The Jedi Master Fallacy and Others

Put bluntly, it appears that people like you are not willing to accept that there are any legitimate arguments against unions under any circumstances.

Put bluntly, you don’t know (or pretend not to know) the difference between “arguments”and “GOOD arguments”.

Try making one of the latter kind. The ones on Henry’s list are transparently self-serving bullshit.

I’m not particularly pro-union to be honest, though they can certainly be important in some situations.

#4 is especially hilarious (and I think the most common argument at the moment). The average private lab, especially the mid-range ones are *much better* for the mid level employee than the average university lab is to its grad students. You get better work conditions on average, better pay for certain, and fewer lies about the structure of the system. [I have no doubt that the university system is as good or better for the top researcher or handful of researchers at each institution, as they essentially have fiefdoms and additionally can often gain returns from the private sector, but we’re talking about the middle level/grad student comparison].

Strangely, in many of the STEM cases, the reason universities are worse is precisely because of the lack of competitive pressures. The students exist in a situation akin to an incredibly loose labor market–they know you can’t leave with far more certainty than an employer suspects/hopes his employees can’t leave.

“Ten degrees to the left of center in good times, ten degrees to the right of center if it affects them personally…love me, love me, love me, I’m a [professor].”

I think we can’t underestimate the personal convenience factor.

But Marc, it likewise appears — “put bluntly” — that you’re not willing to hazard any. You’re unwilling to risk arguments in favor of your position in favor of depriving others of job security and health insurance over fears of name-calling? Please.

I’m a graduate student at the University of California, Davis. We have been unionized for about 25 years now, so it’s the only world I know, grad-school-wise. I can only speak anecdotally, but unionization simply has not destroyed the Professor-Grad Student relationship. Nor has it achieved an Ideal Speech Situation or whatever — I’m no utopian. There were difficulties and misunderstandings (and occasional abuse) before, and there still are. But now, by making rights and obligations subject to negotiation, unionization has cleared up what everybody owes everybody else, so these things don’t have to be re-litigated all the time. This is *good* for professional relationships, at least in my eyes.

Plus: did I mention health insurance?

I’m not “otherwise left-leaning”; I will take that as obvious to everyone.

That said, I do wonder if whether unionization addresses the major problem.

The major problem, as I see it, is the lack of good jobs for students with a PhD. It’s not that RA’s are treated worse than medical residents, it’s that RA’s aren’t assured a professional job at the end of the process and medical residents are. This has always been a problem with apprenticeship systems, and it’s one of the ways in which apprentices have historically been exploited–but I’m not certain that bettering the conditions of apprenticeship helps that much. (And I’m assuming that no plausible union structure will ensure tenure-track job offers for all graduates.)

“Put bluntly, it appears that people like you are not willing to accept that there are any legitimate arguments against unions under any circumstances.”

Ah, don’t leave us hanging. Tell! Tell us these legitimate arguments! There must be lots of great reasons people should be prohibited from banding together to jointly negotiate for better wages and working conditions when they lack bargaining power as individuals.

In short – I don’t think that professors can reasonably demand ideals from TAs/RAs that they themselves would have great trouble living up to.

I’ve been out of the academy for a while, but I would bet that a lot of profs opposed to TA unions think that they *did* live up to those ideals … back when they were TAs themselves. If they didn’t need unions back in the day, why do the kids need them now? “Hey, you gotta pay your dues / Before you pay the rent.”

If my guess is correct, then empirical arguments showing that conditions are relatively worse for TAs today than 20 or 30 years ago might be helpful. Just a thought.

@5: Out of that thread, not out of this forum. Yet, anyhow.

The most basic arguments against graduate student unions are that they don’t address the actual problems that students face in some fields, that there is a tension between the “student” aspect and union rules, and that students in different academic disciplines and departments have very different needs.

A department like mine (small, high academic standing, sciences) can afford to provide benefits that larger departments can’t. For a concrete example, we provide the equivalent of dedicated travel funds for students to attend scientific meetings in addition to stipends. I’m certain that this wouldn’t be part of a university-wide contract. We emphasize some things (like research) much more heavily than others (coursework.) Individual counseling has a lot more to do with people leaving the program than qualifying exams do, and students who leave our program almost always do so in the first two years. Job prospects depend on letters of recommendation.

There are other dimensions than “student vs. professor”. Large public universities in the US can have 10,000 graduate students. A typical program in my field may have 25 students, and there are ~200 PhD graduates a year. We routinely struggle for autonomy relative to other, larger fields.

There are also other solutions to genuine exploitation issues besides unions. Universities (and disciplines) can look at how graduates do in employment, time to degree, working conditions, and so on. In smaller disciplines such as mine, these informal networks can be extremely valuable in steering students towards departments that treat students well and away from those which don’t.

In short, you lose a lot when you turn this into a purity test for being a real (TM) leftist (which in these parts is a synonym for “good person”) and don’t bother to drill down to the actual things that people are thinking.

I find it even more puzzling that most faculty–even most left-leaning faculty–seem to be opposed to faculty unions, too.

@15: I actually feel sorry for you. I’m capable of imagining that people can be decent and still disagree with me. You don’t know a single thing about who I am, how I interact with students, or what it would be like to work together.

Our department has a student to faculty ratio close to 1:1; it’s small; and our students do well in standard metrics. We take graduate education deadly seriously here – it’s the main focus of our department, to be honest. We could support more students than we can mentor or get jobs for. The last three graduate students that I worked with have faculty positions (within 3-6 years after PhD). I don’t factor politics into how I deal with students, I don’t take many students on at one time (typically one, no more than three at one time ever), and I work hard to help them go into whatever direction that they want to go. This is a subject that I take great personal interest in.

But if you want to paint devil horns on me, go for it. I won’t reciprocate.

PTA – unions, being human institutions, are not immune to stupid people. However, speaking as a longtime grad student union grievance-handler, I have to say, that’s really far from best or common practice. In my union, for example, those undergraduate students would be union members – so the idea of trying to get them fired would be verboten. And our first and only move would be organizing the cookie department to improve conditions.

