MIT graduate students vote to unionize
thetech.com
thetech.com
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.
Versus the alternative, “we’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas.”
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.
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.
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".
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
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.
An example of a specific labor standard you'd like to see implemented would be welcome.
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.
My indulgence for "I spent three months going down this rabbit hole because it might have proved interesting" is way hired for graduate students than it would be for research staff, because that's part of them being students.
Could you explain further?
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.
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.
I have seen it go the other way as well.
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?!
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.
It's the unchecked nature of the power.
Politicians have upcoming elections to worry about. 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.
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.
> 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?
Rule by committee. So many examples of that working out great.
How about keeping the apprenticeship aspect just having more masters? One year of just comprehend exams, one year where you’re supposed to devote half your time to research with an advisor and half to comps, and three years where you work on six different projects with different advisors in six month chunks? Some of those will be written up as failures, but basically you end up with 3+ Master’s theses. That’s a great deal more love research academia than legal academia and they don’t seem to lack for scholarly work or impact.
- Promotion. Tenure is awesome, yes, but there are two full academic ranks at my institution above associate professor with tenure, and if I want them, I need to continue to do the same things that got me tenure. Graduate students, get grants, publish papers, etc.
There's also further ambitions like chair, dean, etc. that are often literally elections.
- Internal allocation of resources. Will one of my students be my department's choice for a fellowship? If there's a space crunch (there's always a space crunch) can I get the space I want? If there's internal funds to help support pilot projects or the like, am I on the short list for those?
- Reputation. This is important to me. I want it to be known that "my lab" turns out good people. And that we do good work. This is not only actually a criteria for promotion, but also something I want (I didn't go into academia for the money). It's what gets you invited to things I want to be invited to.
This also includes things like whisper networks. Students warn other students.
- Grants. A number of grants look at things like mentorship and students.
That is why it is fundamentally wrong. Because it ensures widespread abuse.
But this problem is totally fixable. We need to reduce the role that the advisor plays. Grad students should be able to switch labs and universities like most people switch jobs. Once they publish some set number of papers, they get a PhD. No thesis, no committee. The advisor basically is demoted to a fungible manager.
Maybe this fixes the problem of abusive professors wielding their power in wrong ways, but it creates new problems as well. For instance, it shifts the very nature of a Ph.D. from a deep exploration of a single topic to shallow explorations of many topics. If you tell me I need 4 papers to get a Ph.D., I'm going to get 4 papers from the easiest venues on the most shallow of topics, because why go any deeper?
And are these solo author papers? What if you were 1 author out of 30 on one paper, and 1 author out of 2 on another? Are each of those 1 paper credit?
Do paper credits transfer between universities? Do some schools require more papers than others? Who gets to decide? Do some disciplines require more papers than others? Again who gets to decide? What about journal papers versus conference papers versus workshop papers? Do presentations count? Do poster sessions count?
If you are in my lab and I've spent time and money training you, what's my recourse if you just quit on me to join another lab?
None. Every employer the entire world over deals with this. The fact that this makes you feel entitled to continued labor by "your" students is the entire problem.
When I hire a grad student I do so with the intention that I will keep them on for the duration of their education, which is a commitment of at least 4 years, sometimes up to 10 (do any employers have 10 year plans with you specifically in mind? No, as a 22 year old fresh out of college, you are fungible to them.) The bonds that are created between advisor and student can be one of the longest lasting and most important professional bonds a researcher makes in their whole life. It's so important that academic genealogy is actually tracked and recorded. There's a concept of a "grand advisor" or your advisor's Ph.D. advisor. So for all the negative stories you hear about a narcissistic asshole advisor wielding power and abusing underlings, there are far more stories of amazing intellectual relationships that can take a decade to fully bloom.
