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NYU Graduate Student Strike

Jason Stanley

Several people have asked that I post something about the graduate student strike currently happening at NYU. As many of you know, things are about to take a turn for the worse, with the administration making some pretty grave threats. I haven’t posted about this until now, for three reasons. First, I tend to be pretty uniformly pro-labor. Secondly, I’m nervous about the fact that the Bush administration has been chiefly responsible for the legal rulings that are allowing the NYU administration to do what it is now doing. The first and second fact conspire to make me somewhat suspicious of the NYU administration’s position. Third, I haven’t followed the details of the situation at NYU, and some people whom I respect a lot agree with the NYU admininstration’s position. So I am quite open to the possibility that knowing more about the details of the situation would affect my bias from the outside (e.g. perhaps the union is being unreasonable).

Nevertheless, I’d thought I’d link to the following interview, since in it, the distinguished NYU philosopher Paul Boghossian defends the administration position (and thereby adds himself to the list of people I respect a lot who agree with it). Prof. Boghossian raises the worry that having a union will change the relationship between professor and graduate student. But Michigan and Rutgers both have strong graduate unions, and I don’t perceive any difference between my relationship to my graduates at those institutions, and the relationships I had with my graduate students at Cornell (perhaps I always had a managerial relationship with my graduate students? I had better ask Susanna Siegel). Furthermore, the Rutgers philosophy department competes very successfully for graduate students with the departments at NYU and Princeton. No doubt, this has mostly to do with our departmental make-up. But I know of at least one  case of a student who was attracted by the health insurance package available for his family at Rutgers, the generosity of which was due to union bargaining. However, I don’t know what the union’s demands are, and perhaps they are more unreasonable than (as their representative claims) simply wanting to return to the table with the administration.

                                                   -Jason

UPDATE: I had closed the comments thread on this, since it had seemed to me that every side had said their piece. But I guess I will leave it open, and let Brian make the decision how long to continue with it. Post away.

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51 responses to “NYU Graduate Student Strike”

  1. David Velleman

    Having just moved to NYU from a large state university (where the graduate assistants are unionized), I can say that these institutions differ greatly in their use of teaching assistants. And having just attended a meeting with the President of NYU this afternoon, I can say that the attitude of the institution toward its graduate assistants is quite different as well. The NYU administration is committed to the proposition that considerations of graduate education — not the need for undergraduate instructors — should dictate how graduate students are admitted and deployed in the classroom.

    What's more, there are important details of the situation at NYU that are easily glossed over by stereotypes of "labor" and "management". (For what it's worth, the NYU administration is full of people with strong ties to the Democratic Party, all of whom think of themselves as "pro-labor", like you.) The NYU administration offered to recognize the UAW for the purpose of negotiating wages, benefits, and other terms of employment. It demanded, however, that staffing decisions — decisions about who teaches, what they teach, and so on — be excluded from union bargaining, because they are academic decisions. During the life of the union contract, the union had lodged grievances challenging the alloocation of teaching assignments, which were clearly within the academic purview of the departments involved. It was the union's refusal to limit itself to negotiating compensation and benefits, and its insistence on a closed shop, that precipitated the current strike. Given that the union is determined to interfere in academic decisionmaking, the administration is clearly right to stand its ground.

    Reply
  2. Manuel Cabrera

    The position Boghossian took in DN interview was very similar to the one taken by the administration at UCLA both when the TAs first tried to unionize and when our last contract was set to expire. We will have to go through a difficult time again I fear: our current contract expires in March.

    I want to offer one counter-argument to one that Boghossian offered. Assume that it's true that unionization will alter the relationship between the TAs and those who employ them. Assume that the relationship changes in the following way: tension increases between TAs and their employers. The thing is: the TAs aren't employed by the professors in their departments, but by the university. Their professors are fellow employees, not their employers. The TAs aren't appealing to their advisors and mentors to unionize, they're appealing to the entity that employs both groups: the university. The mentor-mentee relationship between professors and students that is, indeed, so important to graduate education need not shift fundamentally even if the employer-employee relationship does, for they are two different relationships between two different pairs of groups.

    At UCLA, the philosophy department–both students and faculty–has been largely supportive of the union. Indeed, philosophy graduate students were among the primary organizers when we were first trying to unionize. The above distinction was never confused in the way Boghossian not-so-subtly confused it. We unionized, we got some of our demands, federal and state funding are still going down, and yet, miraculously by the lights of the scenario Boghossian hinted at, undergraduate education continues to be excellent. Have departments at UCLA seen an overall drop in rankings, either at the undergraduate or graduate level? No. Do we offer fewer classes because the TAs have demanded outrageous luxuries like health care and just enough money to scrape by? No.

    NYU is trying to turn the undergraduates and parents against the TAs in the way that UCLA did by criticizing the strikers as showing disregard for the students whose papers and exams go ungraded while the strike goes on. But what a strike really shows is just how much of the teaching work the TAs really do. If it weren't for the work TAs do, not only would the material in our classes be less effectively taught to the undergraduates (since it's the job of TAs to clarify the material and spend many office hours and sections/tutorials working through it with them), but professors wouldn't have nearly as much time to spend on their own work if they had to grade hundreds or thousands of assignments, exams, and papers in a single term. How would a department's or a university's rankings fare if its professors did not have the time t o make orginal contributions to their fields?

    It's true that it can be cheaper for a university to have a non-unionized group of TAs. This leaves, potentially, more money to spend on undergraduates. But it's also cheaper to hire non-unionized workers in general, leaving companies more money to invest. This does not make it acceptable to do so.

    Reply
  3. Anonymous

    I'm a philosophy grad student somewhere south of NYU, and I'm tempted toward a knee-jerk pro-union response, but I can't help but notice there weren't a lot of facts present in the debate. Both Palm and Boghossian were speaking with more rhetoric than reason.

    Palm didn't have a figure for how many graduate students are teaching courses at NYU. I bet it's nowhere near three-quarters. I also doubt that the university is devastated by the refusal of the graduate students to work. If they had been, they would have acted to put a stop to the strike long before three weeks.

    But Boghossian is certainly wrong to claim that the students aren't workers. These students are doing work that the university does need in the gra.d scheme of things. More than that, if the students are striking, that indicates to me that they either need or truly feel that they deserve more than they're getting. Graduate students are not children, and I'm sure they take their work(indeed, their livelihood) very seriously. $19,000 is a lot of money. About twice what I'm getting in my program. But, NYC is a very expensive city. Between rent and virtually everything else costing much more than elsewhere, I'm sure $19,000 isn't worth much.

    But graduate students can eat dust for a few years and come out better in the end, right? Not really. Graduate students are generally in their mid-twenties to early thirties. These people have families. They need money to live, money to save, and benefits to support their partners and children. And, at least in philosophy, it's not a rigorous 2-3 year ordeal. It's a rigorous 6-7 year ordeal. That's an awfully long time to eat dust and pray for good health and fortune. My partner and I have decided it would be foolish to have a child while in graduate school. But many people aren't willing to put their life on hold for 7 years. Why should they? 7 years is a long time. Some people want a family and an academic career. Do we really want to exclude them? Academia could miss out on a lot of brilliant people that way. Still others enter graduate school with one or more children, already. Are the doors of education to be forever closed to these people?

    Reply
  4. Geoff

    First, David Velleman claims that "The NYU administration is committed to the proposition that considerations of graduate education — not the need for undergraduate instructors — should dictate how graduate students are admitted and deployed in the classroom":

    If this is so, why would Paul Boghossian (in the interview linked by Jason Stanley) cite a concern for the "undergraduates who are currently unable to get the education that they paid for" as his defense of NYU President Sexton's threat (read it here: http://www.nyu.edu/provost/ga/communications-112805.html) that graduate teachers who refuse to go back to work this Monday will lose their stipends for the next two semesters? Professor Boghossian's defense of this threat — which would clearly be illegal if it were not for last year's Bush-appointed NLRB decision to reverse its earlier position that graduate teachers are statutory employees under the NLRA — simply doesn't make any sense at all if "the need for undergraduate instructors" were not a central concern of the NYU administration's decisions about how to "deploy graduate students in the classroom". If graduate teaching is just a function of "considerations of graduate education", then why not simply say that graduate teachers on strike are failing to meet their academic requirements? This is not what President Sexton has done. Instead, he has promised that "none of the striking graduate students will have their ability to continue their own studies affected"; rather, they will be denied employment as teaching assistants and instructors.

    Second, if graduate teachers are employees, then the "allocation of teaching assignments" is clearly not a purely "academic decision," as Professor Velleman claims it is. He himself calls such decisions "staffing decisions". Professor Velleman may disagree with the claim that there is any sense in which graduate teachers are employees of NYU. But he neither made this claim nor argues for it; in its absence it is hard to see how "staffing decisions" are made ought not to be a central concern of a graduate teachers union.

    Third, whatever Professor Velleman thinks of the merits of GSOC's grievances — and it should be noted that according to the union they all "concern[ed] employment matters, not academic issues such as fellowships, grades, curriculum or tenure" (see http://www.2110uaw.org/gsoc/faculty_information.htm#thecontractual for more) — an independently arbitrated grievance procedure is a standard component of any union-negotiated employment contract. NYU's unilateral, non-negotiable offer "to recognize the UAW for the purpose of negotiating wages, benefits, and other terms of employment" included no such provision; indeed it explicitly excluded it. Professor Velleman is being misleading by chalking the union's demand for an independent grievance procedure up to a determination "to interfere in academic decisionmaking". It is no such thing.

    Reply
  5. Zehou

    Prof. Velleman,

    I'd like to hear more about the conflict over "decisions about who teaches, what they teach." Exactly what voice did student-employees want to have concerning who teaches and what they teach? Also, it sounds as though you think any voice the student-employees would want to have here would amount to inappropriate interference in what ought to be decisions made by faculty and/or administrators. Perhaps you're right, but it isn't obvious to me.

    In any case, part of what got folks riled up to unionize at my U was that some grad students were being assigned days before the beginning of a term to serve as instructors (not TAs) in courses way outside their area of competence, and sometimes even outside their discipline/department.

    That, of course, meant a serious difference in workload for the same (or sometimes even LOWER!) pay, yet with no change in the department's expectations ("official" expectations, at least) regarding dissertation progress for the term. Further, the students were selected for such tasks not because of their lack of merit (their inability to compete successfully for better assignments), but because their schedules were the most convenient to change at the last minute.

    Student-employees thought these were examples of decisions about "who teaches, what they teach" that they deserved to have a voice about, unlike the many decisions about "who teaches, what they teach" that they were quite sure they didn't deserve to have a say about.

    Reply
  6. The Continental Op

    Prof. Boghossian raises the worry that having a union will change the relationship between professor and graduate student.

