121–130 of 265 posts
Unfortunately they were all pushed out...
I'm a bit confused - striking workers don't normally retain pay and benefits. I don't understand what would make graduate students any different? If they were being punished just for organizing or demonstrating it would probably be a different matter. But I think the University probably has good legal standing here to say "we're just not compensating them for work they didn't do".
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…
There is no good reason at all for society to accept and institutionalize the sense of entitlement that unionizing workers have. You don't get any moral right to extra-contractual benefits just because you agree to an employment contract. Almost all of the problems society has emanate from the ideological narratives of victimhood (e.g. the superficially plausible but fundamentally fallacious notion that parties with…
It's just a matter of bargaining power in the end. The, so called, fair negotiations you speak of.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right but they’re not suspending the benefit they’re cancelling it. If they pro-rated a portion of the tuition assistance as owed that would be defensible. But this is a rug-pull.
Where do you see that they are cancelling it? Nothing in the statement I see precludes Temple from paying the remission if the strike resolves in two weeks, well before the due date. Even if the strike goes on longer, and the tuition so due is not paid, the penalty is still relatively a minor; a fine, and inability to register for the following quarter (presumably Fall, over 7 months away).
Nothing precludes them from doing anything, and nothing precludes students from seeking legal remedies for those actions.
Look, I'm not sure. Temple might have a defensible claim for charging tuition; it's a really complicated situation and I wouldn't take advice from anyone who isn't an employment lawyer.
But the letter that Temple sent out is probably going to get Temple into some trouble for the reason identified by your parent comment.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
80% of their grad student labor is continuing to work.
According to a university official, with no explanation of how they came up with that number. Unions typically needs a certain percent of the vote to approve a strike. IMO — this will impact prospective students’ opinions towards the university for a longer time period than the strike.
> “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…
>"This decision is intended to benefit Temple the business, not the Temple the university." More and more it seems like academics are just a front for running a hedge fund - one that gets very favorite tax treatment. Growing the endowment is the most important thing in the minds of the leadership.
Matching tshirts and signs for a decent sized group aren't cheap. I see stuff like this often in protests. Who pays?
Graduate students are the “individual contributors” of academia. A Computer Science PhD student typically makes somewhere between $25K and $40K. At well-regarded universities, the bar is relatively high. Most of my office mates in Graduate School either had an FAANG/high-finance offer or actually did 1-2 years at one of those employers before starting their PhD program. Universities get skilled labor at a six figure discount. Professors are also comparatively under-paid.
Maintaining a productive university environment is not easy. They are delicate environments that can go sour very quickly under bad leadership. And when they go sour, everything grinds to a halt in a way that's difficult to see from the outside before it's way too late.
I serve very regularly on grant review panels both for my employer and for federal agencies. To be a bit blunt, I'll probably have a bit of a bias against especially junior Temple faculty... that might not be fair, but shrugs my priors about the quality of new Temple faculty and their ability to get good work done in Temple's environment have cratered watching this play out.
Hopefully someone in Temple's admin reads this.
As a father of a baby I wonder what higher education is going to be in 20 years time. I see a fairly long, gradual decline in prestige and effectiveness of universities - at least in the English speaking world - going back a couple of decades at this point. More bureaucratic, more corporate, filled with ever more political extremists. In my jurisdiction at least it's largely used as a pathway for migrants to get a pe…
I see a long and continuing decline of all of society in most English-speaking countries right now. I think in 50 years, English may still be the universal language of business and international commerce, but the Anglophone countries are going to be very different from now, probably collapsed and/or broken apart, and definitely not leading the world. They're certainly not a place I'd ever want to raise a child, especially America.