261–270 of 400 posts
In France, students and hipsters started similar protests. Horrible outcomes ever since, producing a lot of social, political and ultimately economical problems for the country for decades to come. Having lived in France, I shiver when I hear word “union.”
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The dynamics of academia really surprise me sometimes. When I think of "work", I think of two things: "work" (the actual day to day things you do) and "workplace" (the place your work at). In a traditional workplace, were always taught to value "workplace" over "work" and to never stay at a "workplace" for the "work". That is, if you have a crappy boss and toxic culture, working on a shiny greenfield project isn't go…
Yeah this is related to the reason I'm not sure how much a traditional union can really help here - "school" and "work" become blurred beyond distinction for many grad students. Anyone with funding from an RAship is both getting paid and making degree progress because of their work in the lab. Some items will be very clearly a lab duty and some will be very clearly for personal development, but a lot of time is also…
Where would this idea be originating? I think that would be one of the first things I would tackle, because anyone making a claim of academic freedom for grad students to just research whatever they want is spinning a tale. Students with this perception are being lied to, so we should first address the following disillusionment by dispelling the notion of academic freedom during Ph.D. research exists.
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It's mostly caused by the explosion of lifestyle inflation at universities. Rather than just providing an education and doing research they are now expected to be mental health counselors, promote "diversity" (aka we need more of certain skin colors over other skin colors), and make "democratic" decisions. In practice this means everything is filled with bureaucracy and you need to go through 5 committees and 3 vice…
How diversity has anything to do with institutional mismanagement. And no, US universities do not run as democracies. The appointed deans and the president run the show.
> US universities do not run as democracies. The appointed deans and the president run the show.
That's not really the case especially in public universities. If you want to make a change that might step on a lot of toes you need to get buy in from people. They aren't explicit democracies where everyone votes, but nonetheless you need to secure acceptance from people to get things done.
To give you an example of the useless bureaucracy, I once had to submit a reimbursement for some research expenses and was bounced around for several months between different forms and different people. Any 1 part of the reimbursement that didn't match the forms exactly meant the entire thing would be rejected. This was to access grant money that wasn't even the university's, it was the lab's. In corporate settings people don't give a shit and approve it as long as it looks legitimate.
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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…
It is amazing that unions get a legal monopoly in this manner, and it is not surprising that, with such rights, they fail their constituents, preferring to amass money and power for a corrupt leadership. Imagine a world with two or three unions per employer and you could actually pick which one you were under. They’d actually have incentives to deliver! But we’ll never have that because it means less lobbying money a…
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You write like the professors are just sitting around raking in the glory, but not doing anything while they let everyone else does the work. The reality is that professors tend to work just as hard as their grad students. I completely agree that academia is very disfunctional, but it actually affects all levels. I am familiar with many academics that work >60h a week every week, in fact I believe the most outrageous…
> You write like the professors are just sitting around raking in the glory, but not doing anything while they let everyone else does the work. I've worked at two major research universities in multiple labs. While this is not entirely true, it is more true than not. Professors work hard, but many are not working hard on the actual research work, especially once they have been tenured for a long time.
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Yeah this is related to the reason I'm not sure how much a traditional union can really help here - "school" and "work" become blurred beyond distinction for many grad students. Anyone with funding from an RAship is both getting paid and making degree progress because of their work in the lab. Some items will be very clearly a lab duty and some will be very clearly for personal development, but a lot of time is also…
> what they really feel ripped off on is the lack of academic freedom that was promised as part of this training Where would this idea be originating? I think that would be one of the first things I would tackle, because anyone making a claim of academic freedom for grad students to just research whatever they want is spinning a tale. Students with this perception are being lied to, so we should first address the fol…
Now, sure it is not absolute freedom because it is supervised and the funding was obtained for a specific project. Funding agencies or industrial sponsors don’t like it when the student does something completely different. But then students apply for specific projects. I have never seen any PhD offer that did not have a set perimeter (within which they do have some freedom), so I am not sure they are being lied to about that. Again, that might be context-dependent.
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…
On the other side of this equation, I think international students comprise a potent reservoir of strikebreakers.
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>Ground breaking research and great education isn't something that comes from working 80 hours a week (most of the time). is there much evidence for this claim? If one takes a look at the habits and biographies of groundbreaking researchers they all have one thing in common, they have dedicated virtually their entire time to work. Looking at countries with exceptional educational outcomes broadly you see the same thi…
> biographies of groundbreaking researchers they all have one thing in common, they have dedicated virtually their entire time to work. I'd argue that most ground breaking researchers had the benefit of researching their own ideas for prolonged periods. Putting in 40 hour a week on your own ideas for 10+ years is an awful lot of time. Many ground breaking researchers such as Feynman and Einstein had extended sabbatic…
The Nobel Prizes are still awarded to individuals but often only because that's how Nobel decided the prize had to work over a century ago. Prizes are most of the time awarded to the heads of research groups who's discoveries are made of the backs of dozens of researchers and graduates often working 80 hour weeks, and in some cases hundreds or thousands of technicians.
The only prize that regularly meets the lone genius researcher trope is when the physics prize is awarded to a theorist (partially since it can't go to the hundreds of physicists responsible for verifying the theory).
Newton could see so far from standing on the shoulders of giants, the modern researcher can see so far from standing on the pyramid of overworked untenured researchers.
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…
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.