[HN Gopher] MIT graduate students vote to unionize
___________________________________________________________________
MIT graduate students vote to unionize
Author : Metacelsus
Score : 547 points
Date : 2022-04-09 12:15 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (thetech.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (thetech.com)
| Simon_O_Rourke wrote:
| I know of one tenured professor in a pretty big East Coast
| college who spends his time finding graduate students about to
| launch a start-up, and then demands 20% equity or threatens said
| students for working on commercial projects on college time. Guy
| is easily a multi millionaire through this alone right now.
| einpoklum wrote:
| Unionization, especially academic workers' unionization, and
| double-especially junior, untenured researcher unionization is
| ultra-important.
|
| The recent couple of centuries, especially the last one, have
| brought an increased application of commercial-corporation-type
| relations into academia, with graduate researchers and teachers
| being the object of degradation of both material welfare and
| intra-academic status. I wrote about this when I was involved in
| unionizing grads in my own university - not in the US, but still:
|
| https://app.box.com/s/osnf6xfqgqgvmnat6ldq
|
| (or in Hebrew: https://app.box.com/shared/l3iypqd2yi )
|
| I wish the MIT grads all the best in their struggle. However,
| when looking at their "Path to unionization" page:
| https://mitgsu.org/roadmap , I am worried they are too timid of
| an endeavor. They write:
|
| > The real goal of the campaign is to secure a union contract
|
| A contract is never the goal. Just like signing an employment
| contract as an individual is not the goal - the employment
| conditions, and the relations and standing in the workplace - are
| the goal. A contract is at best a means to reach the goal, and at
| worst - a fetish. I've seen many a unionization drive fixate on
| negotiations and a contract, not on building "shop-floor" power,
| on the individual and collective level. When grads walk around
| knowing that mistreatment by administration or supervisors will
| result in harsh collective action by their peers - from public
| shaming of those involved to work disruption if necessary,
| contract or no contract - that's when things have changed. But if
| what you get is a link to a piece of paper saying that in theory
| you can seek some arbitration somehow, but in practice your daily
| life remains the same, then you haven't gained much.
| dalbasal wrote:
| For a non-american with no union experience.
|
| What's the what with these teamsters, UE & such? What does it
| mean that they choose to unionize with one of them?
| mac-chaffee wrote:
| The lack of protections for graduate student workers is shocking
| IMO, especially in student housing.
|
| Grad student workers of course don't get paid vacation, sick
| time, or anything like that. But you can't even just lower your
| hours since you're paid with a fixed stipend.
|
| Contracts may be largely 20 hours per week, but they have all
| kinds of carve-outs where the university can force you to work up
| to 30/40 hours, like at the start and end of the year and during
| on-call (which is also 100% unpaid), taking time away from exams.
|
| And universities mismanage the hell out of grad students, such as
| only giving purchasing power to one person instead of having
| backups. Or having horrible on-call coverage where you can expect
| 3+ calls per night, many of which are pointlessly mandated
| "escalations".
|
| All of these problems can be fixed so easily (time off, on-call
| pay/coverage), but an enormous administration with a toxic
| culture of "No" prevents progress.
| tomohawk wrote:
| Universities are subject to very little oversight and
| regulation.
|
| They basically are selling a luxury good to very
| unsophisticated buyers (you can't get much less sophisticated
| than the average 18yo). A lot of what they are selling will not
| be worth the time or money put in.
|
| Instead of subsidizing them like crazy, the government should
| be looking into their dodgy practices.
| some-human wrote:
| In the UK, most students are members of their universitys' branch
| of the National Union of Students.[1]
|
| The unions have a big presence on campus and a bar with heavily
| discounted drinks and organise a lot of the social clubs and
| events that happen outside of the study.
|
| They also negotiate with the university and faculty, fighting for
| students, and you can get individual advise and help too.
|
| Enrolling to the student union usual happens almost automatically
| when you turn up and register for your dorm, classes and doctors
| etc.
|
| The staff of the university (academics, lecturers, trainers,
| instructors, researchers, etc) tend to belong to The University
| and College Union.[2]
|
| I didn't know this was abnormal in other countries?
|
| [1] https://www.nus.org.uk/ [2]
| https://www.ucu.org.uk/article/1685/About-UCU
| joeberon wrote:
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| It is abnormal in the _USA_. The USA is not a very typical
| place, so probably should not be taken as representative of
| other countries, or even other rich countries.
|
| I suspect a similar kind of student organization is normal in
| Europe as well as the british commonwealth, at least, but I'm
| not sure.
|
| It is not how it works in the USA.
| ImaCake wrote:
| We used to have the same system in Australia but it was
| abolished by our centre right party (Liberals). The result has
| been an erosion of student rights and tertiary education
| quality.
| nabla9 wrote:
| A student's union is not the same as a labor union. The
| student's union represents students.
|
| This is a labor union representing graduate student-workers who
| are employed by MIT.
| some-human wrote:
| Again, The staff of the university (academics, lecturers,
| trainers, instructors, researchers, etc) tend to belong to
| The University and College Union.[2]
|
| If they are employed by the university in the UK, they
| typically belong to this union.
| j7ake wrote:
| Phd student salaries in uk are probably the worst in the
| developed world. The student union in uk hasn't been doing a
| good job to make salaries competitive with other countries at
| the PhD level.
| omginternets wrote:
| I'm curious, what's the going rate? I was a phd student in
| France circa 2013 and the salary was 1.3kEUR/month.
| joshvm wrote:
| Currently about 16.5k tax free. If you live in London you
| get slightly more, and if you're an STFC-CASE student you
| get more again (total of around 20k in London). It equates
| to somewhere between 19-22k if you were paying income tax.
| For anywhere outside London and Oxford/Cambridge (where
| rents are also extremely inflated) it's a fairly liveable
| wage. Shared housing pretty much anywhere else is in the
| range of 500 a month, possibly a bit less in the North of
| England. UK citizens generally don't have to pay tuition
| fees directly, they're all rolled into the PhD "grant".
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| Exactly. Unions end up becoming chums with the university
| admins. The students come and go but the admins are around a
| long time. Eventually the university just turns the union
| into a lower tier of management that effectively keeps all of
| the students in line. The admins learn which "issues" are
| favored by the unions and which issues hold sway with union.
| Then when they want to fire someone, they just frame it as an
| issue about which the union doesn't care.
| WWWWH wrote:
| This is true, and they are valuable. But a students union is
| best thought of as a very distinct sort of organisation; they
| are not the same as a labour union.
|
| (You obviously know this, but it may help prevent some
| misleading comparisons down the line...)
| some-human wrote:
| This is why I continued that people (including students) who
| are employed by the university are typically members of The
| University and College Union.
|
| This includes "lecturers, trainers, instructors, researchers,
| managers, administrators, computer staff, librarians and
| postgraduates in universities, colleges, prisons, adult
| education and training organisations across the UK."
| chaircher wrote:
| The health of the student union is a very good litmus test for
| the culture of the university. Anyone looking to study at
| university in the UK should check out the student union and try
| to gauge how independent it is from the institution and whether
| they're actually active as a union or just an extension of the
| university's student experience department.
|
| Can you find out much about the history of the SU at the
| intitution?
|
| The names of previous people elected into officer positions?
|
| What sort of jobs do those people have now?
|
| Do you get a feeling like they might have used the officer
| roles to maneuver into those jobs rather than to actually
| advocate for students? (hint: SU Officers doing their jobs
| properly will be in conflict with faculty staff and see the
| worst of the institution, and therefore are not very likely to
| want to hang around after graduation)
|
| Are multiple officers taking credit for the same achievement
| (campaign, event, milestone)?
|
| Is there a good spread across demographics among the officers?
|
| Do they get training? What do they say about their training?
|
| What's going on on their social media? Does it feel like it's
| being used to market the university?
|
| Source: was an SU rep
| temp8964 wrote:
| When I was a graduate student, I always thought I had a good
| deal, where I learn graduate degree for free, AND got a living
| stipend for me and my wife. The relationship between me and the
| university was two folded: I am a customer as a student and an
| employee at the same time. And I think student was my main role.
| And my advisor was mostly my teacher, instead of my work boss. I
| don't think you can turn this relationship into purely an
| employer-employee relationship.
|
| You can separate the two relationships by making the university
| pay the whole salary, and then you pay the tuition from your bank
| account. You can ask for higher wage, but the university can ask
| for higher tuition. I think the low tuition has already having
| this factored in, otherwise how can you get a 2-year / 4-year
| work training program with such low price?
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| The thing is this is great if you and your advisor get along.
| If your advisor decides to blackball your academic career
| instead there's nothing you can do.
| Ar-Curunir wrote:
| Most PhD "students" stop taking classes by the 2year mark (out
| of a five year PhD in CS, longer for other fields), and spend
| the rest of their time doing full-time research and teaching,
| without getting paid full time.
|
| And while your advisor does not necessarily act like a boss,
| they have often even more power; they can withhold funding,
| which can stall or end your PhD, they can assign you dead-
| end/inconsequential projects, killing your career, etc. It does
| no service to anyone to not acknowledge the power differential
| that exists between advisors and advisees.
|
| In general the current academic research model has positives
| and negatives for grad students, and it benefits no one to
| pretend the negatives don't exist.
|
| This is coming from a person who had a wonderful PhD experience
| and has received offers for TT positions from top universities
| in the US (I say this not to brag, but to ward off accusations
| of sour grapes)
| sjg007 wrote:
| It's really an employee-employer relationship with on the job
| training. Specifically your final promotion is a certificate
| (Ph.D.) that has some industry wide accreditation.
|
| The fact that they charge for tuition actually seems legally
| tenuous (akin to a company town) which is why I think they all
| have these tuition waivers for RA and TA positions.
|
| The more I think about it, it seems like there is a bunch of
| legal issues. Maybe Congress has resolved those idk...
| caddemon wrote:
| A big reason they charge tuition and then credit it is
| because it leads to more grants. There's a bunch of bizarre
| accounting between schools/departments/labs behind all this,
| but at the core my school "charges" tuition, then my
| department immediately "credits" the tution using NIH
| training grant money awarded to my program.
| temp8964 wrote:
| > It's really an employee-employer relationship with on the
| job training.
|
| I don't think so. When I was a Ph.D. student, I spent most of
| the time doing my own thing (learning and research), a small
| portion of my time was spent on working. I imagine this could
| be different by field, and I know some other departments pay
| way higher stipend than my department.
|
| I think the lowest paid graduate students belong to social
| sciences and humanities, but their "work" as graduate
| students also has lower value compared to other fields. They
| are also the ones with strongest push for unionization,
| because they (maybe for good reason) are the lowest paid and
| because their ideology.
| dls2016 wrote:
| Did you talk to students in biological or other lab
| sciences? At my PhD institution the materials science
| students were paid a lot more (and barely taught) because
| they essentially had a 9-5 job with plenty of overtime.
|
| (Compared to the math department where people would surf
| between commitments.)
| temp8964 wrote:
| Yes. What you said does not contradict what I said.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| At most US universities, graduate students who are serving as
| employees (ie, have stipends and perhaps assigned work in
| addition to coursework such as teaching) generally have tuition
| waivers too and don't pay tuition. So your formula about
| tuition vs compensation doesn't really apply in the individual
| case.
|
| Anyway, depending on when you were a graduate student, it may
| currently be a lot harder than it used to be to survive
| financially as a grad student.
|
| Also wanting things like reasonable health insurance and a
| modicum of days to take off on vacation or sick leave seem
| reasonable to me. This is not something all grad students at
| all universities/departments have.
|
| In general, at many large universities, graduate students do
| _most_ of the teaching (in terms of hours spent on instruction)
| -- what is bringing in a substantial amount of the university
| 's revenue. And get treated terribly, at the whims of
| professors, in very financially precarious situations. It does
| not seem unreasonable to me to organize to try to get a more
| secure situation. If you look at the actual changes in
| university budgets, the amount spent on compensating those
| doing the teaching is a smaller and smaller portion over time,
| while the amount spent on administrators is higher and higher.
| So it might be just as accurate to consider money spent on
| compensating grad students as competing with administrator
| salaries as with tuition.
| bognition wrote:
| I'm very curious to see what the long term effects of unionizing
| will be in Academia. I'm hopeful and optimistic it will improve
| things in the long run. Yes there will be some unintended
| consequences but academic life is already very rough if you're
| not tenured.
|
| Academia likes to cast itself as a true meritocracy. If you work
| hard and publish good papers you'll do well. In practice it's
| more of a gerontocracy where senior members can single handedly
| destroy a young investigators career. (It happened to me and I
| saw it happen to several people). There is little to no recourse
| against this.
|
| Arguments against unionization from already tenured faculty
| usually sound like: "If you want to be the best in your field you
| have to work harder than everyone else. Forming a union won't
| change that fact and may even discourage students from working so
| hard. This might interfere with their career goals."
|
| However, the power structures in academia are heavily skewed and
| toxic. Individually graduate students have little recourse when
| they are wronged. Life in academia is hard. You have to work long
| days, the chance of success is very low. At every stage the
| probability of getting that next job is very low.
|
| A lot of the field agrees that something needs to change, but no
| one can agree exactly what needs to change or how to get there.
| The people with the power are the tenured professors who "won the
| lottery" and are out of touch with the problems they are causing.
| They aren't going to be the mechanism of change even though they
| hold all the power.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| The intensity of the competition is severe enough to make it a
| toxic situation even if the established scientists were
| completely ethical about it.
| giaour wrote:
| Aren't non-contingent faculty already mostly unionized through
| AAUP?
| wardedVibe wrote:
| The UC grad students have been unionized for decades, and just
| added gsr positions in addition to the teaching positions.
| Mostly right now it serves to protect student's research time
| from heavy teaching requirements.
|
| But honestly, professors are also increasingly far away from
| the levers of power to create more permanent positions. There's
| a lot of bureaucrats making decisions who are mostly
| accountable to themselves.
| namelessoracle wrote:
| Its interesting that the people who create and encourage this
| system so fervently push for major social reforms and claim
| their social theories will create better societies.
| mhh__ wrote:
| In an ideal world I think unionization at least has the
| potential to fight back against the "One bad letter of
| recommendation and your career is over" aspect. Whether it will
| work or not I have no idea.
|
| There is simply way too many questions on the academia
| stackexchange about how to confront a superior without making
| them feel confronted (or wrong). The power dynamic is ugly.
