MSTPs on Strike!?

[Oak]

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Seems that the grad students at Yale and Columbia are currently on a one week strike:

http://www.columbiaspectator.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2005/04/19/4264a05384e1b

http://www.cnn.com/2005/EDUCATION/04/18/ivy.league.strike.ap/index.html

Any students at these universities care to comment?? I guess i'm just not sure why students would need to unionize considering the fact that they choose the school they will be attending anyway - shouldn't this be incentive enough for a school to provide a good working environment?

Also, Grad students (at least MSTPs) at Columbia and Yale didn't seem particularly disgruntled when i visited - did i miss something?

 

[linuxizer]

Seems that the grad students at Yale and Columbia are currently on a one week strike:
http://www.columbiaspectator.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2005/04/19/4264a05384e1b
http://www.cnn.com/2005/EDUCATION/04/18/ivy.league.strike.ap/index.html
Any students at these universities care to comment?? I guess i'm just not sure why students would need to unionize considering the fact that they choose the school they will be attending anyway - shouldn't this be incentive enough for a school to provide a good working environment?
Also, Grad students (at least MSTPs) at Columbia and Yale didn't seem particularly disgruntled when i visited - did i miss something?

I doubt the MSTPs are striking. Usually graduate teaching unionization efforts center around teaching duties, where the grad students consider themselves employees. There are lawsuits working their way through the NLRB also, but I believe that there was a recent anti-unionization ruling for Columbia. I guess if they're not employees to unionize, they're not employees to strike? GET-UP staged a strike here (Penn) last year, and the effect on classes was so tiny as to be ridiculous. That even grad students who pay their own way have teaching duties would seem to bolster the universities' argument that teaching is part of their education, not employment. Either way, the new president here made some concessions, and the game of good-cop bad-cop is likely to succeed.

--Ari

 

[tr]

Any students at these universities care to comment?? I guess i'm just not sure why students would need to unionize considering the fact that they choose the school they will be attending anyway - shouldn't this be incentive enough for a school to provide a good working environment?

No, this is false. Most/all PhD programs in the arts and letters provide inadequate health care and less than a living wage while requiring significant teaching duties.

Doubtless if one school suddenly started to offer standard pay and health care to its graduate students, it would find itself getting the pick of the litter; but this perk is probably not worth the huge monetary outlay such a change would require.

(There are some eerie parallels to the residency system, come to think of it - another setup that is essentially free of market pressures.)

Also, Grad students (at least MSTPs) at Columbia and Yale didn't seem particularly disgruntled when i visited - did i miss something?

There is not much interest in it among the biology graduate students, who generally receive a living wage, and for whom teaching duties are usually optional. (People often choose to do it for the money and for the teaching/learning experience.)

I do know of a few biology students who are involved, as well as one MSTP student. I'm not sure what their reasoning is, and it may be no more than solidarity with the exploited humanities students. The biology stipend is perfectly adequate if not luxurious, and as I mentioned, teaching duties are strictly optional. Our health care plan is pathetic, but most of us are young healthy people without families anyway.

 

[beary]

The grad students at Iowa are unionized. I am not sure how this came about originally, but it seems to me to be a good thing. We have a great health insurance plan that is heavily subsidized so it costs us very little. I had a health problem a while back that caused me to pile up some very significant bills and I would have been up a creek without good insurance.

 

[surge]

There is not much interest in it among the biology graduate students, who generally receive a living wage, and for whom teaching duties are usually optional. (People often choose to do it for the money and for the teaching/learning experience.)

I do know of a few biology students who are involved, as well as one MSTP student. I'm not sure what their reasoning is, and it may be no more than solidarity with the exploited humanities students.

This pretty much captures it.

The strike here is primarily by the humanities/social sciences grad students. Most students in the sciences, and certainly MSTPers are not involved.
As a matter of fact, there is a lot of controversy, and many other students are not supportive of the strike.