re not working enough,” the goal was to make sure she was working in the lab, rather than on unionization. Even in Goldman’s own critical email, it’s clear Dibbern worked on weekends, etc. For those of you unfamiliar with UM’s teaching assistant contract, there are clear guidelines for how much work a professor can require from an assistant in exchange for funding: There are rules on maximum number of hours worked. These guidelines exist to ensure that graduate students have enough free time to make progress towards their degrees, rather than just doing work for funding.

This issue is EXACTLY why many research assistants want a union. So even in the generous (to Goldman) reading of Goldman’s email, her expectations that Dibbern should work every day (including weekends) on Goldman’s project just serve to demonstrate why the unionization that Goldman openly opposed is necessary!

Goldman’s expectation that Dibbern should be available to work any and every day of the week and should be able to respond to emails within “9 hrs,” as she said in the email, is simply an unreasonable expectation for an adviser to put on a graduate student who has her own work to do, a personal life, etc. Too many professors see graduate students as their Kenneth (to throw in a 30 Rock reference). But grad students are not pages, they are individuals who have to balance work demands and educational demands. Many professors pretend as though these demands are the same, but most graduate students pretty clearly delineate between their own work and the research or teaching they do for money. Sure, they might get valuable skills from the latter, but that misses the larger point: You almost always only get “real” jobs due to your own research.

There’s a reason why fellowships that fund graduate students’ own research — think NSF, etc. — are so sought-after. The teaching/research assistant part of a graduate student’s life can be easily excised and it usually won’t hurt — and will often HELP — her/his career prospects. In contrast, many a grad student has had his/her career derailed by focusing (often because of the demands of people like Goldman, it seems) too much on the teaching/research they do for their funding, and doing so at the expense of their own research.

Research assistants want a union simply to get some guidelines about how many hours a day/days a week they can be expected to devote to their advisers’ projects in exchange for funding. Obviously, if Goldman expected Dibbern to be available to her 24/7, it’s clear why she was anti-union — but it’s equally clear why Dibbern was pro-union.

If Goldman truly wanted to be “professional” and make the issue about Dibbern’s research, she should have never brought up her views on the union in the first place. By doing so at length, she created a clear antagonistic relationship with Dibbern and made it impossible for her firing of Dibbern — which violated the department’s own guidelines — to be viewed as separate from her anti-union stance.

If Goldman only had a problem with Dibbern’s work, she had no reason to even mention unionization. That she did shows it was (at least) one factor in her firing of Dibbern, which is why Dibbern has legitimate case and the university is being so defensive.

Henry – I’ll pass along the suggestion!

Two more quick things:
1. I should have also said that I am speaking for myself, and not on behalf of GEO. I stated my affiliation so folks understand my position, not to claim I was speaking for GEO.

2. If anyone is interested in expressing their concerns to the University, I would suggest emailing Provost Phil Hanlon ( hanlon@umich.edu ). GEO has also asked that University of Michigan faculty sign a petition calling for the University to remain neutral and allow GSRAs to vote on forming a union. That petition is available here: http://action.aft.org/c/984/p/dia/action3/common/public/?action_KEY=3517

Thanks!

The August 8th email sounds to me like ‘OK, you worked Sunday, but that doesn’t mean you get Monday off – I mean, do you think researchers get weekends?’

To start, if the work on the funded project that Ms. Dibbern was doing WAS her thesis research, how does asking her to concentrate on it take her away from her education and training? All of the things said about how PIs want students to work on their projects and not the student’s training and thesis work assume that the two are disjoint. In science and engineering that is not the case.

Further along the same track, rational faculty love students with personal fellowships because they don’t have to find ~$50-80K a year in grants to fund the students RA (add up tuition, stipend, travel, overhead and more). If the student has a TA, there is the additional factor that they have to spend significant time teaching and marking so their progress is slowed.

Yes, Goldman is an anti-union hard ass, but what is the solution here for Dibbern – to go back to Goldman’s lab? To continue in the same department? The usual is to find another adviser. If this is in the same department, well, you know how friendly departmental politics is, taking students that have left another group does not improve the atmosphere. Marc is right, this is messy but it is messy to require that PIs keep RAs that they are not happy with in their labs. That will never have a happy ending.