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| But why? It's a supply and demand issue. When demand is high
| and supply is low, the hiring committees will definitely look
| over one or more bad letters. But when supply is high (as it
| is most of the time thanks to overproduction), well the
| hiring committee will choose the best package deal.
|
| I'm sure the university will be happy to claim that they'll
| discount bad letters just because it will be politically
| helpful, but as long as the hiring committee sees them all,
| it won't matter. They'll choose the best package.
|
| Not that it matters, because most of this happens by word of
| mouth. I've seen professors write glowing letters of
| recommendation to cover their butt. Then they privately bad
| mouth the person.
| 2ion wrote:
| > However, the power structures in academia are heavily skewed
| and toxic. Individually graduate students have little recourse
| when they are wronged. Life in academia is hard. You have to
| work long days, the chance of success is very low. At every
| stage the probability of getting that next job is very low.
|
| A "research precariat" is what keeps German universities going
| as well. This is an international issue; even the OECD seems to
| have studies on the subject. Would be interesting to see a
| cross-country comparison of who really has the "best"
| universities --- or university systems, as this kind of issue
| does not tend to be specific to one institution.
| musicale wrote:
| > Individually graduate students have little recourse when they
| are wronged
|
| Changing supervisors without 1) losing your funding and/or 2)
| having to start over on your dissertation is extremely
| difficult at many universities.
|
| As a result, academic supervisors wield excessive power over
| their graduate students.
| bumblebritches5 wrote:
| anonymousDan wrote:
| I think your view on unionization is very US centric. In the UK
| at least there is a university union. In fact it is currently
| striking over a range of issues (mostly related to pension
| cuts).
| gbjw wrote:
| In Canada as well (e.g., York is known to have a strong
| 'activist' graduate union that periodically shuts down
| classes over labour disputes).
| actually_a_dog wrote:
| Forget having their careers destroyed. The fact is that most
| people who graduate with a PhD _will not have_ an academic
| career on the tenure track, and it 's really easy to see why
| once you pay attention to what's going on.
|
| The thing is that academia is not a growing field anymore. So,
| if a professor graduates more than one student, they're feeding
| a glut of candidates who will be competing for one job at some
| point. For instance, in the field of engineering as a whole,
| 7.8 students graduate with PhDs per professor over the length
| of an average academic career [0]. In environmental
| engineering, that number is a whopping 19.0! (Also from [0]).
|
| As a graduate student, once you realize the field isn't
| growing, you can actually see the phenomenon at work. Just look
| around in all your classes. That same handful of people you see
| in most of your courses, especially those leading into your
| intended specialty, those people are probably your competition.
| Now multiply that by every university in the country that
| teaches in your specialty. You very quickly come to the
| conclusion that you'll probably have to wait for someone to
| either retire or die before you get an academic position, and
| that's actually 100% the truth.
|
| ---
|
| [0]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4309283/
| ModernMech wrote:
| It's true that it's hard to get an academic job, but it's not
| true in all industries. In CS for example we've been hiring
| constantly for years and our searches are often not
| successful.
|
| Moreover not everyone who graduates with a Ph.D. wants on the
| tenure track, and universities are increasingly creating non
| tenure roles to meet this demand. I'm not on tenure track and
| I don't think I'm missing much compared to my TT
| counterparts. I don't even want tenure, it's not at all what
| it's cracked up to be.
|
| Your citation also leaves a lot to be desired. From your
| link:
|
| > Nowadays, less than 17% of new PhDs in science, engineering
| and health-related fields find tenure-track positions within
| 3 years after graduation
|
| Two of the things we ask during hiring are:
|
| - "How is your research agenda different from your
| advisor's."
|
| - "What funding agency will you target for your first grant
| proposal and what research will that be based on?"
|
| Most newly minted PhDs cannot answer those questions
| satisfactorily. It sometimes can take 2-3 years doing a
| postdoc to be able to find a suitable research agenda that is
| sufficiently differentiated from your advisor's.
|
| Moreover:
|
| > We recognize that in using a simple model, several
| parameters that are not part of our analysis may pose
| limitations (Ghaffarzadegan et al., 2011). One consideration
| is that many engineering doctorates are not interested in
| academic positions and may not even compete for tenure-track
| positions in academia. Another consideration is that some
| engineering graduates are foreign citizens who take academic
| positions outside of the USA.3 Another factor is inter-field
| hiring. Engineering doctorates might obtain positions in
| other fields such as science or business, which would also
| diminish the gap.
|
| Okay, so they discount people who don't want to work in
| academia, and also foreign students who won't work in
| America. I'm sorry but what? Foreign students who won't be
| working in America after they graduate are most of our
| students. Probably 70% of our grad students right now (and
| the situation can't be much different at MIT). It's pretty
| hard to take this paper seriously when they just handwave all
| that away and say "but in the steady state..."
|
| And then the grand conclusion of the article is to throw up
| their hands and say (paraphrasing) "there's probably nothing
| we can do about this so we just have to be more forthright
| with students about their prospects." Okay then...
|
| I'm not saying it's not hard to get an academic job, but at
| the same time the measure shouldn't be academic tenure track
| jobs. There are lots of non-TT positions across the country
| at top research universities, SLACs, and community colleges.
| jasode wrote:
| _> Arguments against unionization from already tenured faculty
| usually sound like:_
|
| An argument against a union at MIT came from _un-tenured
| graduate student_ Kevin Wang :
| https://thetech.com/2021/10/21/why-we-do-not-need-a-gsu
|
| TLDR: he didn't think paying the 1.44% annual union dues
| (~$620/year) is going to be worth it. He based this on
| comparing MIT salary increase history to other universities
| with and without unions.
|
| Also, KW was previously in Germany & UK so he's presumably
| familiar with the stronger worker unions in Europe.
|
| The MIT union vote was 66%-for and 34%-against. The 34% have
| various reasons to not join a union but I think we can guess
| that many of them think the $620/year salary deductions will
| not be worth whatever benefits the union can negotiate.
|
| I'm not saying KW is right but I think it's more constructive
| to consider the opinions of MIT grad students who actually vote
| (e.g. Kevin Wang) rather than your synthesized quote from
| tenured professors. The collective bargaining unit will
| negotiate with _university administrators_ (not the tenured
| professors) who set salaries etc.
| bombcar wrote:
| It IS interesting to note that if most unions went dues-
| optional they'd starve from lack of money.
|
| If their members were really convinced of the value that
| tragedy of the commons wouldn't occur.
| Redoubts wrote:
| > If their members were really convinced of the value that
| tragedy of the commons wouldn't occur.
|
| It's called a Tragedy for a reason.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| If you made tolls on a toll road optional, the road owners
| would not be able to keep up with maintenance, yet I think
| most drivers value the road...
| nautilius wrote:
| So what's this 'road' in your analogy that was installed
| by the union, that wasn't there before, and that
| introduced _a lot_ of utility, comparable to a road?
| [deleted]
| wardedVibe wrote:
| The tragedy of the Commons is when there is a public good
| that, if most people contribute, everyone gets back more
| than they put in, but because it's rational for each person
| independently to not contribute (since it isn't strictly
| necessary for them in particular), it fails to happen.
|
| You know, like not contributing your Union dues.
| ProjectArcturis wrote:
| No, it's because if dues were optional, the only game-
| theory-efficient outcome is that no one pays dues.
| [deleted]
| light_hue_1 wrote:
| Kevin's entire argument made zero sense. And thank God
| everyone worked so hard to convince people not to listen to
| him. Stipend increases are a function of places like NIH who
| set a lot of people's stipends. The union can and does get
| benefits in many other places. Like healthcare, better mental
| health services (which are bad at MIT), stipend increases for
| the lowest paid students, limits on how much you work as a
| TA, etc.
|
| He gives Columbia as an example. The new Columbia contract is
| great! https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/01/07/co
| lumbia... $100 million in extra spending for students over
| the next 4 years.
|
| > The 34% have various reasons to not join a union but I
| think we can guess that many of them think the $620/year
| salary deductions will not be worth whatever benefits the
| union can negotiate.
|
| Well.. they are wrong.
|
| If you look at unions like University of Michigan or
| University of Toronto the healthcare benefits they get
| compared to MIT are worth more than $620/year. The MIT grad
| student healthcare plan is very bad and expensive. And the
| working conditions as a TA are not good compared to other
| places. You have very few protections as a TA. For example, I
| know someone who was forced to teach an extra section for no
| additional pay, because another TA had to leave for medical
| reasons. That's totally unacceptable and would never fly at
| UMich or UofT.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| It sounds like the situation is pretty terrible already and
| hard for it to get worse; might as well try a union so these
| folks suffer less from a broken system.
|
| Versus the alternative, "we've tried nothing and we're all out
| of ideas."
| canjobear wrote:
| I doubt that a union could do much against the alleged toxic
| aspects of academia that you are pointing out. There's nothing
| they can do, for example, to change the fact that tenure track
| jobs are rare, which is what drives a lot of the stress for
| grad students.
|
| More likely they will be involved in labor disputes involving
| how much TA work the grad students have to do.
| bognition wrote:
| Correct but they can advocate for other types of positions
| and intervene when a university fails to educate students
| about non academic jobs.
| light_hue_1 wrote:
| We know exactly what the long term effects are because some
| grad schools have been unionized for 50 years.
|
| The effects are: slightly better working conditions, slightly
| less discrimination, slightly better healthcare. Just look at
| what say, the grad student union at University of Michigan is
| able to gain for their students.
|
| Neither apocalyptic nor utopian predictions are anywhere near
| the mark.
| topaz0 wrote:
| While it's not particularly widespread, there are places in the
| US where grad students have been unionized for decades. The
| Universities of Michigan and Wisconsin are two of the oldest,
| dating from the 70s iirc. As a grad student falling under the
| collective bargaining agreement for the University of Michigan,
| I feel pretty good about it. Not only do they pay us pretty
| well and give good healthcare, but the union has been essential
| in making the administration set up better-than-average covid
| policies, like free asymptomatic testing and non-retaliation
| for choosing to work remotely (sometimes). There are also a ton
| of corner cases where subpopulations of the grad students have
| a specific issue, where the union has been a very good
| advocate.
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| Teacher assistants or graduate assistants have been unionized
| at UIC [1]. I have noticed that they have gone on strike a few
| times. Unfortunately anything you are hopeful of achieving
| doesn't seem to have changed at all.
|
| The best choice of my life was not going back to school. I
| think I might do it through my employer but at this point I
| just do machine learning as a hobby.
|
| The problem with grad school in general is the fact that other
| than being a gerontocracy is that the optimal strategy for
| scientific research requires more failures than successes and
| getting tenure becomes more and more difficult because other
| than people living longer you don't need more professors
| instead you just need more TAs / GAs to teach people and
| educate people to get the people to keep the system working.
|
| Right now Mathematics (specifically Calculus) makes money for a
| college and or university in contrast to psychology, philosophy
| and other humanities don't. If this was automated then
| Mathematics will have less and less professors and or grad
| students so if the current trends continue then we will
| probably only see computer science professors dominating
| universities.
|
| [1] https://uic-geo.net/mainsite/
| amathres_info wrote:
| The UIC grad student union is pretty effective at keeping
| their teaching hours to under 20 hours per week (so, you
| complain to them when there's too much grading). But the
| stipends there are among the lowest of good math departments,
| certainly lower than many non-unionized places. How much of
| this is due to the union being ineffective vs UIC being broke
| and poorly run I don't know. [Source: I used to teach math at
| UIC]
|
| Overall I am not really convinced grad student unions really
| make much of a difference in practice, at least as far as
| everyday stipends and working conditions. I am at a non-
| unionized place now and we don't work the students any
| harder. But in principle it's certainly a good idea, and I
| have indeed seen the union be a useful advocate in certain
| special situations.
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| UIC has been underfunded for so long that it is a joke. I
| don't even think that they even budget that kind of thing
| anymore and just accept the fact. But, the computer science
| college is going to have a building dedicated to computer
| science due to the fact that a bunch of alumni are funding
| it directly. I personally gave around $100 but I would
| guess many other alumni will give much more.
| robwwilliams wrote:
| Tenure does not provide much protection in biomedical research
| --only funding. In fact at top tier institutions tenure is
| almost meaningless often with <50% salary guaranteed even with
| a teaching load.
|
| I think the abuses of seniority are much less than in the past
| --both wrt extraneous labor (hey, help me paint my house) to
| sexual pressures.
|
| Re unionization---its complex and a function of teaching load
| as a TA versus, class work as a student, versus your own
| research with mentors.
| lumost wrote:
| What society wants from Academia isn't something you can grind
| for. Ground breaking research and great education isn't
| something that comes from working 80 hours a week (most of the
| time). I'd also suspect that the vast majority of effort in
| academia is dedicated to simply pleasing the whims of those
| with power/funding.
|
| A union might increase productivity by both
|
| a) De-stressing those who are actually _doing_ the work of
| academia. Ensuring that they are financially taken care
| including living wages, sustainable working hours, and stable
| employment.
|
| b) Reducing the need/available time for academic make-work.
|
| c) Negotiating with funding bodies to correct lop-sided funding
| policies where students are funded but researchers are not.*
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >Ground breaking research and great education isn't something
| that comes from working 80 hours a week (most of the time).
|
| is there much evidence for this claim? If one takes a look at
| the habits and biographies of groundbreaking researchers they
| all have one thing in common, they have dedicated virtually
| their entire time to work.
|
| Looking at countries with exceptional educational outcomes
| broadly you see the same thing, time and resources spent on
| tutoring and schooling is extremely high.
| lumost wrote:
| > biographies of groundbreaking researchers they all have
| one thing in common, they have dedicated virtually their
| entire time to work.
|
| I'd argue that most ground breaking researchers had the
| benefit of researching their own ideas for prolonged
| periods. Putting in 40 hour a week on your own ideas for
| 10+ years is an awful lot of time. Many ground breaking
| researchers such as Feynman and Einstein had extended
| sabbaticals of one kind or another which lead to their best
| work.
|
| It may be out of ignorance, but I'm not aware of any famous
| researcher who accredits their success to an 80 hour work
| week.
| icelancer wrote:
| >> It may be out of ignorance, but I'm not aware of any
| famous researcher who accredits their success to an 80
| hour work week.
|
| One of the greatest mathematicians ever, Paul Erdos,
| absolutely did - to the point of using methamphetamines
| to work harder, longer, and sharper.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Erd%C5%91s
|
| Greatness is rarely healthy.
| DoughnutHole wrote:
| We're also in an era where groundbreaking research is
| seldom done by lone unicorn researchers expanding on a
| stroke of genius.
|
| The Nobel Prizes are still awarded to individuals but
| often only because that's how Nobel decided the prize had
| to work over a century ago. Prizes are most of the time
| awarded to the heads of research groups who's discoveries
| are made of the backs of dozens of researchers and
| graduates often working 80 hour weeks, and in some cases
| hundreds or thousands of technicians.
|
| The only prize that regularly meets the lone genius
| researcher trope is when the physics prize is awarded to
| a theorist (partially since it can't go to the hundreds
| of physicists responsible for verifying the theory).
|
| Newton could see so far from standing on the shoulders of
| giants, the modern researcher can see so far from
| standing on the pyramid of overworked untenured
| researchers.
| lumost wrote:
| > Newton could see so far from standing on the shoulders
| of giants, the modern researcher can see so far from
| standing on the pyramid of overworked untenured
| researchers.
|
| On the flip side, is this partially responsible for the
| declining productivity of science? We're effectively
| tying brilliant new talent to the whims of elders.
| ultimately as anyone who runs a large organization will
| tell you - you aren't going to get ground breaking work
| from a large org.
|
| Do we need more diffuse science?
| DoughnutHole wrote:
| I don't really know if there's a way it could diffused -
| the reality on the ground is that cutting edge science
| requires cutting edge resources, and since advances are
| made on the margins major breakthroughs require knowledge
| across so many areas that one person can't possible be a
| specialist in everything involved. Both of those aspects
| mean most major research requires a significant
| concentration of resources to even be feasible.
| rr808 wrote:
| > In practice it's more of a gerontocracy
|
| Right, unionization will just make this worse. Protect the
| insiders, those already with jobs.
| jancsika wrote:
| > I'm very curious to see what the long term effects of
| unionizing will be in Academia.
|
| My friend, today you get to actually experience what sci-fi
| writer Frank Herbert called "Traveling without Moving:"
|
| _The year is 2022._
|
| _A virus wreaks havoc on the nations of the world._
|
| _A lone free software warrior named gorhill roams the internet
| to fight for justice, protect the underdog[1], and block
| ads[2]._
|
| _At UC Davis (and possibly other schools) the grad students
| have been unionized now for at least two decades._
|
| 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kung_Fu_(1972_TV_series)#Plot
|
| 2: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-
| origin/cjpa...
|
| 3: https://uaw2865.org/about-our-union/
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| It is interesting that you used word 'gerontocracy', because it
| is the same word used by Thiel to describe current true owners
| of US financial system. I certainly do not disagree. I think
| some fresh blood is needed -- and not just in there or
| academia, but also on just about every political level.
|
| I am personally kinda done with people, who don't understand
| basic technology. They should be retired. They should not have
| any real influence on what the current generation is doing.
| rmatt2000 wrote:
| Academia (in the U.S. at least) is one of the last vestiges of
| the old master / apprentice system.
| musicale wrote:
| I thought we'd gotten rid of indentured servitude, but grad
| students are locked into years of absurdly low pay[1] and an
| extremely asymmetric power relationship with their
| supervisors. Add in the increased risk for depression and
| suicide and it really doesn't seem like a great gig.
|
| [1] Engineering students at least. Humanities students are
| paid just a bit less than the minimum wage they'll be earning
| after graduation.
