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Good for them! Academia is a toxic and broken environment, and this seems like a great first step in fixing it. Interested to see how the dynamic plays out at S

Good for them! Academia is a toxic and broken environment, and this seems like a great first step in fixing it. Interested to see how the dynamic plays out at Stanford, and if other American universities follow suit.

EA-3167 3y ago
The advice I always give people (who ask) is that unless they're SO passionate about a subject that they can't imagine being happy away from it... look at industry, not academia. Maybe this sort of vote will be the beginning of the end of that sort of advice being applicable.
- archgoon 3y ago
  This is not the first university where grad students have unionized. Most of the UC's have been unionized for decades.
mensetmanusman 3y ago
It will be interesting. Some federal grants seem to have pay limit maximums lower than the new minimum pay requirement. Maybe this will have the effect of sending more federal grant money to lower cost of living research institutes. That could be an interesting outcome.
xhkkffbf 3y ago
Alas, I'm not sure a union can begin to fix anything except a few cosmetic things. The biggest problem is the massive oversupply of people who want academic careers versus the number of real jobs. The individual unions at the schools can't tackle this oversupply at all because it's caused by the schools acting independently. The natural game is to protect the insiders by restricting admission like many of the other unions like the AMA that actively campaign against too many doctors. Indeed, the unions risk the bad optics of campaigning to reduce new admits in order to maintain opportunities for those already in the pipeline. In other words, slamming the door shut on people who want to learn all to restrict supply of work for the privileged. I suppose the unions might be able to help in the rare case of a real jerk of a professor who mistreats her students, but I think most professors are smart enough to play passive aggressive games instead. The schools nurture the ability to act passive aggressively. The rest of the time, the students in the union are going to waste their time arguing about something instead of working on their dissertation, the one thing that will spring them from the jail.
- frantzfanon 3y ago
  There is a vast oversupply of people who want academic careers vs. the number of currently-existing tenure track jobs. In most fields (CS is somewhat different since industry is so attractive, so often even teaching faculty receive tenure), almost all of the teaching is done by contract workers and adjuncts. So the need for labor is there, just not the funding to give everyone secure jobs. If public funding returned to higher levels and the number of tenure-track jobs was increased, then the oversupply would not be quite so bad. This is a sector-wide change that graduate worker unions could push for at each of their individual institutions, especially if they worked in tandem with the unions representing adjuncts. Graduate workers have a lot of power since they can gum up the graduation pipeline and piss off wealthy parents and donors. Of course it is a band-aid solution since the system is fundamentally pyramid-shaped.
  - labcomputer 3y ago
    CS is rather unique in that regard (along with maybe economics and business, though to a lesser degree). For everything else, the vast majority of incoming graduate students intend to get a job in academia and then "settle" for a high-paying job in the private sector that doesn't really use their skills. > If public funding returned to higher levels and the number of tenure-track jobs was increased, then the oversupply would not be quite so bad. This is unrealistic. You'd need to increase tenured faculty by at least an order of magnitude to soak up all the grad students currently being produced... But that doesn't even solve the problem because all those professors are going to want to do research, and they're going to want to have graduate research assistants. So now you have the same problem as before, but an order of magnitude bigger. The only real solution is to reduce the number of PhDs produced over a professor's career from ~20 to ~2. Which of course means reducing the number of grad students. > This is a sector-wide change that graduate worker unions could push for at each of their individual institutions, especially if they worked in tandem with the unions representing adjuncts Universities will never go for this. You have to understand your counter-party's BANTA. This is like Brexit: If your position is that you want terms that are strictly worse for your counter-party than if you just don't exist... well then you're not going to get a deal.
- 3y ago
AnimalMuppet 3y ago
A first step, maybe, but far from enough to fix it. Toxic: That won't be fixed until they start firing tenured profs for abusing grad students. Nothing else will do. Broken: There's no route to professorship for most grad students, ever. We either need far bigger universities, or far fewer grad students.
- black_puppydog 3y ago
  Or permanent positions that are reasonably paid and not professors. Like teachers, researchers, ... I don't get the impression that everyone becomes a manager in software, not everyone becomes a line manager in a factory. Not every wants to become CEO eventually. Why should academia be any different? In Germany for one we used to have positions at universities that focused exclusively on teaching. That was, like, their specialty. And frankly a lot of researchers shouldn't be teaching, they only do it because there's nobody else left to do it.