    Despite a fairly long history of collective bargaining by graduate assistants at some very prominant state schools (e.g. Wisconsin, Michigan, Rutgers, etc.), there hasn't been a great deal of empirical research on the question of whether unionization affects the academic relationship between graduate students and professors. However, what little there is indicates that there has not been an adverse effect. Neither the NLRB majority in its Brown University decision (which was, in my view, wholly unsound to the point of being irrational), nor the opponants of graduate assistant bargaining have ever identified any real evidence that unionzation would impair academic relationships or threaten academic freedom. The issue is a red herring, offered up by faculty and administration figures "with strong ties to the Democratic Party", who "think of themselves as 'pro-labor'" except (to borrow a turn of phrase from the late Phil Ochs) when it affects them personally.

    Reply
  7. Anonymous Grad Student

    The NYU grad student union has flatly denied the description of events given by professor Velleman. According to them, they strike because (a) NYU slashed their benefits and (b) NYU revoked recognition of the union.
    See this link:
    http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/27/AR2005092701590.html

    Concerning Professor Velleman's charge that the union "interfere(s) in academic decision making":
    Six of the 15 grievances filed by the union concerned job allocation. At issue is this: the university wants to be the ultimate arbiter of any grievance filed, while the union wishes for an independent arbiter. In other words, the NYU administration wants a free hand to determine who gets which jobs *without any accountability*, while the union simply wants some independent source to which to appeal of jobs are distributed unfairly. In short, the union simply wants an independent grievance procedure so as to guarantee of fairness in job distribution – a procedure, I might add, that many state grad student unions have in their contracts.

    And what are those outside of the NYU community to think of the fact that so many NYU professors disagree with Professor Velleman's description? The organization Faculty Democracy, to which almost 200 NYU professors belong, passed 3 resolutions on November 30th in support of the striking grad students.

    So, I must respectfully disagree with Professor Velleman's George Willian description. Will says, "NYU withdrew recognition of the union because it was breaking its promise to confine itself to economic issues and not inject itself into academic decision-making, such as the assignment of teachers to particular courses." I say that any union worth having is one that can guarantee a minimal amount of job security; thus, teaching assignments must be subject to an independent grievance procedure.

    Reply
  8. Keith DeRose

    The situation at my school, Yale, is at least somewhat similar to that of NYU. At least to the extent that many of the same arguments are raised. When I compare the situation of our TAs at Yale with how things were for me as a TA at UCLA (this was in the mid-to-late 80s, so shouldn't be taken to reflect the current situatio there, about which I know nothing), I think I see a difference much like David V. sees when he compares NYU with his former job. At Yale, when you look at the amount of teaching done by TAs and the number of students they are in charge of, it really is plausible that it's considerations of what would provide a good training for the TAs that's driving how they are deployed. By contrast, it seems very unlikely that someone at UCLA thought, "Now, how often should TAs teach, and how many students should each have, to make their graduate career the best possible training for them?," and came up with the answer: "every quarter after their first year, and often around 70 students." So I think I'm seeing at Yale what David is seeing at NYU.

    But what I'm not seeing is that this feature of TAing at Yale/NYU would underwrite the flat denial that the TAs are employees. And I take it that such a denial is what Paul is doing in the interview. I worry about the fairness of bringing Paul's words into a blog discussion, because, though these discussions do usually involve a lot of shooting from the hip, we do get to consider our words & think a bit before typing, if we wish, while Paul had to answer on the spot. But it seems like this was a considered part of the position Paul came in to the interview to defend when he said:

    "the basic thought behind refusing to continue recognizing graduate student union is that we don't believe that students are employees, and we think that the only people who are really entitled to be represented by a collective bargaining unit and a labor union are people who are primarily employees. Our basic impulse is not to want to lock into place a relationship to our graduate students, whom we treat as developing colleagues, that considers them to be laborers, and we don't want to institutionalize that relationship."

    So, I just finished teaching our big class of first order logic, with 3 TAs. I can see that TAing this class makes sense as part of the TAs preparation. They're getting very valuable experience, which can help them to land jobs, and can help them to do a good job teaching once they land a job. And the number of students they have makes sense from such a point of view, too, I suppose. I can also see how the TAs being there benefits Yale and the undergrads. It's very safe to say that if the number of students taking the course were held constant, but the lecturer had to do all the grading, I would not have agreed to teach the class. The class just couldn't serve as many students without TAs.

    So, as I look forward to the end of the term, when I won't be doing any logic grading (though probably will be doing some checking), I ask: Are the TAs employees/laborers, or are they "developing colleagues": something like apprentices, I take it, who are getting valuable experience as part of their training? And to answer that they simply aren't the former seems very implausible to me. The plausible answer seems to be the one that Paul's opponent, Michael Palm, gives: They are both. While they are students getting training, they're also working here at Yale, aren't they? It sure looks like work.

    Reply
  9. Vincent Baltazar

    I can't speak to the particulars of the situation at NYU, but Professor Velleman's defense of the administration struck me as a bit odd. He mentions, without noting its importance, the union's insistence on a closed shop. We should first be clear what a closed shop is. Typically a closed shop refers to a union-security arrangement where the employer is required to hire only employees who are members of the union. Such an arrangement was made illegal by Taft-Hartley in 1947, so I doubt very seriously the union is asking for that. So by closed shop he probably means what is normally referred to as a 'union shop,' where the employees are not required to belong to the union when hired, but are required to join within a specified amount of time in order to keep their jobs. Not an insignificant difference. Second, a union shop is a standard feature of unions and any employer in any industry who attempts to get rid of it can expect fierce opposition. This is the case because, usually, an open shop is the beginning of the end for the union. As evidence, you might notice the absence of unions in so-called 'right-to-work' states, where right-to-work laws have been passed that have the effect of making union shops illegal. Thus, if the administration is asking for an open shop, they are effectively trying to oust the union. And it would be very hard to believe this wasn't the administration's intent.

    It wasn't clear from Velleman's comments whether the union was trying to keep an already existing closed shop or change an open shop to a closed shop. I suppose it's possible that NYU currently is an open shop, but that would be a surprising and unusual contract, indicating more that the union got a raw deal in the initial negotiations than that the unions' current demands are unreasonable.

    Also, a significant part of the value of unionization involves having a voice on the job. That is to say, unions aim to help employees have control over more than just wages and benefits. So it doesn't look favorable of the administration to demand that the union have no say over such an important aspect of their job as the allocation of teaching assignments. While the norm for most non-union graduate students might be having no say over teaching assignments, I'm not sure how relevant that is for union graduate students. After all, we can't expect business as usual after workers have been organized.

    I'm wondering how much the current situation at NYU is a product of the NLRB's recent (2004) decision to strip graduate students of their employee status at private universities by declaring that "graduate student assistants are primarily students and not statutory employees." Of course, that ruling overturned the 2000 ruling, involving NYU, which rejected NYU's contention that graduate students were not employees. Anyway, that suit, I take it, adequately shows NYU didn't "offer" to recognize the UAW.

    Reply
  10. Manyul Im

    I was personally involved, as a graduate student, in some job actions and picketing at Michigan when the Graduate Employee Organization (GEO) there was trying to get decent health care and other minimal forms of support for providing an employee base that was virtually essential to allowing full-time faculty comfortable teaching loads and other praiseworthy forms of research support, while maintaining a high reputation for undergraduate education. In fact, I think at least David Velleman was there, and maybe Paul Boghossian too (my memory fades), at those times. My experience was that the relationship between the faculty and their teaching assistants was only disrupted to the extent that the particular faculty member did not support the union's job actions. Labor-friendly professors usually worked out some amiable arrangement with their T.A.s, having kept up with the negotiations and being able to plan ahead, so that the T.A.s were able to participate in job actions while going at least some of the way in meeing their felt obligations to the faculty whom they assisted. I don't trust unqualified generalizations about such relationships much, and I suspect that there isn't any unqualified factual or normative characterization of the relationship between graduate student workers and faculty that would withstand much scrutiny. I think it's actually more of a distraction than a real issue to suggest that unionizing graduate student workers has a necessarily ill-effect on that relationship, a distraction that probably says more about the prior anti-labor attitudes of the person suggesting it than anything else.

    Reply
  11. David Velleman

    A few responses.

    1. Everyone acknowledges that teaching experience is an essential part of a graduate education: a university must give its graduate students classroom experience. But state universities tend to use graduate-student instructors, not just for the purpose of providing them with classroom experience, but for the purpose of providing a significant portion of their undergraduate instruction. Decisions about how many graduate students to admit, and how much teaching to assign them, are dictated by the needs of the undergraduate curriculum. I have observed the difference first-hand: graduate students at the state university where I previously taught spend considerably more time in the classroom than is necessary for their training as future professors; graduate students in my department at NYU get *too little* classroom experience, in my view.

    As I understand it, partly from a conversation with the President of NYU, his administration is committed to avoiding uses of graduate teachinig assistants that are not justified on the basis of the graduate students' need for classroom training. The deployment of graduate assistants in the classroom is to be determined by the needs of graduate education, not by the needs of the undergraduate curriculum.

    Of course, once a graduate trainee is assigned to a class, the class becomes dependent on that trainee, and his or her refusal to teach harms the undergraduates. But the fact that undergraduates are harmed in this case does not prove that the University is using its graduate assistants primarily as classroom "labor" rather than providing them with classroom training. They are student teachers, not teachers who also happen to be students.

    2. Graduate programs must be able to limit the number of terms in which its students are eligible to teach, so that older students do not prolong their studies indefinitely, and so that teaching opportunities can be allocated to new graduate students. Graduate programs must also be able to allocate teaching eligibility on the grounds of a graduate student's progress in his or her studies.

    The NYU union lodged grievances that sought to interfere with academic decisions of this kind — seeking, for example, to force a program to allocate teaching to graduate students who had exhausted their years of eligibility. Ask yourself how long a graduate program would survive if forced to allocate teaching assignments to graduate students on the basis of *seniority* — a concept that comes naturally to the UAW. A program would soon be filled with perpetual ABD's, taking up the space that ought to be allocated to new students.

    Again, I have first-hand experience with this sort of problem. My former department had a practice of providing its newly graduated Ph.D.'s with a year or two of employment as visiting assistant professors, to give them additional time to find academic jobs, with an additional line on their CVs. Of course, in order to allocate these opportunities to each new cohort of recent graduates, the department had to limit an individual's employment to one or two years as a visiting assistant professor. But a new contract with the lecturers' union claimed these recent graduates as bargained-for employees, whom the department would have been required to hire on the basis of seniority. The department was forced to stop hiring its own recent graduates, lest they gain seniority and a legal claim on permanent employment. A wonderful opportunity for graduate students had to be withdrawn, because considerations natural to the context of union contracts had been misapplied in the academic context. (Fortunately, the department has endowment funds that have enabled it to give these recent graduates post-docs instead, but most departments would not have those resources.)

    Reply
  12. Matthew Smith

    Keith hits the nail on the head when he points out that teaching by grad students is both part of their education and just plain old regular employment.

    I would like to add that this arrangement is not unique to grad students (or to the academy in general). If someone wants to become a plumber or an electrician (or some other profession in the building trades), one often goes through a long process of apprenticeship – taking classes at the union hall and working for journeymen before becoming a full-fledged plumber, electrician or whatever. These apprenticeships, which include a substantial educational component as well as a working component, are not considered mere education. Rather, the work done by apprentices is treated as regular employment covered by a collective bargaining agreement.

