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MIT graduate students vote to unionize

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Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize

#151

Post by polygamous_bat »

hervature wrote: post #117
dls2016 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sure, you switch out four calculus TAs for calculus with professional TAs. Who is going to TA deep reinforcement learning, or under-actuated robotics, or any of the major-specific courses that takes a lot of relevant knowledge to actually teach properly? Any of the people out there who has the insights to TA these classes thoroughly enough are gonna point and laugh at you if you offer them anything below $200K.

Also, seems like you are completely ignoring the actual "labor" that the graduate students provide for their research labs. The number of professors in Computer Science at MIT who actually writes code at least once a week may shock you, but the truth is, for MIT to be on the top of the food chain someone needs to keep the wheels turning.

Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize

#152

Post by skeeter2020 »

polygamous_bat wrote: post #134
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.

As a current graduate student, the sunk cost can sometimes be too high just to up and move advisors. In small places, you will simply not have someone else whose interest align with yours, and even at a place like MIT, the advisors have their own specialty, and especially after your second year at Ph.D. moving or changing advisor can be quite difficult and basically "reset" all your progress. So, a lot of time, the c…

>> the sunk cost can sometimes be too high just to up and move advisors.

This isn't really the definition of sunk cost, which is the appearance of having tangible impact on decisions while being independent of the future choice. If it has bearing (as in this case) it's material to the decision and not sunk.

Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize

#153

Post by caddemon »

willis936 wrote: post #24
typeofhuman wrote: post #13

Unions can be good. They can be operated poorly and inefficiently too. Good luck to them. Consumer unions seem like a neat idea too.

Graduate students are paid half time but expected to work full time and have their entire career at the mercy of individual professors. If protections will not be given freely then collective bargaining can force the issue.

Except this is still true at US schools that have had a union for many years. The pay and benefits go up a little bit but the fundamental issues remain. I've never even heard of a grad union trying to bargain for true changes in funding structure or degree requirements.

Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize

#154

Post by kolbe »

ipsin wrote: post #64
_huayra_ wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

“Every banana republic has a Bill of Rights.” -Anton Scalia

Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize

#155

Post by PeterisP »

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.

Not really, strikes are a short-term thing and bringing in new international students is something that takes many months at least.

Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize

#156

Post by lumost »

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…

What society wants from Academia isn't something you can grind for. Ground breaking research and great education isn't something that comes from working 80 hours a week (most of the time). I'd also suspect that the vast majority of effort in academia is dedicated to simply pleasing the whims of those with power/funding.

A union might increase productivity by both

a) De-stressing those who are actually doing the work of academia. Ensuring that they are financially taken care including living wages, sustainable working hours, and stable employment.

b) Reducing the need/available time for academic make-work.

c) Negotiating with funding bodies to correct lop-sided funding policies where students are funded but researchers are not.*

Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize

#157

Post by caddemon »

ethbr0 wrote: post #30
gruez wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What leverage do they have? Worker's unions work because they can threaten to withhold labor. Are those students seriously going to not attend MIT? An institution as prestigious as MIT probably has no trouble finding replacements.

Withhold work via a strike? See how many labs run and MIT grants are retained without a graduate student labor force.

Except withholding research work also means ceasing degree progress in practice. For some types of work it could mean setting degree progress back months - experiments can be very time sensitive in some fields, and thesis committee will often require certain experiments to graduate.

TAs striking has been somewhat effective, but RAs mostly don't actually strike.

Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize

#159

Post by caddemon »

sjg007 wrote: post #48
temp8964 wrote: post #22

When I was a graduate student, I always thought I had a good deal, where I learn graduate degree for free, AND got a living stipend for me and my wife. The relationship between me and the university was two folded: I am a customer as a student and an employee at the same time. And I think student was my main role. And my advisor was mostly my teacher, instead of my work boss. I don't think you can turn this relations…

It's really an employee-employer relationship with on the job training. Specifically your final promotion is a certificate (Ph.D.) that has some industry wide accreditation. The fact that they charge for tuition actually seems legally tenuous (akin to a company town) which is why I think they all have these tuition waivers for RA and TA positions. The more I think about it, it seems like there is a bunch of legal iss…

A big reason they charge tuition and then credit it is because it leads to more grants. There's a bunch of bizarre accounting between schools/departments/labs behind all this, but at the core my school "charges" tuition, then my department immediately "credits" the tution using NIH training grant money awarded to my program.

Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize

#160

Post by Barrin92 »

lumost wrote: post #156
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…

What society wants from Academia isn't something you can grind for. Ground breaking research and great education isn't something that comes from working 80 hours a week (most of the time). I'd also suspect that the vast majority of effort in academia is dedicated to simply pleasing the whims of those with power/funding. A union might increase productivity by both a) De-stressing those who are actually doing the work…

>Ground breaking research and great education isn't something that comes from working 80 hours a week (most of the time).

is there much evidence for this claim? If one takes a look at the habits and biographies of groundbreaking researchers they all have one thing in common, they have dedicated virtually their entire time to work.

Looking at countries with exceptional educational outcomes broadly you see the same thing, time and resources spent on tutoring and schooling is extremely high.

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