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I'm very curious to see what the long term effects of unionizing will be in Academia. I'm hopeful and optimistic it will improve things in the long run. Yes the

I'm very curious to see what the long term effects of unionizing will be in Academia. I'm hopeful and optimistic it will improve things in the long run. Yes there will be some unintended consequences but academic life is already very rough if you're not tenured. Academia likes to cast itself as a true meritocracy. If you work hard and publish good papers you'll do well. In practice it's more of a gerontocracy where senior members can single handedly destroy a young investigators career. (It happened to me and I saw it happen to several people). There is little to no recourse against this. Arguments against unionization from already tenured faculty usually sound like: "If you want to be the best in your field you have to work harder than everyone else. Forming a union won't change that fact and may even discourage students from working so hard. This might interfere with their career goals." However, the power structures in academia are heavily skewed and toxic. Individually graduate students have little recourse when they are wronged. Life in academia is hard. You have to work long days, the chance of success is very low. At every stage the probability of getting that next job is very low. A lot of the field agrees that something needs to change, but no one can agree exactly what needs to change or how to get there. The people with the power are the tenured professors who "won the lottery" and are out of touch with the problems they are causing. They aren't going to be the mechanism of change even though they hold all the power.

toomuchtodo 5y ago
It sounds like the situation is pretty terrible already and hard for it to get worse; might as well try a union so these folks suffer less from a broken system. Versus the alternative, “we’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas.”
zitterbewegung 5y ago
Teacher assistants or graduate assistants have been unionized at UIC [1]. I have noticed that they have gone on strike a few times. Unfortunately anything you are hopeful of achieving doesn't seem to have changed at all. The best choice of my life was not going back to school. I think I might do it through my employer but at this point I just do machine learning as a hobby. The problem with grad school in general is the fact that other than being a gerontocracy is that the optimal strategy for scientific research requires more failures than successes and getting tenure becomes more and more difficult because other than people living longer you don't need more professors instead you just need more TAs / GAs to teach people and educate people to get the people to keep the system working. Right now Mathematics (specifically Calculus) makes money for a college and or university in contrast to psychology, philosophy and other humanities don't. If this was automated then Mathematics will have less and less professors and or grad students so if the current trends continue then we will probably only see computer science professors dominating universities. [1] https://uic-geo.net/mainsite/ https://uic-geo.net/mainsite/
- amathres_info 5y ago
  The UIC grad student union is pretty effective at keeping their teaching hours to under 20 hours per week (so, you complain to them when there's too much grading). But the stipends there are among the lowest of good math departments, certainly lower than many non-unionized places. How much of this is due to the union being ineffective vs UIC being broke and poorly run I don't know. [Source: I used to teach math at UIC] Overall I am not really convinced grad student unions really make much of a difference in practice, at least as far as everyday stipends and working conditions. I am at a non-unionized place now and we don't work the students any harder. But in principle it's certainly a good idea, and I have indeed seen the union be a useful advocate in certain special situations.
  - zitterbewegung 5y ago
    UIC has been underfunded for so long that it is a joke. I don't even think that they even budget that kind of thing anymore and just accept the fact. But, the computer science college is going to have a building dedicated to computer science due to the fact that a bunch of alumni are funding it directly. I personally gave around $100 but I would guess many other alumni will give much more.
karaterobot 5y ago
Half the reason I'm ambivalent about unionization is that I was involved with the graduate student union when I was in school. The nominal reason for it was to improve working conditions and pay for grad students. In practice, it improved very little, and added a modest amount of overhead, in the form of a union apparatus which fed itself by taking a little bite out of those paychecks every month. To be clear, the net result was still higher pay overall, but not a lot. All in all, it really had only a small overall effect on us students, and didn't hurt the university much. It felt like the real winner was the UAW itself, which is the source of my mixed feelings.
- qzx_pierri 5y ago
  As long as human beings run a union, the union will be self serving.
  - dmitriid_y 5y ago
    As long as a tyrant is unchallenged, they will remain a tyrant.
    - qzx_pierri 5y ago
      What does this reply even mean? Are you seriously comparing the privileged plights within the ranks of academia to victims of a tyrannical ruler?
      - spacemanmatt 5y ago
        It's germane. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petty_tyranny https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petty_tyranny * https://www.researchgate.net/publication/247717438_Petty_Tyranny_in_Organizations https://www.researchgate.net/publication/247717438_Petty_Tyr...
  - whimsicalism 5y ago
    Who is running the university? Robots?
_huayra_ 5y ago
We were discussing a potential hire at work a few days ago who suddenly turned down the company's offer for another company despite our team being his "dream place to work" and promising to not make a sudden decision without talking with us first. Turns out he was basically forced to go to this other company by his advisor, who had a lot of funding from this other company, or his advisor would "make graduating very difficult".
- otachack 5y ago
  That is f*cked up and I hope people that dropped grad careers chime in in the future about situations like this, especially when more unions pop up.