    What justifies treating blue-collar apprenticing as employment but not treating apprenticing for an academic career as employment? I suspect that there are some class and other similar biases at work. But, I also suspect that much has to do with the supposition that, unlike apprentices for blue collar work, grad students just don't work (teach) nearly as much as they take classes and engage in their own research.

    Additionally, I suspect that part of this has to do with the assumption that grad students are presumably at grad school out of love of their subject and not in order to get, eventually, just a paycheck. But, this strikes me as suspect since most people do not go to grad school _purely_ out of love for the subject matter. Most of us went to grad school in order to get a job as a professor once we had finished. The fact that most of us love our jobs (and think we are the luckiest people on earth to have such jobs) is irrelevant to the question of whether the training for that job counts as employment.

    Perhaps some folks reading this blog could discuss some of their views on my comparison between grad students and apprentices in the building trades.

    Finally, I have two reflections. First, I think that TA's, etc., who wish to unionize should not wait for recognition by the state or the university and just plain act like a union. That means paying dues (even if there is no recognition) and facing up to the fact that striking often means not getting paid. Because I believe that grad TA's are employees and so perform labor in return for a wage, it seems unobjectionable for management not to pay grad employees once they go out on strike. On the other hand, it is despicable for Sexton to threaten strikers with termination of employment (i.e., to blackball currently striking TA's from teaching positions in the future). Sexton should be ashamed.

    Second, I think that it's important to consider the wider implications of this strike. For one thing, NYU's position has been made possible by the Bush administration's full-scale attack on unionized labor. We all have good reason to resist this attack even if it means accepting what some may (wrongly) take to be less than desirable measures, namely the recognition of grad student unions.

    Reply
  13. David Velleman

    A few further comments:

    1. Graduate students are not "cheap" teaching labor. On the contrary, they are relatively expensive, because their compensation includes free tuition. A university such as NYU, in a major metropolitan area, has access to plenty of cheaper labor, in the form of unemployed or under-employed Ph.D.s, or graduate students at nearby universities. Indeed, one of the union's grievances was that NYU sought to hire such people in place of NYU graduate students who had exhausted their eligibility for teaching. So it is clearly inconsistent to complain that NYU's graduate students are being exploited as "cheap" labor.

    2. The dispute over whether graduate assistants are "employees" is not about whether they are performing services for compensation. Of course they are: they're teaching, and they're getting paid for it. (They're also getting a free education.) The question is whether their relations with the university are best regulated by categories and procedures that are appropriate to relations between labor and management in, say, the auto industry. I have already given clear illustration of this question in my previous comment, showing how the concept of seniority can be disruptive to academic decisionmaking.

    When a graduate student is not given a teaching assignment for the coming semester — say, because of failing to make adequate progress toward his or her degree — is that best conceived as a "layoff"? Is the student's return to the classroom best regulated by the sort of rules governing the return of laid-off auto workers to the assembly line? Should the student's appeal of the decision be referred to a labor mediator? The answers to these questions are clearly and unambiguously no. That's the sense in which graduate student instructors are not "employees".

    These are the questions that arise about the graduate students' relations with their departments. The questions addressed by Manyul Im, about personal relationships between students and faculty, are not the crux of the issue.

    3. The NYU administration has refused to recognize the UAW as representing the graduate teaching assistants, but it does not refuse to engage in bargaining with democratic representatives of the graduate students. It is even now in discussions with the graduate students' elected Senate representatives.

    By contrast, commenters here should keep in mind that the UAW does not represent graduate students in the sciences. Why not? For the purposes of the election that originally certified the union, the science students were excluded from the "bargaining unit" — most likely because their votes would have doomed the unionization campaign. Hence the Senate representatives of the graduate students are more representative of the graduate students than the union.

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  14. Manyul Im

    I appreciate David Velleman's detailed comments; he seems to have some evidence "from the horse's mouth" to judge the intentions of NYU's administration. Generally, I tend to trust David's epistemological judgment. But one important worry for union activists–and this should be one for all graduate students or other laborers–is that *simply* trusting the good intentions of people who control the conditions of their labor tilts too much power in the direction of management–administrations change, if nothing else. And I think this is a legitimate concern even if it is conceded that the rationale for graduate student teaching is to train them to be better teachers later. As a rationale, that may suggest ways in which the labor ought to be structured, but that does not change its status as labor. Neither does it guarantee that all the faculty in charge will approach the actual practice of supervising T.A.s with such conscientious self-rule. All of which suggests that how we conceive the *point* of graduate student teaching and other assistance is important but orthagonal to the issue of whether there should be safeguards in place–a contract, say–against the possible or even likely abuses of work requirements, conditions, and inconsistent levels of compensation. One can both support unionizing efforts of graduate students and think of their labor as primarily motivated by the goals of apprenticeship.

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  15. Christopher Pynes

    Professor Velleman’s comment about students “also getting a free education” strikes me as unreflective and just plain removed from what it is like to be a graduate student today.

    This free education is not free at all. First there are opportunity costs for going to graduate school, and second, I would be willing to bet that nearly every graduate student is borrowing money to pay for their graduate school training. This is money that they will have to pay back with interest. This so called free education isn’t free. And if Dr. Velleman is referring to tuition wavers, then I think his point is even further off the mark.

    To claim that tuition wavers are worth X amount of dollars is silly. No one that should go to graduate school pays tuition. It is a kind of shell game that universities play with state government. If you have to pay tuition to be in graduate school (PHD level), then that is an indication that you shouldn’t be there. The fact that the university waves tuition is irrelevant to the discussion. Very few people that aren’t independently wealthy would go to graduate school if they had to pay the cost of tuition. So, to claim that graduate students are getting a free education is just wrong — it is far from it.

    Lastly, this discussion strikes me in a similar way as the Pacific APA issue did last year. Well meaning philosophers that went to graduate school some 20 years or more ago, just don’t seem to get it. And for the students at NYU, they are at a great school that will probably land them a philosophy job. I am surprised that students at graduate schools where placement isn’t as great are trying to unionize. Perhaps it is the knowledge that their free education might be compromised in the same way that it is at NYU.

    Reply
  16. John Turri

    Professor Velleman,

    I was curious about one point you made. Just because NYU could make use of "cheaper labor, in the form of unemployed or under-employed Ph.D.s, or graduate students at nearby universities," how does that render it "clearly inconsistent to complain that NYU's graduate students are being exploited as "cheap" labor"? It doesn't appear inconsistent to maintain that one group of people constitutes cheap labor, even while recognizing that another group makes for cheaper labor.

    Also, you mentioned the threat of having to make teaching assignments "on the basis of *seniority*". Has the NYU graduate student union actually made that demand? You mentioned that the union filed a grievance because NYU had hired cheaper labor "in place of NYU graduate students who had exhausted their eligibility for teaching." This, of course, doesn't amount to demanding that such decisions be made on the basis of seniority. But perhaps there are other examples you can point to.

    Reply
  17. Anonymous Grad Student

    The contract under which the grievances have been filed here http://www.nyu.edu/hr/pdf/forms/loc2110.pdf .
    Under this contract, NYU management retains right to sole discretion concerning appointments. So, IF the GSOC has filed grievances complaining about these kinds of decisions, they should rightly be thrown out. Further, NYU would have grounds for their own grievance.
    OK, so the NYU administration's complaint about abuse of grievance may or may not be legitimate, depending on the actual nature of each grievance.
    On the other hand, the GSOC claims that NYU refused to participate in the grievance procedure to which they were legally bound in the 2001 contract.
    Without knowing the facts of the specific grievances, this discussion of grievances is nothing but a parroting back and forth of partisan positions.

    But that is NOT what this issue is about. What is at issue here is whether this behavior on the part of the GSOC necessitates NYU's revocation of recognition. To that I say No. NYU bargained in good faith in 2001. If they are unsatisfied with GSOC's use of the grievance procedure, the reasonable thing to do would be to take that into the next round of bargaining.
    And what's this about 'they're not workers, but professors in training?' I suppose professors aren't workers either, then? And this supposed distinction between TAs at Michigan and TAs at NYU is illusory as well. What exactly distinguishes the two groups? That the NYU grads are given TA positions *only* so that they can learn how to teach? I do not see how the mental states of the management are relevant to whether a student worker is working or not. Being is TA is work, regardless of whether one's advisor, dept chair, or provost thinks of one as a worker or an apprentice.

    And the argument that 'TAs aren't like auto workers' is the same anti-union line given in every industry where unionization tries to make headway. I'm sure someone in Houston said recently that janitors shouldn't be unionized because they're not like auto workers.

    If the NYU management had any desire whatsoever to continue recognizing the union, they easily could have dealt with these problems in bargaining. But the Bush NLRB let them off the hook. I bet that they would have scrambled to find some other reason if this minor grievance issue had not come up. This is all about a private organization trying to escape having to bargain. The only thing to do as a worker in that situation is to strike.

    Reply
  18. Philosophy grad student

    A response to one of David Velleman's claims:

    Velleman claims that graduate students are not "cheap" teaching labor, but rather relatively expensive (relative, that is, to unemployed or underemployed Ph.D.'s), because their compensation includes free tuition. I'd like to say that this is a bull***t claim – but since we all want to be civil, let me just say that it is very misleading. The assumption here is that by offering its grad students free tuition, the university is losing income it could have otherwise been earning. But the truth is that if universities did not offer free tuition to prospective grad students, very few people would be able to afford 5-6 years of grad school, with obvious implications for the entire higher education system. If people had to pay for graduate tuition out of their own pockets, there would simply be no cadre of graduate students to speak of. (And where would your reserve army of unemployed and underemployed Ph.D.'s then come from?)

    So, there are really two points here:

    (1) It is misleading to say that the choice facing a university administration when hiring TA's, RA's and low-level instructors is between hiring (i) a grad student for (say) $19,000 in stipend and $25,000 in tuition waiver, totalling $44,000; and (ii) an unemployed Ph.D., hired as an adjunct teacher, for (say) $35,000. In most cases, the tuition waiver component of the grad student's compensation is not money the university is really giving up, because it's not money it could have realistically earned anyway.

    (2) Without grad student tuition waivers, the higher education system as we know it in the U.S. would simply not be able to sustain itself.

    Any way you look at it, the choice between (i) and (ii) above – the existence of which is the basis for Velleman's denial that grad student labor is "cheap" labor – is NOT a genuine choice for universities.

    Oh, and another final comment. Velleman writes:

    "For what it's worth, the NYU administration is full of people with strong ties to the Democratic Party, all of whom think of themselves as 'pro-labor'."

    Well, it's certainly not worth much…

    Reply
  19. BL

    I have received the following forwarded e-mail from a friend, and this seems an apt place to post it:

    PLEASE HELP US HEAD OFF FIASCO AT NYU

    Teaching assistants at NYU conducted a union drive in 1999-2000, won
    an election, and affiliated with the United Auto Workers (in a local
    that also includes other educational professionals in NYC such as
    Museum of Modern Art and New York Historical Society employees). The
    NYU administration fought hard against the union but was ultimately
    forced to recognize and negotiate with it by the National Labor
    Relations Board. There followed a 3 year contract that brought the
    teaching assistants health benefits and a stipend increase. During
    this time the university ran quite smoothly.

