"We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters, though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labour above their actual rate. To violate this combination is every where a most unpopular action, and a sort of reproach to a master among his neighbours and equals."
-- Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Book I, Chap. VIII
"Michael Janson, a tall, well-mannered University of Pennsylvania doctoral student, seethes about the modern university: beholden to corporate donors, enthralled by corporate-management strategies, all too willing to exploit the workers -- including its own graduate students -- who make the place run. With a gracious, raised-right humility in his brown eyes, permanent-press khakis and a fashion-free haircut, Janson makes an unlikely radical: he looks like someone whose life will work out fine if he just keeps showing up. But for more than two years, Janson, a budding political scientist, has played David to the University of Pennsylvania's Goliath."
-- Daniel Duane, "Eggheads Unite"
Well, it's the same old, same old. Workers want to form a union, managers want to prevent workers from forming a union.
Deputy Provost Peter Conn thinks it "makes no sense" that "an Ivy League graduate student researching Edmund Spenser is to be identified with a sanitation worker.'" It's funny how the very mention of "union" is enough to elicit such candid expressions of class snobbery and class anxiety. But this is the Ivy League! We're not to be equated with -- gasp! -- sanitation workers. There is Spenser, and there is garbage, and we must not confuse our categories.
Quite. Let us not confuse our categories.
As I see it, there are employers and there are employees. Sometimes their interests will nicely coincide, and sometimes they will not. Increasingly, they do not coincide. And of course it's not very nice when they don't.
I'm not even going to bother with the apprenticeship argument, at least not at the moment. This entire blog is an argument against the relevance of apprenticeships and guilds and the like. I wish it were otherwise. I'm only joking when I say I want to start my own online university; I am appalled by the spectre of the University of Phoenix. I wish it did make sense to talk of apprentices and guilds. Unfortunately, it does not.
Penn's president disagrees. Penn's president Judith Rodin, who makes "more than a million dollars a year if you include other corporate-board fees" (the Chronicle of Higher Education reports that she received the handsome sum of $808,021 in pay and benefits during the 2001 fiscal year), and who has "publicly referred to herself as Penn's C.E.O.," insists that the corporatization of the university is ''completely spurious.'' She speaks of "nurturing" and "nourishing." But (well, what do you think they pay her for? believe you me -- and I say this as both an invisible adjunct and a mother -- you don't get $808,021 per annum to "nurture" and "nourish") she is apparently a skilled hand at union-busting:
"Brought in by the trustees in 1994 in part to trim the staff, Rodin infuriated Philadelphia's working class by appointing the management consultants Coopers & Lybrand and eliminating more than 3,500 positions -- breaking a decades-old union in one instance, simply by moving the Penn Faculty Club across the street to the new DoubleTree hotel."
I won't argue that unionization is the panacea for all ills. Nor will I deny that it might create new tensions and problems. I will point out, however, that graduate teaching assistants at Canadian universities and at a handful of American universities have been unionized for some thirty years. And I will assert my support of the principle that workers have the right to enter into collective bargaining units if they see fit to do so. Never mind what management wants to call them: hands or apprentices or sanitation workers or what have you. There are employers and there are employees, and if you don't think the employers have a union of their own, you are, in the words of the inimitable Smith, "as ignorant of the world as of the subject." Or perhaps not ignorant, but something worse than ignorant.
Posted by Invisible Adjunct at May 7, 2003 12:59 AMI spent some time today wondering if a nonprofit, purehearted online U. would be a Good Thing. Rather, I suppose, if it would be a possible thing. If all the Invisible Adjuncts in the English-speaking world decided on a fair payscale and an agreed grading system, and announced the courses they were willing to teach, could the result be accredited? Would people attend?
Posted by: clew at May 7, 2003 03:29 AMI don't think it would be possible. And probably not desirable: the extent to which it would be possible to come up with a good version is the extent to which it would be possible to come with a really bad version.
