Point seems kind of politely murky. What are they really saying with this letter?
Unions will destroy graduate student/professor relationships"? Are these warnings valid?
I note that the letter mentions absolutely no positive consequences if the employees unionize, only negative ones, which seem to boil down to fear-mongering and vague allusions to negatives.
Along with the subtle threat to grad students’ futures.
I suggest asking staff and students at British and European universities how they grt on. Belonging to a union is common in many educational establishments.
Here’s an article that says that a related notice given by the U of Chicago concerning “no safe spaces” and such was triggered by conservative donors. Such donors would also be very anti-union.
Rich, white dudes are getting quite unhappy with universities having a lot of people with different viewpoints from them.
All organizations point out the billions of horrors of unionization while pointing none of the advantages. And if you can’t trust your employers to have your best interests at heart, who can you trust?:rolleyes:
Public universities have had graduate student unions for a few decades. It’s only the private universities where graduate students have been barred from unionizing since 2004 (Thanks, Brown University!) As far as I can see, the grad students at public universities can have productive relationships with their advisors, merely with some semblance of protection against getting shafted with 40-hour TA loads in addition to 40-hour RA duties…
At my own private university, there’s a situation that’s crying out for union representation: a professor plagiarized the work of three graduate students, from multiple labs. I think those relationships were well and truly fucked before unionization was even a possibility. So far, without a formal union, the grad student council can only request that the university look into the situation. At which point everyone all the department and division heads bury their heads in the sand, because an research misconduct investigation requires so many meetings, and doesn’t make the department look good…
I’m lucky enough to be in a situation where I have a decent, non-exploitive relationship with my research advisor. But that’s only because I knew how to avoid the large fraction of possible advisors that were exploitive assholes.
Safe spaces are antithetical to the mission of the university. Students already have them anyway: Their residences. Or Mommy and/or Daddies place.
Isn’t the point of safe spaces to prevent people with differing opinions from showcasing them?
Safe spaces exist to hide from conflict so helicopter parented children don’t have to become functioning adults.
It sounds like the unions would only be for TAs, so I’m not sure this is a situation that would be changed, unless it were related to teaching and not just research
I’ve only read summaries and skimmed the full decision (pdf here), but it’s clear that it applies to research assistants:
I don’t see any mention of whether grad students with independent fellowships are also covered by the ruling… a quick glance at the union contracts for some of the nearby public universities make no mention of fellows.
Hmm that makes things interesting. I’m curious to see how much organizing we’ll see.
Does the UoC letter have any merit? Absolutely. Do the claims of graduate student union proponents have merit? Absolutely. Is this a very murky issue? Absolutely.
It seems a false dichotomy to say that a graduate student is either an employee or not. It’s a complex relationship (apprenticeship crossed with research assistant crossed with independent contractor crossed with student crossed with collaborator crossed with employee). Further, there is tremendous variation from university to university and program to program in all these relationship aspects and in the purely administrative aspects (e.g., The answer to “Who is the employer?” is not even going to have the same sort of answer from one place to another.)
In most cases, unionizing probably isn’t relevant or wouldn’t net much gain or loss. In some cases, real problems may be solved. In some cases, the educational and research missions may be compromised. In some cases, both may occur.
I read the UoC letter as saying simply, “To those who are aware of potential benefits to unionizing, please think carefully about potential downsides. The issue is not cut and dry.” I can’t argue with that statement at all.
I am skeptical of any claim that outcomes (pro or con) have been well measured. I haven’t dug into the guts of any studies of public universities (anyone have useful link(s)?), but I cannot imagine the metrics are straightforward or simultaneously accepted by both proponents and opponents of unionization. That’s not to say we shouldn’t try to measure the impact empirically – I’m all for gathering the data and taking our best shot. I’m just not sure that an objective interpretation will be trivial.
As far as unionizing, why not? But it is true that unions are not an unalloyed joy.
Cite for that last sentence? It’s more that the trustees, like a large segment of the public, are fed up with various groups not wanting to listen to viewpoints that oppose THEM.
There is so much bullshit in that article and omission of relevant facts. E.g.:
Another student was trying to video the protest. She called for physical force: “I need some muscle over here”. This is what we want to teach in college? The student had as much right to be there as her and every other student, and none of them had any right to refuse or remove him. Why are they so afraid of someone recording them in public?
