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MIT graduate students vote to unionize

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Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize

#381

Post by Fomite »

logifail wrote: post #229
rajin444 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's fundamentally wrong for one human (the PhD supervisor) to have so much unchecked power over another Why is this fundamentally wrong? Short of a truly equitable society (which I think most agree would be a dystopian nightmare), I don't see this as fixable. The problem is that the power is abused. The best way to fix this is high trust societies, not creating one more institution with a disproportionate amount o…

> Why is this fundamentally wrong? It's the unchecked nature of the power. Politicians have upcoming elections to worry about. Tenured professors ... what do they worry about?

Tenured professor here:

- Promotion. Tenure is awesome, yes, but there are two full academic ranks at my institution above associate professor with tenure, and if I want them, I need to continue to do the same things that got me tenure. Graduate students, get grants, publish papers, etc.

There's also further ambitions like chair, dean, etc. that are often literally elections.

- Internal allocation of resources. Will one of my students be my department's choice for a fellowship? If there's a space crunch (there's always a space crunch) can I get the space I want? If there's internal funds to help support pilot projects or the like, am I on the short list for those?

- Reputation. This is important to me. I want it to be known that "my lab" turns out good people. And that we do good work. This is not only actually a criteria for promotion, but also something I want (I didn't go into academia for the money). It's what gets you invited to things I want to be invited to.

This also includes things like whisper networks. Students warn other students.

- Grants. A number of grants look at things like mentorship and students.

Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize

#382

Post by Fomite »

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…

This would require revisiting a lot of things - it basically assumes that all projects can be broken down into one-year, coherent and publishable chunks. I love Masters students, but they are often not the most productive, as they rarely get to wade really deeply into a project, and almost never get to develop a project of their own.

Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize

#383

Post by Fomite »

ModernMech wrote: post #299
Ar-Curunir wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I’m sure you know, Most PhD students stop taking classes by the end of the 2nd year, and focus entirely on research and teaching thereafter, which means that the “free tuition part” is just a sham to avoid classifying PhD students as workers, and to hence avoid paying them for their labour.

As a grad student you are there for an education and your education doesn't only (or even mostly) happen in the classroom. If grad students want to be treated more like employees and less like students, the relationship between student/advisor will shift more toward an employee/employer relationship. This may result in more pay but it will also result in different expectations. For example, if you want to be treated…

This.

My indulgence for "I spent three months going down this rabbit hole because it might have proved interesting" is way hired for graduate students than it would be for research staff, because that's part of them being students.

Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize

#384

Post by patrick451 »

rajin444 wrote: post #214
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 fundamentally wrong for one human (the PhD supervisor) to have so much unchecked power over another Why is this fundamentally wrong? Short of a truly equitable society (which I think most agree would be a dystopian nightmare), I don't see this as fixable. The problem is that the power is abused. The best way to fix this is high trust societies, not creating one more institution with a disproportionate amount o…

You can't have power exist and expect it to not get abused.

But this problem is totally fixable. We need to reduce the role that the advisor plays. Grad students should be able to switch labs and universities like most people switch jobs. Once they publish some set number of papers, they get a PhD. No thesis, no committee. The advisor basically is demoted to a fungible manager.

Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize

#385

Post by Fomite »

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…

The grant that covers the largest portion of my salary doesn't even have grad students on it.

Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize

#386

Post by Fomite »

Ar-Curunir wrote: post #270
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’m sorry, but you sound like a terrible, patronizing advisor; anyone who views their students as “cogs in the machine” is someone I would not want to work with. 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.

"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."

This week I've:

- Worked on a research grant that doesn't have any students on it, so who else is doing the "nitty gritty research work"?

- Gone through a student's research code line-by-line to try to hunt down a particularly pernicious bug.

- Done a ton of data wrangling for another project to minimize the number of hands currently using a restricted-access server.

If the parent poster is painting with an overly broad brush, so are you.

Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize

#387

Post by ModernMech »

patrick451 wrote: post #384
rajin444 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's fundamentally wrong for one human (the PhD supervisor) to have so much unchecked power over another Why is this fundamentally wrong? Short of a truly equitable society (which I think most agree would be a dystopian nightmare), I don't see this as fixable. The problem is that the power is abused. The best way to fix this is high trust societies, not creating one more institution with a disproportionate amount o…

You can't have power exist and expect it to not get abused. But this problem is totally fixable. We need to reduce the role that the advisor plays. Grad students should be able to switch labs and universities like most people switch jobs. Once they publish some set number of papers, they get a PhD. No thesis, no committee. The advisor basically is demoted to a fungible manager.

> Grad students should be able to switch labs and universities like most people switch jobs.

Maybe this fixes the problem of abusive professors wielding their power in wrong ways, but it creates new problems as well. For instance, it shifts the very nature of a Ph.D. from a deep exploration of a single topic to shallow explorations of many topics. If you tell me I need 4 papers to get a Ph.D., I'm going to get 4 papers from the easiest venues on the most shallow of topics, because why go any deeper?

And are these solo author papers? What if you were 1 author out of 30 on one paper, and 1 author out of 2 on another? Are each of those 1 paper credit?

Do paper credits transfer between universities? Do some schools require more papers than others? Who gets to decide? Do some disciplines require more papers than others? Again who gets to decide? What about journal papers versus conference papers versus workshop papers? Do presentations count? Do poster sessions count?

If you are in my lab and I've spent time and money training you, what's my recourse if you just quit on me to join another lab?

Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize

#388

Post by diordiderot »

aidenn0 wrote: post #372
nautilius wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what's this 'road' in your analogy that was installed by the union, that wasn't there before, and that introduced a lot of utility, comparable to a road?

The implication in the comment I was replying to was that if people see the value in something, they will voluntarily contribute to its maintenance. The fact that many workers would not pay optional dues does not prove that the workers don't see value in the union. Obviously the purported value of a union is in the ability to collectively bargain on behalf of its members (and to provide tangible support for workers p…

It's a hilarious tragedy that the person you're responding to has the definition of 'tragedy of the commons' backwards in their mind

Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize

#389

Post by diordiderot »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #360
ProjectArcturis wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So a business

Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize

#390

Post by jl2718 »

overspeed wrote: post #361
jl2718 wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and working is a violation of the student visa.

That is incorrect. On-campus employment is allowed in the student visa and graduate student appointments are typically RA positions which qualify as employment under this definition.

CPT and OPT are interesting cases for collective bargaining. Not my area of expertise. However, I found a different answer that seems like a more concrete protection regardless of labor classification:

> The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) cannot ask you questions about your union membership or participation in lawful union activity. In addition, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) recognized the importance of enforcing labor laws and signed an agreement with the Department of Labor (DOL) that states it is essential to ensure proper wages and working conditions for all covered workers regardless of immigration status. It is your right to belong to a union and being a union member cannot affect your visa application.

https://www.wearegage.org/international-student-rights

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