Graduate Students Push for Reforms They mobilize to seek improvements on both economic and academic issues By COURTNEY LEATHERMAN Braintree, Mass. American graduate education is still considered the best in the world, but the recipients of that training are increasingly demanding its overhaul. The latest evidence of that sentiment came from nearly 200 graduate students who gathered here last month at a conference aimed at breaking with past practices in graduate education. After four days of sessions at its 13th annual meeting, the National Association of Graduate-Professional Students passed resolutions calling for reforms intended to improve the lives of graduate students, such as increasing their health care and making professors and institutions accountable for better faculty advising. The conference was called "Revolutionary Ideas," not surprising since it was held right outside Boston. But some participants said the reference to revolution was more than geographic. "I have the sense that big changes are coming up," said Bryan Hannegan, a graduate student at the University of California at Irvine and past president of the group, which is the nation's largest association of graduate students. "The way we do graduate education is going to change." While the association is not dominated by union activists, the issue of collective-bargaining rights for teaching assistants was a hot one here -- participants passed a resolution supporting that cause. They also passed a resolution supporting the right of teaching assistants on eight campuses of the University of California to strike for union recognition. And the group passed more than a dozen resolutions urging Congress and the federal government to increase financing for graduate fellowships, instead of ending support for new ones, as the Education Department has announced that it plans to do. While such resolutions were aimed at significantly changing graduate education, many at the meeting viewed them as "just stating the obvious -- affirming the basic rights that we believe graduate students are entitled to," said Susan Mahan, a graduate student at Washington University in St. Louis and the group's new president. "Some may consider that revolutionary." The national association does not see itself as a group of rabble rousers. It represents about 900,000 students through the 225 graduate-student groups and graduate schools that are members. In all, about 1.2 million students are enrolled in graduate programs nationwide. The association has clout on Capitol Hill and among other higher-education groups because it is seen as "reasonable and rational," Mr. Hannegan said, noting that the group's plan to move its headquarters in January to Washington from suburban Chicago marks a "full shift, from being a ragtag group of students to a serious organization that's got permanence and will continue to grow." The annual meeting dealt with a mix of the obvious and the innovative. As always, it drew a lot of first-time participants, so some sessions served as primers on setting up and running a graduate-student association. Graduate-student leaders from Michigan Technological University, for example, explained the basics of working with an administration to recruit graduate students both to the university and to the association, as well as orient them to the campus. And, as always, the conference included a session on starting a local union for teaching assistants. It was run by a student from the University of Minnesota, where a union is now running a membership-card drive in its campaign for recognition. But, for the first time, the annual meeting also included a session aimed at helping graduate-student associations and graduate-student unions get along. Typically, those two groups have had some animosity toward each other. "If a union drive is operating, it's usually because they don't think the graduate-student association is working," said Jane Collins. She and Rebecca Menghini ran the session, which was called "Cooperation or Conflict? G.S.O.'s and Graduate Student Employee Unions.'' The two women are graduate students at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and members of the campus Teaching Assistants' Association, the oldest graduate-student union in the country. Even so, they are now working with the Wisconsin administration to set up the university's first graduate-student association. The union represents about 2,400 teaching assistants at Madison, but that leaves about 6,600 other graduate students without representation, either because they don't work for the university or because they work as research assistants, who are not represented by the union. The two women acknowledge that they are walking a narrow line: They want to form an association that will address the concerns of all graduate students, but they don't want to step on the union's toes by setting up an organization that would take up employment issues. Instead, Ms. Collins said, the new association at Madison would address matters that are less overt but equally important, such as the isolation that seems to be inherent in graduate-student life. Concerns about the mental health of graduate students were raised time and again at the conference. Amid discussion about the recent suicide of a Ph.D. student in chemistry at Harvard University (The Chronicle, October 23), the association formed a committee to find ways to improve the ties between faculty advisers and their students. The conferees also passed a resolution urging universities to explicitly include graduate advising as a faculty responsibility, and to evaluate professors on their advising along with their research and teaching. Along the same lines, the association passed a resolution that called for "promoting the psychological well-being of graduate and professional students." It asked universities to acknowledge and take steps to alleviate the unique pressures that graduate students face. The two resolutions marked the first time that the organization had taken a stance on the issue. "We're saying it shouldn't have to be a damaging environment to do good research," said Ms. Mahan, the new president. Preparing for and getting good jobs was the topic of many of the sessions. Michael Smith, a Ph.D. student in history at Indiana University, came to the meeting in part to get a sense of the morale of graduate students around the country. He said it was pretty low on his campus, which many graduate students feel is run more like a corporation than an academic institution. He acknowledged, though, that "within the graduate-student community there's always a culture of complaint." That culture was evident here, too, in lots of talk about the awful job market for new Ph.D.'s. But most participants didn't dwell on the downside for long. Neither did Robert Weisbuch, president of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, in his keynote speech titled, "Employment Prospects and the Ph.D." He said it might as well have been called "Mayday Talk" because the humanities were certainly in a state of crisis. Mr. Weisbuch was blunt in his assessment of the problems facing the humanities: Graduate programs have admitted far too many students and have failed to monitor their careers. A former professor of English, he said humanists themselves are partly to blame. "An engineer sees a problem and fixes it. A humanist sees a problem and celebrates its complexities," he joked. But after issuing his complaints, Mr. Weisbuch changed his tone: "I want to inject into the discipline an idea that the humanities sorely lack -- that they might enjoy a renaissance." He laid out several plans for improvement, some of which his foundation is working on. He urged institutions to track the placement rates of Ph.D.'s and to limit the size of departments accordingly. He called on faculty members to reclaim the curriculum. If institutions end up hiring part-timers to teach courses that tenured professors don't want to teach, "you're in a corrupt situation," and it's up to the professors to change it, he said. When faculty members meet that responsibility, he said, departments can convert the part-time posts into some full-time jobs. For the Wilson foundation's part, Mr. Weisbuch said, it plans to conduct research to find programs that have helped Ph.D.'s land fulfilling non-academic jobs. It also plans to encourage adding an internship experience to doctoral education, to give students a taste of the world beyond academe. In an interview, Mr. Weisbuch said he wanted doctoral education to be about "preparing the next generation of scholars, and also preparing people to unleash the humanities upon the world." His speech drew enthusiastic applause, which he said surprised him. He hadn't been sure how the graduate students would react to his pointed comments. But he was just what many in the audience were looking for. Said Mr. Hannegan: "It's so rare to find someone in academe who will be very blunt about the problems we're facing." http://chronicle.com Section: The Faculty Page: A12