Although the suggestion of a Dean to use AI to do the work of striking TAs has attracted most of the attention (the Dean has since recanted, I am told by a BU faculty member), the real story is that the BU admin is going all out to break the strike.  As a philosopher at BU writes to me:

News articles are generating a lot of noise about our dean’s slip when it comes to recommending the use of AI to replace striking workers, but I actually the more important issue is that the dean is going all out to have us use pretty much any method, including employing workers from elsewhere, to make sure discussion classes continue. In other words, this is all out union busting. Striking graduate students will not be paid from next week onwards. The university is so desperate that we not cancel discussion classes that the dean suggests:

• Combine discussion sections (on Zoom, for instance) and record the meeting so that students who are unable to attend can watch them asynchronously; those participating asynchronously can be asked to submit written exercises or complete an additional written assignment to make it clear they watched the discussion”

Some departments, like my own, have communicated to the Provost that they will not be doing any work (grading, holding discussion classes, etc.) that the Teaching Fellows would be doing if they were not on strike. Other departments, have much less sympathy with the striking workers. But it’s very clear that the deans in our college want to make sure that the teaching fellows are not missed by the undergraduates. 

This BU faculty member shared a comment they posted online at BU Today:

I am one of the many BU professors/faculty who support the graduate student workers and the present efforts of their union. I’d like to address one theme of the university administration’s rhetoric as reported by BU Today above. The administration says that “…if graduate students are not available, faculty will need to create a plan to continue to teach lab or discussion sections…” The administration has also told us that grading of essays and assignment will need to be done by faculty or non-BU workers. BU departments have already been told that the administration would like us to draw up contingency plans and return such plans to the administration, and a number of departments (the number is unknown to me, but I am in one of them) have decided not to comply with this request. I hope the undergraduate students recognize that this is in no way demonstrates a failure on our part to value their continuing education. Undergraduate students and their families actually have a lot of power in this situation to influence the university administration. If faculty were to undermine a strike by BU graduate student workers by making sure that the presence of BU graduate student workers was not required for teaching purposes, this would be effectively undermining the strike (and any non-BU workers employed for this purpose would be crossing a picket line). Of course, every BU faculty member needs to make up their own mind whether to stand with the graduate student workers, or stand against them, but no one should fool themselves:  finding alternative ways to get grading done or have discussion classes taught, etc. necessarily involves pitting oneself against the graduate student union.

This is how strikes work:  they create problems for the employer, includng the employer's "customers," thus forcing the employer to make bargaining concessions to those doing the actual work.

Comments are open for more information from those familiar with what is going on.