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| Even though I think many senior academics are often terrible
| jerks and sometimes capable of behavior that borders on
| criminal, I don't see unions as being much of a help at all.
|
| I've been soured recently by one big event that happened at a
| place where I sometimes work. One guy was accused of doing
| something unwoke in his time off the job. Normally, this guy
| was a big union booster and even a union rep in some
| negotiations. It turns out, though, that didn't matter because
| the other union reps wanted his promotion. He had zero
| relationship with the management because he was frequently
| aggitating for this union cause or that union cause. So when
| push came to shove, the management hated him and they were able
| to cite the lack of support of his so-called union buddies as
| proof that he was bad.
|
| I think students think that the union will bring them some kind
| of lightweight version of tenure. It could help in a few
| negotiations or some extreme cases, but I think that all too
| often it will just be another layer of self-interested semi-
| managers who are just as corruptable as the regular managers.
| _huayra_ wrote:
| We were discussing a potential hire at work a few days ago who
| suddenly turned down the company's offer for another company
| despite our team being his "dream place to work" and promising
| to not make a sudden decision without talking with us first.
|
| Turns out he was basically forced to go to this other company
| by his advisor, who had a lot of funding from this other
| company, or his advisor would "make graduating very difficult".
| lostlogin wrote:
| Surely a resignation upon graduation is the way to go here -
| though burning bridges early in one's career is not ideal.
| otachack wrote:
| That is f*cked up and I hope people that dropped grad careers
| chime in in the future about situations like this, especially
| when more unions pop up.
| temp234 wrote:
| There are so many horror stories about academia waiting to
| come out.
|
| The way vulnerable people are exploited and mistreated in
| what is, in fact, a work environment; moral hazards and
| conflicts of interest everywhere; lots of untrustworthy
| research results and inability to reproduce research.
|
| Universities are big business and ought to be regulated
| just as much as any other big business
| ModernMech wrote:
| Can you expand on what regulations you feel are lacking
| and how you'd like to see them implemented?
| mumblemumble wrote:
| Decent labor standards would be a start.
|
| Universities are rather analogous to sweatshops in how
| they operate and the economic reasons for doing so. And I
| suspect that, in much the same way, this state of affairs
| represents a sort of Nash equilibrium that cannot be
| significantly altered except by an outside force changing
| the rules of the game.
| tbihl wrote:
| >Universities are rather analogous to sweatshops in how
| they operate
|
| Could you explain further?
| ModernMech wrote:
| In grad school we definitely had decent labor standards
| though. I mean, I was worked really hard, but I can't say
| I was worked any harder than I was in private industry.
| And the pay wasn't great, but it was more than enough to
| support myself, and the understanding has always been
| that you get free tuition as part of the deal, which is
| pretty great, so that makes up for a lot of the pay
| deficit. I could see better pay for students with
| families, but other than that I think grad students have
| it pretty good these days.
|
| An example of a specific labor standard you'd like to see
| implemented would be welcome.
| Ar-Curunir wrote:
| As I'm sure you know, Most PhD students stop taking
| classes by the end of the 2nd year, and focus entirely on
| research and teaching thereafter, which means that the
| "free tuition part" is just a sham to avoid classifying
| PhD students as workers, and to hence avoid paying them
| for their labour.
| ModernMech wrote:
| As a grad student you are there for an education and your
| education doesn't only (or even mostly) happen in the
| classroom. If grad students want to be treated more like
| employees and less like students, the relationship
| between student/advisor will shift more toward an
| employee/employer relationship. This may result in more
| pay but it will also result in different expectations.
| For example, if you want to be treated more as an
| employee, then I would have a lower tolerance for
| mistakes a student would make. If you want to be an
| employee I will start hiring for skills rather than
| potential. As employer/employee relationships have
| developed maxims like "fire fast", this attitude change
| may work against grad students.
|
| Also just to be precise, tuition isn't just to pay for
| classes, it goes to pay for all of the resources you use
| as part of the university community. If you are done your
| requirements you will still have to pay tuition. And
| students don't stop taking classes by the end of year 2
| (or 4 depending), they stop taking _required_ classes.
| Since your advisor pays your tuition, you can negotiate
| with them if you want to take more than the minimum. You
| are done your requirements after 2-4 years and don 't
| _have_ to take more classes, but of course you can (I
| did). Maybe this is something unions can help with.
| logifail wrote:
| > Can you expand on what regulations you feel are lacking
| [..]
|
| It's fundamentally wrong for one human (the PhD
| supervisor) to have so much unchecked power over another
| (the PhD student).
|
| Without changing how the entire system works, I'm not
| sure how you fix that by means of regulation.
| ModernMech wrote:
| It's not really unchecked though. There's the department
| vice chair, department chair, the college dean, the dean
| of student affairs, a student senate, a faculty senate,
| etc. etc... there's a structure here for resolving
| grievances.
| logifail wrote:
| > there's a structure here for resolving grievances
|
| That may look good on paper. Yet a 20-something student
| vs an academic surrounded by supporters and wielding
| power and influence, it's only ever going to go one way.
|
| I've personally been on the wrong end of it. After
| reviewing my options, noting that my supervisor had just
| been elected Fellow of the Royal Society in London, I
| decided to bite my tongue, complete my PhD, and leave.
|
| The relationship was so broken I didn't even say goodbye
| to my supervisor (literally cleared out all my stuff from
| the lab very late one night), and I've never spoken to
| him, or had any contact with anyone in his research group
| ever since.
| gwbrooks wrote:
| Agree, and let's also remember that these are wholly
| voluntary situations. Unchecked power is a pretty big
| charge in a situation where the student can (Yes, at a
| cost) always walk away.
| logifail wrote:
| > Agree, and let's also remember that these are wholly
| voluntary situations
|
| Someone is in a position of power over someone else, and
| is exploiting that, and a response is to claim that this
| is a "wholly voluntary situation"?
|
| Really?!
| rajin444 wrote:
| > It's fundamentally wrong for one human (the PhD
| supervisor) to have so much unchecked power over another
|
| Why is this fundamentally wrong? Short of a truly
| equitable society (which I think most agree would be a
| dystopian nightmare), I don't see this as fixable. The
| problem is that the power is abused.
|
| The best way to fix this is high trust societies, not
| creating one more institution with a disproportionate
| amount of power.
| watwut wrote:
| If there is nothing to stop the abuse, abuse escalates
| and gets normalized. This happens any time there is large
| system with unchecked large power.
|
| That is why it is fundamentally wrong. Because it ensures
| widespread abuse.
| logifail wrote:
| > Why is this fundamentally wrong?
|
| It's the _unchecked_ nature of the power.
|
| Politicians have upcoming elections to worry about.
| Tenured professors ... what do they worry about?
| ModernMech wrote:
| > Tenured professors ... what do they worry about?
|
| Class assignments and number of classes taught per
| semester, teaching times and locations, class sizes,
| advising assignments, committee assignments, TA
| allocations, grader allocations, internal grants,
| withholding or revoking consulting permission,
| withholding internal department funding, lack of
| promotion (there is still a ladder after tenure), and
| most of all reputation, which in academia has higher
| currency than currency.
|
| Tenured professors still have a job to do and they still
| have a boss (lots of bosses, as I said), and if they
| don't do their job they can still get fired (I've seen it
| happen), or their lives can be made miserable.
|
| If there's an issue of academic dishonesty then there
| there are processes at journals, conferences, and funding
| agencies to address concerns. I've also witnessed these
| processes work as intended.
| logifail wrote:
| > Tenured professors still have a job to do and they
| still have a boss (lots of bosses, as I said)
|
| We are apparently talking about very different kinds of
| professors at very different kinds of institutions.
|
| Unless he were to actually commit a crime, I don't think
| there is anything my ex-boss could have possibly done
| which could have ended up with him being removed from his
| post. He was simply too important to the institution in
| terms of his reputation and his ability to attract
| external funding.
|
| How he treated his students was really neither here nor
| there, as long as the money and the citations kept
| rolling in.
| ModernMech wrote:
| It sounds like you got a raw deal by a powerful asshole,
| and are now painting with a broad brush. Not every
| professor has so much power as your former boss, so
| saying that the problem is that professors have too much
| unchecked power, and the fix would be to bring more
| oversight, is missing the mark. Because what happens when
| the person at the top of the new oversight pyramid is an
| asshole? You've got the same problem, and the solution
| wouldn't be to again make sure he has more oversight.
|
| > He was simply too important to the institution in terms
| of his reputation and his ability to attract external
| funding.
|
| This reinforces my idea that you should always go with an
| advisor who doesn't have this kind of clout. Not that you
| should have known this ahead of time or you did anything
| wrong, but I have heard sad stories from large labs
| enough to be thankful for avoiding them in the past, and
| it's the advice I will pass on in the future.
|
| I think if you wanted to get at the actual problem and a
| solution to it, I would say the problem is sad
| narcissistic jerks aiming to become kings of their
| research kingdoms, and then they act as tyrants when they
| get a hold of large sums of grant money. That may be the
| experience some people have had.
|
| A solution to this that you may like if you want more
| oversight may be to treat a research lab more like a
| corporation with a board of directors (I can hear the
| researchers recoiling) or some other governing body over
| the lab and the students itself. What do you think of
| that idea?
| dchapp wrote:
| Would you have been willing to hire this person without them
| graduating?
| ipsin wrote:
| This sounds very much like extortion, and I'm curious how any
| school with a purported honor code or sense of academic
| standards could allow it.
|
| Even if the student didn't have proof of threats, the
| situation itself should be enough to get the student a new
| advisor or oversight with the existing one.
|
| I mean "should" in an ideal sense. I think this kind of shit
| is common.
| kolbe wrote:
| "Every banana republic has a Bill of Rights." -Anton Scalia
| lumost wrote:
| An advisor is your gateway into your field of interest. To
| graduate, a student must publish a notable work in the
| field. If you lose your advisor, then you will likely need
| to start over with someone else - delaying your graduation
| by 2-6 years depending on the field.
|
| Even if the university offered a new advisor, it would be
| unlikely to help the student.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Would a death or a retirement have the same effect?
| lumost wrote:
| Professors are "supposed" to help avoid the retirement
| effect by not accepting new grad students, in some cases
| where this is not viable they can continue with an
| emeritus title and provide the entry point that their
| students need. Similarly, a professor leaving for another
| institution will likely make right by their students.
|
| In the case that none of the above is possible the
| institution will probably try to do right by the student,
| but it's a bit of a crap shoot. Even if the institution
| confers the PhD, the student is still beholden to the
| publish or perish culture of academia - and their
| (former) advisor would have helped navigate them to a
| thesis which their former advisors peers would accept. If
| the latter doesn't occur in a big way; then the student
| won't have a good career ahead.
|
| I've known 1-2 people who for various reasons decided
| that the grad student life was the optimal career station
| for themselves as it provided the benefits of an academic
| career without the overhead of grant applications etc.
| lamename wrote:
| If the professor in question brings the university a lot of
| grant money, especially if they're tenured, a lot gets
| ignored.
|
| As for the honor code I cynically suspect it's more about
| having an item go use against someone when the university
| chooses, rather than a true standard that all are held to
| at all times. If nothing else, it's just tough for a large
| institution to handle all of its problems at once.
| saltminer wrote:
| Back when I worked as a tutor, we knew a lot about the
| professors since most of us were also TAs at some point
| or worked as TAs concurrently. Some were consistent in
| busting people for cheating, others tried to avoid it at
| all costs (because they based their self-worth on their
| Rate My Professor page), but a few were just capricious
| and arbitrary. On their good side? "Eh, everyone uses
| Stack Overflow [or forgets to do anything to hide their
| plagiarism, not even bothering to edit the author name
| Javadoc comment on the code they copied] every now and
| then." On their bad side? "Copying others' work is
| unacceptable, you can either take an F in the course or
| plead your case to Academic Integrity."
|
| Of course, the ones who showed favoritism were also the
| ones who practically printed grant money, so nothing ever
| happened while I was there (and I doubt anything ever
| will).
| downrightmike wrote:
| With code, as long as it works, so what. Plus learning a
| language requires copying to learn how to do it
| correctly. Would you want to be required to be completely
| original learning French? It makes no sense to burn
| people for doing what it took industry decades to figure
| out.
| [deleted]
| polygamous_bat wrote:
| As a current graduate student, the sunk cost can sometimes
| be too high just to up and move advisors. In small places,
| you will simply not have someone else whose interest align
| with yours, and even at a place like MIT, the advisors have
| their own specialty, and especially after your second year
| at Ph.D. moving or changing advisor can be quite difficult
| and basically "reset" all your progress. So, a lot of time,
| the choice becomes moving and voiding all your work you've
| done so far, or gritting your teeth and carrying on for
| "just a couple more years until I graduate."
|
| Source: was an undergraduate and Masters student at MIT,
| then left to do a Ph.D somewhere else with a much
| better/less toxic advisor.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| >> the sunk cost can sometimes be too high just to up and
| move advisors.
|
| This isn't really the definition of sunk cost, which is
| the appearance of having tangible impact on decisions
| while being independent of the future choice. If it has
| bearing (as in this case) it's material to the decision
| and not sunk.
| [deleted]
| toast0 wrote:
| I didn't go to grad school, but because changing advisors
| is generally a reset, there's no good outcome for the
| student in this situation.
|
| Status quo: take job forced by advisor; student doesn't get
| dream job
|
| Drop out and take dream job: student doesn't get degree
| they were pursuing
|
| Advisor is fired over this: student must find an advisor
| that will resume advising on current thesis or more likely
| find a new advisor and start on a new thesis... But if it
| becomes known that this student was related to the firing,
| student may have a hard time finding a new advisor.
|
| Advisor is disciplined over this: advisor may retaliate by
| no longer cooperating with student's progress, and then
| you're back to finding a new advisor.
|
| Institution backs advisor and disciplines student for
| 'causing trouble': maybe find a new institution.
|
| So... If there's no good outcomes for the student, it's
| tricky.
| mechanical_bear wrote:
| The last thing you want to do late in the PhD process is
| get a new advisor. In many cases that is akin to starting
| over.
| Tao331 wrote:
| It's "advising" in the same sense that you pay a gangster
| for "protection".
|
| Nice career trajectory you got here, but in a field like
| this one... shame if something _bad_ happened to it...
| frankharv wrote:
| That sounds like a reasonable parallel.
|
| In the field of Machining most of our new folks come from
| one particular Community College that offers a Machine
| Shop with a few CNC machines.
|
| The sole instructor was a friend and would give me heads
| up on excellent machinists.
|
| Stanly retires and new instructor brought in.
|
| Fast forward a year and a competing companies CEO now
| sits on board of college.
|
| He gets all the heads ups from the new instructor and we
| are left with the slackers to hire..
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| Is there no grading system to refer to?
| toast0 wrote:
| You can ask applicants for grades, but if you get heads
| up on good candidates, you ask them to work for you
| before they go looking. So if someone else is getting
| heads up, you're only getting candidates that didn't pass
| their filters.
| klyrs wrote:
| That really sucks but I'm not sure what the connection
| between this professor's probably illegal action and
| unionization.
| spacemanmatt wrote:
| Unions are generally vehicles of resistance to illegal
| and/or oppressive actions. HTH.
| klyrs wrote:
| Sadly, given my experience as a steward, I don't think a
| union could actually help in this particular situation.
| spacemanmatt wrote:
| I'm sorry to hear about your experience. Many people
| don't have a better choice than keep trying with unions.
| cabcalloway wrote:
| It doesn't help, actually, because they were implicitly
| asking how a union will help specifically with that
| example. In corporations unions have the leverage of
| stopping work. What's the leverage here? We'll all stop
| pursuing our education...?
|
| I guess the calculation is that the tuition hit would be
| leverage? Like what, is a union going to force a code of
| conduct for professors? How is it going to be enforced
| when it already exists and half of these comments are
| about it being ignored?
|
| I don't get the union solution here. The incentives are
| wrong. Particularly on the Ph.D. track, how would a union
| specifically help address illegal behavior to the extent
| that you just "HTH" it as the obvious answer?
| klyrs wrote:
| There's a few things a union _can_ do in this situation.
| What they _can 't_ do is prevent blowback from the
| professor -- not even the university has leverage there.
|
| The resources a union have typically amount to (a) a
| grievance process, (b) work stoppage, and (c) a pittance
| of a legal fund. Work stoppages don't occur because one
| professor mistreats one student -- there's no rule
| against that, but unions are democratic and that motion
| would simply never pass unless the harm was particularly
| egregious and the victim was especially charismatic.
| Politics be. A grievance could "succeed" but ultimately
| they're pretty toothless -- the university has little
| leverage over a prof, the union has less. So we're left
| with a pitiful legal fund -- know how everybody hates
| dues? Unions are weak as a result. The student could
| potentially sue their prof through the ordinary legal
| system. They could be awarded monetary damages, but they
| would not be awarded a degree.
|
| The professor is the judge, jury, and executioner for the
| doctoral thesis. Other professors in the department will
| be working alongside the offending professor _for the
| rest of their lives_ so whatever politics be in the
| union, they 're _way_ more intense in a department of
| professors. And even if you do find a sympathetic ear
| with another professor in the same department, they 're
| probably not in your specialty, because when there are
| two profs with the same specialty in a single department,
| one hired the other and they're bosom buds. And this is
| the real reason that individual grad students don't speak
| out, file grievances, etc. against professors, and known
| rapists carry on for decades: to act is to throw away
| your degree, and with it, your entire career.
