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Brainstorm: Lives of the Mind Mark Bauerlein

Kennedy Wades In

crossposted from howtheuniversityworks.com

So I’m back from Illinois and Ohio with some kind of Andromeda strain eating away at my lungs and sinuses, but wanted to quickly post the interesting news that Ted Kennedy has — after several years’ dithering — at last waded into the fray over bargaining rights for graduate employees at private institutions.

Graduate-employee bargaining rights have been won in numerous public institutions (where they are covered by state law) and were won for private institutions, which are covered by federal law, during the Clinton administration. The critical case was GSOC-UAW, representing grad employees at NYU, and was decided unanimously by a bipartisan NLRB — only to be shabbily reversed by Bush appointees during the Brown decision. You can read the scathing dissent to the sleazeball work of the Bush mob on my site and at the NLRB.

In all likelihood, a Democratic presidential victory will see those bargaining rights restored. But Kennedy has introduced a bill guaranteeing those rights, seeking to put them beyond the increasingly dishonest political manipulation of the NLRB:


More than ever in modern education, teaching and research assistants are in classrooms every day, educating students in colleges and universities across the country. Their numbers are increasing as the number of full-time faculty dwindles. Often, teaching and research assistants are now doing the same job as junior faculty members.

In fact, the classroom is a workplace for these scholars. It’s where they earn the money they need to pay to put food on their tables and a roof over their heads. They deserve the right to stand together and make their voice heard in their workplace. Like other employees, they should have the right to join a union and improve their working conditions. Obviously, better wages and working conditions for them also means better education for their students.

In 2004, however, a decision by the National Labor Relations Board changed the law and denied fundamental workplace rights and protections for teaching and research assistants. This ruling stopped an active organizing movement in its tracks and deprived thousands of teaching and research assistants of their right to organize and bargain over their wages and working conditions.

It’s hardly the only bad decision by the National Labor Relations Board under the Bush Administration, which has been the most anti-worker, anti-labor, anti-union NLRB in history. The Board has let workers down at every turn. It has blocked efforts to gain union representation, undermined workers’ attempts to improve their pay and benefits, and exposed them to penalties for seeking to improve their working conditions.

Of course changing the law won’t magically fix the problems of grad students — I put this question to the GSOC-UAW organizers and others in an interview recently. The key will have to be maintaining an organization that can express the united power of the student employees regardless of who seizes control of the law. More on that after I’ve defeated the Andromeda strain.

Oh, and I know I should weigh in on the whole discussion of tenure raised by comrade Fendrich. I’ll have to save up my energy for that.

Posted at 03:17:38 PM on April 22, 2008 | All postings by Marc Bousquet

Comments

  1. While I have not read the text of the legislation which Kennedy is proposing, the language of the excerpt above appears broad enough to provide protection for undergraduate teaching and research assistants as well.

    As I indicated on a thread of HTUW before the MN conference, the numbers of undergraduates who are engaged by colleges and universities in positions which mirror those traditionally assigned to graduate students is rapidly growing — the questionable ethics of having undergraduates grade other undergraduates notwithstanding.

    At the moment, institutions remunerate such undergraduate employment in stipends, in academic credit, and sometimes a combination of the two. Further, Federal work-study funds are often used for these purposes.

    It will become increasingly important to monitor this new frontier in the exploitation of students: as students, as workers, and as teachers — of themselves and of their fellow classmates!

    — Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Apr 22, 10:43 PM · #

  2. Interesting. I hope it passes, if it as good as this text implies.

    On another not. hope you recover soon. Remember that the only way to defeat the Andromeda Strain is to be patient. Well, that and to disable Chekhov’s Nuclear Device.

    — a different Dan · Apr 23, 09:22 AM · #

  3. Being abused was ever in a trade-off relation to special access to genius. What made the abuse worth the abuse was the access to what is rarely accessed. TAs when they collaborated with geinus professors in rare institutions at the top of the pecking order could trade-off their abuses against access to rare geniuses. This elitist image was never real but it sustained eons of masses of abused TAs and their abusers. It is good in many senses of the word that this image has collapsed and real legal powered bargaining has taken its place. It the university is going to outsource all its teaching so that professors merely sprinkle power cooties onto stranger foreign grad students they barely know who do all the teaching, then those doing the teaching of the entire institution—TAs have a right to get professorial salaries and turn the professors into part-time barely surviving option staff!!!!!!

    — Richard Tabor Greene · Apr 24, 06:55 AM · #

  4. I have been a graduate student for a long time now (too long largely due to my having to work as a TA and RA in grad school). I can only speak about the humanities, but never have I seen grad students doing the work of junior faculty. If you could, please explicate this comment at some point. The reference comes up quite often in your book as well, but I did not see it defined there either.

    I appreciate all the thought that you have put into the issue of exploited academic labor. You are helping to create a much needed conversation. That said, I would rather see fewer TAs and fewer adjuncts rather than unionization. If grad students are doing the work of junior faculty and undergraduates are doing the work of grad students, I fear that unionizing will only further legitimize labor practices that are steadily undermining what it means to be a professor. (Let’s face it, I’m not in this to be a TA for the rest of my life. For that matter, I have far too much self respect and education to waste my 30s and 40s making $16,000/year as an adjunct, borrowing money from my aging parents, and clinging to false hopes of landing a tenure-track job.)