SamChevre at 10 – “for all graduates” is tricky. But to follow Camus’ logic, there are union structures that can increase the ratio of tenure-track job offers for graduates. One long-term strategy is to shrink the cost differential between grad student labor and professorial labor (and then repeating for adjunct unions and post-doc unions) to decrease the incentives that are leading to a casualization of academia. Another is to build graduate student power within academia and within the political system to address the academic labor market – the state universities are a huge chunk of the market, and most regents have to pass through state legislatures, so there are mechanisms out there to exercise democratic power on the university, albeit from a degree of separation.

Anderson – you’d think so, but as I said in the other thread, there’s a big difference between their abstract knowledge and their emotional/instinctive mental framework, and a tendency not to integrate the former into the latter when making decisions, especially when many other factors (budgetary pressure, one’s own comfort, etc.) weigh on one side of the scales. That’s one of the reasons why unions are helpful; by transforming these situations from one in which supervisors have virtually unlimited authority within the scope of university rules and the law into one in which supervisors have to deal with countervailing power (i.e, unions), it hopefully will make them more aware of their privilege in a day-to-day context.

Marc – as a science and engineering type, surely you know the maxim that the plural of anecdote is not data. You clearly had a bad experience in your department, but your department is not all departments.

As for your most basic arguments:
1. at the worst, unions provide students with a uniquely independent and powerful vehicle for addressing those problems.
2. there’s actually less tension than you assume, and a lot of that tension actually hides power differentials.
3. that’s why we have the grievance process, which begins at informal negotiations at the departmental level, so that grievance-handlers (preferably from within the department) can work out those specific issues from within the department. But from my six years of doing grievance work across a university, there’s less of this than you might think.

Regarding your department – a union contract is a floor, not a ceiling. Nothing stops departments from offering “dedicated travel funds for students to attend scientific meetings in addition to stipends” under a union contract; my department gives us travel funds to go to archives, and we’ve been unionized for over a decade.

“There are also other solutions to genuine exploitation issues besides unions. Universities (and disciplines) can look at how graduates do in employment, time to degree, working conditions, and so on. In smaller disciplines such as mine, these informal networks can be extremely valuable in steering students towards departments that treat students well and away from those which don’t.” These informal networks are all institutions in which graduate students have no power; the great thing about unions is they allow workers to have power in dealing with their own exploitation, instead of having to rely on the beneficence of the people above them.

Eli takes it that Henry has always personally provided all of his graduate students full tuition and a munificent stipend sufficient for the east side of Manhattan, ensured that they were never stressed and that they spent no more than three years to reach the doctorate. Oh yes, he has personally guaranteed their mortgages.

Further, it is well known that Henry insists that every member of his department and university do the same and has pledged to resign if not.

Eli, since you’ve clearly run out of arguments, I’d like to point out that the door is right over there.

@23: I agree with you on the subject of health benefits and the like; students do benefit. But for programs like mine there are real costs. Collective bargaining centralizes decisions. If you’re part of a large, cumbersome university this can be a problem. It doesn’t *have* to cause problems, but it definitely can cause problems.

Basically, any graduate student union at my university would be negotiating for average student conditions worse than what the students in my department currently have. The only outcomes of a successful unionization drive would be less autonomy for our department and more paperwork.

@19: I understand the objections to informal networks. For small programs sprinkled in universities across the country, however, I don’t think there is any viable alternative. What constitutes an “abuse” is the sort of thing that’s incredibly hard to police, especially locally. A “long time to degree” in some fields is short for others; the only meaningful comparisons are within a given discipline.

Basically, a useful union would be organized by academic field, not by university, and I can’t see a good structural way to make that happen.

Good response, Marc (@16).

My department also has had some funds available for graduate students in areas like travel, although these are not in our contract. These have waxed and waned with the state of the University budget, mind you, but they are there. My point: such things are not incompatible with unionization.

And yes, advising is important for innumerable reasons, no question, but so are things like maternity leave and childcare reimbursements — things that UC graduate students have now, albeit in inadequate amounts, and would certainly not have if we had not bargained for them collectively.

Here’s the precise arguments I once got from chairmen A (big private school in NYC) and B (small private school in Texas).

Chairman A: the lecturers unionized and now we can’t – as we used to – make them teach 75 min per class hour. It’s an outrage! (This falls under Henry’s 6, I believe.)

Chairman B: nobody unionizes in Texas, thank god. All that bureaucracy to deal with would just be too much hassle.

christian_h – and the amazing thing is how often it’s the union that’s arguing for quality of education and the department arguing for cutting corners so that you stick within your hours no matter how many students per TA they assign.

* no.

I hadn’t seen that Velleman thread before. I’m gratified in a resentful way to see that such a sloppy, ahistorical interpreter of Kant is also such a high-handed company man.

I’m not an academic, and I would support graduate student unionization in principal, though without being informed enough to take any sort of firm stance. But if I were going to guess at a reason why unionization might be thought not be super necessary or useful, I’d imagine that it would have a lot to do with the expectation that members would be pretty temporary — being a TA isn’t a long term position like school teacher or factory worker often are, and a lot of the value a union offers is providing protection for members who are stuck one position for a long time and thus don’t have much negotiating power individually. My opinion or understanding of the situation doesn’t much matter, and I’m probably hopelessly uninformed, but I’m surprised that none of the hypothetical bad arguments presented touch on the prospective union members’ (relatively) short tenure.

What I would really love to see is someone of the pro-graduate-unions persuasion make some solid arguments against GSRA unionization, purely as an exercise in intellectualism and open-mindedness. It seems unreasonable to assume that ALL anti-union individuals (or even all left-wing anti-graduate-union individuals) are utterly misguided and have no idea what is good for them and/or their students.

Science grad students are slowly realising that they need unions because an increasing number of professors are stealing their work and not giving credit.

It’s slow going because a lot of science grad students are easily influenced by their professors, who don’t always have the best interests of the student at heart.