| spacemanmatt wrote:
| Stopping work. Same as other unions.
| cabcalloway wrote:
| And again, since you're making me belabor the question
| instead of answering the obvious one, what does that look
| like? Isn't that more harmful to the student than the
| institution? Again: what is the leverage?
|
| I'm from a three generation UAW family, married into
| IBEW, and I was on the line at eight years old. I'm not
| exactly hearing about unions for the first time here. I'm
| also struggling to understand how they're the obvious
| answer to education problems shared in this thread, in
| your estimation. Think you can share 10 or, even, 20
| words to help clarify?
| [deleted]
| iudqnolq wrote:
| Most large schools make most of their money charging
| undergrads tuition. A significant portion of undergrad
| instruction is done by grad students. If grad students
| stop teaching undergrads (or, as some have, keep teaching
| but stop issuing grades) the theory is undergrads and
| parents will threaten admin. This has worked in some
| cases.
| dehrmann wrote:
| What might be different about grad students is the weird
| market dynamics. They're well-educated, overworked, and
| underpaid. They should be able to get a decent job
| outside of academia from hiring managers sympathetic to
| not being in academia. Except for foreign students and
| people who _really_ want to be in academia, there 's a
| lot of pressure that should have made work conditions
| much better.
|
| If someone ready to pay you twice as much with normal
| hours and less drama doesn't improve conditions, I'm not
| sure if a union can.
| spacemanmatt wrote:
| Aren't graduate students there in order to get
| credentials that help them land all those better jobs
| outside of academia? I think you're imputing hiring
| pressure that they're pursuing, not experiencing.
| dehrmann wrote:
| Ignoring professional degrees like MBAs, MDs, and JDs,
| you either go to grad school to do research and/or teach
| in academia or to learn very specialized skills and go
| into industry. For the most part, there are usually less
| specialized roles in industry for people with bachelor's
| degrees.
| polygamous_bat wrote:
| Not necessarily; I myself and a lot of my friends in
| academia are here because we really do care about the
| research we are doing, and believe what we are doing here
| is really going to impact society in 10-20 years in the
| future. I'm sure there are some people here who are only
| doing a Ph.D. to get a better job afterwards. But at
| least for myself I know I rejected a job that has a 5x
| base salary (even without counting the RSU) because I
| really believed in what I wanted to do. If you take the
| opportunity cost in account, it really doesn't make sense
| in 100% of the cases to get a Ph.D. first to just go into
| the "better jobs" in industry afterwards.
| spacemanmatt wrote:
| That's absolutely fair. I really should have narrowed my
| (rhetorical) question to the group of students who will
| eventually "leave for better jobs" outside academia.
| lvs wrote:
| asf9b8hqw4n wrote:
| This is definitely abusive, but it's not clear how a union
| would go about solving this? The CBA could prohibit it (but
| it's already against policy) or the union could file a
| grievance (students could already do this), but nothing
| really prevents this from happening with a union.
|
| I don't even think the union has jurisdiction over "academic"
| matters like graduation. The Harvard CBA explicitly points
| out that academic matters cannot be arbitrated like other
| grievances: https://studentunionization.harvard.edu/files/hgs
| u/files/202...
| thylacine222 wrote:
| Students cannot already file grievances. Grievance
| procedures are part of a contract, and many, if not all,
| non-unionized grad workers work without a contract, and if
| they do have a grievance procedure, they are often only
| through university-run venues where they do not receive
| independent representation.
| caminante wrote:
| That's a material exclusion.
|
| Regardless, for the parent's example, it sounds like a mis-
| alignment in expectations between the PhD candidate and
| their advisor.
|
| I wonder "Why is this coming up now?"
|
| For options, I don't know why the PhD candidate can't
| accept the lesser option, graduate, and then switch jobs.
| Or...maybe the candidate made a crafty tale to accept
| another job without getting called out for a disingenuous
| "love letter."
| einpoklum wrote:
| > I don't even think the union has jurisdiction over
| "academic" matters like graduation.
|
| The union has jurisdiction, or perhaps we should say
| influence, over those matters it is strong enough to act
| collectively to force acceptance of its influence or
| jurisdiction. Naturally if tries to get full jurisdiction
| over handing out Ph.Ds, that will be a misguided attempt
| which will be met with extreme resistance and fail. But if
| it insists on its right to intervene when advisers
| inappropriately block their advisees from graduating - that
| is a realistic (though not easy) objective.
|
| > This is definitely abusive, but it's not clear how a
| union would go about solving this?
|
| It's very clear. Let's assume the student has not yet
| accepted a work offer here or there. A group of union reps
| from the department go talk to that Professor. They tell
| him/her that this is an informal chat; that they have heard
| about his threat. They demand that he perform the
| following:
|
| 1. Informally affirm, to them, that s/he will not penalize
| or impede the advisee in any way, regardless of their
| choice of employment.
|
| 2. Ditto but to the advisee, within X time.
|
| and that if these demands are not met, they will make the
| affair public: The department will be plastered with
| posters attacking him for extortion and mistreatment; press
| releases will be sent out; and ethical charges will be
| filed directly (if grads can do so), or external legal
| action may be initiated.
|
| ... that is, assuming the Professor does not deny the
| claim, which of course can also happen, and then things get
| more delicate and beyond the scope of this comment, but
| still actionable.
| AndyMcConachie wrote:
| People who have no experience with academia would think your
| story is false and outlandish.
|
| People who have experience with academia would think your
| story is commonplace and borderline uninteresting.
|
| This has been my experience with telling and hearing stories
| like this.
| _fat_santa wrote:
| The dynamics of academia really surprise me sometimes. When I
| think of "work", I think of two things: "work" (the actual
| day to day things you do) and "workplace" (the place your
| work at).
|
| In a traditional workplace, were always taught to value
| "workplace" over "work" and to never stay at a "workplace"
| for the "work". That is, if you have a crappy boss and toxic
| culture, working on a shiny greenfield project isn't going to
| help and most will advise you to leave and pursue a
| "workplace" that is more aligned with you.
|
| With academia the dynamics are completely different because
| now "work" and "workplace" occupy the same space, as in they
| are equally important, with "work" might be even more
| important than the "workplace". So you get into a situation
| where you hate the "workplace", but unlike the traditional
| workplace, you can't simply up and leave because your "work"
| is far too important, and continuing your "work" at another
| "workplace" is from everything I read about academia,
| difficult to say the least.
|
| Not sure how unions will look in academia but it's clear that
| we need some sort of arbiter in that space to re-balance the
| "work" and "workplace" since the dynamics are so different.
| caddemon wrote:
| Yeah this is related to the reason I'm not sure how much a
| traditional union can really help here - "school" and
| "work" become blurred beyond distinction for many grad
| students. Anyone with funding from an RAship is both
| getting paid and making degree progress because of their
| work in the lab. Some items will be very clearly a lab duty
| and some will be very clearly for personal development, but
| a lot of time is also spent on tasks that fit into both
| "work I'm doing in exchange for my funding" and "research
| training that is counting towards my degree requirements".
|
| I'm not sure how much impact a union can have on anything
| that isn't purely on the "work for funding" side. I'm all
| for TAs to unionize with a national org because it doesn't
| run into this issue and there is also less overall job
| heterogeneity there. But how do you negotiate highly
| personalized degree requirements as part of a labor union?
| There could be some high level policy changes that would
| help future students, but I don't think we know exactly
| what would work best. And will these national orgs even
| choose to prioritize that kind of improvement?
|
| The UAW unions that have formed at a few other places over
| the last 5 years have helped raise salary/benefits a bit,
| but there has barely been discussion of fundamental changes
| that could help fix academic training. It's pretty focused
| on basic labor rights.
|
| Maybe it is just my department but most people I know
| wanted to do a PhD knowing the terrible salary, and what
| they really feel ripped off on is the lack of academic
| freedom that was promised as part of this training. People
| want a union because they feel ripped off, I get it, but
| the union leaders are working towards a pretty different
| type of resolution from everything I can tell. Maybe this
| is just the first step in the process, but I'm skeptical.
| ModernMech wrote:
| > what they really feel ripped off on is the lack of
| academic freedom that was promised as part of this
| training
|
| Where would this idea be originating? I think that would
| be one of the first things I would tackle, because anyone
| making a claim of academic freedom for grad students to
| just research whatever they want is spinning a tale.
| Students with this perception are being lied to, so we
| should first address the following disillusionment by
| dispelling the notion of academic freedom during Ph.D.
| research exists.
| kergonath wrote:
| This is probably very context-dependent. I have
| supervised PhD students at a top British university and 2
| European research institutes, and usually the students
| had some freedom within the bounds of the project they
| chose initially. That's how it should be: you want
| students to develop some initiative and they are not here
| just to follow instructions.
|
| Now, sure it is not absolute freedom because it is
| supervised and the funding was obtained for a specific
| project. Funding agencies or industrial sponsors don't
| like it when the student does something completely
| different. But then students apply for specific projects.
| I have never seen any PhD offer that did not have a set
| perimeter (within which they do have some freedom), so I
| am not sure they are being lied to about that. Again,
| that might be context-dependent.
| caddemon wrote:
| Exactly, it's not about being literally unconstrained,
| but a lot of biology PhD programs turn into "follow my
| advisor's weekly (sometimes even daily) instructions to
| the letter". This can be very demoralizing and it is
| concerning for the development of future PIs as well.
|
| In addition to micro-management of the thesis project,
| there's also consideration of outside academic
| activities. Many students end up spending 50+ hours per
| week on the work their advisor designed. This leaves
| little time for the student to explore learning new
| skills that might be relevant to them - for example
| programming tutorials, a reading group in a different
| subfield, mentoring an undergrad project, communicating
| with the general public, etc.
|
| Obviously there is not time for every PhD to involve all
| of those things, but currently it is much too restricted.
| For some people to the point that their advisor forbids
| them from taking a night class or whatever despite the
| fact it is outside the (already overtime) working hours
| of the lab. Research may indeed be the priority, but
| entirely ignoring other parts of the academic role has
| not gotten us anywhere good.
|
| What it boils down to is that part of the compensation of
| the PhD is supposed to be training. Yet as it stands many
| students are treated as only employees, with no regard to
| teaching them to become a better researcher and no time
| allowed for their own personal/career development
| activities.
|
| Students are being lied to for sure (at least in certain
| fields/locations). But the solution is not to just be
| blatantly honest about what PhD currently entails. Part
| of the shift also needs to be a return to considering the
| PhD as an important piece of the training for becoming an
| academic.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Maybe it was somewhat unique, but when I received my
| offer to become a PhD student at EMBL in 1986, I wrote my
| own PhD proposal that was completely unrelated to any
| work that my supervisor was doing, and only very loosely
| connected to the work that anyone else was doing at EMBL
| at that time.
|
| However, the funding of EMBL works fairly differently
| from most universities, and quite a few other research
| institutes.
| toastyCheese wrote:
| I am a current PhD student in a CS-related field. My
| advisors had strict requirements for my first project,
| but now on my second project I have complete freedom.
| This was my personal choice, my advisors were/are willing
| to give me projects, but I wanted to learn how to take a
| research project from idea to finish. Obviously, CS (and
| my school) is extremely well funded, so this may be
| unique.
| derbOac wrote:
| FWIW, speaking as someone who has had tenure, the problems
| don't end there. The whole thing is broken all the way through.
|
| There are good places and good people, but the system is
| dysfunctional and too many critically problematic behaviors and
| dynamics are incentivized.
|
| Society at large isn't helpful either, as outside influences
| tend to be politicized badly on both ends of the spectrum in
| multiple ways, even when the other side is trying to improve
| things in good faith.
| karaterobot wrote:
| Half the reason I'm ambivalent about unionization is that I was
| involved with the graduate student union when I was in school.
| The nominal reason for it was to improve working conditions and
| pay for grad students. In practice, it improved very little,
| and added a modest amount of overhead, in the form of a union
| apparatus which fed itself by taking a little bite out of those
| paychecks every month. To be clear, the net result was still
| higher pay overall, but not a lot. All in all, it really had
| only a small overall effect on us students, and didn't hurt the
| university much. It felt like the real winner was the UAW
| itself, which is the source of my mixed feelings.
| lokar wrote:
| As a UAW steward I represented (with lawyers provided by the
| UAW) students in arbitration who were being treated unfairly
| by the UC (breaking their own rules). It was a positive
| experience.
| wardedVibe wrote:
| As a former UC grad student, thank you for your labor.
| qzx_pierri wrote:
| As long as human beings run a union, the union will be self
| serving.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Who is running the university? Robots?
| dmitriid_y wrote:
| As long as a tyrant is unchallenged, they will remain a
| tyrant.
| qzx_pierri wrote:
| What does this reply even mean? Are you seriously
| comparing the privileged plights within the ranks of
| academia to victims of a tyrannical ruler?
| spacemanmatt wrote:
| It's germane.
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petty_tyranny
|
| * https://www.researchgate.net/publication/247717438_Pett
| y_Tyr...
| hedora wrote:
| You had an unusually positive experience with UAW. They own
| the UC system contract, and negotiated pay caps, lowering
| grad student pay on some campuses.
|
| They also negotiated to discontine coverage for various
| women's health issues.
|
| Just before COVID, UC Santa Cruz went on a wildcat strike
| because the union negotiated pay for that campus below the
| cost of living. A bunch of foreign students lost their visas
| as a result.
|
| In the second two cases, the grad students tried, but failed
| to organize against the union.
|
| Most obvious routes to correcting the situation are illegal.
| In particular, organizing a strike against the union, or
| organizing a replacement union would have been illegal.
| icelancer wrote:
| >> You had an unusually positive experience with UAW. They
| own the UC system contract, and negotiated pay caps,
| lowering grad student pay on some campuses.
|
| This is pretty normal with all unions. They negotiate
| higher pay and benefits for journeymen-level members at the
| expense of apprentice-level incoming members. Management
| then does their best to purge the journeymen while bringing
| on tons of apprentices.
|
| Management and union leaders work in concert to ensure the
| above scenario happens a predominant amount of the time.
| See also: MLB, UPS, other entrenched and long-running union
| shops.
|
| It's great if you're a tenured member. Not so much if
| you're new.
|
| Hey, wait a minute... that sounds a lot like academia now
| with more steps...
| fennecfoxen wrote:
| It is amazing that unions get a legal monopoly in this
| manner, and it is not surprising that, with such rights,
| they fail their constituents, preferring to amass money and
| power for a corrupt leadership.
|
| Imagine a world with two or three unions per employer and
| you could actually pick which one you were under. They'd
| actually have incentives to deliver!
|
| But we'll never have that because it means less lobbying
| money and smaller campaign contributions to our
| representatives in government.
| solidsnack9000 wrote:
| In recent years, some decisions from the NLRB are leaning
| in the direction of multiple unions:
| https://laborblog.vorys.com/2014/07/articles/nlrb/how-
| many-u...
|
| The idea is that different kinds of workers could be in
| different unions. A department store might have, for
| example, cosmetics specialists, tailors, accounting staff
| and so on; and these groups are distinct enough, from the
| NLRB's perspective, to have their own unions.
| wadefletch wrote:
| Aren't a bunch of little unions equivalent to independent
| employees advocating their own interests?
| solidsnack9000 wrote:
| Maybe not, because (a) each union can still aggregate the
| interests of hundreds or thousands of workers and (b)
| it's much easier for a few unions to collaborate with
| each other than for hundreds or thousands of individual
| workers to do so.
|
| This depends, of course, on how exactly the new unions
| are allowed to form. It seems unlikely that the NLRB
| would implement policy in a way that allows dozens of
| unions, each with a handful of workers; but I guess if
| that happened, it would end up just like what you're
| saying.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| This is a bad idea for a number of different reasons.
| I'll highlight one.
|
| The actual "competition" wouldn't be among which union
| the employees joined - rather they would compete to
| undercut each other on contract negotiation, which would
| only bolster the employer's hand.
|
| There are good reasons why this is not common practice -
| but there is also no law preventing multiple unions.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Your comment doesn't make sense to me.
|
| > the union negotiated pay for that campus below the cost
| of living
|
| ...and the graduate student workers voted to approve the
| contract? Every negotiated contract goes back to the
| members for approval.