  - analog31 3y ago
    In the US, less than half of all college teaching is done by professors. The remainder are "adjunct" teachers, whose job focus is on teaching. An adjunct job tends to have low pay, is short term, and you sign away some of your rights under the labor laws. You have to re-apply for your job every semester. Perhaps the real difference is how Germany treats workers. The US has community colleges, that focus on teaching. In my state, the community college teachers are unionized, and teaching is treated more like a career. Disclosure: I was an adjunct for a semester at a Big Ten university, more than 25 years ago. My spouse has worked there as a non-faculty researcher since that time.
    - jrochkind1 3y ago
      There is also a USA non-adjunct job called "lecturer" that is meant to focus on teaching rather than research. But while better pay and job security than adjunct, it's still usually pretty bad. (Also not tenured).
    - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
ETH_start 3y ago
[flagged]
- weakfish 3y ago
  Source?
  - ETH_start 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - Fomite 3y ago
      I am definitely what would be classified as a "left-wing academic" by most, and I've never been a member of a faculty union.
    - light_hue_1 3y ago
      Or maybe, the fact that the overwhelming number of smart people working on making new ideas, new medications, making society better, are left wing is a really good indication that this is a much better approach? It's amazing to me that it never occurs to people on the right that when the smartest people around all pretty much agree on reality they aren't actually wrong. The right treats science just like antivaxers treat medicine. Doctors are evil. Until you get cancer and then the doctor does anything to your body to maybe make it better. Let's hate all the academics and denounce them all the time, but wow, isn't it nice when another disease is cured, when my phone works better, when grandma lives for a few more years? Who do you think does the work to make sure that our fighters, bombs, drones are better than those of Russia or China? All the right wants is benefits that only the left can give them while hating us. Just like with doctors. It's really intellectually dishonest. And I'm personally really tired of it.
      - ETH_start 3y ago
        >>Or maybe, the fact that the overwhelming number of smart people working on making new ideas, new medications, making society better, are left wing is a really good indication that this is a much better approach? Business owners are doing all of those things, and more than half of them are right wing. [1] The average Republican has a higher income than the average Democrat, and this is despite staunchly pro-Democrat voting blocs like public sector unions enjoying much higher income than the general population due to rent seeking. [2] If intelligence led to left-wing views, then the business world would be totally left-wing, and higher income would be correlated with having left-wing views. I believe the fact that academia is so overwhelmingly left-wing is explained by its alliance with government (coercive state power) and the typical effects of dogmatic groupthink that manifests whenever a group has a strong economic interest in a particular ideology becoming dominant. >Let's hate all the academics and denounce them all the time, but wow, isn't it nice when another disease is cured, when my phone works better, when grandma lives for a few more years? Academics contribute enormously to society, which is precisely why I so strongly denounce the corruption of academia by the financial conflict of interest and ideological groupthink created by ideologically rationalized union rent-seeking. [1] https://www.americanexpress.com/en-us/business/trends-and-insights/articles/which-political-party-do-small-business-owners-identify-with-the-most/ https://www.americanexpress.com/en-us/business/trends-and-in... [2] https://www.hoover.org/research/california-state-government-workers-earn-143000-twice-much-private-sector-workers https://www.hoover.org/research/california-state-government-...
manvillej 3y ago
Grad student unionization is already well on its way in the US. It started strong in the 90s. It was hamstrung because grad students weren't recognized as workers in 2004 by the NLRB; that was overturned in 2016. Since then, graduate student unions have been having some massive contract wins. Its a pretty complex & shifting situation historically. In fact, its illegal to have a grad student union in some states for public universities: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graduate_student_employee_unionization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graduate_student_employee_unio... It is a growing movement in academia: Harvard(2018), Yale(2022), NYU(1998), BU, Brandeis, Tufts, UMass Amherst(1991), Columbia(2017), UPenn(2016), Brown(2014), Stanford(yesterday, not even joking), UNC(?), etc. Duke is unionizing like right now Grad student unions are such a large body of new union members that the UAW has done some weird things to dilute their power in the UAW. like splitting NYU and Columbia into different locals. They're some of the largest inductions of new members in NLRB history. Its a pretty fascinating history and on going movement