It seems to me that Henry’s (5) isn’t a particularly reasonable way of expressing:

“Research assistanceships vary tremendously in kind, but in many cases are very closely entangled with the student’s own dissertation research. The allocation of responsibilities between RA work for which a student is paid as an employee and research toward the degree for which the student could, in principle, be charged tuition is legitimately very fuzzy. This has two consequences. One is that a collective-bargaining unit will represent students with two very different sorts of employment– those for whom the work is entangled with their own research and those for whom it is not. This is likely to serve one of the groups poorly. The second is that unionization, by organizationally emphasizing the employment frame over the educational frame for work that mixes the two, may bureaucratize the educational relationship in disruptive ways.”

I don’t have strong views on this, and I’m not in Henry’s target audience. But I think it’s unreasonable to gloss the anti-unionization arguments without ever mentioning the word “degree,” or acknowledging the *formally* complicated and hybrid status of the student-RA doing work that is partly-dissertation, partly-assistance. “People learn on the job in all kinds of jobs” isn’t really responsive to that.

Question for those at universities with well-functioning RA unions: in case of strike, are such hybrid researchers allowed to continue showing up to the lab and working on their own dissertations? Or is that illegal strike-breaking? (*Not* a rhetorical or sarcastic question– I genuinely don’t see what the outcome would be, having witnessed less-complicated-but-still-very-messy problems of when a person is a student and when an employee.)

Marc, as Linnaeus (and I, at LGM) have pointed out repeatedly, it’s not only possible for graduate student employee unions to negotiate contracts that don’t interfere with some department’s ability to provide surplus benefits to their students, there are recent, significant empirical examples of such cases. I’m familiar most with Washington, where the concern you raise was a major concern in many of the Sciences. Once the union was formed, we elected a bargaining committee. They knew that a) solidarity across departments was important, and b) no one in English wanted to screw the bioengineering students out of their extra stipend and travel money in any case, anyway. So: we negotiated a contract that focused on a floor, and didn’t attempt to level down departments where students had particularly good deals. I understand this arrangement to be similar to other unionized universities, including the UC system.

I won’t accuse you of arguing in bad faith, but the longer you simply ignore evidence that fails to conform to your anti-empirical yet strangely unshakable views of What Unions Really Do, the harder it’ll be to come up with plausible alternative explanations for what you’re up to here.

I was an RA and TA in Grad school and can’t imagine why I would have needed to unionize unless we were going to get cookies and ponies. If you need to be protected you might not be very good at what you do and there are consequences to that. Welcome to the real world.

I feel like printing this out and having it framed so I can hang it in my gallery of Shockingly Ill-Informed Statements.

Honestly, there’s a thread below where a worker got fired because her PI didn’t like her outside activities. Prior to unionization at the U.C, a post-doc was almost fired because she was pregnant and the university didn’t want to pay her maternity leave. (http://republicans.edlabor.house.gov/UploadedFiles/4.30.10_tyler.pdf)

The real world is full of injustice against which merit is no aegis.

@49: I see your point, and it’s a reasonable one. The original post was postulating that there was no reasonable set of grounds to be opposed to graduate student unions. I’ve given what I regard as actual and reasonable arguments about why unions could be a problem. It’s good to see that there are creative solutions around some of these issues. Protections against firing for pregnancy or political / union activity are obviously good things. A minimum floor is a good method to deal with unequal departmental experiences (although it doesn’t actually benefit the science students much, if at all).

However, other issues (like having the X department being in charge of the X graduate program) are more thorny. And there are some areas – academic ones – where I’m afraid that there really may be less common ground. But at least we can get to a place where we understand why the people that we’re disagreeing with believe the things that they believe.

@Stephen the law already covers that with or without a union.
Your employer may not fire you, force you to quit, or force you to take a leave because you are pregnant.
I am sure since you are not ill informed you are very much aware of that.

Again, being in a science department (math) at a major, graduate assistant unionized research university (UCLA), I have not come across a single issue where the union would have interfered with the education of our graduate students. the same was true at my previous university, University of Illinois at Chicago; again, unionized and no noticeable interference with graduate education.

I have heard stories from other places (Canada mostly) where either graduate or lecturer unions have created some friction that seemed to me to be unnecessary and indicative of a lack of understanding of the academic process, but I have never experienced it (and in any event it is unavoidable – as has been pointed out, unions like any human organization can produce less than smart outcomes sometimes).

On the other hand, many graduate student unions are, in my experience, not very effective as unions (partly due to the high turnover in the membership). But that’s a different issue…

@52: I think that we’re not communicating well. There are two issues here for me.

The first is that I’m generically suspicious of “outrageous behavior claimed on the internet”. Reality is never as simple as the initial portrayal; I’ve seen this movie so often that I’ve gotten jaded. That’s the basis of my reaction to the question of cause here – the tea leaves that I could read made me suspicious that there was more to this case than “union hater fires organizer.” I also freely admit that I could be wrong. I didn’t think that I had to specify that it would be immoral to fire students on political grounds. They trust you with their careers, and you have the duty to be a goddamn grown-up and professional in exchange. If I was in that department and I believed that a good student was fired for activism…I’d be pushing to strip that professor of the ability to supervise students, since she was obviously not taking her responsibilities seriously enough. I’d need to know more than I do to understand what actually happened here.

But Eli was making a different and practical point: sometimes you get into a situation where adviser and student just can’t work together. You’re relying on your adviser to write you letters getting you jobs; you can’t force people to write good letters for people they detest. It’s also the case that you’re sometimes under pressure to produce results in a grant, and if someone isn’t doing the job then you just have to give the work to another person capable of performing it.

The reasons can be petty and they can be wrong. In this respect graduate school is like many other jobs – it is extraordinarily rare in the states to have any formal protection against being fired on short notice. My daughter’s boyfriend was summarily dismissed from his lab with no notice – pretty stunning, really. I’d make no case that he was treated fairly. I also advised him to get the hell of the department, since it was obvious to me that he shouldn’t be in a place that treated students that way. I can’t see of a set of rules that would make his case, or the Michigan case, actually go any better.

“Hard cases make bad law” and all of that. I hope this clears things up a bit.

@Henry, I’m just going to skip over the post as to why normally left-leaning professors are against unionizing since it is somewhat irrelevant to the actual GSRAs that will be affected by this. In one of your comments, you state one of GEO’s basic populist arguments: “shouldn’t we just let the GSRAs decide whether it’s a good deal for them, without outside interference or intimidation?”