  - temp234 5y ago
    There are so many horror stories about academia waiting to come out. The way vulnerable people are exploited and mistreated in what is, in fact, a work environment; moral hazards and conflicts of interest everywhere; lots of untrustworthy research results and inability to reproduce research. Universities are big business and ought to be regulated just as much as any other big business
    - ModernMech 5y ago
      Can you expand on what regulations you feel are lacking and how you'd like to see them implemented?
      - mumblemumble 5y ago
        Decent labor standards would be a start. Universities are rather analogous to sweatshops in how they operate and the economic reasons for doing so. And I suspect that, in much the same way, this state of affairs represents a sort of Nash equilibrium that cannot be significantly altered except by an outside force changing the rules of the game.
        5y ago
paulcole 5y ago
> Academia likes to cast itself as a true meritocracy The more an organization/community says one thing, the more likely the opposite is to be true. Think about Google and “Don’t be evil.” Or companies that tout “work/life balance.”
- bombcar 5y ago
  What would that say about the organization that itself is the union?
  - paulcole 5y ago
    I don’t know. I’m not very smart.
PaulHoule 5y ago
The intensity of the competition is severe enough to make it a toxic situation even if the established scientists were completely ethical about it.
giaour 5y ago
Aren't non-contingent faculty already mostly unionized through AAUP?
jasode 5y ago
>Arguments against unionization from already tenured faculty usually sound like: An argument against a union at MIT came from un-tenured graduate student Kevin Wang : https://thetech.com/2021/10/21/why-we-do-not-need-a-gsu https://thetech.com/2021/10/21/why-we-do-not-need-a-gsu TLDR: he didn't think paying the 1.44% annual union dues (~$620/year) is going to be worth it. He based this on comparing MIT salary increase history to other universities with and without unions. Also, KW was previously in Germany & UK so he's presumably familiar with the stronger worker unions in Europe. The MIT union vote was 66%-for and 34%-against. The 34% have various reasons to not join a union but I think we can guess that many of them think the $620/year salary deductions will not be worth whatever benefits the union can negotiate. I'm not saying KW is right but I think it's more constructive to consider the opinions of MIT grad students who actually vote (e.g. Kevin Wang) rather than your synthesized quote from tenured professors. The collective bargaining unit will negotiate with university administrators (not the tenured professors) who set salaries etc.
- bombcar 5y ago
  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.
  - aidenn0 5y ago
    If you made tolls on a toll road optional, the road owners would not be able to keep up with maintenance, yet I think most drivers value the road...
    - nautilius 5y ago
      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?
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
mhh__ 5y ago
In an ideal world I think unionization at least has the potential to fight back against the "One bad letter of recommendation and your career is over" aspect. Whether it will work or not I have no idea. There is simply way too many questions on the academia stackexchange about how to confront a superior without making them feel confronted (or wrong). The power dynamic is ugly.
- xhkkffbf 5y ago
  But why? It's a supply and demand issue. When demand is high and supply is low, the hiring committees will definitely look over one or more bad letters. But when supply is high (as it is most of the time thanks to overproduction), well the hiring committee will choose the best package deal. I'm sure the university will be happy to claim that they'll discount bad letters just because it will be politically helpful, but as long as the hiring committee sees them all, it won't matter. They'll choose the best package. Not that it matters, because most of this happens by word of mouth. I've seen professors write glowing letters of recommendation to cover their butt. Then they privately bad mouth the person.
bumblebritches5 5y ago
anonymousDan 5y ago
I think your view on unionization is very US centric. In the UK at least there is a university union. In fact it is currently striking over a range of issues (mostly related to pension cuts).
- gbjw 5y ago
  In Canada as well (e.g., York is known to have a strong 'activist' graduate union that periodically shuts down classes over labour disputes).
canjobear 5y ago
I doubt that a union could do much against the alleged toxic aspects of academia that you are pointing out. There’s nothing they can do, for example, to change the fact that tenure track jobs are rare, which is what drives a lot of the stress for grad students. More likely they will be involved in labor disputes involving how much TA work the grad students have to do.
- bognition 5y ago
  Correct but they can advocate for other types of positions and intervene when a university fails to educate students about non academic jobs.
light_hue_1 5y ago
We know exactly what the long term effects are because some grad schools have been unionized for 50 years. The effects are: slightly better working conditions, slightly less discrimination, slightly better healthcare. Just look at what say, the grad student union at University of Michigan is able to gain for their students. Neither apocalyptic nor utopian predictions are anywhere near the mark.
rr808 5y ago
> In practice it's more of a gerontocracy Right, unionization will just make this worse. Protect the insiders, those already with jobs.
jancsika 5y ago
> I'm very curious to see what the long term effects of unionizing will be in Academia. My friend, today you get to actually experience what sci-fi writer Frank Herbert called "Traveling without Moving:" The year is 2022. A virus wreaks havoc on the nations of the world. A lone free software warrior named gorhill roams the internet to fight for justice, protect the underdog[1], and block ads[2]. At UC Davis (and possibly other schools) the grad students have been unionized now for at least two decades. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kung_Fu_(1972_TV_series)#Plot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kung_Fu_(1972_TV_series)#Plot 2: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-origin/cjpalhdlnbpafiamejdnhcphjbkeiagm https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-origin/cjpa... 3: https://uaw2865.org/about-our-union/ https://uaw2865.org/about-our-union/
