Solidarity Forever.
Whenever I read this, I think of some out of touch career academic who has never experienced the real world, yet knows exactly how the world should be, and can't wait to tell you.
MIT graduate students vote to unionize
251–260 of 400 posts
Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize
#252There's a rot in US academia ... ballooning costs, useless degrees that confer no perceivable boost in the job market, swollen bureaucracies. Unions might help one part of the ecosystem: the grad students, but it could also make overall reform harder.
I look at US Academia's complexities and it seems to me an easier approach to reform is to start from scratch via new institutions.
Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize
#253Earlier 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.
It doesn’t help, actually, because they were implicitly asking how a union will help specifically with that example. In corporations unions have the leverage of stopping work. What’s the leverage here? We’ll all stop pursuing our education…?
I guess the calculation is that the tuition hit would be leverage? Like what, is a union going to force a code of conduct for professors? How is it going to be enforced when it already exists and half of these comments are about it being ignored?
I don’t get the union solution here. The incentives are wrong. Particularly on the Ph.D. track, how would a union specifically help address illegal behavior to the extent that you just “HTH” it as the obvious answer?
Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 yo…
Aren't graduate students there in order to get credentials that help them land all those better jobs outside of academia? I think you're imputing hiring pressure that they're pursuing, not experiencing.
Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Tenured professors ... what do they worry about? Class assignments and number of classes taught per semester, teaching times and locations, class sizes, advising assignments, committee assignments, TA allocations, grader allocations, internal grants, withholding or revoking consulting permission, withholding internal department funding, lack of promotion (there is still a ladder after tenure), and most of all reput…
> Tenured professors still have a job to do and they still have a boss (lots of bosses, as I said) We are apparently talking about very different kinds of professors at very different kinds of institutions. Unless he were to actually commit a crime, I don't think there is anything my ex-boss could have possibly done which could have ended up with him being removed from his post. He was simply too important to the ins…
It sounds like you got a raw deal by a powerful asshole, and are now painting with a broad brush. Not every professor has so much power as your former boss, so saying that the problem is that professors have too much unchecked power, and the fix would be to bring more oversight, is missing the mark. Because what happens when the person at the top of the new oversight pyramid is an asshole? You've got the same problem, and the solution wouldn't be to again make sure he has more oversight.
> He was simply too important to the institution in terms of his reputation and his ability to attract external funding.
This reinforces my idea that you should always go with an advisor who doesn't have this kind of clout. Not that you should have known this ahead of time or you did anything wrong, but I have heard sad stories from large labs enough to be thankful for avoiding them in the past, and it's the advice I will pass on in the future.
I think if you wanted to get at the actual problem and a solution to it, I would say the problem is sad narcissistic jerks aiming to become kings of their research kingdoms, and then they act as tyrants when they get a hold of large sums of grant money. That may be the experience some people have had.
A solution to this that you may like if you want more oversight may be to treat a research lab more like a corporation with a board of directors (I can hear the researchers recoiling) or some other governing body over the lab and the students itself. What do you think of that idea?
Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unions are generally vehicles of resistance to illegal and/or oppressive actions. HTH.
It doesn’t help, actually, because they were implicitly asking how a union will help specifically with that example. In corporations unions have the leverage of stopping work. What’s the leverage here? We’ll all stop pursuing our education…? I guess the calculation is that the tuition hit would be leverage? Like what, is a union going to force a code of conduct for professors? How is it going to be enforced when it a…
Stopping work. Same as other unions.
Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize
#257I'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…
It is interesting that you used word 'gerontocracy', because it is the same word used by Thiel to describe current true owners of US financial system. I certainly do not disagree. I think some fresh blood is needed -- and not just in there or academia, but also on just about every political level.
I am personally kinda done with people, who don't understand basic technology. They should be retired. They should not have any real influence on what the current generation is doing.
Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
It doesn’t help, actually, because they were implicitly asking how a union will help specifically with that example. In corporations unions have the leverage of stopping work. What’s the leverage here? We’ll all stop pursuing our education…? I guess the calculation is that the tuition hit would be leverage? Like what, is a union going to force a code of conduct for professors? How is it going to be enforced when it a…
Stopping work. Same as other unions.
And again, since you’re making me belabor the question instead of answering the obvious one, what does that look like? Isn’t that more harmful to the student than the institution? Again: what is the leverage?
I’m from a three generation UAW family, married into IBEW, and I was on the line at eight years old. I’m not exactly hearing about unions for the first time here. I’m also struggling to understand how they’re the obvious answer to education problems shared in this thread, in your estimation. Think you can share 10 or, even, 20 words to help clarify?
Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize
#259Earlier 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.
The last thing you want to do late in the PhD process is get a new advisor. In many cases that is akin to starting over.
Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize
#260Good! The grad student system is incredibly broken. Grad students are basically slaves at worst or indentured servants at best. The worst part is the universitys all know this and dont care because the university gets massive benifits from having highly educated slaves producing intellectual property that can be sold and licensed. The grad student of course gets no benifit from this. Its like the work for exposure BS except worse because the student often has no alternative. Especially foreign students on tight immigration visa deadlines.
Thus doesnt even start to touch the IP subject where universities are public funded and have no right to the IP produced there in the first place...