As various lawyers have commented on Twitter, this seems like an insanely blatant violation of labor laws. Just a straight up written confession of illegal retaliation. Unless they have some obscure exemption that nobody else knows about, I cannot imagine how the university's legal counsel signed off on this.
There are reports from strikers trying to refill medication that the medical benefit suspension has already unilaterally gone into effect. The university has gone ahead with their threats in that regard (which is especially shitty since it's pretty standard in the US to give employees a health insurance grace period on termination). I am really confused about what the university thinks they're going to get out of the…
To be honest, I don't really get the point of the strike. The grad students are not only getting a free education, they're also getting paid a stipend on top of that. Grad students tend to have extremely flexible schedules, freedom to pursue their intellectual interests, the ability to attend seminars and travel to conferences, etc. At least in STEM fields, anyone in grad school probably could have gotten a higher-pa…
We possibly have encountered graduate students with differing lifestyles, but a lot of the grad students I know in the natural sciences have grueling schedules between taking classes, TAing, and conducting research. The way these activities are structured may not correspond to a typical 9-5 but they’re still intense in their own right. To add onto this - attending conferences isn’t always on the universities dime, often it comes out of grants and other associated project costs that are allotted for your research. Maybe the university does foot the bill in other cases, but these are marginal costs when compared to the realizable value brought by graduate students in the form of monetizable knowledge and subsidized teaching costs. The latter point is at the crux of most tension between graduate students and university administrations, and there’s a large imbalance between the tangible value that grad students (and most academic researchers) bring to universities and the way that they’re compensated.
But it is a business. We are not talking about a YouTube channel of lecturers, we are talking about an organization with 2.7 billion dollars of annual revenue.
Businesses have public relations. This is a bad look.
Given the high cost of tuition, are people really going to want to pay grad students higher salaries?
A lot of nice things in life require that someone make a low wage so they are affordable to you.
> “Any Temple employee that decides to strike forfeits their pay and complete benefits package,” explained Temple University senior vice president and chief operating officer Ken Kaiser. Here's the problem -- that's a business solution. This decision is intended to benefit Temple the business, not the Temple the university. The administration is too busy filing TPS reports to realize that they're curating something a…
But it is a business. We are not talking about a YouTube channel of lecturers, we are talking about an organization with 2.7 billion dollars of annual revenue.
An organization that is also supposed to be a non-profit and therefore focused on only using that money to fulfill its larger mission statement
> “Any Temple employee that decides to strike forfeits their pay and complete benefits package,” explained Temple University senior vice president and chief operating officer Ken Kaiser. Here's the problem -- that's a business solution. This decision is intended to benefit Temple the business, not the Temple the university. The administration is too busy filing TPS reports to realize that they're curating something a…
But it is a business. We are not talking about a YouTube channel of lecturers, we are talking about an organization with 2.7 billion dollars of annual revenue.
It is a business but arguably it should be more focused on education and community enrichment than pure profits.
Not everything in life needs to be focused on profit.
Yup - a relative of mine has been an associate professor there for fourteen years. Giving out tenure is something I'm pretty sure they'll only do if they're backed into a corner.
Associate professors are typically tenured. Did you mean assistant professor?
Typically. Not always.
Some institutions/departments will promote to associate without tenure. At those same places, they'll typically let you stick around for quite a while as long as you keep bringing in the money. In every field there are at least a few departments that are notoriously stingy with tenure.
To be honest, I don't really get the point of the strike. The grad students are not only getting a free education, they're also getting paid a stipend on top of that. Grad students tend to have extremely flexible schedules, freedom to pursue their intellectual interests, the ability to attend seminars and travel to conferences, etc. At least in STEM fields, anyone in grad school probably could have gotten a higher-pa…
Who is going to teach anyone in your equation, if everything was about money there wouldn't be professors to educate the STEM majors. There is more to building a society than balancing the checkbooks.
Yup - a relative of mine has been an associate professor there for fourteen years. Giving out tenure is something I'm pretty sure they'll only do if they're backed into a corner.
Associate professors are typically tenured. Did you mean assistant professor?
No, they are an associate professor - although I may have misspoken about tenure, I am not certain about their status. I was under the assumption that associate professors weren't covered to the same extent.
Yes, but if you were a grad student your W-2 almost certainly didn't include your tuition rebate as part of your total income. And the university sure as hell didn't pay taxes on it.
But it is a business. We are not talking about a YouTube channel of lecturers, we are talking about an organization with 2.7 billion dollars of annual revenue.
It is a business but arguably it should be more focused on education and community enrichment than pure profits. Not everything in life needs to be focused on profit.
It's far easier to optimize for profit then theoretical ideals. The issue here isn't that they are optimizing for profit, the issue is that incentives have put that pursuit at odds with the university's core mission (education/community), as opposed to keeping it aligned with it.
Pursuit of profit should keep you accountable for the services you provide, not detract from them.