|
| What would this have looked like in the absence of a union?
| You are saying that with negotiation, UC Santa Cruz got pay
| below cost of living, but if they didn't have that
| negotiation, management would have freely paid them more
| than cost of living? What was the negotiation over?
|
| > In particular, organizing a strike against the union, or
| organizing a replacement union would have been illegal.
|
| What do you mean? Just get 30% of your members to sign a
| petition and you can hold an election to change unions.
| That is _literally_ what organizing is.
|
| If you can get 30% of your members to go on a "wildcat
| strike" against UC Santa Cruz & UAW, then you can get 30%
| to sign a union replacement card.
| jkaplowitz wrote:
| > What do you mean? Just get 30% of your members to sign
| a petition and you can hold an election to change unions.
| That is literally what organizing is.
|
| > If you can get 30% of your members to go on a "wildcat
| strike" against UC Santa Cruz & UAW, then you can get 30%
| to sign a union replacement card.
|
| Are you speaking based on California public sector union
| law or the federal National Labor Relations Act? The
| federal NLRA doesn't apply to state public sector
| workplaces, including UC Santa Cruz, with that being
| handled by state law.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| My only experience with unionization is at private
| universities in Massachusetts, so I guess I am unfamiliar
| with how state law plays in for these public sector
| unions in California.
| wardedVibe wrote:
| Fwiw, UAW has recently had a major shake up, where the
| corrupt leadership of the overall union just got prosecuted,
| and actual one person one vote is being voted on, so I expect
| you (and I) caught them at the worst possible time. I'm
| definitely more weary of large cross sectoral unions than
| before my time at UC though.
| bjourne wrote:
| > To be clear, the _net result was still higher pay overall_
| , but not a lot.
|
| Then I don't understand your ambivalence. Who would complain
| about getting more money?
| chmod600 wrote:
| It's like class-action lawsuits: sure, maybe you get $2.43,
| but the lawyers are really the beneficiaries. The
| individual is just used to justify the whole thing.
| HarryHirsch wrote:
| No, the lawyer's job in a class action is to hold the
| someone accountable to prevent recurrences. They did a
| job, so they ought to be paid.
|
| If some company habitually breaks the law and causes
| damages to a large group of people you can either pray
| that the Attorney General takes the case (but they won't,
| they want to advance their political career) or a law
| firm will take the case out of pure financial interest.
| I'll go with the law firm.
| caddemon wrote:
| Students voted for this union because of major issues with
| the entire academic training process, not to get a small
| salary bump. The presence of the union at other schools has
| not led to any real attempts to fix the systemic issues,
| yet it adds another layer of bureaucracy to deal with for
| any students that want to face these issues.
| IMTDb wrote:
| Because it probably cost a lot more to the institution than
| it brought to the intended target. A middleman takes the
| bulk of the additional investment, without providing that
| much value in itself.
|
| And that money came from somewhere, probably partly from
| profits, but also from other investments (buildings,
| teaching material, ...). Overall teacher got a little bit
| more, but both the org and the students lost a lot,
| comparatively.
| klyrs wrote:
| At many universities, there's a massive stash of funds:
| the Athletics Department, which is a completely different
| organization and therefore off the table.
|
| Also, university administration lover building pyramids
| of hierarchy. When you add a level to the pyramid,
| everybody gets a raise. Executive salaries are ludicrous
| -- and similar to the bank execs in the '08 bailouts,
| they cut themselves bonuses for "saving money" on
| handling disasters of their own creation.
|
| By and large, university endowments are treated as
| separate investment vehicles and are no longer used to
| ease times of hardship.
|
| Universities have largely been sold out. What was once a
| venerable public institution is now run like a profit-
| driven business. Welcome to wal-mart.
| wyldfire wrote:
| > The nominal reason for it was to improve working conditions
| and pay for grad students. In practice, it improved very
| little
|
| It might be interesting to consider how much worse the pay or
| conditions could have gotten in the union's absence.
| paulcole wrote:
| > Academia likes to cast itself as a true meritocracy
|
| The more an organization/community says one thing, the more
| likely the opposite is to be true. Think about Google and
| "Don't be evil." Or companies that tout "work/life balance."
| bombcar wrote:
| What would that say about the organization that itself is the
| union?
| paulcole wrote:
| I don't know. I'm not very smart.
| david38 wrote:
| This is graduate students unionizing.
|
| Everywhere I've seen this, the principal complaints are wages,
| housing, acknowledging they are workers, and working hours.
|
| Grad students are used as slaves. This is trivial to avoid just
| by paying them what they actually need to live. This is a
| university, what they can't figure this out? No, they just
| overplayed their hand at the bargaining table.
| aborsy wrote:
| In France, students and hipsters started similar protests.
| Horrible outcomes ever since, producing a lot of social,
| political and ultimately economical problems for the country for
| decades to come.
|
| Having lived in France, I shiver when I hear word "union."
| aborsy wrote:
| I meant in 1968.
| whatever1 wrote:
| US Universities have enormous overhead costs. And unfortunately
| the PhD students / post docs are paying with their blood and
| sweat for these.
|
| My advisor had to spit 150k to the university to have me as a
| student (including a 20k fee for lab usage, despite the fact my
| PhD was a theoretical one).
|
| From that 150k I was taking 22k - 3k of mandatory health
| insurance. I could barely make it given that I had to pay > 12k
| per year for rent and utilities (with roommates).
|
| Meanwhile the University would splash money to get athletic
| coaches or give bonuses to the executives or open branches in
| dictatorships.
|
| I think unions should focus on university management, because
| they have been acting unchecked for way too long.
| ceeplusplus wrote:
| It's mostly caused by the explosion of lifestyle inflation at
| universities. Rather than just providing an education and doing
| research they are now expected to be mental health counselors,
| promote "diversity" (aka we need more of certain skin colors
| over other skin colors), and make "democratic" decisions. In
| practice this means everything is filled with bureaucracy and
| you need to go through 5 committees and 3 vice chancellors
| before anything gets done.
|
| Football and basketball are actually profitable at most R1
| schools, even though the coaches make lots of money.
| whatever1 wrote:
| How diversity has anything to do with institutional
| mismanagement.
|
| And no, US universities do not run as democracies. The
| appointed deans and the president run the show.
| ceeplusplus wrote:
| Because these deans of "diversity" get paid a lot of money
| to bikeshed about useless issues while not actually having
| any impact on the school. It's run exclusively as a PR
| stunt to satisfy the whiners in the school. It's one
| example of the many cases of unneeded, useless headcount in
| universities that's contributing to bloat. I can't name a
| single time where anyone with the word diversity in their
| title at my former college did anything concrete.
|
| > US universities do not run as democracies. The appointed
| deans and the president run the show.
|
| That's not really the case especially in public
| universities. If you want to make a change that might step
| on a lot of toes you need to get buy in from people. They
| aren't explicit democracies where everyone votes, but
| nonetheless you need to secure acceptance from people to
| get things done.
|
| To give you an example of the useless bureaucracy, I once
| had to submit a reimbursement for some research expenses
| and was bounced around for several months between different
| forms and different people. Any 1 part of the reimbursement
| that didn't match the forms exactly meant the entire thing
| would be rejected. This was to access grant money that
| wasn't even the university's, it was the lab's. In
| corporate settings people don't give a shit and approve it
| as long as it looks legitimate.
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| > How diversity has anything to do with institutional
| mismanagement.
|
| Someone needs to pay for all these useless "diversity"
| consultants, and they aren't cheap.
| yuppie_scum wrote:
| I can understand the value of unions in a situation where you are
| the employee. But Jesus, if you don't like the school just go to
| a different school.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| What are you gonna tell the new school?
| texaslonghorn5 wrote:
| Right so the grad students are employees of the university.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Interesting this is such a big subject, already on my university
| days in the early 1990's, student unions were a common reality in
| many European universities.
| JaimeThompson wrote:
| Good, that an institution with so much money has been treating
| them this way is simply inexcusable.
| Proven wrote:
| ta988 wrote:
| This is highly needed in non-elite universities. Grad students
| are underpaid, and encouraged to apply for scolarship that yes
| will improve their resume but result in them paying taxes on them
| so they end up with even less money than they had before. In some
| places they are threatened to be kicked out of programs if they
| don't apply to those scolarships. This plus the repeat offender
| PIs that can abuse their students and get protected because they
| bring grant money...
| asdff wrote:
| Not uncommon for grad students with supposed "good" stipends in
| high cost of living areas to be only taking home $2300 a month or
| so, where rents are probably $2200 a month now for a 1br
| apartment. What do they expect grad students to do? You almost
| have to share a bedroom, which imo is ridiculous for a job that
| requires a B.S. where you might quite literally be designing
| multi million dollar scientific experiments.
| ok123456 wrote:
| Solidarity Forever.
| meatsauce wrote:
| Whenever I read this, I think of some out of touch career
| academic who has never experienced the real world, yet knows
| exactly how the world should be, and can't wait to tell you.
| milofeynman wrote:
| I want to see PICU attendings at academic universities unionize.
| Some of their schedules should be illegal. 14-16 7-day shifts a
| year, one of those Fri, Sat, Sun shifts they work from 7am
| through their shift the next day which means Fri and Sat are
| approximately 7am-4pm the next day with NO guaranteed sleep. They
| also have other random night shifts throughout the year for a
| total of 35 or so overnight shifts, but those start at 4pm.
|
| Those ~33 hour shifts should be illegal
| bigcat123 wrote:
| [deleted]
| lettergram wrote:
| I can't imagine this actually producing better results long-term.
| Unions objectives are to limit competition amongst relative
| parties in order to combat the higher authority/ employer.
|
| The purpose of graduate school is to put compete your peers. What
| this will likely lead to IMO is more "equity" among the less
| capable (grants, funding, etc) which will reduce the opportunity
| for meritocracy and more capable (while assisting the less
| capable).
| exdsq wrote:
| My wife's very recent PhD experience at Oxford was a little
| crunch time around conferences, a nice 20/25 hour week, and
| enough spare time to row with the Oxford Uni boat team. She
| stayed a year as a postdoc and it was much the same. She's now
| a postdoc at Stanford and she's working 16 hour days, weekends,
| and very stressed for it. Academic output is the same - it's
| just different work culture. I know this is about PhD students
| but I imagine it's no easier for them than early career
| postdocs, so this seems to make a lot of sense.
| sheikheddy wrote:
| Stanford is notorious for "duck syndrome". People are calm on
| the surface but are always paddling below the water. I would
| say the CS papers out of Stanford tend to be nicer than the
| ones out of Oxford though, at least for Systems research.
| (This is a huge generalization: I don't read every paper and
| there's enough variation between authors that it doesn't
| really make sense to do a cross-institution comparison, but
| this is only my half-formed intuition).
| exdsq wrote:
| I think it's going to be very lab specific there, but you
| could be right for systems research (I've not read any
| myself)!. FWIW, she's in medical engineering.
|
| Edit: All it takes is one tenured professor who strongly
| filters submissions for _good_ papers to keep standards
| high for a department to look much better, but then you 'd
| be stopping your lab from playing the
| citations/publications game which is necessary for future
| postdocs. I may be cynical.
| lkey wrote:
| You misunderstand grad school. Typically you and your PI will
| be the _only_ people with a given specialization at a given
| school. You will mostly be competing for grants with your
| colleagues from _other schools_. Even students under the same
| PI will often have focuses so different as to rule out direct
| competition. Additionally "The purpose of graduate school is
| to put(out) compete your peers." is not /the point/ of grad
| school at all. You can't 'win' academia, you survive it long
| enough to pursue your research interest. Moreover, the
| 'competition' for grants is more like a lottery than anything
| else for reasons too complex to get into here.
|
| "What this will likely lead to IMO is more "equity" among the
| less capable (grants, funding)" Putting aside your assertion
| that "equity" is bad, grants are not decided by people that
| know or care if the applicant is in a union.
|
| "which will reduce the opportunity for meritocracy and more
| capable" Not all games are zero-sum and 'merit' based, I'd
| recommend that you not universalize this outlook.
| thot_experiment wrote:
| Ahh yes, less meritocracy or as I like to put it: not having to
| work awful hours and being paid like shit because that's just
| the way things have always been you don't have collective
| bargaining leverage.
| Ar-Curunir wrote:
| What nonsense. Have you actually been a PhD student recently?
| The peers you're "competing" with usually aren't even at the
| same institution; and even then there's a lot more cross-
| institution collaboration than there is competition.
|
| Also this view of doing research as competition is absolute
| garbage. Yes, competing to produce good research is good. No,
| advisors exploiting cheap PhD labour to do that is not good.
| The latter is what unions are meant to prevent.
| lolinder wrote:
| > The purpose of graduate school is to put compete your peers.
|
| This is what's wrong with higher education today. School should
| _never_ be about competition, it should be about education.
| Graduate students _in particular_ aren 't supposed to be
| competing, they're supposed to be contributing to the body of
| human knowledge under the guidance of more experienced
| contributors.
|
| Any competition that exists is the result of either a severely
| misguided but sincere effort to increase productivity or of a
| cynical and deliberate attempt to manipulate vulnerable young
| students into providing free labor. Countering both of these
| cases is exactly why MIT students want a union.
| AlbertoAsw10 wrote:
| e
| ergregregfb wrote:
| ergregregfb wrote:
| lnxg33k1 wrote:
| I am not sure how to fairly express this concept, so I will write
| it as it comes, younger generations are kinda fixing all the fuck
| ups of millennials in terms of working conditions, in a bit maybe
| they will even get paid overtime, I felt always like my
| generation was more focused in trying to find someone to blame
| rather than fighting to fix things, more focused on saying "Ok
| boomer" or blame "GenX". And I think the main issue with
| millennials psychology is that they were born in a welthy and
| rich middle-class society and grew up spoiled, and then when in
| their late-teens the economy fucked them up they didn't have the
| strenght to fight, while maybe younger generations are born in
| crysis, unstability and exploitation, and might have more
| strenght to fix things
| bick_nyers wrote:
| I just turned 26, so I straddle the line between millennial and
| Gen Z. I have friends that are distinctly in both generations.
| What you say definitely rings true to me, although I think the
| relationship with emerging technology also plays an interesting
| part here too. From all that I can tell of the situation, Gen Z
| is much more integrated and connected with each other due to
| the existing popularity of the internet and smartphones, where
| millennials growing up still followed that traditional model
| where there were strong cliques throughout school, and
| interests in things like the internet were still fairly
| obscure. That's not to say that cliques don't exist today, but
| it's hard for me to describe the right words behind the
| communication & relationship model that changed so
| dramatically. As a result, millennials don't feel nearly as
| much comraderie as Gen Z, which I believe to be playing a large
| role in the current societal anti-exploitation movements.
| sheikheddy wrote:
| Do you also believe this pattern will hold as this generation
| ages? It could be the case that this property is really about
| young vs old people. Although I hope future generations will be
| so well off that they'll view the role of menial labor in
| modern society as something akin to slavery.
| lnxg33k1 wrote:
| That's a nice point, I am not sure, but a while ago here on
| HN someone posted an article showing stats about uprises
| going down in a proportional way to ageing of the population,
| so I am not a scholar of sociology but according to that
| article the answer to your question should be "no" :(, but
| maybe there will be young people of new generations who will
| keep the fight on, if current young generation are able to
| get fair working conditions which allow them to make kids and
| families
| g_p wrote:
| For anyone not familiar with the world of academia, grad students
| actually have a good bit more power available to them by
| organising sensibly than you might think. The same is also true
| for early career postdoctoral research staff. This is because
| most of the work that actually matters is being done by these
| individuals, in a very pyramidical structure, but the money stops
| rolling in without the work that the base of the pyramid is
| delivering.
|
| Tenured professors and others win research grants, and are only
| as good as their last grant. If they stop running on the
| treadmill, they won't get any more grants, as their pitch becomes
| less compelling than others'.
|
| They win a grant, but the actual research work is then done by
| postdoctoral researchers and grad students. They do the actual
| work, write it up, and pretty much everything else. Often they
| even win the grants in the first place. The exception is that
| when there's some credit to be gained for the work, the professor
| will reappear to take center stage and give interviews.
|
| If the grad students organise, the wheels could begin to fall off
| quickly - if projects are delayed, grant payments won't come
| through. If they are not teaching classes, someone else has to
| teach them. If the research isn't getting done, someone has to
| speak with funders on calls. Someone has to write reports.
| There's more to be done than the professor can do, and they will
| rapidly end up snowed under, unable to function, and unable to
| deliver papers on their grant. That will make it harder for them
| to get their next pet project funded.
|
| Unfortunately, many people go into academia believing it to be a
| bastion of meritocracy where their efforts and skill will be
| rewarded, and they spend some number of years believing this
| before they start to realise what is actually going on. Some will
| make it to be a professor, others become disillusioned and go
| elsewhere. In my view though, the model is quite broken, and too
| reliant on a professor claiming credit for others' work without
| challenge, even though the work of their (hidden) team was the
| meaningful intellectual input, and some of them would probably be
| better as the professor.
| amitport wrote:
| If a professor is only taking credit for underlings' work he /
| she will, at some point, stop getting good students...