xhkkffbf 5y ago
Even though I think many senior academics are often terrible jerks and sometimes capable of behavior that borders on criminal, I don't see unions as being much of a help at all. I've been soured recently by one big event that happened at a place where I sometimes work. One guy was accused of doing something unwoke in his time off the job. Normally, this guy was a big union booster and even a union rep in some negotiations. It turns out, though, that didn't matter because the other union reps wanted his promotion. He had zero relationship with the management because he was frequently aggitating for this union cause or that union cause. So when push came to shove, the management hated him and they were able to cite the lack of support of his so-called union buddies as proof that he was bad. I think students think that the union will bring them some kind of lightweight version of tenure. It could help in a few negotiations or some extreme cases, but I think that all too often it will just be another layer of self-interested semi-managers who are just as corruptable as the regular managers.
actually_a_dog 5y ago
Forget having their careers destroyed. The fact is that most people who graduate with a PhD will not have an academic career on the tenure track, and it's really easy to see why once you pay attention to what's going on. The thing is that academia is not a growing field anymore. So, if a professor graduates more than one student, they're feeding a glut of candidates who will be competing for one job at some point. For instance, in the field of engineering as a whole, 7.8 students graduate with PhDs per professor over the length of an average academic career [0]. In environmental engineering, that number is a whopping 19.0! (Also from [0]). As a graduate student, once you realize the field isn't growing, you can actually see the phenomenon at work. Just look around in all your classes. That same handful of people you see in most of your courses, especially those leading into your intended specialty, those people are probably your competition. Now multiply that by every university in the country that teaches in your specialty. You very quickly come to the conclusion that you'll probably have to wait for someone to either retire or die before you get an academic position, and that's actually 100% the truth. --- [0]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4309283/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4309283/
- ModernMech 5y ago
  It's true that it's hard to get an academic job, but it's not true in all industries. In CS for example we've been hiring constantly for years and our searches are often not successful. Moreover not everyone who graduates with a Ph.D. wants on the tenure track, and universities are increasingly creating non tenure roles to meet this demand. I'm not on tenure track and I don't think I'm missing much compared to my TT counterparts. I don't even want tenure, it's not at all what it's cracked up to be. Your citation also leaves a lot to be desired. From your link: > Nowadays, less than 17% of new PhDs in science, engineering and health-related fields find tenure-track positions within 3 years after graduation Two of the things we ask during hiring are: - "How is your research agenda different from your advisor's." - "What funding agency will you target for your first grant proposal and what research will that be based on?" Most newly minted PhDs cannot answer those questions satisfactorily. It sometimes can take 2-3 years doing a postdoc to be able to find a suitable research agenda that is sufficiently differentiated from your advisor's. Moreover: > We recognize that in using a simple model, several parameters that are not part of our analysis may pose limitations (Ghaffarzadegan et al., 2011). One consideration is that many engineering doctorates are not interested in academic positions and may not even compete for tenure-track positions in academia. Another consideration is that some engineering graduates are foreign citizens who take academic positions outside of the USA.3 Another factor is inter-field hiring. Engineering doctorates might obtain positions in other fields such as science or business, which would also diminish the gap. Okay, so they discount people who don't want to work in academia, and also foreign students who won't work in America. I'm sorry but what? Foreign students who won't be working in America after they graduate are most of our students. Probably 70% of our grad students right now (and the situation can't be much different at MIT). It's pretty hard to take this paper seriously when they just handwave all that away and say "but in the steady state..." And then the grand conclusion of the article is to throw up their hands and say (paraphrasing) "there's probably nothing we can do about this so we just have to be more forthright with students about their prospects." Okay then... I'm not saying it's not hard to get an academic job, but at the same time the measure shouldn't be academic tenure track jobs. There are lots of non-TT positions across the country at top research universities, SLACs, and community colleges.
lumost 5y ago
What society wants from Academia isn't something you can grind for. Ground breaking research and great education isn't something that comes from working 80 hours a week (most of the time). I'd also suspect that the vast majority of effort in academia is dedicated to simply pleasing the whims of those with power/funding. A union might increase productivity by both a) De-stressing those who are actually doing the work of academia. Ensuring that they are financially taken care including living wages, sustainable working hours, and stable employment. b) Reducing the need/available time for academic make-work. c) Negotiating with funding bodies to correct lop-sided funding policies where students are funded but researchers are not.*
- Barrin92 5y ago
  >Ground breaking research and great education isn't something that comes from working 80 hours a week (most of the time). is there much evidence for this claim? If one takes a look at the habits and biographies of groundbreaking researchers they all have one thing in common, they have dedicated virtually their entire time to work. Looking at countries with exceptional educational outcomes broadly you see the same thing, time and resources spent on tutoring and schooling is extremely high.
