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MIT graduate students vote to unionize

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Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize

#351

Post by macintux »

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.

> With code, as long as it works, so what.

Working as a lab instructor a lifetime ago, I graded two students' C assignments that both worked (mostly) but clearly without understanding what was going on.

It took me a while to figure out how they worked; as it turned out, they declared the same variables at the top of each function in the same order.

They didn't have globals, they weren't passing values around: the stack was being allocated across the same memory for each function, so the variables "just worked."

Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize

#352

Post by blagie »

whatever1 wrote: post #241
ceeplusplus wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Diversity is fundamentally the antithesis of elite schools. The goal of elite schools is to be exclusive. "Inclusive" and "exclusive" are antonyms.

Elite schools artificially limit supply for brand management. There are incredibly complex politics which govern who is admitted, balancing:

- Intellect, since that improves brand

- Connections to power, since that improves brand (e.g. George Bush Jr)

- Appearances of diversity (e.g. having lots of skin colors), since the opposite hurts brand

- Donations

- Athletics, since that gives visibility and improves brand

... and so on.

A lot of this is about mixing the rich/powerful with the brilliant. The former look brilliant by association. The latter gain connections to wealth and power.

Diversity consultants are one piece of the corrupt equation.

The alternative is a university ecosystem which doesn't label everyone with university brand stamps, and aims to provide a quality education to everyone. There are countries with those, and they do well. Even taking other cultures out of the equation, Canada is much closer to that ideal than the US, as is continental Europe.

Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize

#353

Post by jltsiren »

cycomanic wrote: post #142
timkam wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Sweden, students and graduate students are well-organized/unionized, but the situation for PostDocs and other post-doctoral fixed-term employed academics is dire nonetheless, in particular for immigrants, for whom the fixed-term contracts cause problems with their residence permits, considering recent changes in immigration laws.

And recent changes by the government have actually made it worse. The irony is that the unions have been campaigning for these changes. It's really weird how unions think that requiring that postdocs must get a permanent position after 4 years would somehow lead to them getting those positions, while there is no more funding from the government, so no permanent positions are being created. I mean in our department ac…

It's not weird at all, considering where the unions are coming from. This is from Finland and from 10+ years ago, but from what I remember, the Swedish way of thinking was similar.

According to the spirit of the law, all jobs are permanent by default. Fixed-term positions require a valid reason. A project (such as completing a PhD) is a valid reason. The availability of funding is not. While an externally funded research project could be considered a project, it's reasonable to assume that someone in the university will apply for funding for similar research in the future. Because someone is planning to continue similar projects in the future, the need for that particular externally funded researcher does not end when the initial grant runs out. And even if those applications fail, the university still has other money for paying the salary. The employment should continue until the university decides to reduce the number of people doing that kind of research permanently.

In principle, it should be categorically illegal to hire fixed-term postdocs, but the academia does not work like that. Because the union is a union first and a representative of specific people only after that, it's extremely unwilling to let go of the "all jobs are permanent by default" principle. There must be a compromise that allows the international standard practice of hiring postdocs for a few years without letting the employer to chain fixed-term positions indefinitely. Whether 4 years is a good compromise is debatable, but it's easy to see why a union would want something like that.

Also, from a Finnish perspective, Sweden has a reputation as a country where it's relatively easy to get a permanent academic position.

Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize

#354

Post by dotnet00 »

ModernMech wrote: post #103
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…

I was with you until that rant in the second paragraph, it's pretty insulting to treat your grad students as if they must've spent their time partying.

Being as green as grad students are, it's entirely understandable for them to feel good about themselves about their first publication, especially when you also consider the problem of imposter syndrome. Working on my first publication, getting feedback on drafts, finalizing results etc has been a big confidence booster when working directly with people who've been doing research longer than I've been alive.