Your proposal would serve to virtually eliminate this relationship. The employee/employer relationship looks nothing like this. It's transactional and makes employees seem more like mercenaries than team members, no matter how much corporate culture wants to convince you that you're part of the team and a member of the family. You can actually find that environment during a Ph.D.; I know I did. You can make mistakes (sometimes huge mistakes) and not be fired. You can admit you don't know something or that you lack some skill and that's okay -- it's expected that you are still learning. Professors are happy to spend the time to teach such skills because they know they will be used on their own project, so it's worth while.
Here is what your proposal would do to my hiring practices and the way I run a lab: If you want to be an employee with the freedom to quit at anytime and move from lab to lab, I will conversely be quicker to fire you and to hire other better students from other labs to take your place. If you are going slow on a paper and you miss a deadline, I'm not going to shrug it off and say "Oh well, on to the next". I will probably fire you and hire someone else who won't miss deadlines.
If you make a huge mistake, like frying a $30k piece of equipment (true story), you'll be fired instead of met with understanding that you're just a student. Because that's what happens when you shift more onto the employee spectrum.
It's definitely also going to tighten the market for Ph.D. students significantly. This could be a good thing depending on your perspective, it would give you less competition. But it would also give new students fewer opportunities. I would think long and hard before hiring a grad student as opposed to research staff. If you make Ph.D. students too expensive, you'll just price them out of the market. Part of the deal of being a Ph.D. student is there's a general recognition that they will be working on projects they are not really qualified to work on yet.
As a 22 year old undergrad, you don't know enough about the domain to be useful. I need to invest years into you before you're even going to be publishing papers; if you can just leave me after that training to work on another project, I see no reason to invest that time in you in the first place. Instead, I'll just hire staff researchers who know what they're doing. Yeah they're more expensive monetarily than a grad student, but they also don't take up all of my time and make stupid mistakes that burn out expensive and one-of-a-kind electronics.
All in all, I believe your proposal is really throwing out the Ph.D. babies with the asshole professor bathwater. Honestly I joined academia to escape corporate hell, so as far as I'm concerned I'm going to keep treating my students as students rather than employees.
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.
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.
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).
Working as a lab instructor a lifetime ago, I graded two students' C assignments that both worked (mostly) but clearly without understanding what was going on.
It took me a while to figure out how they worked; as it turned out, they declared the same variables at the top of each function in the same order.
They didn't have globals, they weren't passing values around: the stack was being allocated across the same memory for each function, so the variables "just worked."
I ran a whitespace sensitive diff and noticed the only difference between the two files was the author name in the header.
The professor sent a sternly worded letter to the class about not cheating, and nothing else came from it AFAIK.
I never said anything about the accuracy of their code, but I was willing to explain how it worked so they could decide if they thought it was accurate. Most did not take me up on that offer, instead opting instead to bug people in their class until they found someone a) smart enough to help on assignments and b) dumb enough to help them. They didn't care about learning how their code worked or why, they just wanted an easy A.
The few who did take me up on my offer tended to be people who didn't understand the assignment to begin with and, after explaining the problem and how their solution worked, went out and did their own work. I always enjoyed those ones, they tended to want to do things legit but either were too nervous to go the professors/TAs or couldn't make office hours and couldn't get timely answers over email.
The people who just didn't care I was more than happy to talk about at at our weekly meetings. If their TAs weren't also tutors, our supervisor would keep them updated on who came in asking for a thumbs up on copied code.
Even if the university offered a new advisor, it would be unlikely to help the student.
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.
Generally, for retirement, faculty try to "draw down" their labs, and there's very often a "I'm going to see X student through to their defense, and then I'm done" as the end of an academic career.
For unexpected deaths, generally there's a scramble to help cushion the students, get them in with new advisors, etc. But often, their former advisor's grants, data sets, etc. are still available. Unless one is really early in the process, the goal is to help the student finish their current work in a timely fashion.
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.
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.
Nice career trajectory you got here, but in a field like this one... shame if something bad happened to it...
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..