On it’s face, this seems like a perfectly reasonable question. However, you (as does every person who has made this argument in the last year) seem to only allow for interference and intimidation on the part of those opposed to unionizing (e.g. professors, U of M administration, right-wing idealists, etc). Any actions on the part of the union or union-supporters are never viewed in this light, but instead treated as “organizing” or “informing” the GSRAs.

If a professor speaks out against unionization to his students, this is decried as intimidation and an unfair labor practice (GEO has even gone so far as to petition the university that professors not be allowed to even encourage students to vote). On the other hand, when AFT employees repeatedly show up unannounced in a student’s office or lab during work hours, or even at their home, for a 2-on-1 sales pitch, this is never considered intimidation.

An inherent problem with this election is the fact that one side, the union, has far more resources, experience and organization to run a political campaign. The other “side” is either the university (which cannot openly oppose unionization) or GSRAs themselves who have no resources, personnel or time to mount the same level of campaign as the union. While GEO and AFT love to paint their organizing as fair and democratic, they have clearly invested a lot of time and money in swaying the outcome of this election and so it is hard to believe that they only have the GSRAs’ best interest in mind.

If this election occurs, it will be decided by the majority of those that vote. On the one hand you have a fine tuned union campaign juggernaut that has the information of and has repeatedly visited every GSRA that showed support for unionization over the last year. On the other hand you have a group of GSRAs who are unorganized, largely uninformed and therefore apathetic. Which side do you think will be more successful in turning out its supporters? Who should be the counter-balance to GEO’s campaign?

If you forced every GSRA to vote and told him or her that unionizing will not change their salary or benefits (they are identical to the unionized GSIs, after all) and it will cost them $400/yr, I highly doubt the majority would vote for unionizing. But this is not the sales pitch most GSRAs will get. Instead, they have been promised vague things like “a voice” and “solidarity” by union reps that have come by their lab once a week for the last 8 months, which they have either swallowed and will vote for or have ignored and probably won’t bother to vote.

I’ve been present at two Big Ten universities where the grad students unionized, once as an undergrad, once as an adjunct and then lecturer.

I still haven’t heard an argument that grad students don’t have the right to organize that convinces me–but I think that “right” matters a whole lot less than power. And, lord knows, we faculty love power over students. (Is my memory playing tricks, or are many of the arguments against unions similar to arguments against forbidding sexual harassment?)

In any case, at both schools, the union got decent health insurance for grad instructors who had crappy insurance or none, and in both cases, the union got the grad instructors full tuition waivers. I supervise grad instructors and, interestingly enough, they work hard and conscientiously, even though they can take their kids to a doctor now, instead of the ER.

My daughter’s boyfriend was summarily dismissed from his lab with no notice – pretty stunning, really. I’d make no case that he was treated fairly. I also advised him to get the hell of the department, since it was obvious to me that he shouldn’t be in a place that treated students that way. I can’t see of a set of rules that would make his case, or the Michigan case, actually go any better.

Well, maybe if he had bargaining rights or access to a grievance procedure he wouldn’t have been, or couldn’t have been, dismissed in such a “stunning” manner. So that’s one way in which it could go better. Really, it’s just like any other work place, in this manner at least. (And yes, I’m an academic.)

Benevolent dictatorships are only good as long as you’ve got the same dictator; people move on, and everyone dies.

js, care to suggest how the boyfriend could have been protected? No one, no union, could force any other faculty to pick him up as an advisee, and there is the rub. Currently many offer letters guarantee support for some period (three years often) so the department might have to pick him up for a short time until/if he found another advisor and those of us who have seen similar situation are aware of such things happening.

The example of UW is useful. The union helped with a global issue, health insurance, but there really are significant limits about what unions can do with respect to advisor/student relations and that is what this started about.

PS: Go read what the duties of the faculty spy at UW physics

The major responsibility of the faculty spy is to attend faculty meetings and take good notes about any and all issues that may be of interest to graduate students, then to send these notes out to all the graduate students. Faculty meetings can actually be quite lively at times, and you get a good sense of the departmental dynamics by attending them. The faculty meetings are once a month, usually on the first Wednesday at 3:30 pm, and typically last about an hour or an hour and a half (there’s a closed session after that, but they kick the faculty spy out).

I will just note that I am far, far to the right of almost everybody else on Crooked Timber and am a very, very strong supporter of unionization of all workers. Most US unions after WWII were fiercely anti-communist. On the other hand opposition to independent unions by leftists is not unusual at all. Solidarity in Poland was not suppressed by a right wing government. Rather the issue is should workers have the same right to organize and collectively bargain that is accorded to businesses. There is nothing more anti-free market than government restrictions and the use of force that prevent workers from organizing themselves into collective bargaining units to further their own economic interests.

From management’s perspective, unions are a royal pain in the ass.

Anything that requires managing is a pain in the ass to management.

Correct; I didn’t write well there. I was actually assuming that failure to make academic progress was a reason to terminate support, since this is the background of all grad student support systems that I’ve ever heard of.

Please consider this to be added to my comment above.

Question for those at universities with well-functioning RA unions: in case of strike, are such hybrid researchers allowed to continue showing up to the lab and working on their own dissertations? Or is that illegal strike-breaking?

Strikes are not part of the grad union experience. The vast majority of grad unions have never had a strike, in part because they are legally prohibited from doing so. The tiny handful of cases – you could probably count them on the fingers of one hand – are so sui generris you can’t generalize, but one thing we can say is that no one is ever legally obliged to strike. (The category of “illegal strike breaking” does not exist wrt the individual employee.) The only tool the union would ever have is moral suasion, and again, established grad unions *never* strike. (The handful of strikes that have taken place are for recognition.)

It’s an interesting question, tho, insofar as it reveals what a wildly unrealistic perception many people have of the practical implications of graduate employee unionization, e.g. that it involves regular strikes.

I would have thought it obvious, by the way, that the “wage” aspect of being a graduate student isn’t the one that’s a problem for unions. It’s the fact that a student is working in a lab to get a degree, write research papers, and get recommendations for postdoctoral positions. You can prevent someone from getting fired, but you can’t make people do any of the other steps involved in being a successful graduate student. And that’s why the talk of employment rules is so utterly alien in the context of RAs. The employment rules can’t help you with the informal and academic ingredients that are central to a scientific career.