  - lumost 5y ago
    > biographies of groundbreaking researchers they all have one thing in common, they have dedicated virtually their entire time to work. I'd argue that most ground breaking researchers had the benefit of researching their own ideas for prolonged periods. Putting in 40 hour a week on your own ideas for 10+ years is an awful lot of time. Many ground breaking researchers such as Feynman and Einstein had extended sabbaticals of one kind or another which lead to their best work. It may be out of ignorance, but I'm not aware of any famous researcher who accredits their success to an 80 hour work week.
    - DoughnutHole 5y ago
      We're also in an era where groundbreaking research is seldom done by lone unicorn researchers expanding on a stroke of genius. The Nobel Prizes are still awarded to individuals but often only because that's how Nobel decided the prize had to work over a century ago. Prizes are most of the time awarded to the heads of research groups who's discoveries are made of the backs of dozens of researchers and graduates often working 80 hour weeks, and in some cases hundreds or thousands of technicians. The only prize that regularly meets the lone genius researcher trope is when the physics prize is awarded to a theorist (partially since it can't go to the hundreds of physicists responsible for verifying the theory). Newton could see so far from standing on the shoulders of giants, the modern researcher can see so far from standing on the pyramid of overworked untenured researchers.
rmatt2000 5y ago
Academia (in the U.S. at least) is one of the last vestiges of the old master / apprentice system.
- musicale 5y ago
  I thought we'd gotten rid of indentured servitude, but grad students are locked into years of absurdly low pay[1] and an extremely asymmetric power relationship with their supervisors. Add in the increased risk for depression and suicide and it really doesn't seem like a great gig. [1] Engineering students at least. Humanities students are paid just a bit less than the minimum wage they'll be earning after graduation.
david38 5y ago
This is graduate students unionizing. Everywhere I’ve seen this, the principal complaints are wages, housing, acknowledging they are workers, and working hours. Grad students are used as slaves. This is trivial to avoid just by paying them what they actually need to live. This is a university, what they can’t figure this out? No, they just overplayed their hand at the bargaining table.
namelessoracle 5y ago
Its interesting that the people who create and encourage this system so fervently push for major social reforms and claim their social theories will create better societies.
A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago
It is interesting that you used word 'gerontocracy', because it is the same word used by Thiel to describe current true owners of US financial system. I certainly do not disagree. I think some fresh blood is needed -- and not just in there or academia, but also on just about every political level. I am personally kinda done with people, who don't understand basic technology. They should be retired. They should not have any real influence on what the current generation is doing.
robwwilliams 5y ago
Tenure does not provide much protection in biomedical research—only funding. In fact at top tier institutions tenure is almost meaningless often with <50% salary guaranteed even with a teaching load. I think the abuses of seniority are much less than in the past—both wrt extraneous labor (hey, help me paint my house) to sexual pressures. Re unionization—-its complex and a function of teaching load as a TA versus, class work as a student, versus your own research with mentors.
derbOac 5y ago
FWIW, speaking as someone who has had tenure, the problems don't end there. The whole thing is broken all the way through. There are good places and good people, but the system is dysfunctional and too many critically problematic behaviors and dynamics are incentivized. Society at large isn't helpful either, as outside influences tend to be politicized badly on both ends of the spectrum in multiple ways, even when the other side is trying to improve things in good faith.
wardedVibe 5y ago
The UC grad students have been unionized for decades, and just added gsr positions in addition to the teaching positions. Mostly right now it serves to protect student's research time from heavy teaching requirements. But honestly, professors are also increasingly far away from the levers of power to create more permanent positions. There's a lot of bureaucrats making decisions who are mostly accountable to themselves.
2ion 5y ago
> However, the power structures in academia are heavily skewed and toxic. Individually graduate students have little recourse when they are wronged. Life in academia is hard. You have to work long days, the chance of success is very low. At every stage the probability of getting that next job is very low. A "research precariat" is what keeps German universities going as well. This is an international issue; even the OECD seems to have studies on the subject. Would be interesting to see a cross-country comparison of who really has the "best" universities --- or university systems, as this kind of issue does not tend to be specific to one institution.
topaz0 5y ago
While it's not particularly widespread, there are places in the US where grad students have been unionized for decades. The Universities of Michigan and Wisconsin are two of the oldest, dating from the 70s iirc. As a grad student falling under the collective bargaining agreement for the University of Michigan, I feel pretty good about it. Not only do they pay us pretty well and give good healthcare, but the union has been essential in making the administration set up better-than-average covid policies, like free asymptomatic testing and non-retaliation for choosing to work remotely (sometimes). There are also a ton of corner cases where subpopulations of the grad students have a specific issue, where the union has been a very good advocate.
musicale 5y ago
> Individually graduate students have little recourse when they are wronged Changing supervisors without 1) losing your funding and/or 2) having to start over on your dissertation is extremely difficult at many universities. As a result, academic supervisors wield excessive power over their graduate students.

