MIT graduate students vote to unionize • Hacker News Board

Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize

#111

Post by the_only_law » Sat, Apr 09, 2022, 2:52 PM UTC

neutronicus wrote: post #65

g_p wrote: post #45

For anyone not familiar with the world of academia, grad students actually have a good bit more power available to them by organising sensibly than you might think. The same is also true for early career postdoctoral research staff. This is because most of the work that actually matters is being done by these individuals, in a very pyramidical structure, but the money stops rolling in without the work that the base o…

On the other side of this equation, I think international students comprise a potent reservoir of strikebreakers.

In fairness, these already seem to form the majority of PhD students at universities near me

Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize

#112

Post by amathres_info » Sat, Apr 09, 2022, 2:53 PM UTC

zitterbewegung wrote: post #49

bognition wrote: post #23

I'm very curious to see what the long term effects of unionizing will be in Academia. I'm hopeful and optimistic it will improve things in the long run. Yes there will be some unintended consequences but academic life is already very rough if you're not tenured. 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 s…

Teacher assistants or graduate assistants have been unionized at UIC [1]. I have noticed that they have gone on strike a few times. Unfortunately anything you are hopeful of achieving doesn't seem to have changed at all. 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 UIC grad student union is pretty effective at keeping their teaching hours to under 20 hours per week (so, you complain to them when there's too much grading). But the stipends there are among the lowest of good math departments, certainly lower than many non-unionized places. How much of this is due to the union being ineffective vs UIC being broke and poorly run I don't know. [Source: I used to teach math at UIC]

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.

Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize

#113

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Apr 09, 2022, 2:54 PM UTC

lamename wrote: post #74

ipsin wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds very much like extortion, and I'm curious how any school with a purported honor code or sense of academic standards could allow it. 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.

If the professor in question brings the university a lot of grant money, especially if they're tenured, a lot gets ignored. 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.

[deleted]

Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize

#114

Post by sheikheddy » Sat, Apr 09, 2022, 2:56 PM UTC

lnxg33k1 wrote: post #73

I am not sure how to fairly express this concept, so I will write it as it comes, younger generations are kinda fixing all the fuck ups of millennials in terms of working conditions, in a bit maybe they will even get paid overtime, I felt always like my generation was more focused in trying to find someone to blame rather than fighting to fix things, more focused on saying "Ok boomer" or blame "GenX". And I think the…

Do you also believe this pattern will hold as this generation ages? It could be the case that this property is really about young vs old people. Although I hope future generations will be so well off that they'll view the role of menial labor in modern society as something akin to slavery.

Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize

#115

Post by gbjw » Sat, Apr 09, 2022, 2:56 PM UTC

anonymousDan wrote: post #91

bognition wrote: post #23

I'm very curious to see what the long term effects of unionizing will be in Academia. I'm hopeful and optimistic it will improve things in the long run. Yes there will be some unintended consequences but academic life is already very rough if you're not tenured. 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 s…

I think your view on unionization is very US centric. In the UK at least there is a university union. In fact it is currently striking over a range of issues (mostly related to pension cuts).

In Canada as well (e.g., York is known to have a strong 'activist' graduate union that periodically shuts down classes over labour disputes).

Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize

#116

Post by _fat_santa » Sat, Apr 09, 2022, 2:56 PM UTC

_huayra_ wrote: post #54

bognition wrote: post #23

I'm very curious to see what the long term effects of unionizing will be in Academia. I'm hopeful and optimistic it will improve things in the long run. Yes there will be some unintended consequences but academic life is already very rough if you're not tenured. 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 s…

We were discussing a potential hire at work a few days ago who suddenly turned down the company's offer for another company despite our team being his "dream place to work" and promising to not make a sudden decision without talking with us first. 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 d…

The dynamics of academia really surprise me sometimes. When I think of "work", I think of two things: "work" (the actual day to day things you do) and "workplace" (the place your work at).

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.

Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize

#117

Post by hervature » Sat, Apr 09, 2022, 2:57 PM UTC

dls2016 wrote: post #84

hervature wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I didn’t find any of this to be true 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 un…

At my institution the 9-month pay was less than $25k per year (from 2010-2016) with subsidized housing (still pretty expensive) and family on MediCal when my wife worked part time. 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.

The median household income in California is $77.5k [1]. I'll emphasize household. Your 9-month pay was for 20 hours, that means $25k is actually $66.6k annualized which does not include your subsidized housing nor for inflation. The economics just simply is not there. Sure, students might be able to squeak 10-20% in wage increase at the cost of all other university voluntary support such as student group support and things like free gym memberships.

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.

[1] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSCAA646N

Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize

#118

Post by zitterbewegung » Sat, Apr 09, 2022, 2:59 PM UTC

amathres_info wrote: post #112

zitterbewegung wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Teacher assistants or graduate assistants have been unionized at UIC [1]. I have noticed that they have gone on strike a few times. Unfortunately anything you are hopeful of achieving doesn't seem to have changed at all. 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 UIC grad student union is pretty effective at keeping their teaching hours to under 20 hours per week (so, you complain to them when there's too much grading). But the stipends there are among the lowest of good math departments, certainly lower than many non-unionized places. How much of this is due to the union being ineffective vs UIC being broke and poorly run I don't know. [Source: I used to teach math at UI…

UIC has been underfunded for so long that it is a joke. I don't even think that they even budget that kind of thing anymore and just accept the fact. But, the computer science college is going to have a building dedicated to computer science due to the fact that a bunch of alumni are funding it directly. I personally gave around $100 but I would guess many other alumni will give much more.

Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize

#119

Post by exdsq » Sat, Apr 09, 2022, 2:59 PM UTC

sheikheddy wrote: post #109

exdsq wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My wife’s very recent PhD experience at Oxford was a little crunch time around conferences, a nice 20/25 hour week, and enough spare time to row with the Oxford Uni boat team. She stayed a year as a postdoc and it was much the same. She’s now a postdoc at Stanford and she’s working 16 hour days, weekends, and very stressed for it. Academic output is the same - it’s just different work culture. I know this is about Ph…

Stanford is notorious for "duck syndrome". People are calm on the surface but are always paddling below the water. I would say the CS papers out of Stanford tend to be nicer than the ones out of Oxford though, at least for Systems research. (This is a huge generalization: I don't read every paper and there's enough variation between authors that it doesn't really make sense to do a cross-institution comparison, but t…

I think it's going to be very lab specific there, but you could be right for systems research (I've not read any myself)!. FWIW, she's in medical engineering.

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.

Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize

#120

Post by g_p » Sat, Apr 09, 2022, 2:59 PM UTC

neutronicus wrote: post #72

amitport wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a professor is only taking credit for underlings' work he / she will, at some point, stop getting good students...

Yeah in my experience professors are pretty good about giving credit (the student is the first author on the paper, does the conference presentations, etc). 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'd agree it very much depends on the individuals. I have worked with people all across the spectrum. My advisor was absolutely in the "good" camp - we'd openly describe call academia the "world's biggest hidden pyramid scheme". He led a small, tightly knit group, and the group followed the two pizzas rule.

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...