    In the summer of 2005, released from the obligation to negotiate by a
    new Bush-appointed NLRB, the NYU administration un-recognized the
    union and has been refusing to negotiate with it. Given this extreme
    provocation, the union had virtually no alternative but to strike.

    They began striking on Nov. 9 and several hundred professors have
    been teaching off-campus so as not to cross the picket line. The
    administration–really, President John Sexton–steadily refuses to deal
    with the union. He has ignored a compromise proposal by a former
    dean. At one point several administrators infiltrated course websites
    (using the program "Blackboard") so as to be able to determine which
    faculty and teaching assistants were supporting the strike; this
    resulted in widespread faculty outrage and the deans quickly withdrew
    from that effort and apologized.

    Now President Sexton has again thrown a bombshell: he has threatened
    that any TAs who do not return to work by Dec. 5 will be deprived of
    an entire semester's stipend and those who dare to return to a strike
    in the next semester will lose an entire year's funding.

    Such an action would be unprecedented. Graduate student employees
    have struck at many other universities, including those in the Ivy
    League and those just as anti-union as the NYU administration, but
    nowhere have such draconian reprisals ever been taken. Moreover, to
    date American workers retain a right to strike. While employers may
    well withhold wages during a strike, punishing strikers for a
    semester or a year afterward is illegal. The basic disagreement
    between the students and President Sexton is whether they are workers
    or not, and his point of view must be reckoned with, but surely the
    action of teaching assistants who believe that they are workers ought
    not to be dealt with in such a punitive manner.

    Such an action will also set a dangerous precedent by usurping
    faculty responsibility for supervising their graduate students,
    selecting who among them will make good teaching assistants, and
    distributing fellowships.

    If this threatened punishment is allowed to happen it will set a
    disastrous example for democratic debate at universities throughout
    the country. It would also cause irreparable harm to the reputation
    of NYU. We believe it will make it much more difficult for the
    university to recruit and retain the best faculty and graduate students.

    Hundreds of faculty have formed a group, Faculty Democracy, to
    protest President Sexton's policy and to push for greater
    administration consultation with faculty on important decisions–a
    consultation which, if undertaken seriously, might have prevented
    this whole debacle.

    We ask scholars and intellectuals throughout the country to urge
    President Sexton to drop his threats and agree to negotiate with the
    union. He can be reached at 70 Washington Square, NY, NY 10012 and by
    email at
    john.sexton@nyu.edu It would also be useful for you to send a copy to
    NYU trustee chair Martin Lipton at mlipton@wlrk.com and to one of us.

    Sincerely,

    Linda Gordon, History, Linda.Gordon@nyu.edu

    Andrew Ross, American Studies, Andrew.Ross@nyu.edu

    Alan Sokal, Physics, sokal@nyu.edu

    Judith Stacey, Sociology, Judith.Stacey@nyu.edu

    for Faculty Democracy, numbering approximately 250

    (We would also mention that many whole departments, including History
    and English, have unanimously protested this policy.)

    ======end of forwarded letter===============

    It does seem to me unfortunate that Philosophy is not also standing up to the union-busting maneuvers of President Sexton.

    Reply
  20. Derek Bowman

    As a long time philosophy graduate student, I usually find myself astonished by these debates. (I guess part of the problem is that, while I am quite liberal, I grew up in the South where 'pro-labor' doesn't automatically mean 'pro-union.')

    The first thing that astonishes me is the way in which the graduate union organizers seem to completely discount the value of tuition waivers. It borders on the incoherent. On the one hand teaching (or grading, or research assisting, etc) is regarded as quite valuable labor, so that the graduate student deserves substantial compensation for such work. But on the other, the value of the teaching (or grading or research assisting , etc) that the graduate student recieves is so low as to not be considered in calculating what the graduate student is being paid.

    Now it is true, as Michael Palm says in the linked interview, that "you can't buy groceries with tuition remission." But in so far as the argument is that graduate assistants qua laborers are not recieving sufficient compensation, that is beside the point. There are also graduate students without assistantships as well as undergraduates who may sometimes find it difficult to buy goceries. We have as much (and the same kind of) reason to be concerned about them as we do to be concerned with TAs.

    Most of the people in my family have 'working class' jobs, and I've worked a few such jobs myself during time off from school. So I'm often astonished when I reflect on the fact that I get paid to go to school and do philosophy, even if (at least in the short term) I could make more money doing something else. I know what I'm getting into when I accept an assistantship, and I also know what the altneratives are. No one is exploiting me; I'm actually quite fortunate.

    Of course I also have to remember that, unlike some graduate students, I don't have any children to care for. But should that be the standard by which grad stipdends are to be measured – it should be enough to support the student plus children (and an un/underemployed spouse)?

    Reply
  21. Derek Bowman

    As a long time philosophy graduate student, I usually find myself astonished by these debates. (I guess part of the problem is that, while I am quite liberal, I grew up in the South where 'pro-labor' doesn't automatically mean 'pro-union.')

    The first thing that astonishes me is the way in which the graduate union organizers seem to completely discount the value of tuition waivers. It borders on the incoherent. On the one hand teaching (or grading, or research assisting, etc) is regarded as quite valuable labor, so that the graduate student deserves substantial compensation for such work. But on the other, the value of the teaching (or grading or research assisting , etc) that the graduate student recieves is so low as to not be considered in calculating what the graduate student is being paid.

    Now it is true, as Michael Palm says in the linked interview, that "you can't buy groceries with tuition remission." But in so far as the argument is that graduate assistants qua laborers are not recieving sufficient compensation, that is beside the point. There are also graduate students without assistantships as well as undergraduates who may sometimes find it difficult to buy goceries. We have as much (and the same kind of) reason to be concerned about them as we do to be concerned with TAs.

    Most of the people in my family have 'working class' jobs, and I've worked a few such jobs myself during time off from school. So I'm often astonished when I reflect on the fact that I get paid to go to school and do philosophy, even if (at least in the short term) I could make more money doing something else. I know what I'm getting into when I accept an assistantship, and I also know what the altneratives are. No one is exploiting me; I'm actually quite fortunate.

    Of course I also have to remember that, unlike some graduate students, I don't have any children to care for. But should that be the standard by which grad stipdends are to be measured – it should be enough to support the student plus children (and an un/underemployed spouse)?

    Reply
  22. Derek Bowman

    Christopher Pynes says:
    (1) "No one that should go to graduate school pays tuition." and
    (2) "Very few people that aren’t independently wealthy would go to graduate school if they had to pay the cost of tuition."

    Far from showing that tuition wavers aren't worth much, these points seem to me to demonstrate that tuition wavers are actually quite valuable.

    (1) Now some graduate programs will simply not admit you without offering you a fellowship/assistantship (inicluding tuition waver), but let's restrict our attention to those that will. So anyone admitted to such a program including an assistantship offer has a choice: (a) Accept the tuition waver and modest stipend along with the duties associated with it; or (b) reject the assistantship and pay the full cost of tuition through some other means.

    If (1) is true, then such people univocally take option (a). Why is that, unless the tuition waver (plus stipend) is overwhelmingly worth the work that is asked of you?

    As for (2), consider a parallell claim
    (2*) Very few people that aren’t independently wealthy would buy private jets if they had to pay the cost of purchase and maintenance themselves.

    (2*) does not show that an executive compensation package that includes full access to a corporate jet does not have significant monetary value. Rather, it shows that the benefit is so expensive that most people would not be able to afford it on their own.

    Reply
  23. Oran

    Derek Bowman — your corporate-jet analogy misses the point. It's simply not analogous. For an analogous analogy, you would have to add (at least) the following conditions: (a) the company offering an executive compensation package that includes access to a corporate jet also requires that its executive employees use the jet on a regular basis as part of their jobs; (b) unless the company gave its executives access to its jets, it (the company) would not have been able to hire anyone for these executive jobs (precisely since so few applicants would come privately equipped with the jets that are required in order to do the job).

    With these conditions added, does 'access to the corporate jet' still seem like a straightforward monetary benefit?

    Reply
  24. Geoff

    Professor Leiter notes that it is "unfortunate that Philosophy is not also standing up to the union-busting maneuvers of President Sexton". In fact, it appears that the chair of the Philosophy Department is actively defending them. Days after Sexton's threats against striking workers were announced, he appeared on the linked Democracy Now! interview, and according to the interviewer at least, he was "speaking for the N.Y.U. administration."

    There are a number of reasonable positions concerning the merits of graduate teacher unionization. Some of the specific concerns Professor Velleman raises are legitimate, and even though I think they are easily met, they reflect genuine and understandable worries. None of this has any bearing on whether President Sexton's threats to striking graduate workers are appropriate. It is very important to be clear about what those threats are. The threat is NOT that strikers will have their wages or stipends withheld while they are on strike. This would be bad, especially given the administration's position that strikers are not employees, but it wouldn't be scandalous. The threat IS that teachers who do not return to work tomorrow will lose their stipends and teaching assignments IN THE FUTURE, regardless of the outcome of the strike. In common English, this is known as 'blacklisting':

    "…graduate assistants who do not resume their duties by December 5 or the first scheduled teaching assignment thereafter – while experiencing no consequences for this semester – will for the spring semester lose their stipend and their eligibility to teach."

    Moreover, even if the strike is settled for now, graduate teachers at NYU who accept teaching assignments for next year must accept what amounts to a loyalty pledge:

    "For those graduate assistants who return by December 5th and accept a teaching assignment for the spring, this acceptance comes with the commitment to meet their responsibilities without interruption throughout the spring semester. Absences not approved by the dean will result in suspension from assistantship assignments and loss of stipend for the following two consecutive semesters."

    Blacklisting and loyalty pledges? There's a public letter to Sexton denouncing these tactics that you can sign here:

    http://new.petitiononline.com/tosexton/petition.html

    Reply
  25. David Velleman

    It is absurd to suggest that a free education in a Ph.D. program is worth little because the university could not sell it on the open market. What I said is that graduate student instructors are not cheap — a remark about the *cost* of graduate-student labor, not the market value of a graduate education.

    Educating a graduate student is an enormously expensive enterprise. The university bears %100 of those costs. My own department at NYU did not educate Ph.D. students until relatively recently. The expense of doing so is one that NYU could easily have decided not to bear.

    Graduate students who think that tuition waivers are costless to a university are living in cloud-cuckoo land.

    Reply
  26. Paul Boghossian

    A radio interview, it turns out, is not the best place to try to explain one's views on complex issues. I will try to do better here.

    I am pro-labor. Nothing I have said about the graduate student union issue stems in any way from a general anti-labor stance. I am strongly in favor of the unionization of the adjuncts. These people really are employees and it is very important that they be entitled to collective bargaining rights.

    My main reasons for opposing unionization for our graduate students are (a)that I don't believe they are employees, (b) i don't believe that they ought to be employees and (c) I don't believe that they would want to think of themselves as employees, if they could possibly avoid it.