toomuchtodo 5y ago

It sounds like the situation is pretty terrible already and hard for it to get worse; might as well try a union so these folks suffer less from a broken system. Versus the alternative, “we’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas.”

zitterbewegung 5y ago

Teacher assistants or graduate assistants have been unionized at UIC [1]. I have noticed that they have gone on strike a few times. Unfortunately anything you are hopeful of achieving doesn't seem to have changed at all. The best choice of my life was not going back to school. I think I might do it through my employer but at this point I just do machine learning as a hobby. The problem with grad school in general is the fact that other than being a gerontocracy is that the optimal strategy for scientific research requires more failures than successes and getting tenure becomes more and more difficult because other than people living longer you don't need more professors instead you just need more TAs / GAs to teach people and educate people to get the people to keep the system working. Right now Mathematics (specifically Calculus) makes money for a college and or university in contrast to psychology, philosophy and other humanities don't. If this was automated then Mathematics will have less and less professors and or grad students so if the current trends continue then we will probably only see computer science professors dominating universities. [1] https://uic-geo.net/mainsite/ https://uic-geo.net/mainsite/

amathres_info 5y ago
The UIC grad student union is pretty effective at keeping their teaching hours to under 20 hours per week (so, you complain to them when there's too much grading). But the stipends there are among the lowest of good math departments, certainly lower than many non-unionized places. How much of this is due to the union being ineffective vs UIC being broke and poorly run I don't know. [Source: I used to teach math at UIC] Overall I am not really convinced grad student unions really make much of a difference in practice, at least as far as everyday stipends and working conditions. I am at a non-unionized place now and we don't work the students any harder. But in principle it's certainly a good idea, and I have indeed seen the union be a useful advocate in certain special situations.
- zitterbewegung 5y ago
  UIC has been underfunded for so long that it is a joke. I don't even think that they even budget that kind of thing anymore and just accept the fact. But, the computer science college is going to have a building dedicated to computer science due to the fact that a bunch of alumni are funding it directly. I personally gave around $100 but I would guess many other alumni will give much more.

karaterobot 5y ago

Half the reason I'm ambivalent about unionization is that I was involved with the graduate student union when I was in school. The nominal reason for it was to improve working conditions and pay for grad students. In practice, it improved very little, and added a modest amount of overhead, in the form of a union apparatus which fed itself by taking a little bite out of those paychecks every month. To be clear, the net result was still higher pay overall, but not a lot. All in all, it really had only a small overall effect on us students, and didn't hurt the university much. It felt like the real winner was the UAW itself, which is the source of my mixed feelings.

qzx_pierri 5y ago
As long as human beings run a union, the union will be self serving.
- dmitriid_y 5y ago
  As long as a tyrant is unchallenged, they will remain a tyrant.
  - qzx_pierri 5y ago
    What does this reply even mean? Are you seriously comparing the privileged plights within the ranks of academia to victims of a tyrannical ruler?
    - spacemanmatt 5y ago
      It's germane. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petty_tyranny https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petty_tyranny * https://www.researchgate.net/publication/247717438_Petty_Tyranny_in_Organizations https://www.researchgate.net/publication/247717438_Petty_Tyr...
- whimsicalism 5y ago
  Who is running the university? Robots?

_huayra_ 5y ago

We were discussing a potential hire at work a few days ago who suddenly turned down the company's offer for another company despite our team being his "dream place to work" and promising to not make a sudden decision without talking with us first. Turns out he was basically forced to go to this other company by his advisor, who had a lot of funding from this other company, or his advisor would "make graduating very difficult".

otachack 5y ago
That is f*cked up and I hope people that dropped grad careers chime in in the future about situations like this, especially when more unions pop up.
- temp234 5y ago
  There are so many horror stories about academia waiting to come out. The way vulnerable people are exploited and mistreated in what is, in fact, a work environment; moral hazards and conflicts of interest everywhere; lots of untrustworthy research results and inability to reproduce research. Universities are big business and ought to be regulated just as much as any other big business
  - ModernMech 5y ago
    Can you expand on what regulations you feel are lacking and how you'd like to see them implemented?
    - mumblemumble 5y ago
      Decent labor standards would be a start. Universities are rather analogous to sweatshops in how they operate and the economic reasons for doing so. And I suspect that, in much the same way, this state of affairs represents a sort of Nash equilibrium that cannot be significantly altered except by an outside force changing the rules of the game.
      - 5y ago

paulcole 5y ago

> Academia likes to cast itself as a true meritocracy The more an organization/community says one thing, the more likely the opposite is to be true. Think about Google and “Don’t be evil.” Or companies that tout “work/life balance.”

bombcar 5y ago
What would that say about the organization that itself is the union?
- paulcole 5y ago
  I don’t know. I’m not very smart.