Posted by: Invisible Adjunct at May 7, 2003 09:23 AMI think ArsDigita was a move in that direction, though they seem pretty, um, dead lately.
On unionization...
As the article notes, organizing for a union among TAs tends to take on a cult-like atmosphere. No, claim the organizers, turning our representation over to the UAW won't stifle campus discussion, but as one of the minority who didn't think formalizing a union was a good idea, I was quickly pushed to the margin, as were others in the department who thought we should remain independent.
Also, as the article points out, the organizers rarely say "it's about the money." Why? Because TAs are hardly suffering. During my years as a TA, my average pay was about $10,000 for 22 weeks at 20 hours/week, plus an out-of-state tuition waiver of roughly $14,000 a year (and don't tell me this doesn't matter, because I had to borrow to pay for it before I got a TAship). You do the math (~$55/hour), and tell me that this is unfair for graduate students who often have little teaching experience and barely more subject-matter expertise. I really would have done it as an unpaid intern. When I was supported, I dropped my job as a part-time budget analyst like a rock.
At least on my campus, we also had an elected graduate government to lobby on our behalf. Those who organized the union didn't bother to talk to the group we had already elected to represent us. Instead, we were handing the bargaining over to "experts" who would negotiate on our behalf.
Don't get me wrong. I am not agaisnt unions, particularly, nor against students getting a fair shake. What I am against is making the university look even more like a corporation, which I think a union contract and UAW representation does.
Finally, you dismiss the idea of it being an apprenticeship out of hand. Yet, it costs far less to hire you as an invisible adjunct than it does to support ("hire") a TA. If it is no more than employment, why not simply have adjuncts.
I'll answer that question from the other side of the fence. Despite the fact that we could get better teachers for less by hiring instructors from the community, we jealously guard our TAships because we know that the only way to learn something thoroughly is to teach it, and because--despite being at a "Research I" school--we know that one of the most valuable skills you can learn as a graduate student is how to teach.
I was pretty involved in university politics, and those who organized the union came to me early on. I said that I supported coordination among graduate students to ensure the fairest treatment possible. I could not, however, envision myself walking out on my students. I felt obligated to them in a way that I could never feel obligated to a "work product." The organizers claimed that a strike was extremely unlikely. Of course, the credible threat of a strike is one of the things that make a union work.
I had never crossed a strike line as customer before. It was one of my saddest days when I did it as a grad student. The undergrads in my class gave me a standing ovation when I came in to class, but as I walked to the university past many of my "fellow" striking grad students, some of whom I had collaborated with in the past, I got nothing but icy stares. Collegiality survived quite nicely, as long as you were pro-union.
So, my argument is not that unions are evil (just the opposite), nor that TA unions are necessarily bad. But my own experience convinced me that they had more downside than up. If you look at other TAs who are resisting unionization, you will find a similar position: the high-minded ideals are fine, but do not map cleanly to the practical implications.
Posted by: Alex Halavais at May 7, 2003 12:36 PMWe obviously see things differently.
It is precisely because I am an invisible adjunct that I am dismissive of the apprenticeship argument. What kind of apprenticeship did I serve? an apprenticeship in the proletarianization of academic labour, perhaps?
In any case, even if the graduate student stands in relation to the faculty member as apprentice to guildmaster, the graduate student teaching assistant stands in relation to the university as employee to employer. Paycheques are issued, taxes are deducted, and T4 slips are sent out in late January. Issued not by the faculty, of course, but by the university. The faculty who "jealously guard" their TAships are not the employers of the TAs, though they may well be the middle managers.
