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I can’t imagine this actually producing better results long-term. Unions objectives are to limit competition amongst relative parties in order to combat the hig

I can’t imagine this actually producing better results long-term. Unions objectives are to limit competition amongst relative parties in order to combat the higher authority/ employer. The purpose of graduate school is to put compete your peers. What this will likely lead to IMO is more “equity” among the less capable (grants, funding, etc) which will reduce the opportunity for meritocracy and more capable (while assisting the less capable).

thot_experiment 5y ago
Ahh yes, less meritocracy or as I like to put it: not having to work awful hours and being paid like shit because that's just the way things have always been you don't have collective bargaining leverage.
Ar-Curunir 5y ago
What nonsense. Have you actually been a PhD student recently? The peers you’re “competing” with usually aren’t even at the same institution; and even then there’s a lot more cross-institution collaboration than there is competition. Also this view of doing research as competition is absolute garbage. Yes, competing to produce good research is good. No, advisors exploiting cheap PhD labour to do that is not good. The latter is what unions are meant to prevent.
exdsq 5y ago
My wife’s very recent PhD experience at Oxford was a little crunch time around conferences, a nice 20/25 hour week, and enough spare time to row with the Oxford Uni boat team. She stayed a year as a postdoc and it was much the same. She’s now a postdoc at Stanford and she’s working 16 hour days, weekends, and very stressed for it. Academic output is the same - it’s just different work culture. I know this is about PhD students but I imagine it’s no easier for them than early career postdocs, so this seems to make a lot of sense.
- sheikheddy 5y ago
  Stanford is notorious for "duck syndrome". People are calm on the surface but are always paddling below the water. I would say the CS papers out of Stanford tend to be nicer than the ones out of Oxford though, at least for Systems research. (This is a huge generalization: I don't read every paper and there's enough variation between authors that it doesn't really make sense to do a cross-institution comparison, but this is only my half-formed intuition).
  - exdsq 5y ago
    I think it's going to be very lab specific there, but you could be right for systems research (I've not read any myself)!. FWIW, she's in medical engineering. Edit: All it takes is one tenured professor who strongly filters submissions for good papers to keep standards high for a department to look much better, but then you'd be stopping your lab from playing the citations/publications game which is necessary for future postdocs. I may be cynical.
lolinder 5y ago
> The purpose of graduate school is to put compete your peers. This is what's wrong with higher education today. School should never be about competition, it should be about education. Graduate students in particular aren't supposed to be competing, they're supposed to be contributing to the body of human knowledge under the guidance of more experienced contributors. Any competition that exists is the result of either a severely misguided but sincere effort to increase productivity or of a cynical and deliberate attempt to manipulate vulnerable young students into providing free labor. Countering both of these cases is exactly why MIT students want a union.
lkey 5y ago
You misunderstand grad school. Typically you and your PI will be the only people with a given specialization at a given school. You will mostly be competing for grants with your colleagues from other schools. Even students under the same PI will often have focuses so different as to rule out direct competition. Additionally "The purpose of graduate school is to put(out) compete your peers." is not /the point/ of grad school at all. You can't 'win' academia, you survive it long enough to pursue your research interest. Moreover, the 'competition' for grants is more like a lottery than anything else for reasons too complex to get into here. "What this will likely lead to IMO is more “equity” among the less capable (grants, funding)" Putting aside your assertion that "equity" is bad, grants are not decided by people that know or care if the applicant is in a union. "which will reduce the opportunity for meritocracy and more capable" Not all games are zero-sum and 'merit' based, I'd recommend that you not universalize this outlook.

thot_experiment 5y ago

Ahh yes, less meritocracy or as I like to put it: not having to work awful hours and being paid like shit because that's just the way things have always been you don't have collective bargaining leverage.

Ar-Curunir 5y ago

What nonsense. Have you actually been a PhD student recently? The peers you’re “competing” with usually aren’t even at the same institution; and even then there’s a lot more cross-institution collaboration than there is competition. Also this view of doing research as competition is absolute garbage. Yes, competing to produce good research is good. No, advisors exploiting cheap PhD labour to do that is not good. The latter is what unions are meant to prevent.

exdsq 5y ago

My wife’s very recent PhD experience at Oxford was a little crunch time around conferences, a nice 20/25 hour week, and enough spare time to row with the Oxford Uni boat team. She stayed a year as a postdoc and it was much the same. She’s now a postdoc at Stanford and she’s working 16 hour days, weekends, and very stressed for it. Academic output is the same - it’s just different work culture. I know this is about PhD students but I imagine it’s no easier for them than early career postdocs, so this seems to make a lot of sense.

sheikheddy 5y ago
Stanford is notorious for "duck syndrome". People are calm on the surface but are always paddling below the water. I would say the CS papers out of Stanford tend to be nicer than the ones out of Oxford though, at least for Systems research. (This is a huge generalization: I don't read every paper and there's enough variation between authors that it doesn't really make sense to do a cross-institution comparison, but this is only my half-formed intuition).
- exdsq 5y ago
  I think it's going to be very lab specific there, but you could be right for systems research (I've not read any myself)!. FWIW, she's in medical engineering. Edit: All it takes is one tenured professor who strongly filters submissions for good papers to keep standards high for a department to look much better, but then you'd be stopping your lab from playing the citations/publications game which is necessary for future postdocs. I may be cynical.

lolinder 5y ago

> The purpose of graduate school is to put compete your peers. This is what's wrong with higher education today. School should never be about competition, it should be about education. Graduate students in particular aren't supposed to be competing, they're supposed to be contributing to the body of human knowledge under the guidance of more experienced contributors. Any competition that exists is the result of either a severely misguided but sincere effort to increase productivity or of a cynical and deliberate attempt to manipulate vulnerable young students into providing free labor. Countering both of these cases is exactly why MIT students want a union.

lkey 5y ago

You misunderstand grad school. Typically you and your PI will be the only people with a given specialization at a given school. You will mostly be competing for grants with your colleagues from other schools. Even students under the same PI will often have focuses so different as to rule out direct competition. Additionally "The purpose of graduate school is to put(out) compete your peers." is not /the point/ of grad school at all. You can't 'win' academia, you survive it long enough to pursue your research interest. Moreover, the 'competition' for grants is more like a lottery than anything else for reasons too complex to get into here. "What this will likely lead to IMO is more “equity” among the less capable (grants, funding)" Putting aside your assertion that "equity" is bad, grants are not decided by people that know or care if the applicant is in a union. "which will reduce the opportunity for meritocracy and more capable" Not all games are zero-sum and 'merit' based, I'd recommend that you not universalize this outlook.