    I don’t go to a part-time physician and I don’t seek health advice from a first-year medical student. Why should I respect a professor when someone else will do his/her job for less money with, supposedly, the same skill set and the same expertise? If anyone needs to come together and take a stand, it is professors.

    — Matt · Apr 24, 06:58 AM · #

  5. P.S. Many people in this country do go to “part-time” physicians who’ve had the “equivalent” of only a year or two of medical school training.

    They’re called “nurse practitioners” or “physician’s assistants” — and the charge/ insurance reimbursement for their services is at the same rate as the full-time physician who “supervises” them.

    Sound familiar?

    — Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Apr 24, 08:24 AM · #

  6. Matt, in most schools there are many disciplines in which graduate student employees are the faculty of record for a variety of lower-division courses as well as occasional upper-division courses in their field of research. For instance, it’s quite normal for graduate students in English to teach first-year writing, introduction to literature, women’s writing, etc, plus a special topics course in, say, Victorian women’s autobiography. In general, graduate employees belong to the same labor pool as other faculty serving contingently, though they may form a tier within that group with special privileges.

    I wish I could say that there was a solution outside of collective action by those who work. The problem with waiting for the faculty is that they’ve had forty years to do something—and mostly haven’t. Now they’re a tiny minority of the workplace. The future of faculty power—if there is any—is in the self-organization and leadership of the overwhelming majority: faculty and graduate employees serving contingently.

    — Marc Bousquet · Apr 24, 10:13 AM · #

  7. In the preceding comment, the sentence about “waiting for the faculty” should have read “The problem with waiting for the tenured faculty is that they’ve had forty years to do something—and mostly haven’t.

    — Marc Bousquet · Apr 24, 10:15 AM · #

  8. Dear Marc,
    Thank you for your response. I never saw this type of teaching as an undergraduate at a 26,000+ state university and nor have I seen this at my far larger Big Ten state graduate institution. Please note, I don’t intend for my tone to sound disagreeable (tone is so hard to read in these posts). I’m simply stating my experience. Thank you for the clarification.

    I agree that waiting for the faculty to do something is a long shot, but as their status decreases in society and in the professions, which it is, they might come around—eventually. Perhaps it will happen once would-be graduate students realize what a bad deal they’re about to get (thanks to books like your own) and refuse to enter graduate school and become the advisees/employees of professors. For that matter, as the status of the job professor decreases, fewer new people will enter academia, which may force universities to respond to a “labor shortage” by hiring full-time people at decent pay. This may take, I fear, as long as your plan to organize contingent faculty.

    You and I are obviously of different opinions on the whole matter, but, again, I think what you’re doing is excellent and I encourage everyone in academia to read you book. I also encourage people, as I do with high school and college students, to neither apply to universities where the overwhelming majority of the faculty are adjuncts or without terminal degrees nor take college courses from anyone who is an adjunct or lacking a PhD/terminal degree. I know that adjuncts might find this offensive. I do not mean to slight what I know to be very qualified people who should be earning more money and respect. But I find that students, who tend to have no idea how the hierarchy works, are shocked to learn that the outrageous tuition that they pay may go to someone who is paid $2000/class! It insults them both as people who think college bestows some status on them and as decent human being, which I’m perfectly willing to exploit that if it might prompt the uni-corporation to change its hiring practices. If universities get enough complaints by well-informed “customers,” they might not be so happy to employ on the cheap. It’s not the only answer, obviously the solution is far more complicated than that, but it’s one way to get those in power to listen. If students can get cable in every dorm room, maybe they can a professor in every classroom.

    — Matt · Apr 24, 12:46 PM · #

  9. I too made a mistake in my post. I meant to say that I tell students to only apply to colleges or universities where the overwhelming majority of the faculty are full-time and in possession of a terminal degree. Such stats are printed in the (loathsome) US News rankings.

    — Matt · Apr 24, 01:15 PM · #

  10. Matt’s observations are quite edifying for me. There is, I fear, a tendency these days, perhaps fostered by the “turn” towards “privledging the “subject,” for many to see their own “experience” as a genuine microcosm.

    I think the question about grad students doing the “work” of junior faculty needs to be scrutinized by carefully defining what we mean by “work.” It’s also important that we examine in purely quantitative terms, the number of students and the kinds of classes staffed by grad assistants and part-timers in both private and public colleges/universities, and to get a breakdown by disciplines as well. I suspect that such analysis will show that the so -called general or liberal education courses, often so highly touted as foundational in higher education, are taught largely by this contingent faculty. Arguably, the largest amount of teaching work is being done by this exploited workforce.

    With respect to Matt’s suggestion about not applying to certain schools, may I suggest that those of us who receive requests from schools from which we have degrees can begin refusing to donate until they are assured that the institution has a just system of compensation which does not contribute to the growing evisceration of the professoriate.

    — George T. Karnezis · Apr 24, 02:20 PM · #

  11. P.S. MB, what did you find out about undergrad TAs at the MN conference? Did you get my comments/questions at HTUW?

    — Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Apr 24, 05:24 PM · #

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