From the article:
That doesn’t even make sense.
To the OP, no, I think there is no merit to the warnings. I was at the University of California for graduate school and participated in the unionization process there. I can honestly say no relationships between profs and grad students changed that I was aware of. I believe UoC to be blustering. I would wish them good luck, but I’m not on their side.
So what? They’re grad students, not undergrads, so they’d better be intelligent enough to figure out what you’ve stated and weigh all the pros and cons (which I do not know) without the university telling them. As far as I’m concerned, if they want to unionize, it’s their decision.
The Times article on the unionization effort said that places with unions had as good or better grad student / faculty relationships.
When I was a grad student, a long time ago, there were unionization efforts in some departments. None in mine - we got reasonably paid and our salaries went up in lockstep with state set faculty raises - and no grad student got ripped off that I ever heard of.
Treat grad students right and there will be either no union or no bad consequences of having one.
To me, the letter fails to address the two major problems with being a grad student, from what I saw during my recent experience in a Ph.D. program:
(1) As a graduate student, you live or die by your advisor. Unfortunately, there is essentially no recourse if your advisor does something illegal or unethical, or fails to do his or her job with regard to advising you.
(2) Graduate students are a captive and easily-exploited pool of cheap labor to do the grunt work of teaching and research.
Graduate student unions were formed to address Problem (2), and it is a very serious problem. For example, my friends were regularly expected to put in far more than the 20 hours a week maximum that they were allowed to do. It would be wonderful if graduate student unions could address Problem (1) as well-- the power dynamic between graduate students and advisors is so skewed that I think the backing of a union or some other major organization with serious bargaining clout would be the only way to restore the balance.
In short, the University of Chicago letter misses the boat on both these problems, because it it portrays the graduate student/professor relationship as idyllic and egalitarian. It’s not. It’s just not. The authors of the letter are living in some kind of fantasy world.
Yes, at UC it was largely number 2, although power imbalance overall certainly played into it. We were paid for 20 hours, but worked far more. In addition, our duties routinely included a large number things that graduate students were specifically forbidden from doing, but that we were nonetheless expected to do (such as generating all of the grades - not just grading - for courses).
This sums it up.
There are definitely problems with the grad student - professor relationship. If the professor wants to plagiarize the student’s work, work them for 60 hours/week on a pet project, or simply use them to promote themselves at the expense of the student, that’s a problem*. Not to mention grad students are usually wildly underpaid for the work they do, even accounting for tuition/room/board reimbursement**.
Of course, a union isn’t going to solve all these problems. Does the guy that’s been farting around taking one class a semester get the plum teaching assignments due to ‘seniority’? Does the professor with funding have to take students outside his specialty because he has the money? Will students get assigned a professor even if nobody wants to be their mentor? An electrical worker’s union can make a lot of sense because most electricians work very similar jobs (of course there is some specialization), but even within a field, the machine learning required for game AI is going to be vastly different than the machine learning for medical diagnosis.
There are a lot of problems that UoC seems to be glossing over with their letter. But I don’t know that a union is the fix for all of those. I don’t know that it would be more harm than help, either. As mentioned above, it’s not cut and dry for either side. Well, I’m sure it’s cut and dry for the university and the union rep, but it’s not cut and dry for the students.
- In my case, I had a professor that decided he wanted to be a successful startup owner in addition to a tenured professor. (He had zero business sense, so he repeatedly failed at that). His modus operandi was to get a slew of grad students, start them working on things he thought he could monetize, and then either cut them off after graduation or hire them to the startup with VC funding. Of course, all the equity and profits belongs to the professor, because he had the great ideas (“We should make the company logo orange so it stands out!” “Better make a twitter handle required to sign up for the service!”) while the grad students only did the grunt work (“Better develop the algorithms required to make this work” “Time to implement all the code for the system”). When I made it clear I wasn’t interested in joining his startup, suddenly he never had time to meet with me other than to sign the required papers for graduation. I saw him in person only once my last semester of grad school.
** I would much rather have been paid the $65k/year I made as a college grad software developer than the $20k stipend plus $7k tuition reimbursement I made as a Graduate Research Assistant.