Is this not a direct violation of the student visa?
MIT graduate students vote to unionize
221–230 of 400 posts
Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
That really sucks but I'm not sure what the connection between this professor's probably illegal action and unionization.
Unions are generally vehicles of resistance to illegal and/or oppressive actions. HTH.
What might be different about grad students is the weird market dynamics. They're well-educated, overworked, and underpaid. They should be able to get a decent job outside of academia from hiring managers sympathetic to not being in academia. Except for foreign students and people who really want to be in academia, there's a lot of pressure that should have made work conditions much better.
If someone ready to pay you twice as much with normal hours and less drama doesn't improve conditions, I'm not sure if a union can.
Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
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,…
> Who is going to TA deep reinforcement learning Funny aside, did you find my thesis? :D. > Also, seems like you are completely ignoring the actual "labor" But I'm not, you are literally not paid for that (unless you are a research assistant). That is "studying" which I keep pointing out is the whole issue. Which feeds back to your point about highly-specific knowledge TAs. The implicit agreement is that the universi…
> Funny aside, did you find my thesis? :D.
Not particularly, I gave that example because I was TAing that class last semester. Incidentally, it seems we have more in common than I thought!
> But I'm not, you are literally not paid for that (unless you are a research assistant).
This may be a difference in experience and expectation, but in my experience I've always seen graduate student salaries paid out to Ph.D. students employed by the university as an RA or a TA. If you are neither of those, then you do have to pay tuition to the university.
> That is, they are supplying you with a +50k benefit...
Which is another problem with not having a union -- the university unilaterally sets these price stickers without anyone challenging them, and then "waives" it and appearing generous. Without a union, MIT is free to inflate the sticker price of a graduate "education" by 20% a year, thus giving students a 20% raise every year while their life situations don't improve at all. The current student body had no mechanism to prevent it or challenge the administration on shady practices, but hopefully this will change with the union.
> The implicit agreement is that the university provides you with the training required to TA these classes in exchange for being a TA.
Finally, most Ph.D. students after their second year won't even take a class but are already TAing, so by your definition the necessary training is already complete; but they are indentured to work for far below market rate for the three years left on their Ph.D., because...?
Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
can't wait for company unions, where they band together to achieve their objectives
This already exists, in the form of various think tanks and lobbying organisations. Maybe that was the joke you were making though, I can't quite tell.
No I'm talking about things like Ford, GM, and Chrysler creating a group together to more effectively negotiate with the UAW. Together, they are strong!
Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize
#225I'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…
Its interesting that the people who create and encourage this system so fervently push for major social reforms and claim their social theories will create better societies.
Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize
#226Earlier 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.
It's "advising" in the same sense that you pay a gangster for "protection". Nice career trajectory you got here, but in a field like this one... shame if something bad happened to it...
That sounds like a reasonable parallel.
In the field of Machining most of our new folks come from one particular Community College that offers a Machine Shop with a few CNC machines.
The sole instructor was a friend and would give me heads up on excellent machinists.
Stanly retires and new instructor brought in.
Fast forward a year and a competing companies CEO now sits on board of college.
He gets all the heads ups from the new instructor and we are left with the slackers to hire..
Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize
#227US Universities have enormous overhead costs. And unfortunately the PhD students / post docs are paying with their blood and sweat for these. My advisor had to spit 150k to the university to have me as a student (including a 20k fee for lab usage, despite the fact my PhD was a theoretical one). From that 150k I was taking 22k - 3k of mandatory health insurance. I could barely make it given that I had to pay > 12k per…
It's mostly caused by the explosion of lifestyle inflation at universities. Rather than just providing an education and doing research they are now expected to be mental health counselors, promote "diversity" (aka we need more of certain skin colors over other skin colors), and make "democratic" decisions. In practice this means everything is filled with bureaucracy and you need to go through 5 committees and 3 vice chancellors before anything gets done.
Football and basketball are actually profitable at most R1 schools, even though the coaches make lots of money.
Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
lol I hope for the sake of your graduate students that your institution has a union. Your personality sounds exactly like the countless professors I've seen abuse their workers.
edit: sorry I'm just going to disengage from this, I feel trolled so that's that. If you want to interrogate my position, then maybe ask a question. No questions have been asked so an interrogation is not what's taking place here. Ranting about a third party not involved in the discussion here, who nobody knows, is completely different than writing a response to someone, attacking them directly, and calling into ques…
bruh you spent all of your first post writing a rant attacking one of your grad students don't act all high and mighty now
Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Can you expand on what regulations you feel are lacking [..] It's fundamentally wrong for one human (the PhD supervisor) to have so much unchecked power over another (the PhD student). Without changing how the entire system works, I'm not sure how you fix that by means of regulation.
> It's fundamentally wrong for one human (the PhD supervisor) to have so much unchecked power over another Why is this fundamentally wrong? Short of a truly equitable society (which I think most agree would be a dystopian nightmare), I don't see this as fixable. The problem is that the power is abused. The best way to fix this is high trust societies, not creating one more institution with a disproportionate amount o…
> Why is this fundamentally wrong?
It's the unchecked nature of the power.
Politicians have upcoming elections to worry about. Tenured professors ... what do they worry about?
Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
> To be clear, the net result was still higher pay overall , but not a lot. Then I don't understand your ambivalence. Who would complain about getting more money?
It's like class-action lawsuits: sure, maybe you get $2.43, but the lawyers are really the beneficiaries. The individual is just used to justify the whole thing.
No, the lawyer's job in a class action is to hold the someone accountable to prevent recurrences. They did a job, so they ought to be paid.
If some company habitually breaks the law and causes damages to a large group of people you can either pray that the Attorney General takes the case (but they won't, they want to advance their political career) or a law firm will take the case out of pure financial interest. I'll go with the law firm.