@Eli @32 – 1. In other industries, bosses are required to work with employees they may not approve of (different races, genders, sexuality, and so on) because they are expressly prohibited from discriminating against them. Moreover, employers in other industries are not allowed to retaliate against workers for attempting to form a union (ignoring for a moment the ineffectiveness of those laws for many workers). The GSRA-PI relationship is a professional one; requiring PIs to act like professionals should not be seen as a heroic request. If you don’t like your RA’s hobbies or politics, so what? Only because we have bought into the understanding of graduate school as a total institution (cf. Goffman) do we think that such absolute authority is a requirement of the position (see also Schmidt’s Disciplined Minds).

As for the specifics of the case: Dibbern’s requests to the university included asking for an apology and financial support to take a few courses to help transition to another department/field. More broadly, we are calling on the university to cease its anti-union campaign and to allow GSRAs to decide for themselves if they want to unionize. Notably, the UM Board of Regents voted 6-2 in favor of recognizing GSRAs as employees and allowing them collective bargaining rights:

“Consistent with the University of Michigan’s proud history of strong positive and mutually productive labor relations, the Board of Regents supports the rights of Graduate Student Research Assistants, whom we recognize as employees, to determine for themselves whether they choose to organize.” (Quoted in the Michigan Daily)

In spite of the Regent’s vote, the various Deans and President Coleman have made strong anti-GSRA unionization statements and advised faculty to speak to their students in opposition to the union.

We aren’t fucking Jedi masters initiating their apprentices into the Force.

… and even if you were, it doesn’t seem like self-regulation was without its costs there, either.

It’s certainly true that, in situations like this, rehiring is often not a feasible solution. Regardless of who is in the wrong, a closely collaborative workplace can’t function if a relationship has totally broken down.

But that doesn’t excuse the university or the PI (assuming, as seems pretty clear now, that the PI sacked Dibbern unjustly and got the backing of the university to do it) – it just means that the avenue of redress ought to be financial in the case of the university and disciplinary in the case of the PI.

js – quite. I think a part of it also comes from two failures of critical thinking on the part of professors. The first is a quite understandable tendency to base one’s initial reaction-type thinking about what grad students’ lives are like on their experiences a generation earlier; even professors who know intellectually about the massive transformations in academia over the last thirty years often compartmentalize that knowledge rather than integrate it with their mental image of grad student life.

The other is a unwillingness to think of themselves as bosses and to recognize that they are capable of exploiting their workers. Part of it comes from the nostalgia that creeps up over one’s memories of one’s own struggles as a grad student; with the comfortable distance of memory, professors are more likely to see exploitation as character-building, a rite of passage, a meritocratic sorting the wheat from the chaff, and at worst a war story to bring out over drinks. Part of it comes from the fact that virtually all professors are well-educated professionals who chose not to go into the world of business or who left the world of business to return to academia; thus they are unlikely to have a grounding on how relations of power function in the workplace and definitely don’t want to make that part of their identity.

Finally, there’s also the area-specific problem of one’s field of expertise. This happens less often in the sciences, but it crops up a lot in the social sciences and humanities, especially in disciplines that came out of the campus uprisings of the 1960s or which transformed in reaction to challenges made by the New Left, civil rights groups, women’s liberation movement, gay rights groups, etc. There’s a strong feeling in much of academia that what we do is a profession and a vocation in the old Catholic conception of those words, it’s a spiritual mission, a fulfillment of one’s innermost desires, and therefore not something that should be considered work, which we often think of as an unpleasant necessity. In these disciplines, this is added to one’s identity as part of a social movement or a progressive or a scholar who studies issues of inequality, injustice, or oppression who is therefore either on the side of or incredibly attuned to the underdog. Hence, the phrase I’ve heard over and over again, “I/we don’t exploit our grad students, we’re [insert discipline here]!”

“At the department level and above, this is a business”

Quite true and crucial to understanding what is going on. The University is now big business. They don’t like it to be put that way but that’s how it is. Thus, tenure decisions are based on the profitability of the professor and the rest is just pretend.

I think every here is being WAY to easy on Eli.

Pinko@45 I think you have managed to miss the point by an unusually wide margin. It is Dibbern who thinks RAs are employees and wants to be treated like an employee. The university claims she is merely a student – which to them seems to mean she is less important than an employee, and certainly less deserving of due process.

