Universities to Grad Students: Drop Dead

[marmar]

Universities to Grad Students: Drop Dead
“Academic workers worldwide perform the labor that makes our institutions run. We deserve basic labor protections, especially during this pandemic.”

By Mary Retta


(The Nation) On May 1, graduate students at more than 75 public and private universities across the United States and Canada mobilized under the name “X Campus” to protest conditions for student workers.

United under hashtags such as #HighEdWorksBecauseWeDo and #MayDay2020, students at Yale University, the University of Chicago, the University of California–Santa Barbara and many other schools used their platforms to draw attention to unfair working conditions as a result of growing austerity in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic.

While the choice to mobilize on May Day—a day historically used to celebrate and advocate worker’s rights across the world—was strategic, many of these students have been protesting working conditions for years.

Graduate student workers, who often run labs, assist professors, and even teach their own courses on campus, often receive very low pay, are not guaranteed housing, and do not have benefits such as paid sick leave. As universities enact austerity measures such as increased furloughs and pay decreases as a result of the pandemic, many student workers are nervous that their already tenuous living conditions will be put under even more stress. ..........(more)

https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/graduate-students-austerity-conditions/

[RKP5637]

1. K&R!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! n/t

[FM123]

2. Terrible! How these universities treat their student workers speaks volumes.

[Igel]

4. When I was in grad school, teaching assistantships were a prize.

You didn't get a job without teaching at least one term, no matter how golden your CV and references. Don't even apply.

With a full year, there was a decent chance of getting a job.

The teaching assistantship came with a required course on curriculum development, having your mentor supervise your lesson planning and in-class lesson presentation, models of educational practice and test construction. This started a semester before you step foot in the classroom and ended the last day of finals when you're about to submit your grades for the term.

The result was a lot of quarter-time TAships. It spread the wealth and maximized the number of students who could claim teaching experience. Often you'd get a TAship your second or third year, and then return to it when you were just about done your dissertation--but the difficult coursework and first year of dissertation writing was TA-ship free, because it required a lot of research and often travel in presenting research.

A union managed to get put into place. The first thing it demanded was no quarter-time TAships; the second thing was that discontinuing a TAship necessarily was to constitute being fired, and that involved a review and a statement of cause. The year the union was recognized and a contract was negotiated the number of TAs was halved. The 2nd/3rd year students were all but guaranteed that they'd wind up with 3-5 years of TAships, and nobody else would for years. The professors in charge complained, but the contract was the contact--to remove one and let another student have the opportunity to teach would require firing a student teacher, and that would affect their employability after graduation. The other option was that they could quit, and have to explain why they quit once on the job market.

TAships paid better than most of the grants, so some students had good funding for years and others had large loans. The professors also found that after the second year there wasn't much of a point in having the training courses associated with the TAships.

A few years later the long-term TAs had an easy time getting jobs--mostly at community colleges and liberal arts colleges, since they had a lot of teaching experience, but some were placed at universities. Then for a few years the graduates got no jobs because they had insufficient experience; they also had large loans. It was harder to recruit grad students and the drop-out rate increased because of debt and the need to work, coupled with decreased perceived odds of getting jobs in the field.

Both sides have an argument. Improve working conditions, but depending on the department and program it can be primarily training or primarily a job. The one-size-fits-all approach from the union helped seriously hurt some departments. The students pushing for the union in a completely disinterested manner couldn't see past the walls of their own program. And, true to form, when the union was established the first full-time employees were the students who'd pushed for the union, and they went on to careers not in their field but in union organizing.

[MyOwnPeace]

3. The same applies for "Adjunct Instructors" -

people coming in to teach classes but rarely receiving the benefits afforded tenured instructors or professors - and also a lower salary.