Re: the tuition waiver. I too was the recipient of such largesse (to the tune, I believe, of about $23,000 a year). And yet I probably would have supported unionization had there been a campaign at my campus. We used to call these tuition waivers "funny money," because we didn't believe any money actually changed hands. As far as we could tell, the university said, tuition for this programme is 23,000 per year, but you don't have to pay it. Perhaps we were wrong, we never saw the books. But if I were a TA, I'd probably be willing to take my chances and call the university on its bluff. Let them eliminate the waivers. Then watch enrollment in the programmes dwindle down to almost nothing (which mightn't be such a bad thing in some disciplines). It's one thing to take out huge loans for law school or medical school, quite another to take out such loans for graduate school. Those who enter, especially in the humanities, tend to be rather an unworldly lot, but I think you'd have a tough time finding enough candidates who were unworldly enough to take out those kinds of loans for graduate school. So without the waivers, there would be very few teaching assistants.
As for not wanting to make "the university look even more like a corporation," I'm curious about what kind of relationship you are implying between what things look like and what things are. The university already behaves like, and increasingly also looks like, a corporation. Is it the behaving like or the looking like that matters?
I also see the relationship between high-minded ideals and grubby practicalities rather differently. For me, the high-minded ideals have to do with the university as alternative to the marketplace, the academic profession as guild, the graduate student as apprentice, and so on. Unionization, on the other hand, is not high-minded (I don't romanticize union leaders and unionization, I ackowledge that some of it is not high-minded at all), but pragmatic: a coming to terms with the practicalities that are too often masked under cover of the ideals.
Anyway, if teaching assistants don't want a union, then they shouldn't have one. But I think they do have the right to organize and vote on the matter.
Posted by: Invisible Adjunct at May 7, 2003 01:51 PMAlex,
"I could not, however, envision myself walking out on my students. I felt obligated to them in a way that I could never feel obligated to a "work product.""
The same goes with elementary and secondary school teachers--perhaps even more so, but I would argue that it's pretty tough to conclude that unions are inappropriate for *them*. A quick, small-N comparison: in Canada, the public schools' teachers' unions are much, much more powerful than those in the U.S. Guess which public education system is healthier? (Yes, there is an endogenous relationship between the strength of private schools and the strength of public schools' teachers' unions, but I would guess that the relationship is still significant).
I went on strike this year, and before making my decision to do so, I asked my students to anonymously tell me what they thought I should do.
Almost all of them told me that I should "do what I thought was right" or "what I thought I had to do." None of them thought that I was wrong or that I was
"walking out on them" by going on strike.
The thing is, intelligent college students know their relationship with their teacher and the obligations that it entails is embedded in a broader context. They can judge strikes, as we would judge any strikes: based on its merits, considering the overall context. In my case, I think they recognized that we had decent grounds.
I do not want to speak to collegiality. Obviously, depending on which department you are in, you may often find yourself either accepted or marginalized based on your political/theoretical/social/etc. orientation. We shouldn't expect one's views on unionization, if they became a significant source of tension, to be any different; moreso, since they directly impact one's life.
I woould love to address the distributive issues you bring up, but I've been entangled in far too many of those discussions. I think it will suffice to say, however, that your implication that collective bargaining rights should only be available to (or employed by) workers who are "suffering" displays an attitude typical of people who don't really understand why these rights exist in the first place.
Also, Invisible Adjunct, I believe that apprentices in most OECD countries are allowed to unionize, so even if we accepted this model, this would not preclude unionization. Being an apprentice doesn't mean that you lose all of your rights as an employee, which is what you still are, as well as being a student.
Posted by: Eric at May 7, 2003 02:13 PMI won't argue that unionization is the panacea for all ills. Nor will I deny that it might create new tensions and problems. ... And I will assert my support of the principle that workers have the right to enter into collective bargaining units if they see fit to do so.
(from Invisible Adjunct's original post, last paragraph)
A big problem is that many graduate students don't see fit to do so, but if the pro-unionization voters outnumber them, they get forced into it anyway.
I've seen this first hand at my school. If you ask union organizers what kind of union they want to form, they won't respond. They want to let union structure be set democratically after the union is in place, which is pretty much irreversible. The type of union is a critical issue. "Agency shops" force every student to pay dues, while "open shops" let people join and quit as they see fit. The organizers apparently want agency shops. I don't think many graduate student unions are anything else; certainly not those affiliated with the UAW.