I’d also note that PIs differ from your typical freelancer in having tenure, which seems like a rather critical difference.

“some sort of evaluation of the student that is not solely at the PIs discretion, and committee meeting should be used to officially document lack of progress if a firing is to happen.”

If they don’t have that at UM, they are seriously screwed. That alone would justify heavy criticism of the University administration. Coming back for a moment to the “student not employee” argument, if lack of academic progress was the cause of Goldman firing Dibbern, that lack must be documented somewhere. Don’t they have academic performance reviews for grad students? Can they produce documentation of negative reviews? You can’t give a student a bad grade without being able to document it (and they have a complaint procedure). But you can kick out a grad student from one day to the next on a the basis of “I have a gut feeling she’s not working hard enough”? Come on, that’s ridiculous.

Andrew,

I am certain I haven’t missed the point. The questions are what involves due process for a student as an RA and what involves due process as an employee. What are those procedures going to be? They will have to relate to the student’s progress and presumably be tied to some sort of evaluation from the advisor and the student’s dissertation committee. These things should already exist, and if policies are not followed, then I am UNION YES if that is what is required to get those academically based policies enforced.
However, it is also possible that this student is both a union activist and a terrible/problematic student. Since terrible students are much more common than I think some in the thread realize (at least in the sciences), Eli was perhaps alluding to the possibility that this could also be the case even solely based on basic probability. The advisor being a jackhat in terms of documentation of alleged terribleness is a problem.

In the sciences at medical schools, positions are soft money so tenure has no meaning. Tenure does have some meaning here, but if you are a researcher and research is what you want to do most, followed by teaching, which I hope you at least enjoy and take seriously, you ARE a freelancer for your research and laboratory teaching (which is what funds graduate students in the sciences). You are not a freelancer for your classroom teaching, which is what moves undergraduates through the sausage and adds some seasoning to graduate students, but in terms of graduate student teaching has a much lower impact.

I would favor unionization for the strengthening of student benefits and making sure stipends are reasonable. I think faculty appear to have issues in terms of unionization of RAs when it comes to determination of academic policies that relate to student retention, though if these policies are not enforced appropriately, the union has value here.

As PP said, about the only protection is the grad student grapevine. In extreme cases (and Eli believes it has happened) the Department can forbid a PI from taking grad students, but there are all sorts of issues with that too.

Eli, no it isn’t just the ‘grad student grapevine’. The only protection is regular reports on the student’s progress that the adviser (UK ‘supervisor’) needs to write and file. This ought to be the case whether we are discussing the RA as a student – in which case the adviser has responsibility for their intellectual development – or as an employee – in which case the adviser is a line manager and needs to tell them what to do and make sure that they are doing it. Either way, saying “You’re a bit behind” out of the blue, and sacking someone a few weeks later, is not on. If the PI can in fact get away with it, it would imply that U Mich are not very good at research or employment quality assurance. And they are evil union-busters . . . time for a boycott?

Back to the grapevine: has _anyone_ ever heard of a PI so badly thought-of that s/he couldn’t fill salaried positions s/he was offering, even with regard to the most desperate, badly advised and out-of-the-loop applicants? Relying on the grapevine automatically has equal opps implications, because the blue-chip students of Professor X’s old friends/sparring partners will be warned off Prof X’s projects, whereas the clever but badly connected students won’t know to avoid them.

Part of the confusion in Rabett’s comments stems from the question whose research the student is actually doing. Is it her own research? Or is it the PI’s research?

Some students get scholarships for their studies. Academic progress is all that should matter. Some get teaching assistantships to pay for their studies. The teaching duties are normally separate, and evaluated separately, from the studies and research.

Research assistantships are more complicated. The student depends on the supervisor both as employer and academic adviser. The adviser may genuinely mentor the student, or he/she may exploit the student as cheap labor. The interests should ideally be aligned – both should want the student to make progress – but what if that’s not the case? The situation is worse than in any private corporation because the employee/student’s dependency is so total. To argue that precisely that group of workers shouldn’t have any employment protection is rather perverse. If the relationship becomes untenable, whether or not it is the supervisor’s fault, the University could surely, if they wanted to, find a solution that would not destroy both the livelihood and the academic career of the assistant.

To second Colin Danby’s praise of Steven Attewell @40. And to add a little.