    Why don't i think that they are employees? Well, I believe that a certain amount of teaching is an essential part of doctoral training. I think it is obvious that even if we lived in a utopia in which money was no object, we would not devise doctoral programs without a teaching component. Any doctoral program that did that would put itself at a serious disadvantage relative to its peers. Furthermore, when a teaching assistant does badly, we don't fire him or her; we offer more coaching. Finally, we don't pay them as we would pay employees. The University could hire adjuncts to do all that the graduate students do at a fraction of the price that it costs to train a graduate student.

    Some people seem to think that the fact that the strike has had some disruptive impact shows that the University is hugely economically reliant on its graduate assistants. Nothing like that is shown by the strike. At an airline, no particular pilot is indispensable; however, once the plane is in the air with a particular pilot, that pilot then becomes indispensable. Similarly, having launched the semester on the assumption that the graduate assistants would fulfill certain roles, it becomes hard to complete the semester without them. In future semesters, it would be a relatively trivial matter to replace all that they do with adjunct labor, something that the Philosophy Department routinely used to do when it didn't have PhD students of its own some 10 years ago.

    Are there departments at NYU in which there is more teaching than could be justified by the requirements of doctoral training? I confess to not having known much about this until the current unrest, but the answer seems to be 'yes.' But that is easy to solve and should be solved, I believe, by imposing even higher standards on the integration of teaching into the academic curriculum rather than by locking in a conception of graduate teaching as cheap labor that the university and the faculty can benefit from. If I were to become convinced that that cannot be done, I would change my stance on unionization immediately.

    Let me also say a word about the University's experience with the UAW. One of the areas in which our department is weak is in Aesthetics. We certainly have no graduate students who work in that area. So when one of our new hires offered to give a course in that area, we had no qualified graduate student to assign to that course, so we went out, at some expense, to hire a highly qualified young PhD from outside the University to serve as a teaching assistant for that course. The UAW filed a grienvance on the grounds that we were required by the contract to offer it to one of our graduate students. They weren't interested in the fact that we had no student who was actually qualified to assist in the course. The arbitrator threw out the grievance, but not before a number of faculty had wasted hours preparing documents and so forth. The experience also made us realize that it could easily happen that we would one day encounter an arbitrator who understood universities less well than this one did, and that that would permanently affect the University's right to decide who was and who was not qualified to teach or assist in a particular course.

    I would like, if at all possible, to be part of a department in which we bring in enormously talented young people for the sole purpose of training them to be the best philosophers they can become. We are fortunate to work at a university that is wealthy enough to afford such a program. Shouldn't we strive for that ideal given that we can?

    Reply
  27. Ned Block

    The grievance issue is the main issue in the strike. The university actually offered the union a contract at the end of the summer which would have included a purely internal grievance procedure, so although I think that Boghossian is right that the graduate students are not primarily workers, the university was prepared to regard them as such and sign an agreement. (The university also refused to make union dues mandatory, but I suspect that the university might have given in on that if the union had given in on the grievance issue.) Why didn’t the union give in on the grievance issue? I think that the reason is that they were using the grievance procedure as a back door way of trying to gain partial control of the process of assigning TAs. The contract that was in force specified that the university makes all decisions about who teaches and what they teach. The union signed the contract but was using the grievance procedure to undermine it. The grievance in our own department illustrates the point. A professor taught an aesthetics course which no qualified student in our department was available to TA, so we hired a philosophy PhD from outside the university who is knowledgeable about aesthetics and who had TAed in that subject before to assist the professor. The union filed a grievance claiming that we should instead have to hire someone in the bargaining unit, an NYU student—as it might be someone in history or sociology—to assist in the course, irrespective of qualifications. The grievance was dismissed without a hearing by an aribitrator who (correctly) showed some contempt for the union position, but the union brought a number of such cases, apparently hoping that eventually an arbitrator (usually retired judges who cannot be expected to know about university issues) would decide in favor of the union, changing the rules that allow the university to go outside NYU in assigning TAs when there is no qualified graduate student. Some of the arbitrators' reports are posted at http://www.nyu.edu/provost/ga/

    To repeat: the union’s persistent use of this back door to changing the contract was the university’s main reason for de-recognizing the union. This issue is one of a number that suggest that the students should never have chosen the UAW to represent them.

    The issue is not primarily economic—the university has announced raises of $1K per year for the next 3 years. But there is an economic component to it. Students get a 5 year package of aid—a minimum stipend of $19 K—although many departments are authorized to pay more than $20K. Students in our department teach only 2 of their 5 years, although in some other departments, 3 years of teaching is standard. So the stipend is either 40% or 60% fellowship rather than pay for work. If we had hired a student from another department or a student in our own department who had already used up the 5 years of support to assist in the aesthetics course even as a grader, we would have had to pay a term’s stipend, more than $10K whereas the adjunct salary—negotiated by the adjunct union (which by the way, I heartily support) would be half of that or less. So what the union was trying to achieve—that only members of the GRADUATE STUDENT bargaining unit be allowed to TA is an attempt to get adjunct jobs paid at a level that includes 40% or 60% fellowship. Again, they were using a back door grievance procedure to change the contract that they had signed.

    Reply
  28. Jessica Wilson and Benj Hellie

    We weigh in:

    http://wilsonhellie.typepad.com/for_the_record/2005/12/nyu_grad_studen.html

    Reply
  29. Alex Guerrero

    I write as a current graduate student at NYU. I am interested in an argument against the union that I haven't heard in play in the debate here or elsewhere.

    Given the capitalist structures that dominate American society, it seems reasonable to be prima facie pro-labor.

    However, I feel that this stance should be re-evaluated in cases in which (a) those looking to unionize will 'raise the costs' (of products, tuition, taxes) for many people who are more disadvantaged than they are; and (b) those looking to unionize could obtain more lucrative compensation and better work conditions by switching to occupations that are easily open to them. (There seem to be straightforward arguments supporting this view; I'd be interested in hearing thoughts to the contrary.)

    It seems plausible to think that (a) and (b) are not met in many cases of unionization. Often, (a) will not be satisfied because the affected people are at the bottom of the socioeconomic hierarchy. Similarly with (b).

    It seems that in the NYU strike case, however, neither (a) nor (b) is satisfied.

    NYU is not a for-profit enterprise. Any benefits we gain through unionizing will come at the expense of some other part of the university, possibly in the form of increased undergraduate tuition and/or reduced financial aid. Shouldn't we know where our increased health benefits, stipends, etc. will be coming from before demanding our right to bargain for them? What reason do we have to think that we 'deserve' the redistribution?

    Additionally, PhD graduate students could easily find employment in more lucrative occupations that would give them benefits, wages, etc. well above what they are demanding from NYU. Why should we view the claims of graduate students differently than struggling rock musicians, artists, poets, etc., all of whom are choosing to take a financial 'hit' to pursue lives and professions that they find personally rewarding?

    Perhaps neither of these concerns is strong enough taken alone, but combined they seem to threaten the 'justice' case here.

    Additionally, graduate students are valuable commodities, and there is a market for them. The top departments at NYU (and elsewhere) make life for their graduate students very good. If one can't get into a good program with a good package, one probably should take that as a signal that future hardships await along that career path, and make a decision in light of that likelihood.

    I have yet to see the market failure argument. Of course, it would be nice to live in a world in which everyone who wanted to be artists, poets, classicists, philosophers, historians, and the rest were all paid well, not according to the market for them, but it doesn't seem that unionization is the answer, particularly in this context, where one part of the academy will just be 'taking' from another part.

    One worry I've thought about is that students who sink costs in a particular program only to have their financial package change are at a particular disadvantage. That seems true, but it is only a reason to demand actual contracts when we first sign on to our programs (and many of us get what are legally enforceable agreements for multiple years already). Each of us can do this on our own.

    Anyway, this line of concern seems more relevant to me than the debate over whether graduate students are 'employees'–which seems somewhat beside the point.

    Reply
  30. Alex Guerrero

    I should add that I find the NYU administration's stance throughout this experience to be very often self-serving, condescending, classist, intentionally misleading, too ready to confuse 'legal' with 'moral', and otherwise offensive to reason–so much so that I find myself tending to support the union efforts in spite of myself. The blacklisting, coercive, punitive tactics follow in this ugly tradition.

    Similarly, the GSOC rhetoric has often been out-of-control, simplistic, and too ready to paint the administration as The Man–even though many of NYU's leaders are truly good people trying to figure out a good result.

    Many of us are on the fence, and would be (or would have been) swayed by honesty, decency, and a little respect for the positions of both sides.

    I am optimistic about these recent developments, focusing on having a non-union body of graduate student representatives engage in good faith discussion with the faculty about our needs and interests. Read further if you are interested.

    The Graduate Affairs Committee consists of elected representatives from each of
    the graduate and professional schools. One of the tasks of the Committee is to
    develop a robust, credible system of representation and voice for all of NYU’s
    graduate assistants. We respect the graduate assistants’ right to express
    their concerns through the current strike, and also the University’s right to
    address the hardship imposed upon the academic community. We seek a resolution
    that is amenable to all affected.

    In addition to developing a system of representation, the Committee has
    responsibilities to address health insurance coverage, housing, communications,
    and any other matters of interest to graduate students across the University.
    There is much work to be done on all of these issues. We have had many
    discussions in recent weeks with a broad range of students and faculty. These
    discussions are critical right now.

    In normal conditions, our efforts on each of these would extend well into the
    Spring semester, but because issues of representation are so much at the center
    of the current graduate student strike, we are making a proposal now on this
    issue to the entire community – students, faculty and administration.

    The Committee, with other graduate students, including GSOC, will develop over
    the next two weeks a model for a University-wide organization of graduate
    assistants elected locally from departments and programs. This organization
    will speak and act for NYU graduate assistants.

    • We call upon President John Sexton and the University Administration to
    commit publicly that it will meet with this organization regularly and develop
    annually with it multi-year economic packages for GAs (stipends, health and
    other benefits, etc.).

    • We ask striking Graduate Assistants to return to their teaching
    responsibilities, both out of concern for their students and as an act of faith
    in the process we are proposing. We ask GSOC publicly to announce the
    suspension of the strike by 5:00PM on Tuesday, December 6. In order to give
    GSOC time to do this, we call upon the University to suspend the imposition of
    any consequences on Graduate Assistants who return by Wednesday, December 7.

    • We call upon faculty members to embrace our proposal.

    We want to thank those senior faculty members who in recent days have suggested
    to us the main elements of the above approach. Our Committee will continue to
    work next semester on health insurance, housing, communications, and other
    issues for all graduate students, but we anticipate that this new graduate
    assistant organization will be the principal representative body on these
    issues for graduate assistants.