Marc @79 define a system that forces advisers to write good recommendations for people that they don’t like

Those of us in ordinary employment have to make do with the implied threat of a defamation suit, pretty much. It’s far from ideal, but it is better than nothing – and defining rights does actually get some people to internalise them to some extent, others to be concerned in a general way about the consequences of not doing so, yet others to avoid breaking them because of the costs of avoiding detection, etc. Even I know that, and I’m a card-carrying conspiracy theorist, for flip’s sake.

Basically, the idea that imperfect compliance renders attempts at regulation pointless is not a runner, and if I’m right about that then your last two comments aren’t either.

re: #80. I don’t think there’s any question of forcing person A to bring it about that person B does what’s required to get a degree, write research papers – I’m supposing that the idea is that the supervisor/advisor should do their bit, and not obstruct the student in doing theirs. And if there is really is a problem – a student who is seriously underperforming but doesn’t realise it or perversely insists on continuing, presumably? – it should be addressed openly, fairly, according to some set of guidelines and in a reviewable, e.g. documented, kind of way, I should have thought.

Or what consumatopia said.

piglet:

I did my PhD at SOAS (University of London) in two years, but then was unemployed for three years. It took me seven years after completion to get a contract longer than a year. The institutional structures of the market greatly favors people who take longer over those who take a reasonable time. So finishing in 3-4 years only to be unemployed for two to three years is not a better deal than finishing in five to six and getting a tenure track job off the bat.

86: Of course finishing early just to be unemployed is not ideal but what is the evidence that those who take longer have better job chances? “finishing in five to six and getting a tenure track job off the bat”, how realistic is that? And even five years seems, currently in the US, to be on the low side. (I should look up those numbers).

@89: I’m part of an international scientific community. The one certain thing for my students is that they won’t be hired at the place where I work (there are strong cultural taboos against hiring your own students.) Universities in California and research institutes in Denmark aren’t going to care about Midwestern university union rules.

You’re generalizing your experiences into a context where they’re simply not applicable. Research is extremely competitive and assessing the talent for original research is highly subjective.

If there’s one thing that I’ve learned as a professor it’s that academe is a fractured place, where the formal and informal rules can be completely different even in related fields. The union and grievance model simply doesn’t map well onto mentoring relations involving creative work, spanning years, and frequently being one-on-one.

Sorry, I was talking about the US.

piglet:

Does anybody else here think that their department is graduating too many PhDs, and that that the typical duration of a PhD program is unconscionably long? And if yes, what should be done about it?

In the humanities (in the US), students starting a PhD program are generally going to have a Bachelor’s (don’t have numbers on this, but I’m pretty sure this is mostly true). So there’s a couple of years of coursework before you’re technically a “doctoral candidate” working on your dissertation. Once you combine the coursework and the writing of the dissertation, it’s seriously hard to get below 5 years. Especially if, as at all but the richest schools, you also have regular teaching (or other research) duties.

this makes no sense sorry, it does make sense – I misread it. But the following points stand.

People have to work with other people. Teachers have to teach students. If there is some reason why they really don’t think it’s reasonable that they should have to in a given case, then these reasons have to be given and substantiated. What is the big mystery about this?

Teachers have to teach students– accepting all duly enrolled and qualified students into the course. But advisors don’t have to advise in the same way. There’s no duty to act as an advisor for any particular student. There’s no presumption that a student has a right to the advisor of his/her choice, and no burden on the advisor to justify declining taking on another doctoral advisee.

just that a supervisor might be required to give an accurate appraisal as part of their job

I can easily see requiring an accurate appraisal, for items that are objective. I think of an appraisal as answering the question “what did Sam do, and how well did he do it?”

I think of a recommendation as being much more about potential, and hence much less objective. I think of a recommendation as answering the question “what can Sam do, and how likely is he to be good at the things that you do and he hasn’t yet done?”

I can imagine how to require an accurate appraisal; I’m having difficulty imagining how to determine whether a recommendation is “accurate”.

Addendum to Levy 98: “Teachers have to teach students—accepting all duly enrolled and qualified students into the course. But advisors don’t have to advise in the same way.” But actually, grad students are charged tuition precisely because presumably, their advisors spend so much of their precious time educating them. And it was argued earlier that students should regard waved tuition (i. e. the time spent by the advisor) as compensation. Apparently, grad students are not employees because they are students, but then they also aren’t really students. What are they? Chattel?

(I haven’t read all the comments, so this may have been stated above.)

In Australia, tenured academics, TAs and (most kinds of) administrative staff are represented by the same union. It’s not the most militant union in labor history, but we do have the occasional one-day strike and other forms of industrial action. As I type this, the sky looks a little wobbly, but has not yet fallen.

JTL @98 – But we’re talking about the ad-/super-visees they have accepted already, and how capriciously they are allowed to behave once they are in that relationship, aren’t we?

AL @99 – indeed, it’s not perfect by any means but as long as it’s understood that it’s not ok to disadvantage people just because you don’t like them, and that you will have to be sneaky about it, etc., thats’s better than nothing and for all I know courts would recognise this kind of thing – maybe on grounds other than defamation. Who knows – as a supervisor, do you want to gamble on it? The protection offered to employees in other sectors by the nominal ability to sue is pretty feeble in reality too, but these things do still have some effect, see above. In any case, at least the student has been able to get the PhD rather than getting booted out arbitrarily I suppose.

SC @100 – this kind of issue comes up before courts all the time and people manage to make a tolerably sensible fist of sorting them out in many cases. Liberal use of the word ‘reasonable’ and a judge who’s not barking mad will usually do it I reckon.

(A very general point – objections to a proposed change based on the contention that it won’t change much are a bit rum. Or ‘it won’t work’ – well let us worry about that, thanks.)

However it occurs to me that since it’s possible I may want to be a supervisee in the not too distant future, I should probably avoid following a fairly abstract argument entered into in a rather idle fashion down a path that makes me look like I am even countentancing the possibility of any kind of friction with a future supervisor.