Exploitation of research assistants in many areas of the humanities is less likely to be severe, I think, simply because the work an RA does in, say, English or History, is less team-oriented than an RA in a research lab does and less directly tied to the professor’s next grant or fellowship than a PI’s is (although, of course, pressures of deadline and hopes for more grants or fellowships are real enough for any professor). I know I was pretty clueless about the world of contemporary research labs/groups and PI’s until recently (via my son’s partner, who does biomedical research and has worked under several “PI’s” in several labs, in the US and Canada) — boy what a grueling world, for the PI’s as well as everyone working for them. The PI’s do vary a lot, but even the kindest and most thoughtful are unbelievably demanding and under their own pressures (competition for grants, especially, just to keep their research going). I compare what its like for people in these labs to the grad students and post-docs I knew in physics 35 years ago or so, and I see no comparison. Incredibly hard as those physics students worked, they also had some time for lives — and it was just different. More a sense of shared enterprise with the professor and less of being a cog in a machine that was always being speeded up.

You’d think the guidelines unionization promises would be helpful all round. Especially if unionization went national, the insanely frenetic pace of research might be slowed a little to one that made everyone’s lives better. Within the workplace/space of shared scholarly endeavor (call it what you will — I think both are apt), formal guidelines would make it easier for everyone to conduct themselves professionally in the midst of personal relationships. I was thinking about this in a different context recently, when my adm. asst. had her annual “performance review.” She and I are friends certainly in the workplace and sometimes outside it, which is part of why we work so well together. But which also makes it useful to have very formal review procedures — time set aside from any considerations of personal friendship to review both her work and what I could do differently or better so that, together, we can accomplish our shared goal of serving the department.

One caveat concerning Steve Attewell’s last paragraph, about 1960’s activists and notion of scholarship as mission (or, if you will, pro-fession: yes, there is a religious history to this). If that notion is now confined to us of that generation, I am saddened (though I appreciate the larger point SA is making). But more important, I don’t see that notion of mission to be at all in conflict with unionization (see my last paragraph).

As someone who worked to form the TA’s union at Michigan in the early-mid 70’s (minor role, but one large enough to lose me my initially arranged thesis adviser — common response then, and like sexual harassment and such in those days, not only perfectly “legal” but also unlikely to prompt outrage anywhere), I’d be curious to know how many professors truly of “the ’60’s” generation oppose unionization of UofM’s RA’s. Not too many of us from that “60’s” generation who got Ph.D.’s — and who were also political activists — actually got tenured positions in academia, at least at elite universities and colleges (Camille Paglia’s vision of things notwithstanding). Professor Goldman herself must not have been born till the mid-late 60’s. There’s a tendency I’ve observed among many born in and since about 1980 or 1985, to collapse late 70’s, 80’s, and even early 90’s generations with “the 60’s.” I’d compare that to collapsing the WWII generation with the Korean (which would be a very strange thing to do). I am truly curious to know: are there (a significant number of, not the odd occurence) 60’s generation prof’s at the U of M, who were real activists in their 60’s youth, who oppose unionization?

Meredith –

First of all, thanks to both Colin and yourself for the praise; I’m blushing.

In terms of the humanities, Teaching Assistant-ships and Readerships are the major source of exploitation, because that’s where the high volume of work actually gets done and it’s where the rubber meets the road when funding cuts intersect with higher enrollment – more students and fewer people to run the sections and do the grading, the academic equivalent of speed-up and stretch-out.

You’re quite right – a well-enforced union contract is the best way to counter-act this trend by brute-forcing a ceiling on hours of work.

Regarding the 60s (and you’ll note that I was also discussing people from later generations in disciplines and sub-disciplines created by the 1960s and later movements) – many of them don’t outright oppose unionization; in fact, quite often they are pro-union in the abstract. The problem is that they disassociate their political stance from their workplace, and thus get upset when their lives get made difficult by the union challenging their work practices. Suddenly they view this union as outside meddlers even as they support unions in the general.

However, you do see the tendency for progressive-identified academics to take the stance that “grad students aren’t Houston janitors [or sweatshop workers, etc.] and thus aren’t being exploited and shouldn’t worry about unions.”

Tell me, Marc, what’s your justification for the argument that research assistants shouldn’t enjoy the same right to an eight hour day and a 40-hour week that private sector workers got in 1938?

