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Stanford Graduate Students Won Their Union Vote

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Re: Stanford Graduate Students Won Their Union Vote

#151

Post by light_hue_1 »

ETH_start wrote: post #124
weakfish wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Source?

[flagged]

Or maybe, the fact that the overwhelming number of smart people working on making new ideas, new medications, making society better, are left wing is a really good indication that this is a much better approach?

It's amazing to me that it never occurs to people on the right that when the smartest people around all pretty much agree on reality they aren't actually wrong.

The right treats science just like antivaxers treat medicine. Doctors are evil. Until you get cancer and then the doctor does anything to your body to maybe make it better.

Let's hate all the academics and denounce them all the time, but wow, isn't it nice when another disease is cured, when my phone works better, when grandma lives for a few more years? Who do you think does the work to make sure that our fighters, bombs, drones are better than those of Russia or China? All the right wants is benefits that only the left can give them while hating us. Just like with doctors.

It's really intellectually dishonest. And I'm personally really tired of it.

Re: Stanford Graduate Students Won Their Union Vote

#152

Post by labcomputer »

frantzfanon wrote: post #24
xhkkffbf wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alas, I'm not sure a union can begin to fix anything except a few cosmetic things. The biggest problem is the massive oversupply of people who want academic careers versus the number of real jobs. The individual unions at the schools can't tackle this oversupply at all because it's caused by the schools acting independently. The natural game is to protect the insiders by restricting admission like many of the other u…

There is a vast oversupply of people who want academic careers vs. the number of currently-existing tenure track jobs . In most fields (CS is somewhat different since industry is so attractive, so often even teaching faculty receive tenure), almost all of the teaching is done by contract workers and adjuncts. So the need for labor is there, just not the funding to give everyone secure jobs. If public funding returned…

CS is rather unique in that regard (along with maybe economics and business, though to a lesser degree).

For everything else, the vast majority of incoming graduate students intend to get a job in academia and then "settle" for a high-paying job in the private sector that doesn't really use their skills.

> If public funding returned to higher levels and the number of tenure-track jobs was increased, then the oversupply would not be quite so bad.

This is unrealistic. You'd need to increase tenured faculty by at least an order of magnitude to soak up all the grad students currently being produced... But that doesn't even solve the problem because all those professors are going to want to do research, and they're going to want to have graduate research assistants. So now you have the same problem as before, but an order of magnitude bigger.

The only real solution is to reduce the number of PhDs produced over a professor's career from ~20 to ~2. Which of course means reducing the number of grad students.

> This is a sector-wide change that graduate worker unions could push for at each of their individual institutions, especially if they worked in tandem with the unions representing adjuncts

Universities will never go for this. You have to understand your counter-party's BANTA. This is like Brexit: If your position is that you want terms that are strictly worse for your counter-party than if you just don't exist... well then you're not going to get a deal.

Re: Stanford Graduate Students Won Their Union Vote

#153

Post by hayst4ck »

mlyle wrote: post #145
hayst4ck wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happens when there is no where left to move, or the cost of moving is too high? Solidarity, not freedom, is the opposite of tyranny. Neutrality and running away implicitly supports the injustice you are running away from. Flight-ing instead of fighting leaves those left behind to the wolves. Political change only happens once people are willing to put themselves at risk.

Not every battle is mine to fight. I've spent plenty of time tilting at windmills. But there are limits to how much effort I'll put in for collective good.

Your lack of solidarity for others means they will have a lack of solidarity for you.

The mindset guarantees your exhaustion, loss, and ultimately your oppression.

You don't have to fight the battle, but you should at least support those who self sacrifice and hold it in high regard and equally you should feel shame for running away.

Your privilege let you run away, but others aren't so lucky.

Re: Stanford Graduate Students Won Their Union Vote

#154

Post by ars »

uoaei wrote: post #132
ars wrote: post #106

How does a group of diverse people "win" a vote? Did the people who voted "no" also win? The person you vote for can win, sure, and you can win if your preference is the majority, but the group can't win or lose. i.e. this title doesn't make any sense - what did they actually vote for?

Are you familiar with the concept of democracy? This may seem like a tongue-in-cheek response, but I believe addressing this question in good faith will lead you to the answers you seek.

You didn't answer the question: Did the people who voted "no" also win the vote? And are they not part of the union?

Re: Stanford Graduate Students Won Their Union Vote

#155

Post by mlyle »

hayst4ck wrote: post #153
mlyle wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not every battle is mine to fight. I've spent plenty of time tilting at windmills. But there are limits to how much effort I'll put in for collective good.

Your lack of solidarity for others means they will have a lack of solidarity for you. The mindset guarantees your exhaustion, loss, and ultimately your oppression. You don't have to fight the battle, but you should at least support those who self sacrifice and hold it in high regard and equally you should feel shame for running away. Your privilege let you run away, but others aren't so lucky.

How do you know how much I've run away from compared to you?

Maybe it's been less.

But I sure don't stick around in every shitty situation hoping that I can turn it better with enough sweat of the brow and sufficient persuasion to others to play nice. Hopefully you don't, either.

The thread we're talking about is a classic tyranny of the majority situation: something that democracies handle poorly. If you're outnumbered by a large factor by people with drastically different interests than you, and it's going to be decided by voting, you're in for a bad time if you stick around.