I’m assuming that these are pretty rare cases we’re talking about here, where either the student or supervisor is being unreasonable.

I remember that in Germany (and probably some other places) employees have a legal right to a written work appraisal by their employer (“Arbeitszeugnis”). These are submitted as part of any subsequent employment application. The legal requirements for how the appraisal must be written are strict and well established and employees who feel treated unfairly go to court regularly. Since the appraisal cannot be openly negative, there is a lot of speculation about how to recognize a bad or mediocre one.

It is interesting that in US academia, although recommendations are voluntary, the tendency is that any recommendation that is less than glowing is interpreted as a no-no. Iow the pressure on supervisors who wish their students well is clearly to not be honest. Moreover, I have heard the same about tenure evaluations, which are supposed to be fair and accurate reviews rather than letters of recommendation. A tenure applicant who was denied was told by the Dean that the reviews “have to be glowing”. Any hint at room for improvement justifies denial.

Nobody is so good that a fair and accurate review wouldn’t contain any negativity. Everybody has room for improvement. So is the trend that reviewers are required to make up their mind whether they want the candidate to get approved, and if yes, then to lie?

@108
I remember that in Germany (and probably some other places) employees have a legal right to a written work appraisal by their employer (“Arbeitszeugnis”). These are submitted as part of any subsequent employment application. The legal requirements for how the appraisal must be written are strict and well established and employees who feel treated unfairly go to court regularly. Since the appraisal cannot be openly negative, there is a lot of speculation about how to recognize a bad or mediocre one.

I seem to recall this being mentioned on CT before. Whoever mentioned it added that employers had devised an elaborate code for trashing someone without saying anything openly negative. For example “X performed his duties to my full satisfaction” sounds good, but actually that’s actually meant to blackball someone. If you want to really recommend them you say “X performed his duties to my fullest satisfaction”.

Copyrights can be transferred, which is what is usually done with scientific publications. Geez, get your fingers outta there guys

@Barry 109 – no, I’m not.

@piglet – that’s an odd argument to bring up considering that the German academic system is far more abusive to graduate students and recent graduates and much more of an old boys network than in the US.
I think Marc is completely right that no union or other regulation will be able to remove a relatively high degree of dependency from the advisory/advisee relationship. It’s impossible to regulate good advising, it’s impossible to make a professor mention a student’s name to his colleagues, to make those phone calls during the job market etc. I just don’t see why that’s an argument against unions.

@117: and we have exactly this setup without unions. Every year you have to evaluate progress to degree. Grants have to be renewed, and funding can be contingent on getting a grant. If a student isn’t doing well they typically get anywhere from 3 months to a year to change their progress, depending on the case involved. If a student does get dropped by an adviser, they either need to get another one or they have to leave the program. It’s therefore pretty unusual to have people summarily dropped, and that is usually the consequence of some sort of nasty argument. These cultural protections are much stronger than the formal ones in any department that I’ve ever been a part.

adam.smith 116: which argument exactly do you consider “odd”?

adam.smith: that was more of a side remark. It has little bearing on German academia and the treatment of doctoral students.

At the UK universities I’m familiar with, research assistants are unionized. (That is, the union is recognized by the employer and many – but not all – employees join it).

Strikes are pretty rare, but do happen occasionally (see the recent UCU strike at the former polytechnics over pensions).

It’s pretty clear that research assistants are employees.

Something that may be different from US universities: some people are just PhD students, some people are just research assistants (i.e. employees) and some people are both. Back when I was both, I was paid a salary by the university (in my capacity as an RA) and out of that paid fees back to the university (in my capacity as a grad student).

The two roles are fairly decoupled (although the discussion in this thread makes me aware of how much potential for conflict of interest there is).

It’s certainly possible to imagine someone being kicked out of the PhD programme but kept on as an employee. (The failed researcher who is really, really good as a Unix sysadmin is almost a cliche).

I think Henry gets most of the arguments correct, with the addition 14‘s position. I heard this frequently when unionization was discussed at NYU and Columbia in the 90s.

7 is well put too. At Columbia in the 90s many of the hard science grad students wanted nothing to due with unionization in order to raise humanities’ GAs salaries. They figured that the humanities would end up stealing from the sciences rather than obtaining new funds for the humanities. The floor would be built by lowering the ceiling.

There are plenty of leftists who do not clamor for unions for professions where labor supply is lower than demand or strong competition means that employees can exit to better positions easily. No one campaigns to unionize corporate lawyers (even if their labor supply is now greater than demand), medical specialists, or investment bankers. But DAs and PDs, GPs, and bank tellers could use a union. Enrolling in a new degree program is not easy, and at dissertation stages, switching schools on your own in near impossible.

Much of the debate here makes me think that academics just don’t understand the concept of professionalism. When you work in the real world, you have to work alongside, above or beneath people you don’t like and don’t get along with. You have to write them recommendation letters, you have to sometimes do things that help their career but not yours, and you have to learn to separate your ego from your work.

For some reason, a lot of academics seem to believe that managing graduate students is different to this. That you couldn’t possibly supervise someone you don’t like, or write them a recommendation letter that recognizes their skills and contribution even though you don’t like them. Or that if your student you hated moves to a different supervisor in the same department, you somehow have to continue hating them and trying to shaft them.

Try doing that in any moderately well-run organization outside of academia, even without a union, and watch how well it works out for you. Unless you’re already near the top and happily committed to running a dysfunctional organization, it won’t. And I’m yet to see a reason why academia should be different.

J Otto Pohl, that’s like saying “I don’t like eggs because they’re gross.” It strikes me that academia is not different and not special, and with a suitably-designed union and some standards that academics are held to (other than just “freedom”) maybe they would start to behave professionally.

In fact, I would go further and suggest the following: abolish the PhD system altogether, and replace it with a graded system of employment. Everything would look different to everyone involved if the “student” nature of the PhD student were done away with. And what are PhD students in the end? They’re potential academics who are learning on the job. The very concept of a PhD student is ripe with opportunities for exploitation, and I think in many ways it’s an anachronism. So, unionize and professionalize!