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| In these kinds of departments, I think the professor PI is
| understood as basically a management position -- they get the
| funding, they "hire" and manage the right grad students and
| other staff who do the work -- and yeah, then they take
| credit for it. So they aren't "only" taking credit for others
| work, they are performing administrative and management
| functions. And if they do that job well, they will not stop
| getting students. Because it can be the only game in town
| (literally, in the "town" you are in), and switching labs is
| a set back (switching schools/departments even harder and
| more so).
| neutronicus wrote:
| Yeah in my experience professors are pretty good about giving
| credit (the student is the first author on the paper, does
| the conference presentations, etc).
|
| The comment above is right about the general structure
| (professors pitch, students deliver), though. And perhaps
| right about claiming credit in some fields, although not
| mine.
| g_p wrote:
| I'd agree it very much depends on the individuals. I have
| worked with people all across the spectrum. My advisor was
| absolutely in the "good" camp - we'd openly describe call
| academia the "world's biggest hidden pyramid scheme". He
| led a small, tightly knit group, and the group followed the
| two pizzas rule.
|
| I've also dealt with people who tried to come across like
| this, but were the absolute opposite - they'd grown a
| pretty large research group to get their chair, but had a
| reputation of over-promising and under delivering. They'd
| promise things without the technical knowledge to
| understand what they were saying they'd do, then causing
| morale problems among their team when people found out what
| had been promised. They absolutely didn't follow the two
| pizzas rule - you could barely find their whole group, let
| alone fit them in a room. This prof would try to give the
| impression they wanted others to grow and succeed, but
| ultimately it was all about them, and preserving their
| carefully crafted hierarchy. They didn't like to hear "no",
| and couldn't bear the thought that they were over stretched
| and not delivering, so everyone would tell them things were
| fine, as they under-delivered, exacerbating the
| situation...
| g_p wrote:
| In theory this should be true, although the information
| asymmetries involved (especially for international students
| who go based on citations or notable papers or "reputation")
| mean that it can be hard to lose the flow of good students.
|
| Ultimately if they are a tenured prof and can keep winning
| grants, they can offer postdoc and postgrad contracts, and
| that is effectively the only internal currency that matters
| for a student that needs to find a postgrad position.
|
| With a limited number of chairs, it's hard for someone else
| to get a "rival" chair post and then compete internally, to
| give students the choice (which you'd get in a free market).
| If the institution has a good reputation, they'll likely have
| a flow of willing students regardless of how they act.
| neutronicus wrote:
| On the other side of this equation, I think international
| students comprise a potent reservoir of strikebreakers.
| Ar-Curunir wrote:
| are you an international student? I am one, and the position
| of international students is much more precarious than most
| other PhD students: their very presence in the country
| depends on the whim of the advisor. In many unionization
| efforts that I've seen, there's been lots of leadership from
| international students
| klyrs wrote:
| In my experience, international students are very active in
| grad student unions. Also, good luck bringing in scabs during
| finals week. Admission runs on a schedule, visas add delays,
| and even if they show up in time, they'll soon be informed
| that it's a closed shop and scabbing has financial penalties.
| Oh, and there's typically a high degree of solidarity between
| profs and their grad students -- you don't just get admitted
| by a university, you get admitted by a committee of
| professors in the department you apply to.
| azernik wrote:
| Yup - especially because student unions (in the labor-union
| sense, not in the faux-government US sense) are the norm in
| many places abroad rather than an exception.
| slim wrote:
| Not if the international students get unionized. They're
| actually the most prone to unionization if the union is able
| to defend them.
| PeterisP wrote:
| Not really, strikes are a short-term thing and bringing in
| new international students is something that takes many
| months at least.
| the_only_law wrote:
| In fairness, these already seem to form the majority of PhD
| students at universities near me
| walkhour wrote:
| There's a reason why Academia and Big Tech love immigration.
|
| And then there's the argument they use to justify why
| immigration is good, like diversity, inclusion,
| globalization, ... which may be valid or not.
|
| But isn't it just perfect when your objectives are so closely
| aligned with what is considered morally right.
|
| To regard these agents as moral actors instead of self-
| serving profit seekers is just lunacy.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| Except in general people from other countries may be _more_
| amenable to union organizing and joining, since they often
| come from cultures where unions are viewed more positively
| than in the US, and where more of the workforce is
| unionized, and may possibly even have experience themselves
| with unions, or else have family members who do -- or if
| not with unions, with other kinds of collective political
| action of sorts that have become less common in the USA
|
| I think this has been shown to be true in grad student
| unionization drives in the US.
| walkhour wrote:
| > where more of the workforce is unionized
|
| Is this fact coming from the weighted average of how
| unionized is the workforce in the diferented countries
| from which workers comes to USA? Is this true for high
| and low paying jobs? Are the migrants from these
| countries representative of the workforce of their
| country?
|
| Could you provide proof? My first reaction is to be
| agnostic upon this claim.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| I know from observation that international students are
| often involved in grad student unionization efforts,
| especially in leadership positions -- anecdotal but
| generally noted by anyone else paying attention.
|
| The rest is, yes, a theory I have that I don't currently
| have the data to back up -- and the theory is not _just_
| about union density in countries of origin, although that
| 's part of it.
|
| But as far as that part, just for some quick napkin math
| sanity check, if we're talking "countries from which
| workers come to USA" -- let's choose Mexico for example.
| First google hit (this is just a sanity check) says
| "Approximately 90% of Mexican production workers in
| industrial enterprises that employ at least twenty-five
| employees are unionized."
|
| As far as international _students_ , the top countries
| are China and India. China is it's own thing where unions
| exist in a completely different context. First google hit
| for India says "Over all, in India, 34.13% of regular
| non-agricultural workers are trade union members" -- this
| is of course much higher than the US. (First google hit
| says 10% USA, although that may be general not "non-
| agricultural").
|
| The US is very low in unionization rate compared to most
| countries, most countries on the planet are going to have
| higher rates.
|
| But I'm definitely not going to convince you of anything
| in this HN thread, it would require actually doing some
| research, like probably original research,, probably
| including sociological qualitative research actually
| talking to immigrants and such, not just the off-hand
| googling I am willing to put the time into now. It's just
| a theory I am sharing, yes. It would be an interesting
| research topic... for a grad student in some social
| science field. :)
| walkhour wrote:
| > But I'm definitely not going to convince you of
| anything in this HN thread
|
| You'd be surprised :). I appreciate your response, it was
| an interesting read.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| Reading my post again, I think to be fair we should say
| that Mexican unions can often definitely be corrupt in a
| way that doesn't serve the interests of workers. While
| this could result in people from there being very cynical
| about and uninterested in unions -- that is often my
| personal experience with people from former soviet
| countries -- my personal experience with people from
| Mexico (totally anecdotal and subjective sense, not proof
| in any sense) is still that they come from a culture
| where it's generally understood that collectively
| organizing as workers -- and collectively organizing for
| grassroots political power in other ways -- is a good
| thing, and a culture where they may have some experience
| doing so, very differently from most people in the USA.
|
| It's just my theory based on my personal observations and
| thoughts though, yeah!
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Speaking from my personal experience - which includes
| involvement in unionization drives, that has never been
| true. I think this is supported by the evidence.
|
| Maybe if you're talking about immigrants from Western
| Europe. Otherwise, no.
| canjobear wrote:
| > They win a grant, but the actual research work is then done
| by postdoctoral researchers and grad students. They do the
| actual work, write it up, and pretty much everything else.
|
| In this scenario, which does happen but is not the only way it
| works, the convention is that the student or postdoc is first
| author and the advisor is final author on the paper. That seems
| fair to me.
| g_p wrote:
| Order of authorship is quite dependent on discipline - in
| comp sci and engineering the convention is as you say. In
| other fields they prefer alphabetical order or other orders,
| as I understand.
|
| Some journals have started requiring specific disclosures of
| activities that each individual carried out.
|
| Interestingly for some of the professors, some publications'
| ethics codes don't consider merely obtaining funding as
| meeting the requirements for authorship of a paper. Of course
| they'll claim other activities, but a quick review of the
| papers and input they claim to have made will likely give
| rise to probable doubt. There's a few papers looking at
| "prolific authorship" in different disciplines.
| ModernMech wrote:
| > They do the actual work
|
| Used to think this as a grad student. Now as a professor I see
| how naive this attitude is. There is _so_ much work beyond what
| grad students are tasked with including getting research
| funded, staffed, and results out the door. Grad students are
| cogs in a research machine, cogs that need to _constantly_ be
| readjusted and recalibrated because they are quite green
| (sorry, it 's true) for a number of years. Most 22 year olds
| coming out of undergrad into a PhD program are not doing what
| you would consider publishable research for a number of years,
| and what work they do is usually _heavily_ based on a
| foundation of research that was laid to get funding in the
| first place (usually by the professor), based on ideas that
| have been thought of and refined over a number of an entire
| research career (not by the grad student doing the "actual
| work"). Grad students may have great technical ability, but
| they have next to 0 research sense and ability. As I said,
| doing research is _so_ much more than the technical aspects and
| writing the paper.
|
| Grad students love to feel like since they got a paper
| published, that they are 100% responsible for what happened in
| that paper, and I just have to ask: where were you 2 years ago
| when I was up at 4am finalizing the Nth draft of the grant
| application, based on research that I have been working on
| since 6 years before that? Oh, you were partying, drunk off
| your ass at a frat in undergrad, and when I started this
| research project you were learning your times tables. So tell
| me again how you're 100% responsible for the results here, and
| I'm just taking credit for all you have done on your own?
|
| Sorry if you haven't noticed this post has turned into a rant
| at someone I have in mind, not at you. But I just needed to say
| this.
| Ar-Curunir wrote:
| I'm sorry, but you sound like a terrible, patronizing
| advisor; anyone who views their students as "cogs in the
| machine" is someone I would not want to work with.
|
| Yes, professors work hard, but let's not kid ourselves that
| they're involved with the nitty-gritty research work. You
| just sound like someone who's bitter at young people.
| ModernMech wrote:
| Again, kindly see my reply about attacking me personally.
| If you feel affronted by my calling grad students cogs,
| make a case for why they are not. I spend plenty of time
| shaping those cogs into fine researchers, and they're all
| better for it, so my results speak for themselves. But
| you're kidding yourself if you think a green 22 year old
| fresh out of undergrad is able to perform at a level much
| higher than a cog in a research lab. There's usually a
| researcher in there, but it takes _a lot_ of work, usually
| years, to properly shape their minds.
|
| I'm quite young myself so I don't understand why you would
| say I'm bitter at young people, but I guess it just goes to
| show I hit a nerve and you want to lash out at me even
| though you know nothing about me, not even my age. You want
| to form an opinion about me and my personality and my
| entire professional posture based on a rant go ahead, but
| keep it to yourself.
|
| As for professors not being involved in the nitty gritty
| research, there's just no basis for this statement. Like I
| said I've spent almost a literal decade getting my research
| agenda up and running, and that's pretty much the common
| case. It takes at least 6 years to get tenure. Students
| joining me today are getting involved in a project that
| began when they were preteens. Students claiming full
| credit over research done at that point is pure hubris.
|
| How do you think research labs come to be without
| professors getting involved in the "nitty gritty"? Research
| happens over a long timescale, longer than any one grad
| student's tenure.
| thylacine222 wrote:
| lol I hope for the sake of your graduate students that your
| institution has a union. Your personality sounds exactly like
| the countless professors I've seen abuse their workers.
| ModernMech wrote:
| edit: sorry I'm just going to disengage from this, I feel
| trolled so that's that. If you want to interrogate my
| position, then maybe ask a question. No questions have been
| asked so an interrogation is not what's taking place here.
|
| Ranting about a third party not involved in the discussion
| here, who nobody knows, is completely different than
| writing a response to someone, attacking them directly, and
| calling into question their professional capabilities
| directly, then doubling down and tripling down on that even
| after they asked you to stop is just rude and unnecessarily
| antagonistic. I asked you to make a point a couple times
| now and you don't have a point to make except to attack me
| personally, so kindly find someone else to troll.
| thylacine222 wrote:
| i'm sure that your students are very happy to criticize
| the person that pays them, and who has a complex about
| them not being deserving enough, to their face
|
| edit: if you expect to be able to use your own anecdotes
| as evidence against unionization, expect them to actually
| be interrogated. if this is how you handle conflict with
| a random person on the internet, i shudder to imagine how
| you handle conflict with someone who works for you.
| thylacine222 wrote:
| bruh you spent all of your first post writing a rant
| attacking one of your grad students don't act all high
| and mighty now
| SantalBlush wrote:
| I just went through this with a small grant. My only colleague
| in our dept. quit just before COVID started, so I was doing
| both full-time jobs on the grant. The university froze hiring
| _and_ raises in 2020. I wrote all reports, wrote the new grant,
| handled all of the budgeting and admin. In late 2021, our PI
| retired and we finally filled the vacant admin position, so I
| had to train the new hire and the new PI about how the grant
| worked.
|
| During that time, I received zero merit raises, and as a thanks
| from the university, they took more money from the grant so we
| could no longer afford a research assistant. My new colleague
| with zero years of experience was hired at the same rate as me;
| she almost immediately started venting to me how she doesn't
| get paid enough. She wants to earn a big promotion, so she is
| making her own changes to our reports that end up taking a lot
| more time. I put my notice in last week. I need to recharge for
| a month or two before I get back out there.
|
| Basically, most of the value I created went to the university
| and our PI, and I was expected to be thankful for the
| opportunity. In spite of that, I think I left the dept. in
| better shape than it was in when I arrived.
| cycomanic wrote:
| You write like the professors are just sitting around raking in
| the glory, but not doing anything while they let everyone else
| does the work. The reality is that professors tend to work just
| as hard as their grad students. I completely agree that
| academia is very disfunctional, but it actually affects all
| levels. I am familiar with many academics that work >60h a week
| every week, in fact I believe the most outrageous examples of
| overworking grad students comes from academics who work crazy
| hours and expect everyone else to do the same.
|
| What many don't see is that the way academic financing works is
| that academics spend probably >30% of their time on writing
| grants and evaluating others grants and then they have to
| report on the grants as well. Then there is all sort of other
| buerocratic work that they have to do, and the view by most of
| the admin staff that surround them is that academic time is not
| counted, which means most reporting systems are made so it's
| easy for the administrators but not the academics.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > You write like the professors are just sitting around
| raking in the glory, but not doing anything while they let
| everyone else does the work.
|
| I've worked at two major research universities in multiple
| labs. While this is not entirely true, it is more true than
| not.
|
| Professors work hard, but many are not working hard on the
| actual research work, especially once they have been tenured
| for a long time.
| asdff wrote:
| It depends on the lab. Just like in private industries,
| some superiors merely phone it in, while others are a lot
| more hands on with their subordinates.
| aardvarks wrote:
| It's true that professors rely on grad students/postdocs to do
| work. And, at least in my experience, advisors are actually
| pretty good about giving students credit for their work --
| having successful students reflects well on the advisor. But a
| student is even more dependent on their advisor than vice
| versa. It's not like undergrad where the main thing that
| matters to your future employment is to collect the diploma,
| because for most fields the main reason to get a PhD is to
| continue in academia, and academia right now is an extreme
| employer's market. The things you need to leave grad school
| with are 1) impressive recommendation letters, like "best
| student in N years, reminiscent of <mid-career hotshot> at that
| age", and 2) (lots of) refereed publications. If you manage
| that, the diploma should be automatic.
|
| Yes, you can push back against advisors who require 12 hrs a
| day in lab. But if that means you take longer to produce work,
| your letters might be just good instead of positively glowing,
| which might mean you fail to launch in academia. Several
| hundred other people will apply for each tenure track job you
| apply to; those with "just good" letters tend to get crowded
| out. The tenured advisor might have a bruised ego because their
| publication rate has slowed, or be more frazzled because they
| have to save money and write more proposals, but at least they
| still have a job.