Re: Stanford Graduate Students Won Their Union Vote

#156

Post by labcomputer »

maybelsyrup wrote: post #31
xhkkffbf wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alas, I'm not sure a union can begin to fix anything except a few cosmetic things. The biggest problem is the massive oversupply of people who want academic careers versus the number of real jobs. The individual unions at the schools can't tackle this oversupply at all because it's caused by the schools acting independently. The natural game is to protect the insiders by restricting admission like many of the other u…

> a few cosmetic things Show me someone who thinks a living wage and a boss who can’t overwork you anymore are cosmetic and I’ll show you a university administrator.

TAs aren't overworked, even without union representation. You'll never be asked to do more than an average of 20hrs/week, ever. You can always just refuse to sign the end-of-semester certification.

RAs are overworked, but unions can't do anything to help that. As a grad student, you need to publish papers, which means you need the cooperation of your advisor. If you bring a grievance or work to rule, there are a million innovative ways your advisor can sabotage you as retaliation.

They can let you pursue ideas that they know are not novel (and the papers will be rejected). Or suggest you try something they know won't pan out. Or run out of budget before ordering that $THING you need for your experiment. When you still haven't defended after ~8-10 years, the university's policies will automatically kick you out. Problem solved!

As for a living wage: I wasn't represented by a union in grad school, but all the commenters here who were have pointed out that their unions didn't fight for higher wages.

Re: Stanford Graduate Students Won Their Union Vote

#157

Post by labcomputer »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #26
Atreiden wrote: post #7

Good for them! Academia is a toxic and broken environment, and this seems like a great first step in fixing it. Interested to see how the dynamic plays out at Stanford, and if other American universities follow suit.

A first step, maybe, but far from enough to fix it. Toxic: That won't be fixed until they start firing tenured profs for abusing grad students. Nothing else will do. Broken: There's no route to professorship for most grad students, ever. We either need far bigger universities, or far fewer grad students.

> There's no route to professorship for most grad students, ever. We either need far bigger universities, or far fewer grad students.

What we really need is for professors to produce fewer PhDs over their career. When each professor produces 20 PhDs, you need an exponentially increasing number of professorships. That number needs to be closer to 2.

Re: Stanford Graduate Students Won Their Union Vote

#158

Post by PeterStuer »

CraigRo wrote: post #18

It was a disaster at Wisconsin. Union favored the 8th year humanities students at the expense of the 1 and 2 year STEM students, and traded cash for benefits that really only affected people with families. Stipends were the lowest in the country among major research universities, and the union refused to let wages rise for in-demand TAs, so a bunch of them went off and got private sector jobs instead, limiting the si…

This is a real issue. Graduate students are a very heterogenic bunch, with some study domains forfeiting very substantial wage and carreer opportunities by staying at university, and students in other fields have no or comparably very less lucrative prospects outside of academia.

Not differentiating these groups does have a real impact. (I was on the board of a university so had a first row seat to this)

Re: Stanford Graduate Students Won Their Union Vote

#159

Post by ETH_start »

light_hue_1 wrote: post #151
ETH_start wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Or maybe, the fact that the overwhelming number of smart people working on making new ideas, new medications, making society better, are left wing is a really good indication that this is a much better approach? It's amazing to me that it never occurs to people on the right that when the smartest people around all pretty much agree on reality they aren't actually wrong. The right treats science just like antivaxers t…

>>Or maybe, the fact that the overwhelming number of smart people working on making new ideas, new medications, making society better, are left wing is a really good indication that this is a much better approach?

Business owners are doing all of those things, and more than half of them are right wing. [1] The average Republican has a higher income than the average Democrat, and this is despite staunchly pro-Democrat voting blocs like public sector unions enjoying much higher income than the general population due to rent seeking. [2]

If intelligence led to left-wing views, then the business world would be totally left-wing, and higher income would be correlated with having left-wing views.

I believe the fact that academia is so overwhelmingly left-wing is explained by its alliance with government (coercive state power) and the typical effects of dogmatic groupthink that manifests whenever a group has a strong economic interest in a particular ideology becoming dominant.

>Let's hate all the academics and denounce them all the time, but wow, isn't it nice when another disease is cured, when my phone works better, when grandma lives for a few more years?

Academics contribute enormously to society, which is precisely why I so strongly denounce the corruption of academia by the financial conflict of interest and ideological groupthink created by ideologically rationalized union rent-seeking.

[1] https://www.americanexpress.com/en-us/business/trends-and-in...

[2] https://www.hoover.org/research/california-state-government-...

Re: Stanford Graduate Students Won Their Union Vote

#160

Post by LatteLazy »

CraigRo wrote: post #18

It was a disaster at Wisconsin. Union favored the 8th year humanities students at the expense of the 1 and 2 year STEM students, and traded cash for benefits that really only affected people with families. Stipends were the lowest in the country among major research universities, and the union refused to let wages rise for in-demand TAs, so a bunch of them went off and got private sector jobs instead, limiting the si…

Forming a union is one thing. Actually agreeing what to demand and getting it is another. That seems to be where these things break down. I watched the Amazon union go from popular and "more money, less crazy metrics, more toilet breaks" to "end racism in Amercia" and then no one wanted to risk their jobs to ask for the impossible...
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