    Sincerely,
    Rodney L. Washington, Chair, Graduate Affairs Committee
    Brian A. Levine, Chair, Graduate Student Voice Subcommittee

    Reply
  31. anon

    I agree with BL: it's sad the philosophy department seems to be siding against the students and it's hypocritical to do so in the name of teacher-student relations. As a grad student, I can't imagine anything souring me on my profs more than professors taking such a stand–it's not like their situation stands to worsen. They seem to be trying to avert what they perceive to be an injustice being done the administration. Seriously, all these arguments seem to me, _if they succeed_ (and so far, I'm far from convinced) to show that grad students don't have a right to the union, or to their demands. They haven't show that anything in any way bad will result from their demands being met. And this is why it boggles my mind that the faculty is on side with the administration. Frankly, I think this is a case where it would be more politically savvy for profs to either support students or take the 5th.

    I should mention that there is a philosophy grad student union at my school that negotiates with the administration via the faculty. The faculty have been generally very supportive in this regard and our relationship is great.

    Reply
  32. Tad Brennan

    One of the substantive issues in play here involves the possibility that union rules & regs would come into conflict with the decisions of faculty or administration about what is in the best pedagogical interests of students, whether the grad students qua teachers-in-training, or the undergrads being taught. I take seriously the thought that faculty have expertise about pedagogy and training that union reps do not, and that arbitrators may not (see the story of the aesthetics class, told by Boghossian & Block above).

    Question: isn't this just analoguous to the idea that medical doctors are better positioned to make judgements about the care of patients than e.g. orderlies or nurses, or the unions representing orderlies & nurses?

    So I assume that built into the collective bargaining agreements that govern the working conditions of orderlies, nurses, etc. must be safeguards that ensure that the union representation does not interfere with the doctors' decisions about what constitutes standards of care. If the docs say that the patient needs somebody on hand 24hrs a day, then the union can't declare that everybody packs up at 5p.

    Why can't comparable structures be built into the collective bargaining agreements for grad students, so that the faculties decisions about "standards of care", i.e. pedagogical requirements, will always be enforced?

    I should say that I am pretty mixed about this whole issue. I taught at Yale for a number of years, and was fairly appalled by the behavior of both sides.

    Still, I take the standard-of-care issue to be one of the more substantive anti-unionization arguments brought forward by faculty. If it can be answered, or if an answer can be discerned by looking at how comparable problems are already addressed in medicine, then some of the faculty resistance to unionization might subside.

    Reply
  33. David Velleman

    The administration has now responded to the proposal quoted above by Alex Guerrero:

    >We accept the proposal offered by Rodney Washington, chair of the
    >Graduate Affairs Committee of the Student Senators Council/UCSL, and
    >Brian Levine, chair of the graduate student voice subcommittee. The
    >University is prepared to work with a group of graduate students in the
    >manner proposed by Graduate Affairs Committee, including GAs who are also
    >willing to accept the terms proposed by the committee.
    >
    >Accordingly, implementation of the steps outlined in the November 28
    >letter to graduate assistants will be delayed until Wednesday morning to
    >give GSOC an opportunity to consider this proposal and to give GAs an
    >opportunity to return to class, preferably as early as tomorrow.
    >
    >John Sexton, President
    >David McLaughlin, Provost

    Reply
  34. Mark van Roojen

    I had posted this just as Jason closed this thread so it was rejected. Since I spent some time on it I'll try again now that the thread has reopened. Perhaps it duplicates new postings.

    I don't have views about all of the specific issues here and I probably shouldn't wade into this dispute. But I'm hugely puzzled by the arguments that TAs are not employees and should not be regarded as such.

    That TAs could be replaced with less costly adjuncts is somewhat besides the point. Many of us (even those of us who are professors at much less prestigious places) stay in our current line of work partly because we enjoy having graduate students.

    Clearly a graduate assistantship with its attendant tuition benefits is quite valuable to the student who gets one. But that does not show that their net costs to the institution do not compare favorably to hiring adjuncts. A whole lot of faculty would likely move to a place with a graduate program if their TAs were replaced with adjuncts and their graduate offerings replaced with another undergraduate class. So one thing a university gains by having grad students is an ability to attract and keep good faculty. You can't do that with adjuncts, even if the university might be able to teach a few more undergraduates with the same number of faculty if the graduate classes were replaced with undergraduate classes.

    Furthermore, adjuncts who were paid what grad students are paid as salary (not including tuition benefits) would soon become pretty burnt out. We have good empirical evidence for that. And while TAs may have less experience, they have a kind of enthusiasm that somewhat compensates. The better the faculty at the institution, the better the grad students (other things equal) so that graduate students help to leverage faculty excellence in a way that adjuncts would not. So in addition to helping to keep good faculty, a good graduate program allows the benefits of a good faculty to be magnified.

    Finally, the argument that viewing graduate students as colleagues somehow shows that they are not employees (I think I saw that argument in one comment above) seems to me to refute itself. Professors are employees too, so being the colleague of a professor would most naturally also make one an employee. That we professors regard our jobs as sufficiently attractive that we don't need or want a union is a good thing. But we as a group have leverage that the average graduate student does not have to determine the working conditions under which we work.

    I'm not saying that some of the union's demands might not be unreasonable or have bad effects. But I do think that much likely turns on the particulars of the case and that the abstract argument that grad students at private institutions should not be regarded as employees has so far been unconvincing.

    Reply
  35. Anonymous Philosophy Student

    (sorry for the long comment)

    I am having a hard time understanding the
    administration's arguments. Outside of a general disrespect for organized labor, what's the argument?

    These grad students are working. Period. Undergraduates pay for classes, part of what they receive for those classes includes graded papers and discussion groups. TAs lead those groups.

    The arguments from professors Block, Vellemen and Boghossian seem to be:

    1. TAing is part of a students education not work.

    or, if that doesn't work:

    2. TAs are well-compensated, so they don't have a right to demand more.

    or, if that doesn't work:

    3. We let the TAs organize and they asked for things we didn't agree with.

    (1) is false, clearly. And (2) and (3) strike me as red-herrings. If the TAs are employees then, if one is pro-labor, they should be allowed to organize. If the administration doesn't like their demands, they should deal with the union, not try to break its back (which seems to be what is going on here).

    An anecdote from me:

    Before entering a Ph.D. program in philosophy (not the wisest career move, but I, personally, get a little tired of the expectation that I should be "thankful" for my few thousand a year I get in fellowship), I worked in finance. My first job in this field was as an "intern". This meant that for the first few months I had to work closely with other analysts, that I was billed out at a lower rate, and was occasionally feted with baseball games or drinking parties.

    I didn't get benefits but I did get compensated *extremely well*. (Double my previous salary as an office assistant).

    This anecdote is telling, I think, for two reasons:

    1. Although many of the hours interns worked had to be written off because we took much longer to get comparable work done, the company still made money off of us.

    2. More importantly, although they could have found less qualified people to do the level of work that interns did, they brought us in in the hope that we would learn, advance, take accredidation exams and become senior analysts and consultants. We were paid a premium because other companies offered the same thing. School administration (and at times faculty) seem to forget that grad students are highly qualified persons with college degrees. Graduate school has an opportunity cost for many students upwards of $300,000. I entered graduate school because I love philosophy and felt that the lower pay was justified by my love for the work. BUT if I had not received the sub-subsistence fellowship I got, instead receiving a tuition bill, I would NEVER have come to graduate school. Just as the financial firm I worked for had to compete against different companies to get good, promising interns, academia needs to compete against the draw of the private sector. Graduate school, from my perspective, is like the internship I worked at: a job with a lot of training involved where the company ate a certain loss in profits for future returns. But we were certainly considered employees, and no one questioned the fact that we were getting paid. To treat graduate students differently strikes me as disengenuous, and the arguments against their organizing self-serving.

    Reply
  36. L

    I did my graduate work at a school which is known for its graduate student union. Students (if they are fortunate enough to get a TA position) are dropped into teaching their second year, teaching 4-5 sections of 20-25 students per semester. When I started, my net pay was exactly that of my rent. The pay did not increase very much as I became more experienced (and one logs many hours in the classroom teaching 4-5 sections per week!). I left with significant debt, in spite of the fact that I was "fully funded" for my time there.

    Had I known about how terrible the financial situation was there, I certainly would have gone elsewhere to graduate school. But, for a number of reasons, it was very difficult for a prospective student to see how bad things were.

    All of this was in spite of the fact that we had, I was told, a terrific graduate student union. There were two problems, though. First, state law prohibited state employees from striking. So, we had no bargaining power, at all.

    Second, the people in charge of the union (I got involved to try to change things, and then distanced myself when I saw the futility) had, in my view, skewed priorities. Social issues which would get no hearing with a conservative state government were at least as important in the platform as were economic issues. (E.g. the governer said that he would veto any bill that included domestic partner benefits.) I admired, I suppose, the idealism. However, graduate students were teaching twice as much as those at comparable institutions, and were being paid 1/2 of what those other graduate students were paid.

    From talking to various people, I think the following happened. The union was formed in response to legitimate concerns. Its formation created a strongly adversarial relationship with the administration, and the university decided to play "hardball" with the graduate students. The union couldn't strike–it was truly impotent–and with the adversarial relationship, graduate students suffered. As Marxist as I am in my politics, I can't help but wonder if I would have been better off without a union. I don't know.

    My friends at private schools had conditions that were orders of magnitude better than the situation I had. They were not unionized. (I realize that students at private schools almost always have things better than those a public schools. But the difference in the two situations–my situation and their situation–was laughable.)

    Obviously many of the details don't apply to those at NYU (e,g. they can strike!). But, one thing I took from my experience is that one should be careful what one wishes for. Any good union will have an adversarial relationship with the employer. And, this has effects on how the graduate students are treated. From the perspective of the graduate students, this is a complex issue, perhaps more complex than many realize at first. So, i think it's important to decide what are tolerable living conditions, especially relative to other comparable schools, and then choose wisely which battles to enter with NYU.

    Again, I make no claims here as to how NYU students should behave. But, to reiterate, it is a complex issue.

    Reply
  37. Iain Martel

    As a philosopher who is also on the executive committee of a TA Union (at the University of Toronto), I have been following this debate closely. I am glad that posting was reopened, as I did not get a chance to post earlier.
    The union here in Toronto, Canadian Union of Public Employees, Local 3902, was in fact the first TA union in North America, over 30 years ago. I came on board last year, when the sessionals (adjuncts) were organized for the first time. While the Union and the University don't always see eye to eye (we are currently having a strike vote!), I do not see all of the dire problems reported by Paul Boghossian et al. Our Collective Agreement is quite explicit about the line between "academic" decisions that remain within the control of the University, and "employment" decisions which are subject to the Collective Agreeement. Few grievances are ever filed that (are ruled to) cross this line. For example, the case cited by Ned Block would be very unlikely to be filed as a grievance by our union, for our Collective Agreement only requires graduate students to be hired for TA positions when there are qualified applicants, and arbitrators have been quite clear that they would not question academic judgements about who is qualified in this sort of case. No arbitrator is going to argue with a Paul Boghossian who says that a metaphysician is not qualified to teach aesthetics!