FYI, the highest PhD stipend in the country in biomedical and biological sciences puts you at $32k in New York City. The median stipend is more like $25k a year. Which brings me to this point – how low should people’s income go before they have the permission of their employers to unionize? 30th percentile? 20th?

@Marc

If unions mean “doesn’t work on the weekend” or “lengthy grievance procedures to deal with academic judgements” – yup, you’re going to get a lot of well-justified opposition from faculty. If you’re talking about health care or salaries – there would be support.

I’m a TA in Michigan. As Meredith pointed out, the TA’s have been unionized since the 1970s (sincere thanks for your efforts, Meredith) and forty years later I’m in the library at 11:52 on a Saturday night grading exams that I proctored on Friday afternoon. Working on the weekend isn’t the issue. It never was and I expect it never will be.

As for the lengthy procedures to deal with academic judgements: UM wrote up their own rules on academic administration and it appears failed to follow them in this case. If nothing else, this gives the appearance of impropriety rather than fair procedure for dismissal.

In the abstract, Jennifer Dibbern’s case isn’t a pro-union issue at all. There are of course arguments for and against RA unionization. Let there be a free and open debate on the referendum.

The referendum was endorse by the Regents of the University. Campaigning is authorized and part of the democratic process. Now we see a member of the ‘Yes’ side was kicked out of her program by a member of ‘No’ side. There may well be an innocent explanation. Nonetheless this looks like punishment for political activism. That should worry you, be you pro- or anti-union.

Steven @60: However, you do see the tendency for progressive-identified academics to take the stance that “grad students aren’t Houston janitors [or sweatshop workers, etc.] and thus aren’t being exploited and shouldn’t worry about unions.”

This and your post @40 are totally and exactly right. What’s sort of sad about this is that it has a huge effect on how grad students very often think about their own position and role. I remember early in grad school, a decade or so ago, talking to some friends who were organizers, and them suggesting that we unionize, and this seeming crazy to me at the time. Even though, abstractly, I was extremely pro-union. After all, I was a student, not a worker. I guess this is really neither here nor there, but I think there’s this sort of feudal vestige to the mentor-advisee relation, and wide-scale unionization is really the way to rid ourselves of it.

Marc @63: Science is creative work, like music or art. Writers don’t turn off after 40 hours, painters don’t, and scientists don’t.

Yes, it’s all very beautiful, but the point is about fair terms for paid employment, so I’m failing to see how this matters.

Steve writes “FYI, the highest PhD stipend in the country in biomedical and biological sciences puts you at $32k in New York City. The median stipend is more like $25k a year. Which brings me to this point – how low should people’s income go before they have the permission of their employers to unionize? 30th percentile? 20th?”

Counting tuition? The cost of an RA to a grant includes tuition (it also often includes overhead, but that is an entirely different story) and materials and equipment usage fees. If the student were not supported by the grant she would have to come up with that out of whatever salary she was earning elsewhere. A reasonable range is that a student cost to a grant is about 60-100K$/year depending on the local rules about tuition and overhead. While universities are not allowed to charge overhead on tuition, they often do so on stipends.

The problem is not that unions are incompatible with research in science and engineering, the problem is that there are real tensions between the thesis research and the work parts of the job which have to be dealt with.

Counting tuition? The cost of an RA to a grant includes tuition (it also often includes overhead, but that is an entirely different story) and materials and equipment usage fees.
That’s true in every other kind of job as well. People require training, facilities and other overhead to get their job done, so adding an employee to the payroll costs far more than their salary.

@71: Here in the US you’re flatly wrong. Salaried workers, like me, have no 40 hour work week limit.

@69: And with this sort of abusive horseshit I’m out of here.

I’m sorry that you have a job that you hate and that you count the minutes until 5 PM. I enjoy what I do; I see no relationship between my training, my current work, and the environment of the students in my profession with the bitter and distorted blather that I see here. Doing what you love isn’t slave labor in any meaningful sense of the word.

And, yup, other countries have other rules. In fields like mine this has the direct consequence that US scientists are far more productive than those elsewhere, and that many of the most talented people in the world come to the US. (The fact that the pay is a lot better in most cases doesn’t hurt either.)

