For people who are interested in what graduate students do or why we'd want to unionize:
I find myself thinking plenty about the paternalistic emails university administrators keep sending about graduate students’ efforts to unionize, so I figured I’d put those thoughts down here.
I want to start with an assumption, for which I have minimal evidence, given that I have little contact with university administrators. I’m going to pretend that administrators actually have some version of my interests at heart, so that I can address what kinds of well-intentioned notions might be distorting their view of my interests. My assumption, then, is this: administrators aren’t evil, nor do they simply view the university as an economic institution that provides them with a stable career. Instead, they actually believe they’re doing what’s right for the university as an educational institution and for graduate students, who they do not see as laborers.
In other words—strictly for the purposes of a thought experiment—I’m going to take Paula McClain, Dean of the Graduate School, at her word when she wrote (via email to the graduate students, 12/13/2016) that graduate students “participate in teaching and research experiences as part of their overall academic program.” This argument is in contradiction to how I’d summarize the central argument for a graduate student union: that graduate students are laborers being exploited under the guise of education.
So, here are three possible ways of thinking that might explain how our administrators could be somewhere north of Lawful Evil on the old D&D alignment chart and so strongly anti-union.
Graduate students are children, not laborers: It’s not uncommon for education to involve the conflation of the roles of student and child. Teachers and administrators are assumed to be those with greater knowledge and greater administrative responsibilities, when compared to students. The same assumptions are widely made regarding parents in comparison to their children. Society is more or less structured under the assumption that parents will act in their children’s best interests and regulatory intervention is required only when parents can be shown to fail in that task. It seems that university administrators expect the same kind of assumption to apply in their relations with graduate students. While laborers are to be protected from exploitation by contracts, graduate students are children, and are thus expected to trust in our teachers and administrators to act in our interests, in the absence of personal instances of abuse and violence. So, perhaps administrators just can’t take our concerns seriously because they see us as children (let’s set aside the reality that even my toddler’s concerns should be taken seriously). They might feel they would be acting irresponsibly if they assented to our right to collective bargaining. Perhaps they even feel they’re protecting us from the corruptive influence of some outside labor agents.
Graduate students can’t be exploited because students’ lives revolve around their studies: Pierre Bourdieu criticized the “scholastic disposition,” an assumption that academic work is properly done in freedom from worldly concerns. It is thought that academic work requires that academics not worry about “real world” stuff like loans, children, their health, any of that. So perhaps our administrators believe that, when it comes down to it, graduate students should really just be putting our lives on hold and focusing entirely on our work. Graduate school is a temporary scholastic space in which we forfeit real world concerns and should be grateful for any kind of assistance (e.g., health insurance, access to recreational facilities, generous freedom from continuation penalties for a few years) we receive, since we shouldn’t even have any concerns apart from our academic work, anyway. Perhaps, by keeping us from advocating for benefits and actual contracts that lay out the terms of our employment, administrators feel like they’re keeping us focused on what really matters: our studies. Perhaps they think that not only graduate students, but also professors, are not laborers. Maybe they just think we should all be grateful they give us an academic sandbox to play in while they deal with real world issues.
Graduate student teaching isn’t exploited labor because teaching is an easily acquired skill: To be blunt, any training I receive in how to teach is in addition to anything required in my doctoral program. I’ve been fortunate enough to have been a TA for professors who put quite a bit of thought and effort into their teaching, and who have made it their mission to devote time and effort into working closely with their TAs in developing our teaching skills. That’s just a function of chance, though. Not all doctoral students are so lucky. Sometimes we TA for professors who don’t particularly care about our training, and other times we TA for professors who don’t even care about their own teaching, as they’re focused on their own research. What resources there are in the broader university are, at best (if we set aside that some of them are student-run, and others have long waiting lists), extra demands on graduate students’ time and energy, especially considering we have the pressure of loss of benefits and assessment of continuation penalties looming, should we take on too much more than our coursework, research, and required teaching duties. So, perhaps administrators just think we’ll naturally pick up the ability to teach by teaching. Our teaching isn’t exploited labor because it’s the only educational experience we actually need in order to become teachers. They’re being generous by making part of our funding dependent on such teaching, because being thrown into the job is the best way to learn, right? Just look at the success of Teach for America in throwing undertrained teachers at classrooms…
Now, in reality, graduate students are adults who are responsible for ourselves and ought not be told to trust ourselves to an institution that uses our labor, however well-intentioned its administrators might be. Graduate students have real world needs, and ought not be asked to simply trust that people who have virtually no contact with us known what we need better than we do. Graduate students are working to acquire skills in the difficult work of teaching, even as we are thrown into teaching with minimal preparation beforehand.
I’m willing to imagine that administrators think they’re doing what’s best for graduate students and for the university that educates us. If that’s true, though, I have to worry that they have some serious misconceptions about graduate students’ lives and the kind of resources that would be needed to educate us well. After all, we learn to teach in programs that make any attention we give to that learning a distraction from the natural course of our programs. And when we say that we need some kind of material resources, we’re told that the university knows what we need and that we should be happy they’re giving us what they are.