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MIT graduate students vote to unionize

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Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize

#341

Post by barry-cotter »

ModernMech wrote: post #255
logifail wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Tenured professors still have a job to do and they still have a boss (lots of bosses, as I said) We are apparently talking about very different kinds of professors at very different kinds of institutions. Unless he were to actually commit a crime, I don't think there is anything my ex-boss could have possibly done which could have ended up with him being removed from his post. He was simply too important to the ins…

It sounds like you got a raw deal by a powerful asshole, and are now painting with a broad brush. Not every professor has so much power as your former boss, so saying that the problem is that professors have too much unchecked power, and the fix would be to bring more oversight, is missing the mark. Because what happens when the person at the top of the new oversight pyramid is an asshole? You've got the same problem…

> A solution to this that you may like if you want more oversight may be to treat a research lab more like a corporation with a board of directors (I can hear the researchers recoiling) or some other governing body over the lab and the students itself. What do you think of that idea?

Rule by committee. So many examples of that working out great.

How about keeping the apprenticeship aspect just having more masters? One year of just comprehend exams, one year where you’re supposed to devote half your time to research with an advisor and half to comps, and three years where you work on six different projects with different advisors in six month chunks? Some of those will be written up as failures, but basically you end up with 3+ Master’s theses. That’s a great deal more love research academia than legal academia and they don’t seem to lack for scholarly work or impact.

Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize

#342

Post by [deleted] »

ModernMech wrote: post #176
logifail wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can you expand on what regulations you feel are lacking [..] It's fundamentally wrong for one human (the PhD supervisor) to have so much unchecked power over another (the PhD student). Without changing how the entire system works, I'm not sure how you fix that by means of regulation.

It's not really unchecked though. There's the department vice chair, department chair, the college dean, the dean of student affairs, a student senate, a faculty senate, etc. etc... there's a structure here for resolving grievances.

[deleted]

Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize

#343

Post by barry-cotter »

iudqnolq wrote: post #276
cabcalloway wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And again, since you’re making me belabor the question instead of answering the obvious one, what does that look like? Isn’t that more harmful to the student than the institution? Again: what is the leverage? I’m from a three generation UAW family, married into IBEW, and I was on the line at eight years old. I’m not exactly hearing about unions for the first time here. I’m also struggling to understand how they’re th…

Most large schools make most of their money charging undergrads tuition. A significant portion of undergrad instruction is done by grad students. If grad students stop teaching undergrads (or, as some have, keep teaching but stop issuing grades) the theory is undergrads and parents will threaten admin. This has worked in some cases.

That’s relevant to grad student/university relations. It has no bearing on “This one specific professor is a total power hungry asshole and the university loves them because they’re very research productive. You, on the other hand, are one more fungible grade student.”

Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize

#344

Post by CountHackulus »

downrightmike wrote: post #324
saltminer wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back when I worked as a tutor, we knew a lot about the professors since most of us were also TAs at some point or worked as TAs concurrently. Some were consistent in busting people for cheating, others tried to avoid it at all costs (because they based their self-worth on their Rate My Professor page), but a few were just capricious and arbitrary. On their good side? "Eh, everyone uses Stack Overflow [or forgets to d…

With code, as long as it works, so what. Plus learning a language requires copying to learn how to do it correctly. Would you want to be required to be completely original learning French? It makes no sense to burn people for doing what it took industry decades to figure out.

Because the goal of the assignment isn't to write code, it's to learn what code to write. If you're copy and pasting from someone else you're potentially skipping out on a lot of learning. Granted, good luck passing the exam with copy and paste, but I've seen someone do basically that for 5 years, don't know if they ever graduated but they were grinding it out.

Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize

#345

Post by skrtskrt »

changoplatanero wrote: post #297
jrochkind1 wrote: post #164

I was a graduate student with a research assistantship position at the University of Washington in the mid 2000s, a few years after they unionized and got a contract with the UAW. By the time I was there, even though it was only a few years after the union struggle, I didn't hear much about the union, at least in my department. But what I knew it meant was: we had good health insurance, we had a guaranteed minimum st…

I was also a grad student at the University of Washington and my feeling was that the union was a net-negative. I remember one time in particular when my advisor had an extra funding source for me but the union rules didn't allow her to hire me in that position. It's hard for me to understand why business the union has in inserting itself in between the relationship between me and my advisor. On top of that, the unio…

In general the presence of collective bargaining is going to limit the presence of the few best case employment scenarios, but with the advantage of preventing a lot of the really bad cases. It is a collectivist action after all.

Sure you didn’t get some advantage you could have gotten from a kind professor. But it protected many more people from abuse and low pay

Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize

#347

Post by ModernMech »

barry-cotter wrote: post #341
ModernMech wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like you got a raw deal by a powerful asshole, and are now painting with a broad brush. Not every professor has so much power as your former boss, so saying that the problem is that professors have too much unchecked power, and the fix would be to bring more oversight, is missing the mark. Because what happens when the person at the top of the new oversight pyramid is an asshole? You've got the same problem…

> A solution to this that you may like if you want more oversight may be to treat a research lab more like a corporation with a board of directors (I can hear the researchers recoiling) or some other governing body over the lab and the students itself. What do you think of that idea? Rule by committee. So many examples of that working out great. How about keeping the apprenticeship aspect just having more masters? On…

I like your idea a lot, but I don't think it could replace the Ph.D. proper. You really do need all that time on one project to make a dent in the state of the art sometimes. One year I spent an entire summer generating data for a single figure in my dissertation. That's part of the reason why it took me 8 years to graduate.

Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize

#348

Post by vorpalhex »

skrtskrt wrote: post #345
changoplatanero wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was also a grad student at the University of Washington and my feeling was that the union was a net-negative. I remember one time in particular when my advisor had an extra funding source for me but the union rules didn't allow her to hire me in that position. It's hard for me to understand why business the union has in inserting itself in between the relationship between me and my advisor. On top of that, the unio…

In general the presence of collective bargaining is going to limit the presence of the few best case employment scenarios, but with the advantage of preventing a lot of the really bad cases. It is a collectivist action after all. Sure you didn’t get some advantage you could have gotten from a kind professor. But it protected many more people from abuse and low pay

How did it protect other people? Who were those people? How much were they protected?
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