ACTA's Must-Reads
« More on NKU | Main | Activism for credit at Berkeley »
Confused at Penn
At the University of Pennsylvania, members of the would-be graduate student union are sending a remarkably self-defeating message to prospective students. As high school seniors who have been accepted to Penn visit campus and tour the area with their folks, members of GET-UP (Graduate Employees Together -- University of Pennsylvania) are handing them leaflets based on a study they conducted earlier this year on who is actually doing the teaching at Penn. The study argues that only 40% of Penn classes are being taught by tenured or tenure-track faculty, and that the other 60% are taught by graduate students and a range of contingent lecturers, adjuncts, and other temporary workers (these results, it should be noted, are disputed). The ostensible purpose of the leaflet, according to one GET-UP member, is "to make them aware of how the administration treats its workers and where the resources are going. ... This is the kind of information [students] don't get from the administration ... but this is exactly the kind of information they come here for."
GET-UP has struggled for years to be recognized by the Penn administration, and the organization is by this time essentially moribund. Never popular with the majority of Penn grad students, the would-be union effort lost its momentum after the National Labor Relations Board--which once recognized the rights of graduate students at private universities to unionize--reversed its position in 2004. GET-UP's latest publicity stunt speaks to the confusion about mission and the questionable strategy that now plague the group.
Graduate student unions make their case by arguing that because grad students are doing a significant percentage of the teaching on a campus, their contributions to the overall work of the university should be recognized and treated with the respect it deserves. When arguing for larger stipends, better benefits, improved working conditions, and so on, graduate student unions use the fact that grad students do so much of the day-to-day work of undergraduate education to make a case for their value to the prestige and quality of the institution. In other words, graduate student unions must frame their criticism of university administrations within a broader compliment: the argument that graduate student labor is worthy of more respect and more remuneration is predicated not only on the supposition that graduate students do excellent work, but also that in so doing they are helping to create and maintain educational excellence at their school.
GET-UP seems to have missed that elemental point. Instead of arguing for the value of graduate student teaching to a valuable institution, GET-UP is effectively arguing that Penn is cheating undergrads by depriving them of the chance to be taught by tenured and tenure-track faculty. That argument is premised on some of the very assumptions that graduate student unions work hard to overturn: that graduate students teachers are "lesser" teachers, that their work is not "real," and that universities are cheating undergraduates when they charge huge tuitions for an educational experience that will revolve most of the time around inexperienced and implicitly inept journeymen teachers who are only a few years beyond college themselves. It's true that a large number of undergraduate classes at Penn are taught by graduate students--just as it's true at most, if not all, major universities. And it's true that this is a real problem for undergraduate education. But unless graduate students at Penn are united in the struggle to convince the administration that they should not be teaching, this is not an issue that helps GET-UP's cause.
According to the Daily Pennsylvanian, "GET-UP contends that by employing teachers who receive lower salaries than professors, Penn is cheapening its education." But it's not rational to argue that graduate student teachers, who are learning to teach as they go, who teach fewer classes than full-time faculty, and who are receiving tuition remission in exchange for teaching, should have paychecks that rival those of the faculty. What is rational is to recognize that GET-UP's irrational expectation has led it to commit the tactical equivalent of scoring a goal for the wrong team.
On its face, GET-UP's leaflet campaign is ultimately an argument against graduate student teaching, not an argument for the rights of graduate student teachers to be recognized as employees. GET-UP seems to think it is trying to use the occasion of pre-frosh campus visits to shame the university into treating grad students better, but it looks more as though GET-UP has lost track of its own agenda in the wake of its members' transparent desire to try to damage the university in the eyes of prospective students and their paying parents.
Posted by acta online on April 21, 2006 at April 21, 2006 07:53 AM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.goactablog.org/blog/mt-tb.cgi/141
Comments
Never popular with the majority of Penn grad students, ...
But we don't know that, since the recognition vote was never counted.
Posted by: Sherman Dorn at April 21, 2006 03:39 PM