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
However, the funding of EMBL works fairly differently from most universities, and quite a few other research institutes.
This minimizes the possibility of ending up with a bully or someone incompetent. And if you do, it's much easier to run away to a different group.
I think this is a key piece to what makes grad school feel so exploitive. It's almost impossible to switch advisors, let alone universities. This results in a power imbalance that basically doesn't exist anywhere else in the modern, liberal world. If you do switch, it's almost certain to come with a hefty setback in terms of time.
A lot of this could be solved by standardizing the PhD. Passing prelims at school A should mean you don't have to retake prelims if you switch to school B. The fact that you do means you're the victim of a pissing match between universities.
The requirement to make novel contribution to the field is crying out for standardization. How novel? How big? Nobody can tell you. I remember asking my advisor what exactly this meant. Her best answer was just "Ehhh, basically it depends on your committee."
This is absurd. It would be trivial to standardize this. Do away with the committee and the thesis. Put down a number. You publish N journal papers, you get a PhD. But we won't do this because it's this ambiguity they use to exploit grad students further. Everybody ends up doing more work than necessary just to be sure they pass their defense. Fuck academia.
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.
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?
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?
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.
Would we love to not operate on threats and counter-threats? Sure, but that would require the mutual consent of both parties, and the ones in power have rejected that outright.
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.
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/hgsu/files/202...
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."
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.
Outside of “My daddy arranged a new chair so I could get in here.” students have ~0 leverage. Academia is feudal, at least in fields based on Ph.D.s. Your supervisor can make it impossible for you to graduate at any time with minimal impact for them. If you graduate and they don’t want you to get an academic job you won’t. That’s what letters of recommendation are for, just with the usual justification flipped.
This isn’t a necessary part of academia. Law and medicine don’t work that way because their terminal degrees are Master’s degrees with elephantiasis. But absent getting rid of PhDs or changing them so radically you might as well change the name the power imbalance isn’t going anywhere.
Then I don't understand your ambivalence. Who would complain about getting more money?
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.
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.
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.
It might be interesting to consider how much worse the pay or conditions could have gotten in the union's absence.
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.
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.
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.
If there are no competing unions and you're in union C, then you've got no options but to quit or try and topple the union (impossible, effectively).
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
If things were department wide, or even campus wide, the UAW wouldn't last a year in the departments I'm familiar with.
Instead, what you're proposing would require a statewide campaign against one of the most powerful political groups in California. The UAW is well aware of this, and has no incentive to act in its members' interest.
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...
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.”
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.
If their members were really convinced of the value that tragedy of the commons wouldn't occur.
The fact that many workers would not pay optional dues does not prove that the workers don't see value in the union.
Obviously the purported value of a union is in the ability to collectively bargain on behalf of its members (and to provide tangible support for workers participating in strikes or who are pursuing legal action against an employer). Unions may do this or not, but the argument that gp made is not a good one.
It’s called a Tragedy for a reason.
You know, like not contributing your Union dues.
He gives Columbia as an example. The new Columbia contract is great! https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/01/07/columbia... $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.
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.
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.
More likely they will be involved in labor disputes involving how much TA work the grad students have to do.
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.
Right, unionization will just make this worse. Protect the insiders, those already with jobs.
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...
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.
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.
---
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.
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.*
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.
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.
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.
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?
One of the greatest mathematicians ever, Paul Erdős, 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.
I once read a theory, I think it was in the book "At Home: A Short History of Private Life" by Bill Bryson, based on an observation (the accuracy of which I can't confirm or deny, some of the things in the book stretched credulity) that a surprising number of inventions in England were made by rural clergymen. The theory went that these people were usually the well-educated sons of wealthy families, who were parked in some small village that needed a priest, where they had almost no responsibilities apart from occasionally holding mass (they didn't really need to prepare sermons themselves, they could just buy a big book of sermons every now and then and read from that). So they lived lives of leisure and relative luxury, and some of them took an interest in science and technology and actually advanced the fields they got interested in.