Marc, people in many professions spend years learning the ropes. In fact, a bit of professionalization might lead to a higher standard of learning – we’ve all seen the quality of “thought” that comes out of some of the more biased supervisors in the academic world (I’m lookin’ at you, Economics). Maybe if those people treated their students more like (shudder! woe!) “clients” and less like clay to be molded, we’d see a little more rigor in that part of academia. And why should students be victims of a single adviser anyway? What’s the benefit? It’s ego-massaging of the basest kind, and yet another example of a non-professional ethos.

I don’t see what “they tend to graduate into well-paying jobs” has to do with it. So do train drivers, but you won’t find each train driver being taught idiosyncratic crap by their particular supervisor, and bullied for failing to do things in a specific and outdated way. Engineers and doctors don’t learn in such a backward way, and they earn just as much as academics. So, probably, do Australian soldiers. What makes academia so terribly unique that a single professor has to have complete power over what a single student learns?

Good discussion. The way you frame it makes me think the question is, “why do academics think they are special when they work for institutions with endowments that rival tech-giant capitalization?”

You say

“would seem to me to suggest that collaboration works better in a system where hierarchical subordinates do not live in fear of being canned summarily if they do something to annoy the boss. ”

“annoy the boss” might be something so simple as having the annoying quality of costing more money than supposed “peer institutions” are paying for a given employee pool. Oops, we’re looking at some “painful” staff reductions even though the endowment is as prosperous as can reasonably be expected (the securities wizards are right on schedule and everything)

Also: not all academic fields, let alone practitioners, fit into the same box. It would help if people with an animus against academic unprofessionalism narrowed it down slightly by the fields which they have in mind.

@132: “Victim of a single adviser?” It seems that a lot of people here have some really strange mental picture of what research is like and how it’s done.

A typical pattern in a department like mine would go something like this. Students are expected to do two non-dissertation projects with different people . These will almost always be first-author papers for them. They find a topic they like, a person that they can work with, and they then define a dissertation and choose that professor as an adviser. Once there is a dissertation they work together for 3 years, give or take, and then the student graduates. The adviser typically sinks many hours into teaching the student the intricacies of the field and how to perform original research. The payoff is that the student takes off and becomes the teacher once they’ve mastered the subject.

Some subfields involve massive collaborations, in which case the student defines a sub-project and the adviser spends more time jockeying for the students interest. Others involve small collaborative groups, in which case the concept of a single adviser is more dilute. Choosing the right graduate school and subfield is important because it largely dictates which of the models involved is the one that the student will work in. So in most cases of a one-on-one relationship, it’s one that the two people have chosen after completing something successfully, and it’s because they have compatible interests and working styles. And the flip side of the “power” of the adviser is the responsibility involved and the large up-front investment of time in training students and advocating for their career development.

The original argument was not that an advisor be forced to keep a student on, but that an advisor would be forced to support that student from the research grants that the advisor is responsible for. Neither Eli or Marc (assumed) would have much trouble with the idea that the department/university might support that student for some time, but if the student is not working on the project it is flat out illegal in the US to pay him or her from that grant.

However, let us move the ball forward a bit. Assume that Advisor Alice and Student Bob come to a parting of the ways. Assume also that Student B is not supported by the grants of Advisor Alice. How long should the student have to find another advisor and what if he or she cannot do so.

Now assume that Student Bob is being supported by the grants of Advisor Alice, does this change anything? If so what?

Again, I refer people back to #84, which as Katherine notes seems to present a rather different set of arguments than those that Marc believes himself to be responding to. The obvious question for me is whether someone who might innately be inclined to fire a RA who has the impertinence to disagree with her politics will be more likely, less likely, or equally likely to do so under a system where there are actors representing her interests and clear rules governing fairness and appeal procedures, than under a system where there are no such procedures, and where the university will rubberstamp whatever the PA decides. The plausible answer to that question seems pretty obvious to me.

The original claim was that union protection could compel a professor to keep a student as a RA.

No, it really wasn’t, and it’s increasingly exasperating to have to re-explain this. The claim is that with union protection the student has a better chance of receiving the protections they were supposed to receive according to official university policy.

The counterargument was a practical one: if the relationship between the two is so poor that the professor wants to end it

…then the professor can be a professional about it, suck it up, fulfill their professional responsibilities, and follow all the procedures their university has in place, so that that professor is not violating the student’s right to be bound to those procedures as part of their contractual agreement with the university facilitating and governing the terms of both of their employments.

@117: and we have exactly this setup without unions.

No, ‘we’ don’t, at least not those of ‘us’ (not including me) who are graduate students at the University of Michigan. When you hire someone while you have a policy in place governing how to fire them, and then don’t announce any change to the policy and don’t follow that policy to the letter, you’ve done something wrong, you misled the student when hiring them; unions provide a mechanism through which we can prevent or inhibit exactly that kind of wronging.

hellblazer:

A lot of these students are not learning on the job, they don’t even know how do to the job when they start;

obviously I’m not proposing that people go straight from undergrad or masters to being a fully-fledged academic; rather, I think that maybe PhD studentship should be abolished in favour of a structured and professionalized research assistantship, which includes training in the necessary aspects of the profession, supervision of the sort one sees in other professions, and proper assessments under some formal kind of program. This would then be the first level of a properly professionalized academic career. Most people who enter a research assistantship straight from a Masters are learning on the job, and that’s accepted by everyone involved. So why not just get rid of the distinction between paid, not-yet-fully-skilled researcher, and unpaid but not-yet-fully-skilled researcher?

The answer of course, is that lots of academics enjoy having a free or very cheap workforce at their disposal, that can be expected to take on the tedious and nasty tasks and do long hours because it’s “for their career.” If all their students turned into paid-up, unionized research assistants they wouldn’t be able to make them do a lot of the stuff they do. Think,e.g. of that stats guy in GMU who blamed his plagiarism on a student (who wasn’t credited anyway). He’d have thought twice about that if the student were a unionized and paid employee.

Separately, I would be interested to hear what people (including the OP’s authors, and Michael Berube) think of the conflict between academic freedom and professionalism, and how these two things can be balanced. I don’t think it always can be, and I think this may be the big downside of academic freedom – but maybe I’m just misunderstanding the ideal.