EA-3167 3y ago

The advice I always give people (who ask) is that unless they're SO passionate about a subject that they can't imagine being happy away from it... look at industry, not academia. Maybe this sort of vote will be the beginning of the end of that sort of advice being applicable.

archgoon 3y ago
This is not the first university where grad students have unionized. Most of the UC's have been unionized for decades.

mensetmanusman 3y ago

It will be interesting. Some federal grants seem to have pay limit maximums lower than the new minimum pay requirement. Maybe this will have the effect of sending more federal grant money to lower cost of living research institutes. That could be an interesting outcome.

xhkkffbf 3y ago

Alas, I'm not sure a union can begin to fix anything except a few cosmetic things. The biggest problem is the massive oversupply of people who want academic careers versus the number of real jobs. The individual unions at the schools can't tackle this oversupply at all because it's caused by the schools acting independently. The natural game is to protect the insiders by restricting admission like many of the other unions like the AMA that actively campaign against too many doctors. Indeed, the unions risk the bad optics of campaigning to reduce new admits in order to maintain opportunities for those already in the pipeline. In other words, slamming the door shut on people who want to learn all to restrict supply of work for the privileged. I suppose the unions might be able to help in the rare case of a real jerk of a professor who mistreats her students, but I think most professors are smart enough to play passive aggressive games instead. The schools nurture the ability to act passive aggressively. The rest of the time, the students in the union are going to waste their time arguing about something instead of working on their dissertation, the one thing that will spring them from the jail.

frantzfanon 3y ago
There is a vast oversupply of people who want academic careers vs. the number of currently-existing tenure track jobs. In most fields (CS is somewhat different since industry is so attractive, so often even teaching faculty receive tenure), almost all of the teaching is done by contract workers and adjuncts. So the need for labor is there, just not the funding to give everyone secure jobs. If public funding returned to higher levels and the number of tenure-track jobs was increased, then the oversupply would not be quite so bad. This is a sector-wide change that graduate worker unions could push for at each of their individual institutions, especially if they worked in tandem with the unions representing adjuncts. Graduate workers have a lot of power since they can gum up the graduation pipeline and piss off wealthy parents and donors. Of course it is a band-aid solution since the system is fundamentally pyramid-shaped.
- labcomputer 3y ago
  CS is rather unique in that regard (along with maybe economics and business, though to a lesser degree). For everything else, the vast majority of incoming graduate students intend to get a job in academia and then "settle" for a high-paying job in the private sector that doesn't really use their skills. > If public funding returned to higher levels and the number of tenure-track jobs was increased, then the oversupply would not be quite so bad. This is unrealistic. You'd need to increase tenured faculty by at least an order of magnitude to soak up all the grad students currently being produced... But that doesn't even solve the problem because all those professors are going to want to do research, and they're going to want to have graduate research assistants. So now you have the same problem as before, but an order of magnitude bigger. The only real solution is to reduce the number of PhDs produced over a professor's career from ~20 to ~2. Which of course means reducing the number of grad students. > This is a sector-wide change that graduate worker unions could push for at each of their individual institutions, especially if they worked in tandem with the unions representing adjuncts Universities will never go for this. You have to understand your counter-party's BANTA. This is like Brexit: If your position is that you want terms that are strictly worse for your counter-party than if you just don't exist... well then you're not going to get a deal.
3y ago

AnimalMuppet 3y ago

A first step, maybe, but far from enough to fix it. Toxic: That won't be fixed until they start firing tenured profs for abusing grad students. Nothing else will do. Broken: There's no route to professorship for most grad students, ever. We either need far bigger universities, or far fewer grad students.

