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Comment by fallingknife | Hacker News Reader

I don't really understand what leverage they have here. The school controls the issuance of their degree and if they strike they will just be delaying that. A strike would be a headache for the university, but from what I understand about grad school, pissing off the professor you work for is a near death sentence.

Good to see them pushing back but I guess I don't see the system as fixable without a complete overhaul.

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The schools can't operate without grad students. The entire system is built on the assumption they teach and run labs. Accreditation requires hours of class per term. Striking for two weeks would cancel an entire term of undergrad. The damage to the school's budget and reputation would be enormous, while delaying their grad degrees a term.

Their leverage is significant.

> Striking for two weeks would cancel an entire term of undergrad

That's an interesting point, but can you provide a source of that? (Just curious as a fellow graduate student)

Depends on the school, but look up your school's accreditation requirements for hours in class requirements.

Grad students do the heavy lifting of teaching and research. Universities would fall apart without them. That's plenty of leverage.

They would be pissing off the admins who have to answer phone calls from angry donor parents about cancelled classes, but the professors that count, their PIs/supervisors probably back them 100%. If they get themselves paid by the Uni, that's less topping up that the lab head might feel obligated to do to make it possible for them to complete dissertation research that benefits the lab.

Replace “degree” with “paycheck” and its a statement about how unions and corporations work in general. Yet unions solidarity still holds a lot of sway.

The UC graduate students recently went on strike and got more money.

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