It's really sad. There are very important issues a union could effectively address (including those the IA posts about: thanks!), but the organizers seem to want to strike a blow -- any blow -- against the University without regard for the student's rights they claim to support.
Posted by: Will Kennerly at May 7, 2003 08:15 PM"A big problem is that many graduate students don't see fit to do so, but if the pro-unionization voters outnumber them, they get forced into it anyway."
Yes, this is a problem. But so too is the scenario where many graduate students do see fit to do so, but are outnumbered by the anti-union vote.
Given the existing power imbalance, I don't see how an open shop union would be effective. But I don't support or endorse evasion on this matter. They should be upfront about what kind of union they are after.
Posted by: Invisible Adjunct at May 7, 2003 10:13 PMOn the funny money: at least in our university, and I am sure that it differs from school to school, the tuition waiver comes directly out of the dean's budget. That is, we pay the tuition bill rather than for travel to conferences, cheese on sticks, etc.
I guess what I am still wondering, and none of you have answered this, is this: If TAs are *just* part of the profit-maximizing motive of the modern university, why aren't we hiring cheaper, better, part-time adjuncts instead? I know what the answer is at the faculty level, at least in one instance, since we have discussed this issue in meetings repeatedly. We (most of us) want TAships because we think they are good for our students, and what is good for our students is good for our program.
I am overstating my position, probably in large part because I tend to be a contrarian. But it always struck me that those fighting for a union on campus did so with an eye toward the means and not the ends. They threw around this idea that they wanted a "voice," but most never showed up at faculty meetings or participated in student government.
I suspect that that this is a topic upon which we will not agree. That was certainly the outcome when the unionization efforts took hold in my graduate school. As a result, it became two graduate groups--with those who were in favor of unionization insisting that we would continue to have a voice, of course, but only through the graces of the UAW. In the best of all possible worlds, I would love for the students and the faculty to be better paid and better represented on campuses. I still have a great deal of respect for the individual students who continue to fight for unionization at my alma, but again, when it comes to whether the fight was and is worth the casualties, for me, the answer remains "no."
Posted by: Alex Halavais at May 7, 2003 10:52 PM"I suspect that that this is a topic upon which we will not agree."
I agree...er, to disagree :)
In practical terms, my disagreement with you is of little moment. I am neither a graduate student nor a regular faculty member; I am not involved with TAs or with faculty governance; and I have very little say (uh, that would be no say at all) in the matters under discussion. The real question is: Why do so many graduate students disagree with your position? Some would agree with you, of course, but some (and I suspect more) would not. Why are they seeing/experiencing things differently?
Posted by: Invisible Adjunct at May 8, 2003 12:04 AMBecause I'm strange.
Seriously, that's the only conclusion I can reach. It's not like the issue hasn't bugged me. These are not dumb people (and nor are you) so why can't they just see it the way it is. Normally it isn't so hard to make people see things my way :). Moreover, there were some really silly/creepy students--mainly in the business school--who agreed with my position far more than I did, and that also bothered me.
Here's another piece to throw into the mill, and it didn't really strike me until now. Most of those in my cohort who opposed the union have graduated and moved on to academic appointments. Those who were/are union organizers and supporters are mostly still at the university--either as students or parts of various administrative structures. Not sure what this signifies, if anything.
And I'll leave it at that. I'm really not in any position to do more than comment at this point either. I'm a union member, as are our graduate TAs. Except for the semi-annual open bar, this really hasn't affected me one way or another, and although both were unionized before I got here, I think the process was a lot less protracted and nasty than it was at Washington.
Posted by: Alex at May 8, 2003 03:01 AM"I'm a union member, as are our graduate TAs. Except for the semi-annual open bar, this really hasn't affected me one way or another, and although both were unionized before I got here, I think the process was a lot less protracted and nasty than it was at Washington."