    So the grievance filed by GSOC (note that defenders of the Administration always say "UAW"; this is propaganda to give the idea that this is the work of a bullying industrial union) probably should not have been filed. (Though maybe there are further details I don't know which affect this.)So what? The Union is a new one, and it is only through the grievance procedure that the true boundaries of an agreement can be tested. In six months, the new sessionals unit here in Toronto has filed about 20 grievances, because it takes time for both sides to adjust to the new ways of doing things. When the dust settles, the two sides get back to the bargaining table, and work to adjust what did not work in the old agreement. Had NYU been serious about bargaining, they would simply have demanded reasonable, and precise, limits on what kinds of decisions were grievable. But they didn't do this: they made a show of bargaining, then announced a deal that no union could ever accept, denying the right to file ANY kind of grievance. THis is not "bargaining in good faith".

    There are many other issues here, but I want to mention just two more.

    First, a note on the issue of "closed shop" vs "open shop". My understanding is that the previous agreement contained neither of these things, but an "agency shop". An agency shop does not require that all employees become members of the union, but it does require that all employees who are part of the bargaining unit pay an "agency fee" equivalen to union dues. This stops the "freeloader" problem, where non-members getall of the benefit of the contract, but don't pay anything for the union's work. This is the standard form of union deal (here in Canada, its required), and a refusal to allow an agency shop can only be seen as a naked attempt to destroy the power of a union. To then claim that the issue was about closed vs open shop is an ouragious lie, and the worst form of propaganda.

    The second point concerns the idea expressed frequently by faculty, and repeatedby David Velleman that "Graduate programs must be able to limit the number of terms in which its students are eligible to teach, so that older students do not prolong their studies indefinitely, and so that teaching opportunities can be allocated to new graduate students. Graduate programs must also be able to allocate teaching eligibility on the grounds of a graduate student's progress in his or her studies." I find this argument deeply troubling, for it assumes that those who take longer than the set number of years to finish their PhD are dragging it out nedlessly and should be cut off from funding. First, there are many reasons why someone might take longer than the suppopsed standard: at Colorado, where I got my PhD, almost no-one ever finished in five years, largely because the teaching load was so high that we didn't have much time for writing. Second, if the goal is to get people to finish, this is counterproductive. If I had to work at Starbucks full time to pay my bills, I would never have finished! If there is an academic problem, deal with it academically, not by threatening people's livelihood!

    Reply
  38. David Velleman

    Like many of the other philosophy graduate students who have commented here, Anonymous Philosophy Student hasn't given a single thought to how a university runs, how it is funded, or how it must manage its affairs in order to fulfil its many responsibilities. He knows (or thinks he knows) what he is worth and what he is sacrificing to study philosophy, and he wants to be compensated accordingly. Where the money is supposed to come from, he doesn't know — and he doesn't care.

    He says: "[A]cademia needs to compete against the draw of private sector". That's nonsense. The academy cannot possibly pay its graduate students *or* its faculty on a scale competitive with the private sector. It never has, and it never will. If he is expecting compensation on such a scale, he should go back to the private sector.

    He says: "Graduate school, from my perspective, is like the intership I worked at: a job with a lot of training involved where the company ate a certain loss in profits for future returns." That's nonsense squared. What are the "future returns" that a university can expect from educating its graduate students? There are none. Who gets the economic return on the resources that a university invests in its graduate students? Not the university, but the graduate students themselves. (I guess it's a good thing that Anonymous didn't go into finance, after all.)

    Like many of the other student commentators, Anonymous thinks that his tuition waiver is worthless because *he* wouldn't have been willing to pay the equivalent tuition. His reasoning appears to be as follows: "I would never have spent the money to educate myself, so the university must not be spending any money to educate me." Another piece of financial nonsense.

    If graduate students don't want to be treated like spoiled children, they should stop thinking like spoiled children.

    Reply
  39. Anonymous Philosophy Student

    My apologies if I came across as foolish. I really meant to make two simple points:

    1. That graduate students are employees.
    2. And that as such, from a pro-labor perspective, graduate students have a right to organize. And that the administration should deal with that organization in ways other than destroying that organization.

    I realize that I am ignoring the details of the NYU situation, and in a way meant to, as I think arguments against (1) are not particular to the NYU situation.

    In the end, I tend to group graduate students in with professors. We do a whole lot less, and get a whole lot more instruction, and that is why we make 10%-15% of what professors make and no benefits (private sector salaries not needed to make this comparison stark). But we are part of the educators, not the students. I guess that was my intention in the internship example. Which I think is still apt.

    Vellemen sees my comparison silly enough to challenge my credentials as a financial analyst, stating:

    "Who gets the economic return on the resources that a university invests in its graduate students? Not the university, but the graduate students themselves."

    But this is exactly the case in the private sector. Entry level analysts are trained at one firm. Junior analysts are stolen from that firm by another, and then the senior analysts bounce around for higher and higher salaries (doesn't sound That much different than philosophy to me). The return on the investment isn't to the company that trained the employee, necessarily, but to the health of the marketplace, i.e. there are a number of trained analysts that can keep the field, of say acquisitions and mergers, alive.

    Tempting talented thinkers to drop their dreams of big houses for philosophy by at least guaranteeing that they won't be homeless keeps philosophy healthy. Sure the graduate students gain, but so does the field of philosophy. This is good for philosophy departments, and in turn for full professors, and without any doubt for the college's administrators.

    Reply
  40. anon

    Velleman writes:
    "[Anonymous] says: "[A]cademia needs to compete against the draw of private sector". That's nonsense. The academy cannot possibly pay its graduate students *or* its faculty on a scale competitive with the private sector. It never has, and it never will. If he is expecting compensation on such a scale, he should go back to the private sector."

    Um, "competing with the private sector" doesn't mean "paying on a scale competitive with the private sector" in the sense of paying on a scale that nearly equals the pay in the private sector. John might attach a $10,000 value to doing job A and a 0$ value to doing job B. Job A pays $10,000, job B pays $15,000. If John is rational, he'll take job A even though it is not competitive in pay scale.

    So Anonymous has a point. Will students demand extravagent stipends? I doubt it. But what about a student who's already a parent? In general, students will accept stipends far below the market value of their labor because of the value of studying. But, as in the example above, that doesn't mean the level of the stipend doesn't matter or that the university isn't competing with the private sector.

    Tuition waivers clearly aren't worthless, but they're also not worth the amount they're cited as. I think someone said, the university isn't going to be able to fetch $30,000 for grad school tuition on the market. Therefore, the tuition waiver isn't worth that much–the university isn't giving up $30,000 by waiving the student's tuition. The tuition is worth the cost of providing the education, which, in a private university system, is far less than the price of the education. The university _is_ giving up the cost of producing the education.

    In any case, I'm not sure what the point of quibbling with that part of Anonymous' post was. If it was supposed to call into question the real arguments contained in his post, I fail to see how it does so.

    Also, you might consider toning down the invective a tad. If, as you claim, you're concerned about grad student-professor relations, you might want to reserve the name-calling for people doing something _wrong_, instead of people who have a different opinion and are expressing it civilly (as Anonymous was doing).

    Reply
  41. anonymous future graduate student

    It has been noted elsewhere that the philosophical community lacks the norm of distinguishing the person from the position. This norm — adopted almost universally in the sciences, as far as I can tell — would make it highly infelicitous (perhaps to the point of social sanction) to say things like:

    "Graduate students who think that tuition waivers are costless to a university are living in cloud-cuckoo land."

    or

    "If graduate students don't want to be treated like spoiled children, they should stop thinking like spoiled children."

    In fact, it's more than a little disturbing to imagine what graduate education must be like if professors are willing to talk to their students this way. As (people who claim to be, or strive to be) philosophers, can't we at least try to tone down the rhetoric and focus solely on the merits of the issue at hand?

    Reply
  42. Matthew Smith

    Professor Velleman:

    I think very highly of your philosophical work. I have also found the NYU department to be a friendly place and have heard from many that Michigan philosophy is a wonderful place. I am therefore surprised at what I perceive as the vitriol of your posts.

    It just is not at all obvious to me that support for a graduate TA union is the product of "thinking like spoiled children" (in the same way that it is not at all obvious that opposition to a graduate TA union is the product of "thinking like Rush Limbaugh").

    In fact, I think that this is an important issue to which we as philosophers can make a reasonable contribution. The structure of higher education is changing in the United States (and, I suppose, the rest of the world) with some speed. Among the changes are an increased reliance on adjuncts and graduate students teaching undergrads, a commodification of university education (into the College Experience) and the rise of the star system in faculty hiring. All of these changes raise substantive questions about, for example, pedagogy, distributive justice and the role and structure of the academy in a democratic society, to name just a few matters off the top of my head.

    Since these are genuine philosophical issues and they also directly concern all of us who do make or hope to make the academy our homes for the rest of our working lives, it seems that there are many reasons for us to dig our philosophical teeth into them. Furthermore, since those who have tenured positions actually might have some say in how these matters develop over the next few generations, it seems that if we are going to expend any energy at all discussing these issues, we should seek to expend that energy as constructively as possible.

    And I should note to all — I do not mean to be critical exclusively of Prof. Velleman. I hope that union organizers and union supporters would argue both respectfully and in good faith.

    Reply
  43. Greg

    I must admit I am very confused by Professor Vellman's comments in this thread. Maybe I am lost, but this seems so obvious to me that I will post it.

    He says: "Who gets the economic return on the resources that a university invests in its graduate students? Not the university, but the graduate students themselves."

    The clarity of Vellman's statement seems to me to cover up a very unclear conception of what a research university is, its economical structure, and the role of the graduate students in it. It might be that NYU dosent get a economic return directly on their own graduate students (though one might reasonably suspect that they do, since high quality grad students are likely to be part of the reputation of a institution etc. I mean there are simply so many ways that our types of universities gets money that to claim a universities' own grad students has no role in getting money to the university seems highly suspect).

    But, and this is my main point, certainly NYU is a research university and as such they are completely dependent on having top-notch graduate students being available to them to continue that activity that justifies them being a research university. Both as students and as future professors. In that sense graduate students has tons to do with future returns for the university, and for the justification of the research universities existence at all. Now, of course that will not – in most cases anyways – be their own graduate students. NYU could of course want to be a free rider in this respect and just take graduate students from other instituitions (and if you feel like closing down your graduate philosophy program Professor Vellman please do, it would make it easier for me getting a decent job 😉 ). But that would amount to such a break with the ideal of a research university that it would almost destroy the justification for it doing research at all> The university would rather end up being a think-tank kind of entity. The idea of teaching being tied to research and vice versa is at the center of the idea of a research university. Instead of going on I will just state my main point that seems pretty obvious to me: the economic value of graduate students are not simply tied to their teaching undergrads. Paying graduate students is not simply generousity from the universities side, its a part of the deal (and ideal) for any university being a research university, with all that implies. We graduate students are as much a vital part of the research universities life as the professors are.

    Modern american universities are capitalistic entities, and one should be quite careful with employing simplistic models when one investigates their economic structures (and their superstructure!).

    Reply
  44. Maria

    I am currently a graduate student at NYU. I am not a TA yet – I'm still on my fellowship semesters – but would not adhere to the strike if I were.