I just want to interject a description of two actual scenarios with which I am familiar in order to maybe help shed some light on where the unions might come into this discussion. One of these situations took place at my graduate institution, in my department (physics); the other took place at a friend’s graduate institution in a different scientific department. I’m keeping the details of both situations vague out of respect for my friends’ privacy, but I am reporting all the things I either know or have very good reason to believe are accurate and germane to the point.

Situation 1: A friend of mine, who was also at one point my lab partner in a class, was admitted to my graduate program (he was a year ahead of me) and wanted to be a theorist. Since I’m guessing Marc is a physicist of some sort, he should be able to confirm that competition for theory spots is quite tough in many departments. In my particular department, it was very clear that the adcom had admitted more people than there were theory spots. What that meant, obviously, was that someone would end up being left out. Who got the theory spots was determined almost entirely from the results of the preliminary exam, scored in my department out of 50 points. Since the folks competing for the spots were very bright people, it was not uncommon for a one-point difference (this is essentially noise as far as the prelim goes) to decide who got what. I know my friend scored very well (I don’t know what it was but it was well over 40) but for whatever reason, whether it was because more people scored even higher or the profs who had openings didn’t like him for some reason, or I don’t know what, he wasn’t offered a spot. Long story short, he had the choice of either leaving or becoming an experimentalist, and as his lab partner I can vouch for the fact that the latter option would not have gone well for either him or the experiment. In the end, he chose to leave the department and transfer to a much less prestigious one so that he could pursue the theoretical work he wanted to do (he loved it that much). The last wrinkle here is that he was also foreign, so without staying in a graduate program, he couldn’t stay in the country.

Situation 2: My friend is a graduate student working under a professor with a large group. This group included two individuals, one male and one female. The male grad student made repeated unwelcome sexual advances on the female grad student, to the point where the female grad student had to take a leave of absence to cope with the situation. When my friend brought the issue before his advisor, the advisor replied that he didn’t know what was going on, didn’t care to know, and because it wasn’t an “academic” problem, it didn’t matter anyway. To this, my friend replied that he could no longer work with the harasser and requested that he (the friend) be excused from any interaction with him (the harasser). My friend’s advisor refused this request, and again, long story short, the final outcome was my friend having to withdraw from his department over this issue.

I bring this up because it seems to me that these are exactly the sorts of situations which unions could help prevent. Admitting more grad students than you know you have places for in the hopes that they’ll abandon their stated goals to fit into your organizational rubric is dishonest, in my view; standing by while one grad student sexually harasses another and then not allowing a witness to that harassment to excuse himself from interaction with the harasser is even worse. In both of these cases, a union would almost certainly have had institutional protections in place that would have either prevented these abuses or given the people involved some measure of recourse.

The problem with the informal methods Marc is defending is that in an informal setting without any formalized protections, the person with the power (that would be the professor) is essentially infinitely more powerful than the underling. Yes, academia is special in some ways, but it’s not that special. It’s not so special that underlings cannot be victimized by their supervisors (or others in the department, as per Sit. 2) and it’s not so special that those with the power should be allowed to wield it however they please without having to answer to anyone. If a grad student is truly wrongfully dismissed, maybe reinstating them isn’t the right remedy, necessarily (you really can’t work for an advisor who hates you), but they sure as hell should get some kind of compensation. Because the flipside to Marc’s point about how grad school works is that it is also a gargantuan investment of time (not to mention opportunity cost) on the part of the student, who hopes to defend their dissertation and come away with a degree; if that path is unfairly derailed, then it is absolutely imperative that the student be compensated in some way.

As we’ve seen from quite a few posters in this thread, GSRA unions exist in many places and don’t seem to affect the student-advisor relationship, nor do they seem to result in hypotheticals like “English grad students setting the compensation of grad students in physics” (although if I’m wrong about this, please do correct me; I’ve never heard of such a thing happening, although to be honest I’m not sure it would be entirely inappropriate even if it did). Instead, they function to protect the basic rights that I think all workers, grad student or not, should have: the right not to be abused in the workplace, the right not to be deceived by management, the right to not be expected or coerced to work 70 or 80 hour weeks (and believe me, when you’re working that much, the returns diminish quite rapidly). I think these are perfectly reasonable protections to want and grad students are perfectly reasonable for wanting them.

I would have thought that Jerry’s point:

The problem with the informal methods Marc is defending is that in an informal setting without any formalized protections, the person with the power (that would be the professor) is essentially infinitely more powerful than the underling

should not need reiterating on a left-wing blog. It’s kind of basic. Institutional intervention is necessary to mediate negotiations between a weak person and a powerful person, or else the powerful person always wins.

I’ve also seen many examples of the same flavour as Jerry highlights. I think many of them would go away – or would end very differently – in a unionized workplace.

like any (ANY) rational employer, they seek to limit the wages and power of their employees; I mean, what else would you do if you are an employer ??

I dunno, act like a human being towards other human beings instead of an arsehole? Honestly, is it just taken as read by you that it is a benefit to the employer to have their employees paid as little as possible and miserable? That’s an extremely zero-sum way of looking at things. Another would be that happy, well-paid employees might be more productive and useful, and less likely to take industrial action, say.

To summarize Marc’s argument:

1. Faculty essentially have complete power over grad student careers.

2. It is not clear how unionization would dilute said power, instead it would
create a lot of paperwork.

3. Therefore unionization is a bad idea. Instead one should rely on a) informal networks and b) “grievance procedures” for students and self policing of faculty (i.e disciplining each other).

This argument is very weak.
i) Students face a real fear of retaliation if they file grievances, while professors rarely suffer any real consequences for mistreatment. This is the case even in situations going far beyond poor treatment by faculty, involving professional misconduct on the part of faculty (e.g scientific misconduct, see for example the case of one H. Hellinga at Duke). Informal policing by faculty has no real value, since i) they have a greater cost to bear by punishing one of their own rather than ignoring student grievances, and ii) even if the department is “good” and well intentioned, faculty have little enforcement power.

At the very least a union provides some legal workplace protection for students, which is better than nothing. Expecting students to give up this in order to repose their faith in a group of people with power over their careers and whose interests are different and in conflict is at the very least a poor idea.