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Teaching Assistants at U. of Illinois Prevail in Contract Dispute

October 3, 2011, 2:05 pm

The Graduate Employees Organization, a union representing teaching assistants at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has come out on top in a dispute over a contract provision dealing with tuition waivers. In a three-year agreement reached with the union in November 2009, the university had agreed that it would not unilaterally reduce the tuition waivers offered teaching and graduate assistants from outside Illinois. Last fall, however, several departments in the university’s College of Fine and Applied Arts, arguing that the contract provision applied only to assistants already on the payroll, ceased giving new, nonresident graduate employees waivers covering the full cost of out-of-state tuition. The union responded by filing a grievance. Now an independent arbitrator has ruled that the university’s actions “violated the plain terms and conditions” of the contract, and ordered the administration to repay graduate assistants any money they spent on tuition as a result of the university’s actions.

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  • grward

    Happy Canada Day Professor Ruse!
     

  • katisumas

    Michael Ruse writes:  “He notes, correctly, that most lay people (non-professional evolutionists that is) automatically assume that it can and often does promote the good of the species. And this fallacy is not restricted to non-biologists.”
     
    Dear Prof. Ruse, when you start your comments with such a dismissive statement you preclude meaningful discussion.  Particularly your choice of words “the good of the species” is misleading.  We are discussing survival of a species and not whether it is good or not.  “Good” implies some sort of value  judgement. 
     
    There are many people, lay or not, who look upon the theory  of evolution as pertaining to the survivial of species, not of individual genes. Biologists tend to talk about the very slow process of speciation I discussed yesterday.  So suffice to repeat here that when a scientific theory matches exactly the political culture whence it sprang from, a political culture that has made selfishness and shortsightedness the primary virtues, there is ground for suspicion and that theory should be doubly scrutinized.  Scientists are human beings after all, particularly those focussing on the sort of evolutionary psychology based on totally subjective foundations and the denial of the cultural molding and cultural innovation that define our species. 
     
    In a society, a teacher might have more impact than the transmission of a few genes.  The corporation that has enough resources to sway the opinion of a public against most of its members’ self interest has more impact that those individuals’ genes.  If you can talk people into, to use the wisdom of the ages, “cutting their nose to spite their face”, your stance falls apart because it makes reproduction and the survival of the offspring/genetic recipient problematic.  This of course is evidenced by the fact that the US has the highest rates of miscarriages and infant death than any other ‘wealthy” countries, and that ratio is directly causally linked to lack of access to prenatal and infant care for many.  In our society, a newborn from a low income family is  designated as a free loader the moment she or he is born.  

    I am bringing up a sociopolitical factors  here because the “selfish gene” theory stems from political and ethical views and they are have nothing to do with science.  Where is that selfish gene? Has anyone found it now that we have mapped the human genome?

    PS: how about adding some interdisciplinary perspective to your views, such as anthropology, sociology and history? Not to mention some molecular biology….

  • 5768

    What? Does Barash as an evolutionary biologist deny genetic drift of populations? A major influence on Darwin was Malthus’ Essay on the Principle of Population (1798).

    But we are long past Darwin. With the post-Darwinian advent of molecular evolution–namely, the fact that molecular features of biomolecules are as valuable as were the gross morphological features used by Darwin in attempting to group organisms into categories of relatedness and even more valuable when it came to explaining changes within populations–most of us are aware that what drives change per se at either the level of the individual or at the population level are chance molecular mutations having absolutely no teleological aim in mind, not even “survival” which is but an afterthought [sic]. Such chemical mutations lead to changes in the molecular function of molecules, changes which may be either beneficial or, more likely, deleterious to the individual, as well as to the population at large. In hindsight it is easy for those of us living beneficiaries of chance mutations who happen to be alive and healthy–whether plant, animal, or human–to think that we have been “selected” for survival.

    So much for the obvious. There are those who have also been just as “selected” by chance mutational changes for debilitating genetic diseases, for never having come to term, for vulnerabilities that disfavor their existence, for death. We make much of the fact that there are vast numbers of living organisms that have yet to be catalogued, while remaining oblivious to the vast numbers that became extinct if they were once living, or never made it past a limiting chemical event in their existence.

    Having a chance mutation that might favor existence is but a precondition for possible survival, and that survival not necessarily a happy one; a chance mutation is thus a necessary but not sufficient condition for that survival. Malthus realized populations had to be checked if they were to survive (against overpopulation dangers, for example). Darwin thought individuals had to be able to survive if they were to continue to exist as part of a propagating species. “Survival” most of us now realize is not the driving force for existence, and chance molecular mutation at the front end of the process may lead to either death or to existence. From the standpoint of molecular evolution it doesn’t get any better than this.

  • 22014710

    Michael Ruse and David Barash are quite right that Darwin does not speak of the “good of the species” (though Wallace does),  but wrong in suggesting that Darwin did not endorse group selection.  Much depends, of course, on what is meant by group selection.  Ruse prefers to exclude what we would call kin-selection from the rubric of group selection.  But why?  After Darwin became convinced that his model of community selection in social-insect groups could be extended to human groups, he went further than Ruse allows.  This is evident from passages in the 5th and 6th editions of the Origin of Species that originally only spoke of individual selection.  Darwin wrote (6th ed.): “In social animals it [natural selection] will adapt the structure of each individual for the benefit of the community; if the community profits by the selected change” (“Variorum Edition, p 172).

  • rachel312

    Bravi students!

  • 11152886

    Hooray for the teaching assistants. Fair is fair; they work just as hard as the instate ones. 

  • mellify

    Unfortunately, despite having previously agreed to arbitration by a neutral third party, the U of I administration has decided to reject the arbitrator’s decision and spend further limited resources on fighting, rather than honoring, the employment contract.

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1932422 Carl Lehnen

    It’s disappointing that the U of I is continuing its anti-union record by unilaterally rejecting the outcome of the arbitration.

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