    First, I have heard from faculty I trust that it wasn't the union's pressure that brought up stipends and health benefits, but rather a change in direction towards becoming a reputable research university. I've never seen any evidence from either side on how conditions were before the union, and in my department there aren't many students left from those days, so I have no way to form an opinion on that.

    Second, the union is alleging that the university reduced health benefits. This is not entirely correct. We still get the comprehensive health plan that undergrad students from NYU can pay for (there is also a standard plan). This is the same plan that faculty receive. Because of rising healthcare costs, the plan's benefits were reduced – for all clients. Now, I'm still waiting to hear back from the union as to how they would go about regaining the old benefits (which I would love to have!), or what other, better, plans the money NYU allegedly pays for this plan could buy.

    Third, the fact that I will have to pay "agency fees" for an organization that could be replaced by a democratic committee for free does not make me precisely sympathetic towards the union. As everyone concerned agrees, grad students have a tight budget (given that we are living in one of the most expensive cities in the world), and that money could be better spent in a thousand other things. I sympathize with real workers who could use our "agency fees" in their own struggles, but at this point I cannot really afford to help them in that way.

    So there it goes. I'd like to see more hard evidence of the good the union has meant before turning over to their side.

    Reply
  45. Zehou

    D.V.: "That's nonsense squared. What are the 'future returns' that a university can expect from educating its graduate students? There are none."

    I think you've misunderstood AGS' analogy. The non-service years in a typical private U grad program are like the cost the U/company "eats" for the sake of later returns. NOT: the entire time to degree is a cost the U/company "eats" for the sake of later returns.

    The U isn't gaining anything IN FALL 2005 in return for sending a 1st-yr. grad to take a full load of grad courses. But IN FALL 2006, when that student starts putting that year's worth of book learning to use by grading papers, holding office hours & staff meetings, and preparing for and leading sections, the U starts to see a little bit of a return (of some kind) on its investment.

    That's not to say the U rakes in truckloads of dough for every penny it invested on the student the year before. Just what sort of return, if any, the U wins, and why the U's financial advisors insist that grad students are worth keeping around (so long as they don't expect the same health care deal professors get, that is), are presumably not very easy questions to answer.

    In any case, sloppy talk about "closed shops," about the greivance the "UAW" filed, and about GSOC's attempt to gain "partial control" of hiring decisions is embarrasing and irresponsible. Please keep descriptions neutral, and be clear about the difference between the facts as all parties can agree to state them (GSOC filed the greivance, which stated, and I quote, that….) and the interpretation of their meaning or significance, which not all will agree about.

    Reply
  46. Another Anonymous Philosophy Student

    I’m a philosophy grad student at NYU, and so far my sympathies are with GSOC, rather than the administration. But I’m confused about one issue.

    Some supporters of the NYU administration’s position have written on this blog that one of the administration’s primary objections to the continued existence of the union is that it threatens the university’s control over academic decision-making. Why, exactly? The argument seems to be: Control over who gets t.a.-ships is an important part of the university’s control over academic decision-making. The union has filed grievances challenging such decisions in the past, so the union will surely continue to file such grievances, and one day an arbitrator will unwisely side with the union.

    But in a letter to the university dated August 4, 2005, the union wrote:
    “Second, we have previously advised you that in a successor contract, we will not appeal to arbitration any grievance challenging academic decisions—including employee selection. In your letter you proposed the withdrawal of ‘all such pending grievances and arbitrations.’ In the context of agreement on the terms of a successor contract, we have already agreed to withdraw pending grievances in this category. Please provide us with a list of the grievances you assert fall in this category.”

    It sounds like the union was being pretty reasonable about this issue. The union agreed to drop all pending grievances relating to “employee selection,” and not to file such grievances in the future. Doesn’t this cover the grievances mentioned in previous posts, such as the grievance filed when the philosophy department hired a non-NYU t.a. for Aesthetics? If “employee selection” doesn’t cover such grievances, what does it cover? And if “employee selection” does cover such grievances, then doesn’t this letter show that the union was quite responsive to the administration’s concerns about control over academic decision-making?

    Perhaps the correspondence between the University and the union that’s been made public doesn’t give us the whole story about this grievance issue. If so, I’m curious to hear the rest of the story.

    Reply
  47. Andrew Janiak

    As a former graduate student at Professor Velleman's former department, viz. Michigan, I was disheartened to read his post yesterday. He wrote: "If graduate students don't want to be treated like spoiled children, they should stop thinking like spoiled children." Philosophers more than anyone else ought to recognize the fact that reasonable people can disagree, and that ad hominem remarks such as these are unprofessional in every sense of the term. It seems to me that he ought to apologize for this remark, and to maintain a higher level of debate. Many graduate students in philosophy at Michigan were active in the union — I was our union steward at one point — and as far as I can see, there's just no evidence that having a union spoiled the relationship between faculty members and graduate students. Indeed, the Michigan department has been flourishing for years. But even if I am wrong about that, we ought to be able to discuss this issue in a professional manner.

    Reply
  48. anon

    ""Who gets the economic return on the resources that a university invests in its graduate students? Not the university, but the graduate students themselves." [Velleman]

    But this is exactly the case in the private sector. Entry level analysts are trained at one firm. Junior analysts are stolen from that firm by another, and then the senior analysts bounce around for higher and higher salaries (doesn't sound That much different than philosophy to me). The return on the investment isn't to the company that trained the employee, necessarily, but to the health of the marketplace."

    Actually, this concedes too much to Velleman (from whose post you'd think the university funds grad students out of altruism or in order to further scholarship or something). The university's investment in graduate students does pays off, in the form of impressive placement records. Private firms want to maximize profits, philosophy departments want to maximize placement. That's why they compete over good grad students and that's why they eat economic losses to train grad students: they're eating economic losses in order to reap future returns.

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  49. Dev L. Advocate

    I'm curious as to the extent of a connection between the opposition to a grad union and the practice of the administration to encourage the rapid development of certain departments into star programs and to sustain, or expand, such programs, perhaps at the expense others.

    NYU presents a great example. Take, for example, its philosophy program. It enjoyed a brilliant and rapid rise to fame. This has been a great thing for the program, NYU itself, philosophy in the tri-state area, and perhaps more broadly too. But it's not crazy to wonder whether this kind of rapid success could have occurred as easily as it did if some of the fears (whether now well-founded or not) some have about a grad union had been manifest. Would the program have been able to compete with other top grad programs if, perhaps as a result of union pressures to more evenly distribute teaching loads and funding, grad students were required to teach 6 semesters instead of 4, or if stipends were a couple thousand less?

    That's all quite hypothetical. And, of course, the NYU philosophy program has already achieved its rise to stardom. So there's a clear sense in which concern over these hypotheticals sustain no anti-union sentiment now. But it doesn't strike me as completely absurd that one might worry that the union could negatively impact sustaining the program as it is, or future plans to expand.

    I, for one, find little objectionable in an administration focusing resources on the rapid developemtn of a small number of programs (perhaps even at the expense of some others). But are there incompatibilities between this practice and the existence of a grad union? Are fears about these (alleged) incompatibilities motivating anti-union sentiment? Should they? What do others think?

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  50. Ned Block

    Response to "Another Anonymous Philosophy Student": You say it sounds like the union was being pretty reasonable because they agreed that in a successor contract, they "will not appeal to arbitration any grievance challenging academic decisions—including employee selection." However, as the university administration has pointed out repeatedly, the union signed a contract in force between 2001 and 2005 saying "Decisions regarding who is taught, what is taught, how
    it is taught and who does the teaching involve academic judgment
    and shall be made at the sole discretion of the University."
    Despite having signed that agreement, the union nonetheless brought a series of grievances challenging who does the teaching. Of course they dressed it up as something else.
    It is unfortunate the the NYU graduate students chose the UAW to represent them.

    The contract can be found at http://www.virtualmind.info/nyustrike/loc2110.pdf
    And reports of some of the grievances can be found at http://www.nyu.edu/provost/ga/uaw-grievances.html

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  51. Anonymous PhD Candidate 3

    A few things that I can establish from these comments, and from my own experience at NYU as an adjunct represented by the UAW and a doctoral student with two advisors in the philosophy dept:

    -the union has overstepped its bounds in a way that seems to make them untrustworthy. Boghossian and Block both give a detailed example of the UAW filing grievances against the phil dept (were any TAs even party to this grievance?) despite the dept's perfectly good reasons for getting an outside TA for an aesthetics class. Notably, not one pro-GSOC comment has acknowledged this fact, which would have significant academic implications if the GSOC/UAW position were accepted. Y'know, academic integrity – that dimension of NYU that makes your degree worth something. It's worth protecting, and that seems to be the primary concern of the phil dept in response to the union. It is very telling that there has been no response to this problem.

    -some union supporters are not fully informed (e.g., "NYU slashed their [TA's] benefits"). The comprehensive health insurance package was changed for everyone, not only for TA's (see Maria's comment above). A hell of a lot of PhD students at NYU pay for **everything** – tuition, fees, and insurance – and their benefits were also changed. The fact that I've heard this claim countless times means that (1) many are unaware that the insurance company, not NYU, changed its benefits program, and (2) many don't check facts before attacking NYU. Like so much of this debate, objectivity is thrown out the window before the conversation even starts. "Anonymous phil student" claims that "[TAs] make 10%-15% of what professors make and no benefits" – this can't be true for NYU, which is what we're talking about. An NYU TA makes $19K plus benefits and tuition remission. The average NYU prof does not make $130-200K/yr.

    -A number of students have mentioned that either tuition remission isn't worth its market value, or that no doctoral student actually pays tuition anymore. First, they are wrong about who does and doesn't pay tuition anymore. A large percentage of NYU PhD students pay full tuition, which, since it is paid for with loans initially, is actually much more expensive than $30,000/yr. That's real money for those people, who don't have the privilege of making $20K a yr w/ benefits and tuition remission for TAing (not teaching) one course/term. Second, this is a tremendous investment from the university, and the financial sacrifice TAs are claiming is compensated in large part by the fact that their free professional degrees will give them access to high-paying, stable jobs. Further, you're probably only in a top PhD program if you've been privileged enough to get excellent UG and MA degrees elsewhere, and are not paying off that debt. The likelihood of a PhD student being upper class is high. $20K is not a lot to some people, and is actually quite a lot to others, including more than 1/5 of NYC residents. If you didn't pay East Village rent, $20K would be more than enough. Whoever claims that including tuition remission in the breakdown of how much a TA package is worth should first talk to the hundreds of other NYU PhD students who are completely unfunded to get a reality check. Then you can see how much you're simply complaining.

    The UAW/GSOC overstepped its bounds into academic matters (and no pro-GSOC comment in this thread is willing to acknowledge that), misrepresents information (not including tuition remission or benefits in how it represents TA compensation; claiming that NYU slashed benefits), and is unhappy with a perfectly adequate TA deal that is significantly better than that of the large # of unfunded NYU PhD students. (Every striker I've spoken to is completely unaware of that PhD students can be unfunded.) And, TAs have bailed on their contracts, departments and students for many weeks now. TAs should accept their incredibly privileged, highly subsidized positions and work for the countless union causes in which genuine injustices occur.

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