“Counting tuition? The cost of an RA to a grant includes tuition (it also often includes overhead, but that is an entirely different story) and materials and equipment usage fees. ”

If I work at a factory should the owner be able to subtract the cost of the equipment I am using from my wage?

“And with this sort of abusive horseshit I’m out of here.”

Marc what was so abusive about 69?

MPAVictoria ever wonder why science and engineering grad students don’t emerge from their PhD’s with a mountain of debt the way medical and law school students do? It’s because someone else (the PI through grants) PAYS THEIR TUITION. It is a real cost and a benefit. Same as health insurance (btw, that gets charged to the grants also), social security is an interesting issue tho.

Eli @76,

Odd comparison, this. Since, after all, grad students in the humanities and the social sciences ALSO FINISH THEIR PHDS WITHOUT INCURRING A MOUNTAIN OF DEBT. (Sorry, wanted to see if all-caps makes an argument stronger; it doesn’t.) Grad students in humanities etc. are the right comparison class because in both cases, tuition is waived or otherwise paid in return for working—as an employee of the university, whether as a TA or a RA.

Graduate tuition is a trifle absurd when your typical late stage grad student (myself being one) isn’t taking classes. What, exactly, is it paying for? Not facilities, because that comes out of overhead. Is it more than an accounting fiction? (The economics of running a lab are opaque to me, as you might have gathered.)

Eli @76,
Sorry to be blunt, but grad students get paid for work, which the PI and the university by extension live off. I don’t think that grad students are responsible for the issues with tuition and overheads that PI’s often complain about. The fairness or otherwise of the grant allocation structure is properly a matter for faculty to discuss with university administrations, not something that grad students should be indirectly made to bear the cost of (As I read it, this is one of the reasons that you feel that grad student RA’s should not be treated as employees).

Marc @72,
I am sorry you feel that you were abused. Personally, I think I was just stating the obvious, although I can see how some people find that insulting.

You see, many people who are RA’s also love their work. They probably just don’t think that their passion for scientific research should be made into a hook for abusive and unreasonable treatment. People are not generally masochistic enough to forego a decent income and a regular career to put up with the often unreasonable demands of grad school research unless they really like their work.

You say:
“And, yup, other countries have other rules. In fields like mine this has the direct consequence that US scientists are far more productive than those elsewhere, and that many of the most talented people in the world come to the US. (The fact that the pay is a lot better in most cases doesn’t hurt either.)”

I am sorry to be so rude, but this is condescending rubbish. US scientists are more “productive” because a) the US spends far more on scientific research than pretty much any other place, and b) it has a liberal immigration policy which allows american scientists to hire grad students and postdocs freely from elsewhere in the world, with the consequence that the US has a lot of people doing research. This is not because they disregard the concern for workplace rights, that you think is so unnecessary.

In many fields (e.g the biomedical sciences), academic lab structures resemble a pyramid scheme with far more grad students and postdocs than there are PI’s (or positions available for that matter). It is not surprising that a PI with a big lab with several grad students and postdocs is fairly productive. The PI has to be a truly incompetent manager for this not to be the case. After all those personnel have ideas too, and spend all their time working.

Finally, as a practising scientist, I should point out, that (in my opinion) a lot of modern scientific research is best described as a lot of “sound and fury signifying nothing”. I doubt scientific research is going to suffer if there is a bit less “productivity”. Certainly, treating the people who do science better is worth this imagined loss of productivity.

Yes – but there still is debt across the disciplines in significant levels (note that S&E has more debt than life and and physical sciences), despite tuition remissions being a pretty ubiquitous form of financial aid. Which suggests that tuition remissions aren’t doing the trick in terms of freeing graduate students from financial burdens, and that graduate students still face financial burdens from education on weak salaries.

Right. Hence my statement at “Tell me, Marc, what’s your justification for the argument that research assistants shouldn’t enjoy the same right to an eight hour day and a 40-hour week that private sector workers got in 1938?” The FLSA is far from universal, unfortunately – and expanding the ranks of workers operating under a union contract is the best way to make it universal de facto.

Steven @81,

I didn’t at all want to suggest that student debt is not a (growing) problem for grad students across all or most disciplines. Though, thanks for the numbers–actually a bit surprised at how widespread indebtedness is, esp. for doctoral students, had a much better sense 0f this for non-doctoral grad programs. Anyway, my point was only that Eli’s reference to med and law students seemed entirely besides the point.