PaulHoule 5y ago

The intensity of the competition is severe enough to make it a toxic situation even if the established scientists were completely ethical about it.

giaour 5y ago

Aren't non-contingent faculty already mostly unionized through AAUP?

jasode 5y ago

>Arguments against unionization from already tenured faculty usually sound like: An argument against a union at MIT came from un-tenured graduate student Kevin Wang : https://thetech.com/2021/10/21/why-we-do-not-need-a-gsu https://thetech.com/2021/10/21/why-we-do-not-need-a-gsu TLDR: he didn't think paying the 1.44% annual union dues (~$620/year) is going to be worth it. He based this on comparing MIT salary increase history to other universities with and without unions. Also, KW was previously in Germany & UK so he's presumably familiar with the stronger worker unions in Europe. The MIT union vote was 66%-for and 34%-against. The 34% have various reasons to not join a union but I think we can guess that many of them think the $620/year salary deductions will not be worth whatever benefits the union can negotiate. I'm not saying KW is right but I think it's more constructive to consider the opinions of MIT grad students who actually vote (e.g. Kevin Wang) rather than your synthesized quote from tenured professors. The collective bargaining unit will negotiate with university administrators (not the tenured professors) who set salaries etc.

bombcar 5y ago
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.
- aidenn0 5y ago
  If you made tolls on a toll road optional, the road owners would not be able to keep up with maintenance, yet I think most drivers value the road...
  - nautilius 5y ago
    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?
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]

mhh__ 5y ago

In an ideal world I think unionization at least has the potential to fight back against the "One bad letter of recommendation and your career is over" aspect. Whether it will work or not I have no idea. There is simply way too many questions on the academia stackexchange about how to confront a superior without making them feel confronted (or wrong). The power dynamic is ugly.

xhkkffbf 5y ago
But why? It's a supply and demand issue. When demand is high and supply is low, the hiring committees will definitely look over one or more bad letters. But when supply is high (as it is most of the time thanks to overproduction), well the hiring committee will choose the best package deal. I'm sure the university will be happy to claim that they'll discount bad letters just because it will be politically helpful, but as long as the hiring committee sees them all, it won't matter. They'll choose the best package. Not that it matters, because most of this happens by word of mouth. I've seen professors write glowing letters of recommendation to cover their butt. Then they privately bad mouth the person.

bumblebritches5 5y ago

anonymousDan 5y ago

I think your view on unionization is very US centric. In the UK at least there is a university union. In fact it is currently striking over a range of issues (mostly related to pension cuts).

gbjw 5y ago
In Canada as well (e.g., York is known to have a strong 'activist' graduate union that periodically shuts down classes over labour disputes).

canjobear 5y ago

I doubt that a union could do much against the alleged toxic aspects of academia that you are pointing out. There’s nothing they can do, for example, to change the fact that tenure track jobs are rare, which is what drives a lot of the stress for grad students. More likely they will be involved in labor disputes involving how much TA work the grad students have to do.

bognition 5y ago
Correct but they can advocate for other types of positions and intervene when a university fails to educate students about non academic jobs.

light_hue_1 5y ago

We know exactly what the long term effects are because some grad schools have been unionized for 50 years. The effects are: slightly better working conditions, slightly less discrimination, slightly better healthcare. Just look at what say, the grad student union at University of Michigan is able to gain for their students. Neither apocalyptic nor utopian predictions are anywhere near the mark.

rr808 5y ago

> In practice it's more of a gerontocracy Right, unionization will just make this worse. Protect the insiders, those already with jobs.

jancsika 5y ago

> I'm very curious to see what the long term effects of unionizing will be in Academia. My friend, today you get to actually experience what sci-fi writer Frank Herbert called "Traveling without Moving:" The year is 2022. A virus wreaks havoc on the nations of the world. A lone free software warrior named gorhill roams the internet to fight for justice, protect the underdog[1], and block ads[2]. At UC Davis (and possibly other schools) the grad students have been unionized now for at least two decades. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kung_Fu_(1972_TV_series)#Plot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kung_Fu_(1972_TV_series)#Plot 2: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-origin/cjpalhdlnbpafiamejdnhcphjbkeiagm https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-origin/cjpa... 3: https://uaw2865.org/about-our-union/ https://uaw2865.org/about-our-union/