black_puppydog 3y ago
Or permanent positions that are reasonably paid and not professors. Like teachers, researchers, ... I don't get the impression that everyone becomes a manager in software, not everyone becomes a line manager in a factory. Not every wants to become CEO eventually. Why should academia be any different? In Germany for one we used to have positions at universities that focused exclusively on teaching. That was, like, their specialty. And frankly a lot of researchers shouldn't be teaching, they only do it because there's nobody else left to do it.
- analog31 3y ago
  In the US, less than half of all college teaching is done by professors. The remainder are "adjunct" teachers, whose job focus is on teaching. An adjunct job tends to have low pay, is short term, and you sign away some of your rights under the labor laws. You have to re-apply for your job every semester. Perhaps the real difference is how Germany treats workers. The US has community colleges, that focus on teaching. In my state, the community college teachers are unionized, and teaching is treated more like a career. Disclosure: I was an adjunct for a semester at a Big Ten university, more than 25 years ago. My spouse has worked there as a non-faculty researcher since that time.
  - jrochkind1 3y ago
    There is also a USA non-adjunct job called "lecturer" that is meant to focus on teaching rather than research. But while better pay and job security than adjunct, it's still usually pretty bad. (Also not tenured).
  - seanmcdirmid 3y ago

ETH_start 3y ago

[flagged]

weakfish 3y ago
Source?
- ETH_start 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - Fomite 3y ago
    I am definitely what would be classified as a "left-wing academic" by most, and I've never been a member of a faculty union.
  - light_hue_1 3y ago
    Or maybe, the fact that the overwhelming number of smart people working on making new ideas, new medications, making society better, are left wing is a really good indication that this is a much better approach? It's amazing to me that it never occurs to people on the right that when the smartest people around all pretty much agree on reality they aren't actually wrong. The right treats science just like antivaxers treat medicine. Doctors are evil. Until you get cancer and then the doctor does anything to your body to maybe make it better. Let's hate all the academics and denounce them all the time, but wow, isn't it nice when another disease is cured, when my phone works better, when grandma lives for a few more years? Who do you think does the work to make sure that our fighters, bombs, drones are better than those of Russia or China? All the right wants is benefits that only the left can give them while hating us. Just like with doctors. It's really intellectually dishonest. And I'm personally really tired of it.
    - ETH_start 3y ago
      >>Or maybe, the fact that the overwhelming number of smart people working on making new ideas, new medications, making society better, are left wing is a really good indication that this is a much better approach? Business owners are doing all of those things, and more than half of them are right wing. [1] The average Republican has a higher income than the average Democrat, and this is despite staunchly pro-Democrat voting blocs like public sector unions enjoying much higher income than the general population due to rent seeking. [2] If intelligence led to left-wing views, then the business world would be totally left-wing, and higher income would be correlated with having left-wing views. I believe the fact that academia is so overwhelmingly left-wing is explained by its alliance with government (coercive state power) and the typical effects of dogmatic groupthink that manifests whenever a group has a strong economic interest in a particular ideology becoming dominant. >Let's hate all the academics and denounce them all the time, but wow, isn't it nice when another disease is cured, when my phone works better, when grandma lives for a few more years? Academics contribute enormously to society, which is precisely why I so strongly denounce the corruption of academia by the financial conflict of interest and ideological groupthink created by ideologically rationalized union rent-seeking. [1] https://www.americanexpress.com/en-us/business/trends-and-insights/articles/which-political-party-do-small-business-owners-identify-with-the-most/ https://www.americanexpress.com/en-us/business/trends-and-in... [2] https://www.hoover.org/research/california-state-government-workers-earn-143000-twice-much-private-sector-workers https://www.hoover.org/research/california-state-government-...

manvillej 3y ago

Grad student unionization is already well on its way in the US. It started strong in the 90s. It was hamstrung because grad students weren't recognized as workers in 2004 by the NLRB; that was overturned in 2016. Since then, graduate student unions have been having some massive contract wins. Its a pretty complex & shifting situation historically. In fact, its illegal to have a grad student union in some states for public universities: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graduate_student_employee_unionization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graduate_student_employee_unio... It is a growing movement in academia: Harvard(2018), Yale(2022), NYU(1998), BU, Brandeis, Tufts, UMass Amherst(1991), Columbia(2017), UPenn(2016), Brown(2014), Stanford(yesterday, not even joking), UNC(?), etc. Duke is unionizing like right now Grad student unions are such a large body of new union members that the UAW has done some weird things to dilute their power in the UAW. like splitting NYU and Columbia into different locals. They're some of the largest inductions of new members in NLRB history. Its a pretty fascinating history and on going movement