The most important thing we must be teaching undergrads is to avoid grad school like a plague that it is which will suck everything out of you and leave you begging on the streets.
MIT graduate students vote to unionize
331–340 of 400 posts
Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize
#332I'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…
> 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 once read a theory, I think it was in the book "At Home: A Short History of Private Life" by Bill Bryson, based on an observation (the accuracy of which I can't confirm or deny, some of the things in the book stretched credulity) that a surprising number of inventions in England were made by rural clergymen. The theory went that these people were usually the well-educated sons of wealthy families, who were parked in some small village that needed a priest, where they had almost no responsibilities apart from occasionally holding mass (they didn't really need to prepare sermons themselves, they could just buy a big book of sermons every now and then and read from that). So they lived lives of leisure and relative luxury, and some of them took an interest in science and technology and actually advanced the fields they got interested in.
The core idea behind academia is probably based on a similar observation: there's a small set of people who will do amazing things if you just let them figure things out without setting goals for them or applying pressure on them to produce something specific, so let's just give these people a decent wage and leave them to their business. But identifying who is a good candidate for such an arrangement isn't easy. In the days of the rural clergymen, this was essentially left to chance (after a basic intelligence filter of having to study to enter the clergy). We don't want to leave it to chance, so we set all kinds of goals and metrics to identify good candidates. But these metrics can be gamed, and for some academics gaming the metrics essentially is their job.
Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize
#333Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They do the actual work Used to think this as a grad student. Now as a professor I see how naïve this attitude is. There is so much work beyond what grad students are tasked with including getting research funded, staffed, and results out the door. Grad students are cogs in a research machine, cogs that need to constantly be readjusted and recalibrated because they are quite green (sorry, it's true) for a number of…
I’m sorry, but you sound like a terrible, patronizing advisor; anyone who views their students as “cogs in the machine” is someone I would not want to work with. Yes, professors work hard, but let’s not kid ourselves that they’re involved with the nitty-gritty research work. You just sound like someone who’s bitter at young people.
>I’m sorry, but you sound like a terrible, patronizing advisor; anyone who views their students as “cogs in the machine” is someone I would not want to work with.
He pointed to the state of affairs, not how he treats them. Understand?
Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize
#334Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 th…
Most large schools make most of their money charging undergrads tuition. A significant portion of undergrad instruction is done by grad students. If grad students stop teaching undergrads (or, as some have, keep teaching but stop issuing grades) the theory is undergrads and parents will threaten admin. This has worked in some cases.
That's the theory, anyway. If you want to take a crack at steel-manning this particular case, I've replied upthread with a fuller breakdown of the politics of why the union almost certainly won't do a lick of good
Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize
#335The most important thing we must be teaching undergrads is to avoid grad school like a plague that it is which will suck everything out of you and leave you begging on the streets.
Meanwhile in a different country I got basically paid to go to grad school.
The already low yearly fees were discounted for good grades and jobs for students are provided to help with living expenses.
Ended grad school positive on my bank account, loved studying what I studied (distributed systems).
The US school system has some upsides, but the whole student debt thing is pretty F’d up.
Edit: spelling
Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize
#336Earlier quoted context omitted.
You had an unusually positive experience with UAW. They own the UC system contract, and negotiated pay caps, lowering grad student pay on some campuses. They also negotiated to discontine coverage for various women's health issues. Just before COVID, UC Santa Cruz went on a wildcat strike because the union negotiated pay for that campus below the cost of living. A bunch of foreign students lost their visas as a resul…
Your comment doesn't make sense to me. > the union negotiated pay for that campus below the cost of living ...and the graduate student workers voted to approve the contract? Every negotiated contract goes back to the members for approval. What would this have looked like in the absence of a union? You are saying that with negotiation, UC Santa Cruz got pay below cost of living, but if they didn't have that negotiatio…
UAW set it up so that the entire UC system votes on these contracts. This leads to situations where you have large student protests at union meetings followed by students at other campuses voting to ratify the contract, and then entire campuses holding unauthorized strikes in protest of the contract they just "voted for".
If things were department wide, or even campus wide, the UAW wouldn't last a year in the departments I'm familiar with.
Instead, what you're proposing would require a statewide campaign against one of the most powerful political groups in California. The UAW is well aware of this, and has no incentive to act in its members' interest.
Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize
#337Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except in general people from other countries may be more amenable to union organizing and joining, since they often come from cultures where unions are viewed more positively than in the US, and where more of the workforce is unionized, and may possibly even have experience themselves with unions, or else have family members who do -- or if not with unions, with other kinds of collective political action of sorts th…
Speaking from my personal experience - which includes involvement in unionization drives, that has never been true. I think this is supported by the evidence. Maybe if you're talking about immigrants from Western Europe. Otherwise, no.
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Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize
#338Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is probably very context-dependent. I have supervised PhD students at a top British university and 2 European research institutes, and usually the students had some freedom within the bounds of the project they chose initially. That’s how it should be: you want students to develop some initiative and they are not here just to follow instructions. Now, sure it is not absolute freedom because it is supervised and…
I am a current PhD student in a CS-related field. My advisors had strict requirements for my first project, but now on my second project I have complete freedom. This was my personal choice, my advisors were/are willing to give me projects, but I wanted to learn how to take a research project from idea to finish. Obviously, CS (and my school) is extremely well funded, so this may be unique.
I think CS has pretty different dynamics than most fields for a few reasons. CS is really well positioned when it comes to both funding received and average funding required to do a project. Similarly, the time required for set up of CS work can often be minimized in a way that is not possible for many natural sciences. And culturally people seem less attached to old school academic status - CS has many viable and relevant career paths for someone that wants to exit academia, some of which even allow for fairly easy reentry to a university position.
Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize
#339I was a graduate student with a research assistantship position at the University of Washington in the mid 2000s, a few years after they unionized and got a contract with the UAW. By the time I was there, even though it was only a few years after the union struggle, I didn't hear much about the union, at least in my department. But what I knew it meant was: we had good health insurance, we had a guaranteed minimum st…
I have 7 close friends that graduated with CS PhDs from UW in recent years, and they all feel positively about the union.
Here's a table from the union comparing before and after unionization in 2004: https://www.uaw4121.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/UW-ASE-Be...
Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize
#340Earlier 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 is definitely abusive, but it's not clear how a union would go about solving this? The CBA could prohibit it (but it's already against policy) or the union could file a grievance (students could already do this), but nothing really prevents this from happening with a union. I don't even think the union has jurisdiction over "academic" matters like graduation. The Harvard CBA explicitly points out that academic m…
Yeah, unions can usefully do things where they’re negotiating with the university over e.g. pay or benefits but a supervisor? How?
Outside of “My daddy arranged a new chair so I could get in here.” students have ~0 leverage. Academia is feudal, at least in fields based on Ph.D.s. Your supervisor can make it impossible for you to graduate at any time with minimal impact for them. If you graduate and they don’t want you to get an academic job you won’t. That’s what letters of recommendation are for, just with the usual justification flipped.
This isn’t a necessary part of academia. Law and medicine don’t work that way because their terminal degrees are Master’s degrees with elephantiasis. But absent getting rid of PhDs or changing them so radically you might as well change the name the power imbalance isn’t going anywhere.