What Meredith said.

Also what Paul Campos has been saying.

There may also be an equality of opportunity aspect. Certainly there is where very low pay is concerned, as in the case of unpaid internships, but presumably single parents and others with similar commitments should be considered analogously ‘time-poor’.

The “different, often competing systems of evaluation and exchange” point is great, and even stronger with the critique of the romanticization of The Gift. (There’s also useful non-romanticizing work on this in anthro e.g. Bourdieu.) Strongly hierarchical systems are often suffused with gifting ideology, particularly the idea that the oppressed are the recipients of an infinite boon, a gift so great they can never fully repay it, from their oppressors.

Where different systems of evaluation/exchange are present simultaneously, the question is what’s the larger system that supports them all. The seams are visible when the discourse of one system gives way to another e.g. when people suddenly switch from talking about time sheets and grant dollars to teh wonders of science. (To take a less contentious example from another area, think about how a real estate agent switches from the cold discourse of “good investment” to the emotional language of “home.”)

The most basic point, though, to return to the politics at hand, is that people who are vulnerable need formal protections and somebody who is on their side when trouble arises, and that’s what a union is for. Of course, many managers don’t like that — Rachel Goldman’s actions in this case are completely rational if she wants maximum control over RAs. Nor is it surprising that a university administration interested in grant dollars will let itself be guided by people like Goldman.

Pinko @ 45 : “what is apparently underestimated in much of the rest of the thread is that productivity and progress by students are absolutely critical for lab function and existence”

How is that different from ANY OTHER WORKPLACE? Productivity and progress by employees is absolutely critical for any firm’s function and existence. It does not excuse attempts to impose medieval relationships between employer and employee. **** a duck.

“The tuition is nothing but wooden nickels.”

Thanks Barry @ 79. People forget this far too often in universities in all sorts of areas.

Colin Danby @ 96 put the point about “gifts” beautifully as well. As a lawyer I hear it all the time in our profession as well. Most of which is code for a master/servant ideology that would have been out of place in 1920.

The apprentice v. employee distinction much beloved by provosts is silly — many plumbers’ unions have an apprentice, journeyman, master system, so unionization and apprenticeship are compatible.

Faculty in labs have legitimate concerns about how unionization would affect the way labs work, but that’s what bargaining is all about. If individual PI’s bargained fairly with their RAs now, then the RAs would see no need for a union.

Of course, the faculty could always accept an exchange or auction system: RAs would list their work-schedule, and faculty could be bid for them. Some students might take low-stipend/low-hour offers, and others high-stipend/high hours. Smarter student could command premiums, as could those working nights and holidays. My guess is that PIs would run out of money before their labs were fully staffed.

All I’m saying is that people might well be willing to accept inferior treatment in cases where they expect to only have to endure that treatment for a limited time and expect to be in the “management” rather than “labor” position soonish.

And I will pop in again to say that to take advantage of that disposition, when for many that expectation is in fact delusional, is unethical.

Steve@104: I’m not arguing with you that it is. However, as I say, the degree to which it’s delusional varies a lot between fields.

Steven@105: Again, I’m not taking an ethical position. I’m just trying to explore why so many grad students (especially S+E students) not only are accommodating, but don’t in fact feel that they are being exploited. You could of course say that this is false consciousness, as Steve LaBonne suggests, but I think it’s still an interesting question what motivates them.

Isn’t the delusionality of the expectation the problem?

On the whole, yes (though I think some limits ought to be set to the extent even of rationally justifiable self-exploitation). But it was at least somewhat delusional even when times for academia were pretty good, and those relatively good times are not coming back in the foreseeable future, so while I actually do agree that EKR might have a point if the premise were accurate, it isn’t (and never really has been) so he doesn’t.

EKR, the question is, where are you trying to go with what is a fairly uncontroversial point. Since you agree that the expectation is largely false, I take it you would agree that it certainly can’t be used as a justification for the current state of affairs. If you want to say that the students should be better informed- something that could be greatly aided by unionization- then I would heartily agree with you. So what’s IS your take on the significance of this kind of voluntary self-exploitation?

Ok then, so if you’re not arguing about what should be done, then can we move on from the factual point that “some people let themselves be exploited”?