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MIT graduate students vote to unionize

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Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize

#101

Post by ModernMech »

temp234 wrote: post #92
otachack wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is f*cked up and I hope people that dropped grad careers chime in in the future about situations like this, especially when more unions pop up.

There are so many horror stories about academia waiting to come out. The way vulnerable people are exploited and mistreated in what is, in fact, a work environment; moral hazards and conflicts of interest everywhere; lots of untrustworthy research results and inability to reproduce research. Universities are big business and ought to be regulated just as much as any other big business

Can you expand on what regulations you feel are lacking and how you'd like to see them implemented?

Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize

#102

Post by IMTDb »

bjourne wrote: post #75
karaterobot wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Half the reason I'm ambivalent about unionization is that I was involved with the graduate student union when I was in school. The nominal reason for it was to improve working conditions and pay for grad students. In practice, it improved very little, and added a modest amount of overhead, in the form of a union apparatus which fed itself by taking a little bite out of those paychecks every month. To be clear, the ne…

> 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?

Because it probably cost a lot more to the institution than it brought to the intended target. A middleman takes the bulk of the additional investment, without providing that much value in itself.

And that money came from somewhere, probably partly from profits, but also from other investments (buildings, teaching material, ...). Overall teacher got a little bit more, but both the org and the students lost a lot, comparatively.

Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize

#103

Post by ModernMech »

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…

> 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 years. Most 22 year olds coming out of undergrad into a PhD program are not doing what you would consider publishable research for a number of years, and what work they do is usually heavily based on a foundation of research that was laid to get funding in the first place (usually by the professor), based on ideas that have been thought of and refined over a number of an entire research career (not by the grad student doing the "actual work"). Grad students may have great technical ability, but they have next to 0 research sense and ability. As I said, doing research is so much more than the technical aspects and writing the paper.

Grad students love to feel like since they got a paper published, that they are 100% responsible for what happened in that paper, and I just have to ask: where were you 2 years ago when I was up at 4am finalizing the Nth draft of the grant application, based on research that I have been working on since 6 years before that? Oh, you were partying, drunk off your ass at a frat in undergrad, and when I started this research project you were learning your times tables. So tell me again how you're 100% responsible for the results here, and I'm just taking credit for all you have done on your own?

Sorry if you haven't noticed this post has turned into a rant at someone I have in mind, not at you. But I just needed to say this.

Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize

#104

Post by bjt2n3904 »

I remember when I was in graduate school doing engineering, a union rep wandered into my lab to try and sell me on the idea.

I got into the program because I was the best at what I did. It paid for tuition, medical, and a little extra on top.

And this guy wanted to tell me that I didn't have it good enough, and I could have it better if he became a middleman? And that my program director was "greedy" and keeping all the fat for himself?

I asked him what program he was in, he wasn't even a student at the University. Asked him what he got his degree in, and he told me some nonsense non-STEM degree.

He was a worthless parasite, with no marketable skills but to leech off what other students worked for. I told him in no uncertain terms to get out of the lab, and if he ever came back I'd call campus police on him.

Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize

#105

Post by g_p »

canjobear wrote: post #90
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…

> They win a grant, but the actual research work is then done by postdoctoral researchers and grad students. They do the actual work, write it up, and pretty much everything else. In this scenario, which does happen but is not the only way it works, the convention is that the student or postdoc is first author and the advisor is final author on the paper. That seems fair to me.

Order of authorship is quite dependent on discipline - in comp sci and engineering the convention is as you say. In other fields they prefer alphabetical order or other orders, as I understand.

Some journals have started requiring specific disclosures of activities that each individual carried out.

Interestingly for some of the professors, some publications' ethics codes don't consider merely obtaining funding as meeting the requirements for authorship of a paper. Of course they'll claim other activities, but a quick review of the papers and input they claim to have made will likely give rise to probable doubt. There's a few papers looking at "prolific authorship" in different disciplines.

Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize

#106

Post by lolinder »

lettergram wrote: post #35

I can’t imagine this actually producing better results long-term. Unions objectives are to limit competition amongst relative parties in order to combat the higher authority/ employer. The purpose of graduate school is to put compete your peers. What this will likely lead to IMO is more “equity” among the less capable (grants, funding, etc) which will reduce the opportunity for meritocracy and more capable (while ass…

> The purpose of graduate school is to put compete your peers.