|
| Also, PIs themselves generally work a lot as well (often the
| ones insisting on lots of hours from their students think,
| rightly or wrongly but based on their own experience, that
| that's the only way to succeed....). I agree academia is
| broken, but think it's at a deep structural level, and more
| complicated than schools exploiting students and hanging them
| out to dry.
| adminprof wrote:
| I think your comment is pretty spot on. Just three things I'd
| add to, are that 1) the advisor is not intentionally
| downgrading your letter to "just good", but it's that they're
| obligated to write a better than "just good" letter for
| someone who has been more productive both in terms of
| research and in being a leader in the community (these two
| things go hand in hand). Writing the same letter for two
| students regardless of what they accomplish would be unfair.
|
| And 2) sometimes getting more funding is simply not possible,
| as in the advisor has basically reached the limit of what
| they can do. There's a limit to the number of proposals that
| one can submit and the number of calls that fit their
| research agenda. So what I think you're missing is that if an
| advisor has less funding, there's going to be more pressure
| to finish sooner and less freedom to explore ideas beyond
| what's written in a previous grant proposal.
|
| 3) I've never heard of a tenured professor that concerned
| about their publication rate. In fact, most of them don't
| even update their CVs or websites with the last few years of
| papers. It's always the student who is trying to get more
| papers.
| TheMagicHorsey wrote:
| There's a rot in US academia ... ballooning costs, useless
| degrees that confer no perceivable boost in the job market,
| swollen bureaucracies. Unions might help one part of the
| ecosystem: the grad students, but it could also make overall
| reform harder.
|
| I look at US Academia's complexities and it seems to me an easier
| approach to reform is to start from scratch via new institutions.
| throwaway787544 wrote:
| I think this is what's needed on a massive scale to end rent-
| seeking by publishers.
|
| The problem as I see it is two-fold: one, the academic
| institution requires publishing to an esteemed journal. And two,
| the esteemed journal seeks exorbitant fees because they know the
| institutions want esteemed journals. If a union forced the
| institutions to stop requiring publishing to esteemed journals,
| and instead formed boards of reviewers that gave ratings to pre-
| prints on a donation-based server, then the big publishers would
| have to adapt dramatically new pricing to compete.
| bjt2n3904 wrote:
| I remember when I was in graduate school doing engineering, a
| union rep wandered into my lab to try and sell me on the idea.
|
| I got into the program because I was the best at what I did. It
| paid for tuition, medical, and a little extra on top.
|
| And this guy wanted to tell me that I didn't have it good enough,
| and I could have it better if he became a middleman? And that my
| program director was "greedy" and keeping all the fat for
| himself?
|
| I asked him what program he was in, he wasn't even a student at
| the University. Asked him what he got his degree in, and he told
| me some nonsense non-STEM degree.
|
| He was a worthless parasite, with no marketable skills but to
| leech off what other students worked for. I told him in no
| uncertain terms to get out of the lab, and if he ever came back
| I'd call campus police on him.
| slothtrop wrote:
| Is this unprecedented for grad students?
| oceliker wrote:
| There's another school down the street from MIT where the grad
| students already have a union.
| Ar-Curunir wrote:
| No, grad students have been unionizing across the country,
| including Berkeley, Columbia, and many other places
| asdflawje5qwa35 wrote:
| No, not unprecedented, see my earlier comment:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30969055 TL;DR is many
| grad students at UW Madison had a union until about 10 years
| ago.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| No, I'm surprised MIT wasn't already. Big arrogant institutions
| really require a union.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| I assume you mean in the USA specifically. No, it is not
| unprecedented for grad students to have a union and a union
| contract. It has been slowly gaining steam in the USA over the
| past 20 years -- as the US NLRB keeps changing it's mind about
| whether graduate students have the legal right to protections
| to organize unions (and sometimes different for public vs
| private universities).
|
| I went looking for a list, and found the wikipedia article has
| some kind of old statistics (anyone wanna try to find newer
| ones and update it?), but let's you know it's not
| unprecedented: "As of 2014, there are at least 33 US graduate
| employee unions, 18 unrecognized unions in the United States,
| and 23 graduate employee unions in Canada," and "Since 2000,
| more than twenty campuses have unionized." --https://en.wikiped
| ia.org/wiki/Graduate_student_employee_unio...
|
| I haven't found a complete list, but some mentioned in the
| wikipedia article are Oregon State University, Michigan State
| University, Temple University, the University of Washington,
| and Columbia.
|
| They are still more common at public than private schools, and
| I think it may be that none of the Ivy League universities have
| graduate student unions? MIT is not technically an Ivy, but is
| usually considered in the same tier of
| prestige/funding/quality. So in that sense MIT unionization is
| ground-breaking.
| sseagull wrote:
| When I was a grad student at a public university, we were
| affiliated with a larger union (CWA, Communication Workers of
| America IIRC). So not unheard of I guess.
|
| Exactly what benefits we got I don't remember, but things got
| interesting once when CWA was talking about striking :)
|
| Edit: This about 10-15 years ago
| hervature wrote:
| As someone who just finished their PhD, I fear these unionization
| efforts will have the exact opposite effect that the students are
| aiming for. In particular, many universities provide subsidized
| housing in some of the most expensive places in the US. Housing
| is not a bargainable. The direct consequence is that universities
| will kick graduate students out of the housing, replace them with
| undergrad students to pay for the 10% wage increase. So the grad
| students get the 10% raise with a 50% housing increase. Grad
| students really are not in a position to bargain for much as they
| work 20 hours to earn their salaries which is most often
| teaching. They can easily be replaced with a lecturer whose full
| time equivalent already matches PhD stipends at this tier of
| universities. At least the last time I saw the numbers.
| Furthermore, who wants to lose a year of PhD when they already
| take so long to complete? Striking would really lower your
| lifetime earnings by delaying your real earnings another year.
| Furthermore, many other union benefits are moot in the PhD
| setting. Grievances with your supervisor are irrelevant because
| you're supervisor cannot be replaced. Or, again, the pain of
| replacement is burdened by the student.
|
| The democratic process is the democratic process and so I respect
| their decision but grad students unionizing is really more
| complex than the workforce. In particular, the union is turning
| over every 5-8 years. It is quite possible no one wants the union
| after those who voted it in and don't have a choice not to join.
| Your PhD is defined by your advisor and my #1 advice to future
| PhD students is to pick your school based on advisor before
| location and other things. What this means is that your choice to
| "join" the union is incredibly overshadowed by external forces.
|
| Again, as someone who went through this very recently, the
| problem is the power imbalance between the institution and the
| students. They have complete control over your supply of labor.
| That is, many (all?) US universities usually have the policy "any
| outside job is considered incompatible with full time PhD work
| and grounds for removal from the program". To me, forcing
| universities to pay students their prevailing market rate would
| solve all these issues. The first step towards this would be a
| cultural shift that allows part time PhD and moving towards PhD
| students being employees and not students. This would require a
| massive change to the F1 visas to allow international students to
| work which really pinpoints the root cause of all of this. PhD
| students are really in this strange limbo of being neither a
| student nor an employee. This limbo allows the university to use
| whichever definition fits their prerogative just like the NCAA.
| For instance, PhD students want more pay but the university
| decreases tuition assistance, nothing has changed.
| dls2016 wrote:
| I did a math PhD at USCB, where grad students are represented
| by the UAW. I didn't find any of this to be true, in particular
| the university would not be able to provide the same level of
| service without graduate student TAs.
| hervature wrote:
| > I didn't find any of this to be true
|
| Any of what? You felt with the union that you could change
| your advisor on a dime? How many of your fellow students did
| so?
|
| > the university would not be able to provide the same level
| of service without graduate student TAs
|
| Just factually not true. The difference between a senior and
| a first year PhD student is quite literally one year. Plus,
| graduate student TAs are not the university's only source of
| TAs. At $100k/year, there would be many former PhDs willing
| to work at the university full time. That's what I meant by
| full time equivalent. My stipend as a PhD student was $35k
| plus subsidized housing. That's already pretty aggressively
| close to the upper bound.
| dls2016 wrote:
| At my institution the 9-month pay was less than $25k per
| year (from 2010-2016) with subsidized housing (still pretty
| expensive) and family on MediCal when my wife worked part
| time.
|
| How are you going to replace 50 TAs with full time
| employees? Class sizes were already 700 students in basic
| calculus and up to 300 in engineering calculus.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| I made 16-19k/yr as a chem TA 09-11 there IIRC
| hervature wrote:
| The median household income in California is $77.5k [1].
| I'll emphasize household. Your 9-month pay was for 20
| hours, that means $25k is actually $66.6k annualized
| which does not include your subsidized housing nor for
| inflation. The economics just simply is not there. Sure,
| students might be able to squeak 10-20% in wage increase
| at the cost of all other university voluntary support
| such as student group support and things like free gym
| memberships.
|
| Furthermore, I can very easily see one "professional" TA
| replacing 5 grad students. Just use HN search to find how
| many people's advisors told them that teaching does not
| win Nobel prizes. To be frank, most (not all) grad
| students do the job poorly. First, the professional TA
| automatically is 2 grad students because they can devote
| twice as much time, but then there is economies of scale
| where they can teach the same stuff multiple times in the
| larger classes. Again, the number of people would would
| be signing up to be a professional calculus TA for $100k
| would be very high.
|
| [1] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSCAA646N
| polygamous_bat wrote:
| Sure, you switch out four calculus TAs for calculus with
| professional TAs. Who is going to TA deep reinforcement
| learning, or under-actuated robotics, or any of the
| major-specific courses that takes a lot of relevant
| knowledge to actually teach properly? Any of the people
| out there who has the insights to TA these classes
| thoroughly enough are gonna point and laugh at you if you
| offer them anything below $200K.
|
| Also, seems like you are completely ignoring the actual
| "labor" that the graduate students provide for their
| research labs. The number of professors in Computer
| Science at MIT who actually writes code at least once a
| week may shock you, but the truth is, for MIT to be on
| the top of the food chain someone needs to keep the
| wheels turning.
| hervature wrote:
| > Who is going to TA deep reinforcement learning
|
| Funny aside, did you find my thesis? :D.
|
| > Also, seems like you are completely ignoring the actual
| "labor"
|
| But I'm not, you are literally not paid for that (unless
| you are a research assistant). That is "studying" which I
| keep pointing out is the whole issue. Which feeds back to
| your point about highly-specific knowledge TAs. The
| implicit agreement is that the university provides you
| with the training required to TA these classes in
| exchange for being a TA. They normally call this waived
| tuition. That is, they are supplying you with a +50k
| benefit for free which is how they draw many people to
| begin with.
| polygamous_bat wrote:
| > Funny aside, did you find my thesis? :D.
|
| Not particularly, I gave that example because I was TAing
| that class last semester. Incidentally, it seems we have
| more in common than I thought!
|
| > But I'm not, you are literally not paid for that
| (unless you are a research assistant).
|
| This may be a difference in experience and expectation,
| but in my experience I've always seen graduate student
| salaries paid out to Ph.D. students employed by the
| university as an RA or a TA. If you are neither of those,
| then you do have to pay tuition to the university.
|
| > That is, they are supplying you with a +50k benefit...
|
| Which is another problem with not having a union -- the
| university unilaterally sets these price stickers without
| anyone challenging them, and then "waives" it and
| appearing generous. Without a union, MIT is free to
| inflate the sticker price of a graduate "education" by
| 20% a year, thus giving students a 20% raise every year
| while their life situations don't improve at all. The
| current student body had no mechanism to prevent it or
| challenge the administration on shady practices, but
| hopefully this will change with the union.
|
| > The implicit agreement is that the university provides
| you with the training required to TA these classes in
| exchange for being a TA.
|
| Finally, most Ph.D. students after their second year
| won't even take a class but are already TAing, so by your
| definition the necessary training is already complete;
| but they are indentured to work for far below market rate
| for the three years left on their Ph.D., because...?
| hervature wrote:
| > Ph.D. students employed by the university as an RA or a
| TA.
|
| The vast majority of students are paid through TA (which
| you have admitted that you were last semester). This
| means all your other "duties" was your "study". I agree
| with everything you say, but there is literally nothing a
| union can do about these things because it these things
| are not your job. I know it feels like a job. Writing
| code, SSHing into the cluster, analyzing results. All
| things that I continued to due in my industry job after
| graduation. But, this is the key part students don't seem
| to understand, you are not employed by the university to
| do this. It does not matter if it is part of a course.
| This is the sole reason international students are able
| to come on F1/J1. Legally and practically, you are doing
| this under the guidance of your advisor. Others have
| commented in this thread as well, RA becomes very
| difficult to separate what an RA tasks are and what your
| PhD student tasks are, but this is the crux of the issue.
| Your union might be able to fight for increase RA pay,
| but your advisor/department/university can just forego
| your RA and accept your student work.
|
| > If you are neither of those, then you do have to pay
| tuition to the university.
|
| Then you are not an employee and cannot unionize. At
| least, not in a trade union.
|
| > Which is another problem with not having a union -- the
| university unilaterally sets these price stickers without
| anyone challenging them, and then "waives" it and
| appearing generous...
|
| This is the problem with these unions. They make it
| appear to the students that they can solve these
| problems, but they legally cannot. A union cannot bargain
| for these things. Just like a union cannot bargain with
| Ford on the price of a F150, a grad student union cannot
| tell the university how to run its programs. At least at
| my institution, some students thought that, if we
| unionized, they could negotiate for fewer teaching
| requirements. The very thing that makes them employees
| and eligible to be in the union.
| lolinder wrote:
| > Again, as someone who went through this very recently, the
| problem is the power imbalance between the institution and the
| students. They have complete control over your supply of labor.
|
| I'm pretty sure people were saying the same things during the
| early labor movements. "They'll just replace you, they have all
| the control, you'll just screw up your life." The thing is,
| they were probably right. For a while it really sucked. But the
| result in the long run was that the generations that followed
| ended up starting with a much less lopsided power imbalance.
|
| You acknowledge that there are problems and have ideas for
| where you'd like things to go. What you don't have is a
| proposal for bringing about the cultural shift you desire. How
| do you propose to get schools to allow part-time work or to
| change any other bad practice if _not_ through organizing the
| workers?
| caddemon wrote:
| Organizing workers does not necessarily require joining a
| huge national labor union that was obviously not meant for
| the type of problems grad students face. It's fucking weird
| to me that so many schools have joined United Auto Workers. I
| don't see any real changes to the problems with academic
| training at any of those schools. And I don't see why UE will
| be better here. The power imbalance in grad school is very
| different from the typical labor situations:
|
| 1) Grad student roles are extremely heterogeneous compared to
| laborers. The union at Harvard for example is trying to
| represent both TAs and RAs, in departments ranging from
| literature to biology to math, all as part of one collective
| bargaining agreement. There are huge differences in the
| problems those students face, and that's before getting into
| how different student experiences can be even amongst e.g.
| biology RAs.
|
| 2) Grad students receive atypical compensation, not just the
| degree itself but also things that are clearly not quantified
| by the union orgs - the (often falsely promised) academic
| freedom to pursue independent research interests and the time
| and resources to do some learning for the sake of it.
| Further, for RAs it can be impossible to untangle work that
| counts towards the degree requirement and work that is being
| done in exchange for stipend/other benefits.
|
| 3) Graduate school is only a short portion of someone's
| overall career in the grand scheme of things, while existing
| unions mainly focus on jobs that can be/often are lifelong.
| Grad school is by definition a stepping stone. Nobody asks
| "what do you want to do when you're done being a cop".
|
| 4) Most grad students at least enter their programs with the
| goal of themselves reaching professorship. Auto workers are
| not trying to build towards owning an automobile factory.
|
| 5) There is not a sub-20% acceptance rate for becoming an
| electrical worker. At many of the schools that are forming
| unions lately, there are tons of departments with highly
| competitive admissions processes for the PhD. Some at MIT are
| easily in the single digits acceptance rate, and this is
| amongst a specialized pool to begin with.
| hervature wrote:
| Thank you for actually engaging in a meaningful discussion.
|
| > How do you propose to get schools to allow part-time work
| or to change any other bad practice if not through organizing
| the workers?
|
| I alluded to it, but this change requires massive changes at
| the government level. The first thing I would like to see
| changed is that universities cannot count waived tuition as a
| cost of a grad student. Trump actually proposed to tax these
| waivers taxed at the individual level. Short term, this would
| have crushed students. But, imagine working for a car
| dealership and part of your pay was a new car, of course it
| should be taxed. This tax would have really brought this
| distortion that this causes in the market. Second, the
| student-employee limbo needs to be solved. Personally, I
| think being allowed to pay your PhD tuition should be
| allowed. That is, if I can make $100k outside, I should be
| allowed to pay $50k in tuition and work at my own pace. I
| don't want to advocate for government intervention, but it
| seems to me that if there is a tuition, that is an implicit
| admission that that is the price a student would need to pay
| for the services of being a student. After the university
| admits me, they should have no control which route I decide
| to go: TA + research or work + research. This would require
| rethinking the F1/J1 visa.
|
| Now, why do I think organizing workers won't solve this
| issue. Because, it does not break the student-employee limbo.
| As I have pointed out in other comments, PhD students enjoy
| many benefits of being a student. Chief among them,
| international students can come here to "study". However, the
| problem is that your status at the university is dependent on
| your progress as a student with many programs having hard
| caps on the number of years to complete certain tasks. This
| is fundamentally opposed to organized labor because they
| cannot bargain for changing degree requirements.
| nharada wrote:
| I was in a grad student union at University of Michigan and it
| was awesome. Compared to my colleagues at other institutions I
| got better pay (especially taking cost of living into account)
| and insanely good healthcare. When our stipend contracts were up
| for re-negotiation I never had to worry someone didn't have my
| back, which is great cause as a grad student I was far too busy
| to worry about that myself.
| Rovanion wrote:
| Coming from Sweden I'm surprised they aren't already. Do you also
| not have student unions to represent you until you reach
| undergrad?
| Bilal_io wrote:
| Yeah that's weird, I wish this included undergraduate students
| as well. But maybe there is a reason behind it that I don't
| understand.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Including undergraduates, who are primarily paying consumers,
| would have muddied the waters. Graduate students are clearly
| workers under any definition.
| pas wrote:
| Aren't there paid graduate programs in the US?
| hypersoar wrote:
| All Ph.D. programs nominally charge tuition, but hardly
| any students (at least in STEM, don't know about
| elsewhere) pay it. They get a stipend plus a "tuition
| waiver".