The core idea behind academia is probably based on a similar observation: there's a small set of people who will do amazing things if you just let them figure things out without setting goals for them or applying pressure on them to produce something specific, so let's just give these people a decent wage and leave them to their business. But identifying who is a good candidate for such an arrangement isn't easy. In the days of the rural clergymen, this was essentially left to chance (after a basic intelligence filter of having to study to enter the clergy). We don't want to leave it to chance, so we set all kinds of goals and metrics to identify good candidates. But these metrics can be gamed, and for some academics gaming the metrics essentially is their job.
[1] Engineering students at least. Humanities students are paid just a bit less than the minimum wage they'll be earning after graduation.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
On top of that, the union took a portion of pay pay from each check. I wish they would give me a refund.
Sure you didn’t get some advantage you could have gotten from a kind professor. But it protected many more people from abuse and low pay
> 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.
Here's a table from the union comparing before and after unionization in 2004: https://www.uaw4121.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/UW-ASE-Be...
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
I think this has been shown to be true in grad student unionization drives in the US.
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.
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. :)
You'd be surprised :). I appreciate your response, it was an interesting read.
It's just my theory based on my personal observations and thoughts though, yeah!
Maybe if you're talking about immigrants from Western Europe. Otherwise, no.
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.
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.
Used to think this as a grad student. Now as a professor I see how naïve 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
He pointed to the state of affairs, not how he treats them. Understand?
This week I've:
- Worked on a research grant that doesn't have any students on it, so who else is doing the "nitty gritty research work"?
- Gone through a student's research code line-by-line to try to hunt down a particularly pernicious bug.
- Done a ton of data wrangling for another project to minimize the number of hands currently using a restricted-access server.
If the parent poster is painting with an overly broad brush, so are you.
Being as green as grad students are, it's entirely understandable for them to feel good about themselves about their first publication, especially when you also consider the problem of imposter syndrome. Working on my first publication, getting feedback on drafts, finalizing results etc has been a big confidence booster when working directly with people who've been doing research longer than I've been alive.
Then again, I understand the work the advisor/professor has done to set things up for me (was even surprised that I'm supposed to be the lead author despite being under their supervision) and my advisor is always pretty clear on matters relating to credit, often even more than I expect. So perhaps I just haven't seen the sort of friction leading to your rant.
Sorry I thought I was clear I had gone of on a tangent with someone in particular in mind. That wasn't literally directed at all grad students.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
This is a labor union representing graduate student-workers who are employed by MIT.
If they are employed by the university in the UK, they typically belong to this union.
(You obviously know this, but it may help prevent some misleading comparisons down the line…)
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."
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
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.
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.
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.
This varies by state too. Many of the UC's in California right now are basically becoming corporations. They argue that them making more money means they can better serve students, but they routinely lobby for less funding from California. That's because that funding comes with certain conditions, like accepting more Californian students.
The UC I went to, UCI, is facing a huge housing crisis and has been building a ton of new housing, but the amount of in-state students they're accepting hasn't changed since before 2010. Instead they've drastically increased the number of foreign students they've accepted. Those students usually pay more than twice as much as in-state and, counter to narratives about "increased diversity", often come from a very specific class background.
Their whole strategy is basically to wean themselves off of state funding so they can run the UC like a profit-driven corporation
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.
Football and basketball are actually profitable at most R1 schools, even though the coaches make lots of money.
And no, US universities do not run as democracies. The appointed deans and the president run the show.
> 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.
Someone needs to pay for all these useless "diversity" consultants, and they aren't cheap.
Elite schools artificially limit supply for brand management. There are incredibly complex politics which govern who is admitted, balancing:
- Intellect, since that improves brand
- Connections to power, since that improves brand (e.g. George Bush Jr)
- Appearances of diversity (e.g. having lots of skin colors), since the opposite hurts brand
- Donations
- Athletics, since that gives visibility and improves brand
... and so on.