xhkkffbf 5y ago

Even though I think many senior academics are often terrible jerks and sometimes capable of behavior that borders on criminal, I don't see unions as being much of a help at all. I've been soured recently by one big event that happened at a place where I sometimes work. One guy was accused of doing something unwoke in his time off the job. Normally, this guy was a big union booster and even a union rep in some negotiations. It turns out, though, that didn't matter because the other union reps wanted his promotion. He had zero relationship with the management because he was frequently aggitating for this union cause or that union cause. So when push came to shove, the management hated him and they were able to cite the lack of support of his so-called union buddies as proof that he was bad. I think students think that the union will bring them some kind of lightweight version of tenure. It could help in a few negotiations or some extreme cases, but I think that all too often it will just be another layer of self-interested semi-managers who are just as corruptable as the regular managers.

actually_a_dog 5y ago

Forget having their careers destroyed. The fact is that most people who graduate with a PhD will not have an academic career on the tenure track, and it's really easy to see why once you pay attention to what's going on. The thing is that academia is not a growing field anymore. So, if a professor graduates more than one student, they're feeding a glut of candidates who will be competing for one job at some point. For instance, in the field of engineering as a whole, 7.8 students graduate with PhDs per professor over the length of an average academic career [0]. In environmental engineering, that number is a whopping 19.0! (Also from [0]). As a graduate student, once you realize the field isn't growing, you can actually see the phenomenon at work. Just look around in all your classes. That same handful of people you see in most of your courses, especially those leading into your intended specialty, those people are probably your competition. Now multiply that by every university in the country that teaches in your specialty. You very quickly come to the conclusion that you'll probably have to wait for someone to either retire or die before you get an academic position, and that's actually 100% the truth. --- [0]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4309283/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4309283/

ModernMech 5y ago
It's true that it's hard to get an academic job, but it's not true in all industries. In CS for example we've been hiring constantly for years and our searches are often not successful. Moreover not everyone who graduates with a Ph.D. wants on the tenure track, and universities are increasingly creating non tenure roles to meet this demand. I'm not on tenure track and I don't think I'm missing much compared to my TT counterparts. I don't even want tenure, it's not at all what it's cracked up to be. Your citation also leaves a lot to be desired. From your link: > Nowadays, less than 17% of new PhDs in science, engineering and health-related fields find tenure-track positions within 3 years after graduation Two of the things we ask during hiring are: - "How is your research agenda different from your advisor's." - "What funding agency will you target for your first grant proposal and what research will that be based on?" Most newly minted PhDs cannot answer those questions satisfactorily. It sometimes can take 2-3 years doing a postdoc to be able to find a suitable research agenda that is sufficiently differentiated from your advisor's. Moreover: > We recognize that in using a simple model, several parameters that are not part of our analysis may pose limitations (Ghaffarzadegan et al., 2011). One consideration is that many engineering doctorates are not interested in academic positions and may not even compete for tenure-track positions in academia. Another consideration is that some engineering graduates are foreign citizens who take academic positions outside of the USA.3 Another factor is inter-field hiring. Engineering doctorates might obtain positions in other fields such as science or business, which would also diminish the gap. Okay, so they discount people who don't want to work in academia, and also foreign students who won't work in America. I'm sorry but what? Foreign students who won't be working in America after they graduate are most of our students. Probably 70% of our grad students right now (and the situation can't be much different at MIT). It's pretty hard to take this paper seriously when they just handwave all that away and say "but in the steady state..." And then the grand conclusion of the article is to throw up their hands and say (paraphrasing) "there's probably nothing we can do about this so we just have to be more forthright with students about their prospects." Okay then... I'm not saying it's not hard to get an academic job, but at the same time the measure shouldn't be academic tenure track jobs. There are lots of non-TT positions across the country at top research universities, SLACs, and community colleges.

lumost 5y ago

What society wants from Academia isn't something you can grind for. Ground breaking research and great education isn't something that comes from working 80 hours a week (most of the time). I'd also suspect that the vast majority of effort in academia is dedicated to simply pleasing the whims of those with power/funding. A union might increase productivity by both a) De-stressing those who are actually doing the work of academia. Ensuring that they are financially taken care including living wages, sustainable working hours, and stable employment. b) Reducing the need/available time for academic make-work. c) Negotiating with funding bodies to correct lop-sided funding policies where students are funded but researchers are not.*