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Masters programs are typically where you pay tuition and
| receive training via classes. PhD programs don't have
| much classwork and instead are positions where students
| are paid by the university but are expected to perform
| labor to produce original research.
| pas wrote:
| Hm, here in Hungary PhD students can opt to do zero
| teaching[0], and also the tuition is 4500 EUR/semester
| (and students from the EU can apply for grants that
| covers 100% of tuition). And on top of all this it's
| possible to work for the university, which apart from the
| salary also results in the elimination of certain costs
| (eg. if someone is not employed by the university they
| have to pay to have their thesis examined and pay for the
| exam committee or something).
|
| https://www.inf.elte.hu/en/content/doctoral-
| training.t.1616?...
|
| [0] I expect that if someone wants to do a PhD in
| teaching methodology they might have to still do some
| teaching
| beezlebroxxxxxx wrote:
| Graduate students are employees of the university. There are
| usually other unions at universities for employees, and
| undergraduate students working in universities can sometimes
| be in those unions as well, but graduate students as
| employees face some unique circumstances due to their
| employment and as a result often form their own union.
|
| Traditionally for better or for worse, undergraduate
| representation comes by way of a student council, with a
| single person elected to a chair on the larger university
| advisory council (the structure can be different depending on
| the university, I'm generalizing).
| Bilal_io wrote:
| I thought graduate students were paying customers. Now this
| makes much sense. Thank you.
| waswaswas wrote:
| There's a distinction in the US between fully-funded PhD
| graduate students (who receive a stipend contingent upon
| research/TA work in an employment relationship) and
| professional/masters students who pay tuition, even
| though the latter group is also referred to as graduate
| students.
| neltnerb wrote:
| Yes, they needed to be RAs or TAs (including hourly
| appointments or fellowship appointments accompanied by a
| partial RA/TA appointment).
|
| https://mitgsu.org/updates/we-have-an-election-date-vote-
| yes...
|
| Note that for instance if you're there with a fellowship
| and aren't getting a partial RA/TA assignment as well
| then you're not eligible. I know that some masters
| students pay for their tuition, so they might not be
| eligible either since they're not getting a stipend.
| kingkawn wrote:
| They are cash farms for a university and must be kept docile
| and disorganized
| oceliker wrote:
| I believe you are thinking about representative bodies (maybe
| the equivalent of UA for undergrads, or GSC for grads, at MIT)
| while the union in the news is employment-based and is the sole
| legally recognized entity to negotiate salaries, employment
| conditions, etc. on behalf of MIT graduate students.
| timkam wrote:
| In Sweden, students and graduate students are well-
| organized/unionized, but the situation for PostDocs and other
| post-doctoral fixed-term employed academics is dire
| nonetheless, in particular for immigrants, for whom the fixed-
| term contracts cause problems with their residence permits,
| considering recent changes in immigration laws.
| cycomanic wrote:
| And recent changes by the government have actually made it
| worse. The irony is that the unions have been campaigning for
| these changes. It's really weird how unions think that
| requiring that postdocs must get a permanent position after 4
| years would somehow lead to them getting those positions,
| while there is no more funding from the government, so no
| permanent positions are being created. I mean in our
| department academic faculty have to find 50% of their salary
| plus ~80% overhead from external funding. Really universities
| in Sweden tend to be more like research hotels, with lots of
| regulations that you have to follow.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| Why is it surprising? MIT is based in Massachusetts, USA.
| mpascale00 wrote:
| dmitriid_y wrote:
| There are usually "student council" programs that give a
| handful of elected students a regular audience with
| administrators, but most of these programs don't have any
| teeth.
|
| Graduate student council programs in particular are often built
| as a compromise to prevent the students from forming an
| organization with greater efficacy.
|
| Anecdotally, some PIs I know have had to directly contend with
| rising organization among students and handed out a raise and a
| bonus to their labs.
| jl2718 wrote:
| Is this not a direct violation of the student visa?
| thylacine222 wrote:
| Why would it be? International workers have the same labor
| rights that American workers do.
| tomohawk wrote:
| They don't say how the election was done. Was it secret ballot,
| or one of the union-favored methods such as card check. The non-
| secret ballot methods are notorious for allowing pressure tactics
| to be used.
|
| Do grad students still have a right to work without joining, or
| will they be forced to join?
| Quillbert182 wrote:
| For the uninformed, what is the purpose of a student union?
| beezlebroxxxxxx wrote:
| Graduate students are paid by the university. Unlike
| undergraduate student unions, graduate student unions are
| actual unions in the workers sense. They have the same purpose
| as any other employee union would: protect the students from
| arbitrary and capricious changes to working conditions, and to
| negotiate for better conditions/represent the students in the
| event of negotiations.
| jasode wrote:
| _> , what is the purpose of a student union?_
|
| I'm guessing the _" student"_ part of _" graduate student"_ is
| the confusion.
|
| Fyi... grad students are also _employees_ of the university. So
| a labor union applies to the "workers" aspect of graduate
| students. Grad students get paid a stipend (salary) for
| research, teaching, etc. It's a _" workers union"_ and not a
| "student union".
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graduate_student_employee_unio...
| mynameishere wrote:
| The purpose of a union is to make more money for their members
| and to handle infractions committed by their members
| internally. This is the purpose of almost all organizations.
| trentnix wrote:
| When it's used responsibly, it's a great way to make sure union
| members are being treated reasonably and fairly. When not, it's
| an easy way to extort your employer.
|
| Eventually, Pournelle's Law Iron Law of Bureaucracy takes hold
| and the purpose of the union is to strengthen the union
| regardless of the needs of its members.
| [deleted]
| urthor wrote:
| Elect leadership. Who then negotiates with the faculty.
| gruez wrote:
| What leverage do they have? Worker's unions work because they
| can threaten to withhold labor. Are those students seriously
| going to not attend MIT? An institution as prestigious as MIT
| probably has no trouble finding replacements.
| hiptobecubic wrote:
| "MIT fires entire graduate student body in union-busting
| move" is probably not a great look for them.
| sjg007 wrote:
| The would use the term "expells" because they want to say
| they are students and not employees.
| stale2002 wrote:
| At which point there would be a lawsuit, and they would
| lose the lawsuit.
|
| Labor labors are an established thing. If a union is
| approved by the government, then they would have
| protections.
| willis936 wrote:
| When you run a research group: one student leaving is no
| big deal, every student leaving is a catastrophe. Who's
| going to fund you when you have no one to do the work? It
| takes years to get grad students up to speed. All wind is
| drained from the sails and you need to waste your precious
| time rebuilding. All because you didn't want to treat your
| workers like humans.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Withhold work via a strike? See how many labs run and MIT
| grants are retained without a graduate student labor force.
| caddemon wrote:
| Except withholding research work also means ceasing
| degree progress in practice. For some types of work it
| could mean setting degree progress back months -
| experiments can be very time sensitive in some fields,
| and thesis committee will often require certain
| experiments to graduate.
|
| TAs striking has been somewhat effective, but RAs mostly
| don't actually strike.
| danuker wrote:
| Same kind of thinking led to empires breaking up.
|
| Failure to accept feedback makes for a fragile institution.
| Since the students decided to unionize, clearly their
| issues are not being heard, and a union will have a much
| stronger public voice than any individual student, perhaps
| on par with the university's brand and PR campaigns.
| cmeacham98 wrote:
| In this case, the union is for grad students employed by the
| university (i.e. it has the same purpose as a normal union).
| cowsandmilk wrote:
| 1. Protect students from advisors who want them to work 100
| hour weeks.
|
| 2. Get dental insurance for the students. Almost no US graduate
| school offers this.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Dental insurance is a scam.
| leetcrew wrote:
| not necessarily. most plans seem to be pretty bad at
| covering major work, but every plan I've had has paid out
| more for my two yearly cleanings than I pay in premiums,
| making it a no brainer.
| [deleted]
| memish wrote:
| Because it pays out so little or what?
| xur17 wrote:
| Yeah, basically. Most dental insurance I've seen has a
| "benefit maximum" [0], the maximum amount the plan will
| cover in a 12 month period, I've seen numbers from 1.5k
| to 3k for this. Since the coverage is capped, and capped
| so low, it's arguably not really "insurance", and isn't
| really protecting me.
|
| That said, to a graduate student, $3k can be a non-
| negligible amount of money, and the school is likely
| kicking in money to pay for the plan. In my position, if
| my company didn't subsidize the plan, I'd be happy to
| just go without.
|
| [0] https://deltadentalks.com/knowledge/what-is-an-
| annual-maximu...
| MrPatan wrote:
| Economics students? That'd be delicious
| [deleted]
| asdflawje5qwa35 wrote:
| UW Madison teaching assistants were represented by a union [1,2]
| between 1970 and 2011, when its status was abruptly terminated by
| conservative political forces in Wisconsin. When the union was
| active, it was pretty clear that negotiating was not its
| strength, but the union was always available to help people
| navigate day-to-day problems that come up. Maybe it is just
| coincidence, but multiple independent accounts detailing toxic
| work environments within UW have been reported in recent years.
|
| [1] https://taa-madison.org
|
| [2]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teaching_Assistants_Associatio...
| rossdavidh wrote:
| Did you mean "represented by a union" rather than "repressed by
| a union"?
| asdflawje5qwa35 wrote:
| Yes! Edited to fix that.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| Unionization usually works when:
|
| 1) the workers in question are not easily replaced (for example,
| specialized skills or long training period before they become
| productive)
|
| 2) the workers in question are not easily able to switch
| employers, so they need the protection of a union (instead of
| just switching employers whenever they are unhappy, such that
| they are normally happy)
|
| There are lots of professions which either do not meet condition
| 1 or do not meet condition 2. However, grad students would seem
| to be a classic example of a group ripe for unionization.
| slibhb wrote:
| I think you're right. I'm usually skeptical of unionization but
| it may make sense in this case. Grad students have little
| leverage, the universities know this and use it.
|
| I also think there are too many grad students but that's a
| different issue.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| True on both.
| citizenpaul wrote:
| Good! The grad student system is incredibly broken. Grad students
| are basically slaves at worst or indentured servants at best. The
| worst part is the universitys all know this and dont care because
| the university gets massive benifits from having highly educated
| slaves producing intellectual property that can be sold and
| licensed. The grad student of course gets no benifit from this.
| Its like the work for exposure BS except worse because the
| student often has no alternative. Especially foreign students on
| tight immigration visa deadlines.
|
| Thus doesnt even start to touch the IP subject where universities
| are public funded and have no right to the IP produced there in
| the first place...
| andreyk wrote:
| hmm, as a grad student a lot of this seems hugely hyperbolic to
| me
|
| "slaves at worst or indentured servants" is a rather harsh way
| to put it, it's not like you can't quit your PhD (many people
| do this after getting their Masters, so the times spent in the
| program is not wasted).
|
| "gets massive benifits from having highly educated slaves
| producing intellectual property that can be sold and licensed"
| is again way overstating things. Very little of research is
| worth much as far as IP; in my 5 years as grad student I only
| know of one research project that resulted in a patent. The
| production of IP is much more of a thing in industry research,
| as would make sense.
|
| "The grad student of course gets no benifit from this." in CS
| (especially AI, where I work) this is not really true, doing
| research lets you get really good research positions in
| industry, even assuming you don't want to stick around in
| academia.
|
| Don't get me wrong, there is a ton wrong about academia/the
| grad student system. I really wish I was paid anything near my
| value on the job market. But I think your view is way too
| negative.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| I was a graduate student with a research assistantship position
| at the University of Washington in the mid 2000s, a few years
| after they unionized and got a contract with the UAW.
|
| By the time I was there, even though it was only a few years
| after the union struggle, I didn't hear much about the union, at
| least in my department.
|
| But what I knew it meant was: we had good health insurance, we
| had a guaranteed minimum stipend, we had the right to actually
| take vacation during university vacations, and a certain number
| of sick days. I knew from talking to oother students, that before
| the union contract, grad students with assistantships didn't
| necessarily have these things (it depended on department), and
| sometimes literally got no vacation or allowed sick leave at all.
|
| I was aware of no ways that the presence of a graduate student
| union harmed the grad students involved -- to the contrary of
| some suppositions in this thread. Grad student unions exist in
| dozens of universities, some for years now, so it's possible to
| look at actual experiences, not just forecasting supposition. I
| was also aware of no ways the union harmed research or academics
| at the university (beyond of course costing them more money to
| treat the grad students right).
|
| I wonder if a few years after I left, most grad students even
| realized what the union had won for them. The union was not very
| visible, once the fight for a contract was over.
| changoplatanero wrote:
| I was also a grad student at the University of Washington and
| my feeling was that the union was a net-negative. I remember
| one time in particular when my advisor had an extra funding
| source for me but the union rules didn't allow her to hire me
| in that position. It's hard for me to understand why business
| the union has in inserting itself in between the relationship
| between me and my advisor.
|
| On top of that, the union took a portion of pay pay from each
| check. I wish they would give me a refund.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| I was in a union as a PhD student. The union did nonsense
| things like running a (bad) cafe. My pay was set by my funders
| so the union didn't have any say on that or any leverage on
| anything else at all really. Wasn't sure what the point was. I
| just opted out after a while. I don't think they added anything
| of value whatsoever.
| typeofhuman wrote:
| Unions can be good. They can be operated poorly and inefficiently
| too. Good luck to them.
|
| Consumer unions seem like a neat idea too.
| willis936 wrote:
| Graduate students are paid half time but expected to work full
| time and have their entire career at the mercy of individual
| professors. If protections will not be given freely then
| collective bargaining can force the issue.
| caddemon wrote:
| Except this is still true at US schools that have had a union
| for many years. The pay and benefits go up a little bit but
| the fundamental issues remain. I've never even heard of a
| grad union trying to bargain for true changes in funding
| structure or degree requirements.
| missedthecue wrote:
| can't wait for company unions, where they band together to
| achieve their objectives
| occz wrote:
| This already exists, in the form of various think tanks and
| lobbying organisations.
|
| Maybe that was the joke you were making though, I can't quite
| tell.
| missedthecue wrote:
| No I'm talking about things like Ford, GM, and Chrysler
| creating a group together to more effectively negotiate
| with the UAW. Together, they are strong!
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