College campuses have enough problems without one more cropping up. "Dateline" made every parent shudder when they exposed the soaked underbelly of campus life, but the most interesting problems concerns graduate assistants.
Across America, graduate students are saying they have a bone to pick with university management. They have accused their schools of exploiting them as cheap teaching labor in lieu of professors, and they have turned to a time-honored tradition: they're unionizing.
Graduate students at NYU fired the first shot when they formed a trade union in 2001. Since then others have attempted this at Wisconsin, Illinois and California. The most recent and most public fight is at Pennsylvania.
Penn's group, GET-UP, is led by political-science Ph.D. candidate Michael Janson. Janson and his comrades felt the university was becoming too corporate (their president does refer to herself as Penn's CEO) and began a proletarian revolt.
Since then, GET-UP has been waging war with Penn administrators to get their union recognized. They've enlisted the National Labor Relations Board and have even gotten endorsements from Democratic presidential candidates Dick Gephardt and Howard Dean.
But Penn isn't rolling over. Penn's President, Judith Rodin, and deputy provost, Peter Conn, have spent hours rebutting arguments from GET-UP. Conn has pointed out that, while graduate assistants perform teaching functions for the school, they're still, first and foremost, students. As students, Conn argues, they're not eligible for benefits that professors get. Conn also points out that those grad students get their health care, fees and tuition paid for as well as a stipend.
Janson still doesn't think this counts, calling tuition waivers "imaginary funds." Janson also complains about having a cramped closet office, saying his space is inadequate for "work and study."
Study? Isn't that what the library is for?
How much more does one want? Janson and his ilk refuse to understand exactly what costs a university expends to draw people like him. Conn notes that it costs Penn around $45,000 a year per graduate assistant, including a stipend of $15,000. Also, tuition waivers aren't imaginary; somebody else picks up the cost Janson isn't bearing. Unionizing will only drive these costs up.
The real issue is not exploitation; it's about professorships. Conn said the students want to become professors someday, and the market is shrinking, making it more difficult to achieve their goals. Thus, to force a guaranteed spot, they've unionized in order to get their way. This conclusion is echoed by Daniel Duane, who wrote about GET-UP for the New York Times Magazine.
Unionized graduate assistants are acting like spoiled children. They get a whale of a deal: a killer education and on-the-job training while coming out ahead financially, but somehow, it's not enough, and they now want the institutionalized welfare (read: tenure) they have no legitimate claim to as students.
The fact that schools provide packages such as Penn shows that universities value the function graduate assistants provide. Legitimate concerns are one thing, but graduate assistants shouldn't bite the hand that educates them. If they want a professorship, there's one way to get it: earn it, not extort it, which is what unionizing does. GET-UP needs to get down to a key economic principle: there's no such thing as a free lunch (or education).
Write to Jeff at mannedarena@yahoo.com
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