A lot of this is about mixing the rich/powerful with the brilliant. The former look brilliant by association. The latter gain connections to wealth and power.
Diversity consultants are one piece of the corrupt equation.
The alternative is a university ecosystem which doesn't label everyone with university brand stamps, and aims to provide a quality education to everyone. There are countries with those, and they do well. Even taking other cultures out of the equation, Canada is much closer to that ideal than the US, as is continental Europe.
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?
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)
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...
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.
(Compared to the math department where people would surf between commitments.)
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.
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.
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
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).
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.
According to the spirit of the law, all jobs are permanent by default. Fixed-term positions require a valid reason. A project (such as completing a PhD) is a valid reason. The availability of funding is not. While an externally funded research project could be considered a project, it's reasonable to assume that someone in the university will apply for funding for similar research in the future. Because someone is planning to continue similar projects in the future, the need for that particular externally funded researcher does not end when the initial grant runs out. And even if those applications fail, the university still has other money for paying the salary. The employment should continue until the university decides to reduce the number of people doing that kind of research permanently.
In principle, it should be categorically illegal to hire fixed-term postdocs, but the academia does not work like that. Because the union is a union first and a representative of specific people only after that, it's extremely unwilling to let go of the "all jobs are permanent by default" principle. There must be a compromise that allows the international standard practice of hiring postdocs for a few years without letting the employer to chain fixed-term positions indefinitely. Whether 4 years is a good compromise is debatable, but it's easy to see why a union would want something like that.
Also, from a Finnish perspective, Sweden has a reputation as a country where it's relatively easy to get a permanent academic position.
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...
"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.
You do realize that there is a large number of people that have only patented a handful of things and retired? They robbed that opportunity from you plain and simple. Universities patenting IP in the first place is inarguabley wrong . They are funded with tax dollars and have no right to the IP in the first place. At the very least all IP should be released into public domain, more ideally with right of first refusal to the grad students involved.
I am only closely involved with people in the grad life not in it myself. I may be wrong as how bad the grad student thing is, no benefits is dramatic i suppose. However there is massive manipulation of young people inexperienced in negotiation involved, double so when there is no recourse after the fact like quitting/leaving/changing/moving. I hear and see endless things that make my skin crawl from grad friends and they are most definitely beting taken advantage of in power gap that is funded with tax dollars.
Consumer unions seem like a neat idea too.
Maybe that was the joke you were making though, I can't quite tell.
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).
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.
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.
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.
"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.
Labor labors are an established thing. If a union is approved by the government, then they would have protections.
TAs striking has been somewhat effective, but RAs mostly don't actually strike.
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.
2. Get dental insurance for the students. Almost no US graduate school offers this.
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...
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...
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.
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.
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.
I also think there are too many grad students but that's a different issue.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...?
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teaching_Assistants_Associatio...
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.
Having lived in France, I shiver when I hear word “union.”
[0] https://www.science.org/content/article/grad-student-union-f...
Those ~33 hour shifts should be illegal
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.
Do grad students still have a right to work without joining, or will they be forced to join?
The already low yearly fees were discounted for good grades and jobs for students are provided to help with living expenses.
Ended grad school positive on my bank account, loved studying what I studied (distributed systems).
The US school system has some upsides, but the whole student debt thing is pretty F’d up.
Edit: spelling
What's the what with these teamsters, UE & such? What does it mean that they choose to unionize with one of them?
If it's really the latter, do studying count as work now?
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
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.wikipedia.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.
> The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) cannot ask you questions about your union membership or participation in lawful union activity. In addition, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) recognized the importance of enforcing labor laws and signed an agreement with the Department of Labor (DOL) that states it is essential to ensure proper wages and working conditions for all covered workers regardless of immigration status. It is your right to belong to a union and being a union member cannot affect your visa application.
I was a union carpenter before I went back to school.