This is what's wrong with higher education today. School should never be about competition, it should be about education. Graduate students in particular aren't supposed to be competing, they're supposed to be contributing to the body of human knowledge under the guidance of more experienced contributors.

Any competition that exists is the result of either a severely misguided but sincere effort to increase productivity or of a cynical and deliberate attempt to manipulate vulnerable young students into providing free labor. Countering both of these cases is exactly why MIT students want a union.

Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize

#107

Post by light_hue_1 »

jasode wrote: post #68
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…

>Arguments against unionization from already tenured faculty usually sound like: An argument against a union at MIT came from un-tenured graduate student Kevin Wang : https://thetech.com/2021/10/21/why-we-do-not-need-a-gsu TLDR: he didn't think paying the 1.44% annual union dues (~$620/year) is going to be worth it. He based this on comparing MIT salary increase history to other universities with and without unions.…

Kevin's entire argument made zero sense. And thank God everyone worked so hard to convince people not to listen to him. Stipend increases are a function of places like NIH who set a lot of people's stipends. The union can and does get benefits in many other places. Like healthcare, better mental health services (which are bad at MIT), stipend increases for the lowest paid students, limits on how much you work as a TA, etc.

He gives Columbia as an example. The new Columbia contract is great! https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/01/07/columbia... $100 million in extra spending for students over the next 4 years.

> The 34% have various reasons to not join a union but I think we can guess that many of them think the $620/year salary deductions will not be worth whatever benefits the union can negotiate.

Well.. they are wrong.

If you look at unions like University of Michigan or University of Toronto the healthcare benefits they get compared to MIT are worth more than $620/year. The MIT grad student healthcare plan is very bad and expensive. And the working conditions as a TA are not good compared to other places. You have very few protections as a TA. For example, I know someone who was forced to teach an extra section for no additional pay, because another TA had to leave for medical reasons. That's totally unacceptable and would never fly at UMich or UofT.

Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize

#108

Post by rr808 »

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…

> In practice it's more of a gerontocracy

Right, unionization will just make this worse. Protect the insiders, those already with jobs.

Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize

#109

Post by sheikheddy »

exdsq wrote: post #88
lettergram wrote: post #35

I can’t imagine this actually producing better results long-term. Unions objectives are to limit competition amongst relative parties in order to combat the higher authority/ employer. The purpose of graduate school is to put compete your peers. What this will likely lead to IMO is more “equity” among the less capable (grants, funding, etc) which will reduce the opportunity for meritocracy and more capable (while ass…

My wife’s very recent PhD experience at Oxford was a little crunch time around conferences, a nice 20/25 hour week, and enough spare time to row with the Oxford Uni boat team. She stayed a year as a postdoc and it was much the same. She’s now a postdoc at Stanford and she’s working 16 hour days, weekends, and very stressed for it. Academic output is the same - it’s just different work culture. I know this is about Ph…

Stanford is notorious for "duck syndrome". People are calm on the surface but are always paddling below the water. I would say the CS papers out of Stanford tend to be nicer than the ones out of Oxford though, at least for Systems research. (This is a huge generalization: I don't read every paper and there's enough variation between authors that it doesn't really make sense to do a cross-institution comparison, but this is only my half-formed intuition).

Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize

#110

Post by g_p »

amitport wrote: post #60
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…

If a professor is only taking credit for underlings' work he / she will, at some point, stop getting good students...

In theory this should be true, although the information asymmetries involved (especially for international students who go based on citations or notable papers or "reputation") mean that it can be hard to lose the flow of good students.

Ultimately if they are a tenured prof and can keep winning grants, they can offer postdoc and postgrad contracts, and that is effectively the only internal currency that matters for a student that needs to find a postgrad position.

With a limited number of chairs, it's hard for someone else to get a "rival" chair post and then compete internally, to give students the choice (which you'd get in a free market). If the institution has a good reputation, they'll likely have a flow of willing students regardless of how they act.

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