Barrin92 5y ago
>Ground breaking research and great education isn't something that comes from working 80 hours a week (most of the time). is there much evidence for this claim? If one takes a look at the habits and biographies of groundbreaking researchers they all have one thing in common, they have dedicated virtually their entire time to work. Looking at countries with exceptional educational outcomes broadly you see the same thing, time and resources spent on tutoring and schooling is extremely high.
- lumost 5y ago
  > biographies of groundbreaking researchers they all have one thing in common, they have dedicated virtually their entire time to work. I'd argue that most ground breaking researchers had the benefit of researching their own ideas for prolonged periods. Putting in 40 hour a week on your own ideas for 10+ years is an awful lot of time. Many ground breaking researchers such as Feynman and Einstein had extended sabbaticals of one kind or another which lead to their best work. It may be out of ignorance, but I'm not aware of any famous researcher who accredits their success to an 80 hour work week.
  - DoughnutHole 5y ago
    We're also in an era where groundbreaking research is seldom done by lone unicorn researchers expanding on a stroke of genius. The Nobel Prizes are still awarded to individuals but often only because that's how Nobel decided the prize had to work over a century ago. Prizes are most of the time awarded to the heads of research groups who's discoveries are made of the backs of dozens of researchers and graduates often working 80 hour weeks, and in some cases hundreds or thousands of technicians. The only prize that regularly meets the lone genius researcher trope is when the physics prize is awarded to a theorist (partially since it can't go to the hundreds of physicists responsible for verifying the theory). Newton could see so far from standing on the shoulders of giants, the modern researcher can see so far from standing on the pyramid of overworked untenured researchers.

rmatt2000 5y ago

Academia (in the U.S. at least) is one of the last vestiges of the old master / apprentice system.

musicale 5y ago
I thought we'd gotten rid of indentured servitude, but grad students are locked into years of absurdly low pay[1] and an extremely asymmetric power relationship with their supervisors. Add in the increased risk for depression and suicide and it really doesn't seem like a great gig. [1] Engineering students at least. Humanities students are paid just a bit less than the minimum wage they'll be earning after graduation.

david38 5y ago

This is graduate students unionizing. Everywhere I’ve seen this, the principal complaints are wages, housing, acknowledging they are workers, and working hours. Grad students are used as slaves. This is trivial to avoid just by paying them what they actually need to live. This is a university, what they can’t figure this out? No, they just overplayed their hand at the bargaining table.

namelessoracle 5y ago

Its interesting that the people who create and encourage this system so fervently push for major social reforms and claim their social theories will create better societies.

A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago

It is interesting that you used word 'gerontocracy', because it is the same word used by Thiel to describe current true owners of US financial system. I certainly do not disagree. I think some fresh blood is needed -- and not just in there or academia, but also on just about every political level. I am personally kinda done with people, who don't understand basic technology. They should be retired. They should not have any real influence on what the current generation is doing.

robwwilliams 5y ago

Tenure does not provide much protection in biomedical research—only funding. In fact at top tier institutions tenure is almost meaningless often with <50% salary guaranteed even with a teaching load. I think the abuses of seniority are much less than in the past—both wrt extraneous labor (hey, help me paint my house) to sexual pressures. Re unionization—-its complex and a function of teaching load as a TA versus, class work as a student, versus your own research with mentors.

derbOac 5y ago

FWIW, speaking as someone who has had tenure, the problems don't end there. The whole thing is broken all the way through. There are good places and good people, but the system is dysfunctional and too many critically problematic behaviors and dynamics are incentivized. Society at large isn't helpful either, as outside influences tend to be politicized badly on both ends of the spectrum in multiple ways, even when the other side is trying to improve things in good faith.

wardedVibe 5y ago

The UC grad students have been unionized for decades, and just added gsr positions in addition to the teaching positions. Mostly right now it serves to protect student's research time from heavy teaching requirements. But honestly, professors are also increasingly far away from the levers of power to create more permanent positions. There's a lot of bureaucrats making decisions who are mostly accountable to themselves.

2ion 5y ago

> However, the power structures in academia are heavily skewed and toxic. Individually graduate students have little recourse when they are wronged. Life in academia is hard. You have to work long days, the chance of success is very low. At every stage the probability of getting that next job is very low. A "research precariat" is what keeps German universities going as well. This is an international issue; even the OECD seems to have studies on the subject. Would be interesting to see a cross-country comparison of who really has the "best" universities --- or university systems, as this kind of issue does not tend to be specific to one institution.

topaz0 5y ago

While it's not particularly widespread, there are places in the US where grad students have been unionized for decades. The Universities of Michigan and Wisconsin are two of the oldest, dating from the 70s iirc. As a grad student falling under the collective bargaining agreement for the University of Michigan, I feel pretty good about it. Not only do they pay us pretty well and give good healthcare, but the union has been essential in making the administration set up better-than-average covid policies, like free asymptomatic testing and non-retaliation for choosing to work remotely (sometimes). There are also a ton of corner cases where subpopulations of the grad students have a specific issue, where the union has been a very good advocate.

musicale 5y ago

> Individually graduate students have little recourse when they are wronged Changing supervisors without 1) losing your funding and/or 2) having to start over on your dissertation is extremely difficult at many universities. As a result, academic supervisors wield excessive power over their graduate students.