Interesting. Some people argue that faculty shouldn't be unionized: it interferes with collegiality, it undermines shared governance, it betrays academic values, and so on. Indeed, in many respects, the arguments against faculty unionization are strikingly similar to the arguments against graduate student unionization.
Posted by: Invisible Adjunct at May 8, 2003 03:16 AMVery interesting discussion.
As an ex-academic, let me make a couple of comments: the "tuition waivers" are most certainly "funny money," if you mean by that a price that could not be supported (successfully charged) if exposed to the free market. An entity like a university can conduct all sorts of internal shennanigans with its budgets which have nothing to do with economic realities. To claim that an extended 7-year (or whatever) program which leads a promising young student to experience ever lower economic expectations, as non-science PhD programs do, is worth something like $20-30k per year is ludicrous on its face. (We are just talking about economic considerations here.)
Secondly, if you think the university is too corporatized, you ain't seen nothing yet. In fact, universities are in an intermediary stage between the old-fashioned system it once was and the system it will become. That explains the question about why the university still employs TAs instead of just hiring adjuncts and separating the education the TAs receive from the job (the teaching) they perform. The inevitability of further corporatization is as debatable as any prediction of the future, but if you look at the rate of increase in tuitions (leaving aside the question of just how much faster tuition growth has been than inflation) and see future projections of its growth, which I bet are baked into the minds of university financial management, you know that the university has not yet even begun to confront the needed cost controls that are going to make it an affordable expenditure for even upper middle class US parents. Have you ever walked into a bank and seen estimates of future tuitions? They’re shocking at first – a four-year education at Villanova will cost $350,000 in the year 2020 (the numbers are about right) – until you realize they are laughable. Few families can afford that – and they won’t. Universities will simply be unable to raise tuitions that quickly. As a consequence, future budgetary reform by the university system will be sharp. It will have to undergo something similar to the layoffs and cost reductions major US corporations experienced in the early 1990s, except it will be worse.
My other prediction about academia is that it will go back to the model of the turn of the century. The rich (and I don’t even mean the quite wealthy husband-is-a-doctor-and-wife-is-a-HR-exec couple, I mean the rich) will send their children to Harvard with a few scholarship students. The fly in the ointment with this prediction is that our society is much more meritocratic than its predecessor from early last century. So maybe I am wrong, but if I am, the present economic trends in higher education are going to have to reverse themselves.
Thanks for reading this. I hope it provides a different perspective.
Posted by: JT at May 9, 2003 01:47 PM"the 'tuition waivers' are most certainly 'funny money,' if you mean by that a price that could not be supported (successfully charged) if exposed to the free market. An entity like a university can conduct all sorts of internal shennanigans with its budgets which have nothing to do with economic realities. To claim that an extended 7-year (or whatever) program which leads a promising young student to experience ever lower economic expectations, as non-science PhD programs do, is worth something like $20-30k per year is ludicrous on its face. (We are just talking about economic considerations here.)"
Yes, that's basically what I mean. Thanks for stating it much more clearly than I could. Yes, those amounts could not be successfully charged under free market conditions. Who could pay this kind of money? And who would be willing to loan this kind of money to a humanities grad student? (Hello, can we say "loan default"?)
You are probably right that we are in an intermediary stage, with even more corporatization all but inevitable.
And your idea that an academic degree will become once again the province of the wealthy doesn't seem so farfetched. Certainly not when it comes to the liberal arts, at any rate.
Posted by: Invisible Adjunct at May 9, 2003 08:51 PMAt the Canadian universities, the TA's are unionized, as you point out. But they still face a lot of the problems that you've noted above. One thing that seems to come up is the fact that graduate tuition fees always seem to increase faster than the tuition waivers that come with a TA's position.
Posted by: Dr_Funk at May 12, 2003 03:42 PMJT, that comment about the waiver being 'funny money' was right on the money, so to speak. And it's so common sense.
Posted by: Barry at May 12, 2003 11:16 PM