Then again, I understand the work the advisor/professor has done to set things up for me (was even surprised that I'm supposed to be the lead author despite being under their supervision) and my advisor is always pretty clear on matters relating to credit, often even more than I expect. So perhaps I just haven't seen the sort of friction leading to your rant.

Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize

#355

Post by barry-cotter »

ModernMech wrote: post #347
barry-cotter wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It wasn’t always like that in the US. Three year doctorates are still a thing in the UK and in Germany. Lower the standards for a doctorate and make a postdoc a formal necessity for a job as a professor, rather than not formally being one but practically so. You can even call it a habilitation, like the Germans do. If you want a doctorate go for it. If you want to teach at university after you get your doctorate you need to basically do another one, but it’s called a habilitation.

Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize

#356

Post by foobarian »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #309
kergonath wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is probably very context-dependent. I have supervised PhD students at a top British university and 2 European research institutes, and usually the students had some freedom within the bounds of the project they chose initially. That’s how it should be: you want students to develop some initiative and they are not here just to follow instructions. Now, sure it is not absolute freedom because it is supervised and…

Maybe it was somewhat unique, but when I received my offer to become a PhD student at EMBL in 1986, I wrote my own PhD proposal that was completely unrelated to any work that my supervisor was doing, and only very loosely connected to the work that anyone else was doing at EMBL at that time. However, the funding of EMBL works fairly differently from most universities, and quite a few other research institutes.

The funding makes a huge difference. A student that the advisor doesn't have to fund that has initiative and workable ideas will only require occasional face time. To top it off, the ones I've seen that were like this were usually more senior, coming from some experience usually in the industry, and as a result more savvy; therefore they knew what leverage they had and were able to walk away from bad situations. But an RA that gets paid out of grant money will have a lot less leverage.

Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize

#357

Post by nextos »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #309
kergonath wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is probably very context-dependent. I have supervised PhD students at a top British university and 2 European research institutes, and usually the students had some freedom within the bounds of the project they chose initially. That’s how it should be: you want students to develop some initiative and they are not here just to follow instructions. Now, sure it is not absolute freedom because it is supervised and…

Maybe it was somewhat unique, but when I received my offer to become a PhD student at EMBL in 1986, I wrote my own PhD proposal that was completely unrelated to any work that my supervisor was doing, and only very loosely connected to the work that anyone else was doing at EMBL at that time. However, the funding of EMBL works fairly differently from most universities, and quite a few other research institutes.

IMHO this is the way to go. Students like these tend to have freedom to choose whatever advisor they want. For example, in Cambridge self-funded students typically do rotations to see how labs look like.

This minimizes the possibility of ending up with a bully or someone incompetent. And if you do, it's much easier to run away to a different group.

Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize

#358

Post by ModernMech »

dotnet00 wrote: post #354
ModernMech wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I was with you until that rant in the second paragraph, it's pretty insulting to treat your grad students as if they must've spent their time partying. Being as green as grad students are, it's entirely understandable for them to feel good about themselves about their first publication, especially when you also consider the problem of imposter syndrome. Working on my first publication, getting feedback on drafts, fin…

> it's pretty insulting to treat your grad students as if they must've spent their time partying.

Sorry I thought I was clear I had gone of on a tangent with someone in particular in mind. That wasn't literally directed at all grad students.

Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize

#359

Post by [deleted] »

throw_m239339 wrote: post #321
whatever1 wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> How diversity has anything to do with institutional mismanagement. Someone needs to pay for all these useless "diversity" consultants, and they aren't cheap.

[deleted]

Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize

#360

Post by s1artibartfast »

ProjectArcturis wrote: post #97
bombcar wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It IS interesting to note that if most unions went dues-optional they'd starve from lack of money. If their members were really convinced of the value that tragedy of the commons wouldn't occur.

No, it's because if dues were optional, the only game-theory-efficient outcome is that no one pays dues.

If dues are mandatory, The only game-theory-efficient outcome is that the union takes as much money as possible and provides as little benefit as possible.
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