Turns out he was basically forced to go to this other company by his advisor, who had a lot of funding from this other company, or his advisor would "make graduating very difficult".
In a traditional workplace, were always taught to value "workplace" over "work" and to never stay at a "workplace" for the "work". That is, if you have a crappy boss and toxic culture, working on a shiny greenfield project isn't going to help and most will advise you to leave and pursue a "workplace" that is more aligned with you.
With academia the dynamics are completely different because now "work" and "workplace" occupy the same space, as in they are equally important, with "work" might be even more important than the "workplace". So you get into a situation where you hate the "workplace", but unlike the traditional workplace, you can't simply up and leave because your "work" is far too important, and continuing your "work" at another "workplace" is from everything I read about academia, difficult to say the least.
Not sure how unions will look in academia but it's clear that we need some sort of arbiter in that space to re-balance the "work" and "workplace" since the dynamics are so different.
I'm not sure how much impact a union can have on anything that isn't purely on the "work for funding" side. I'm all for TAs to unionize with a national org because it doesn't run into this issue and there is also less overall job heterogeneity there. But how do you negotiate highly personalized degree requirements as part of a labor union? There could be some high level policy changes that would help future students, but I don't think we know exactly what would work best. And will these national orgs even choose to prioritize that kind of improvement?
The UAW unions that have formed at a few other places over the last 5 years have helped raise salary/benefits a bit, but there has barely been discussion of fundamental changes that could help fix academic training. It's pretty focused on basic labor rights.
Maybe it is just my department but most people I know wanted to do a PhD knowing the terrible salary, and what they really feel ripped off on is the lack of academic freedom that was promised as part of this training. People want a union because they feel ripped off, I get it, but the union leaders are working towards a pretty different type of resolution from everything I can tell. Maybe this is just the first step in the process, but I'm skeptical.
Where would this idea be originating? I think that would be one of the first things I would tackle, because anyone making a claim of academic freedom for grad students to just research whatever they want is spinning a tale. Students with this perception are being lied to, so we should first address the following disillusionment by dispelling the notion of academic freedom during Ph.D. research exists.
Now, sure it is not absolute freedom because it is supervised and the funding was obtained for a specific project. Funding agencies or industrial sponsors don’t like it when the student does something completely different. But then students apply for specific projects. I have never seen any PhD offer that did not have a set perimeter (within which they do have some freedom), so I am not sure they are being lied to about that. Again, that might be context-dependent.
In addition to micro-management of the thesis project, there's also consideration of outside academic activities. Many students end up spending 50+ hours per week on the work their advisor designed. This leaves little time for the student to explore learning new skills that might be relevant to them - for example programming tutorials, a reading group in a different subfield, mentoring an undergrad project, communicating with the general public, etc.
Obviously there is not time for every PhD to involve all of those things, but currently it is much too restricted. For some people to the point that their advisor forbids them from taking a night class or whatever despite the fact it is outside the (already overtime) working hours of the lab. Research may indeed be the priority, but entirely ignoring other parts of the academic role has not gotten us anywhere good.
What it boils down to is that part of the compensation of the PhD is supposed to be training. Yet as it stands many students are treated as only employees, with no regard to teaching them to become a better researcher and no time allowed for their own personal/career development activities.
Students are being lied to for sure (at least in certain fields/locations). But the solution is not to just be blatantly honest about what PhD currently entails. Part of the shift also needs to be a return to considering the PhD as an important piece of the training for becoming an academic.
However, the funding of EMBL works fairly differently from most universities, and quite a few other research institutes.
This minimizes the possibility of ending up with a bully or someone incompetent. And if you do, it's much easier to run away to a different group.
I think this is a key piece to what makes grad school feel so exploitive. It's almost impossible to switch advisors, let alone universities. This results in a power imbalance that basically doesn't exist anywhere else in the modern, liberal world. If you do switch, it's almost certain to come with a hefty setback in terms of time.
A lot of this could be solved by standardizing the PhD. Passing prelims at school A should mean you don't have to retake prelims if you switch to school B. The fact that you do means you're the victim of a pissing match between universities.
The requirement to make novel contribution to the field is crying out for standardization. How novel? How big? Nobody can tell you. I remember asking my advisor what exactly this meant. Her best answer was just "Ehhh, basically it depends on your committee."
This is absurd. It would be trivial to standardize this. Do away with the committee and the thesis. Put down a number. You publish N journal papers, you get a PhD. But we won't do this because it's this ambiguity they use to exploit grad students further. Everybody ends up doing more work than necessary just to be sure they pass their defense. Fuck academia.
I don't even think the union has jurisdiction over "academic" matters like graduation. The Harvard CBA explicitly points out that academic matters cannot be arbitrated like other grievances: https://studentunionization.harvard.edu/files/hgsu/files/202...
Outside of “My daddy arranged a new chair so I could get in here.” students have ~0 leverage. Academia is feudal, at least in fields based on Ph.D.s. Your supervisor can make it impossible for you to graduate at any time with minimal impact for them. If you graduate and they don’t want you to get an academic job you won’t. That’s what letters of recommendation are for, just with the usual justification flipped.
This isn’t a necessary part of academia. Law and medicine don’t work that way because their terminal degrees are Master’s degrees with elephantiasis. But absent getting rid of PhDs or changing them so radically you might as well change the name the power imbalance isn’t going anywhere.
The union has jurisdiction, or perhaps we should say influence, over those matters it is strong enough to act collectively to force acceptance of its influence or jurisdiction. Naturally if tries to get full jurisdiction over handing out Ph.Ds, that will be a misguided attempt which will be met with extreme resistance and fail. But if it insists on its right to intervene when advisers inappropriately block their advisees from graduating - that is a realistic (though not easy) objective.
> This is definitely abusive, but it's not clear how a union would go about solving this?
It's very clear. Let's assume the student has not yet accepted a work offer here or there. A group of union reps from the department go talk to that Professor. They tell him/her that this is an informal chat; that they have heard about his threat. They demand that he perform the following:
1. Informally affirm, to them, that s/he will not penalize or impede the advisee in any way, regardless of their choice of employment.
2. Ditto but to the advisee, within X time.
and that if these demands are not met, they will make the affair public: The department will be plastered with posters attacking him for extortion and mistreatment; press releases will be sent out; and ethical charges will be filed directly (if grads can do so), or external legal action may be initiated.
... that is, assuming the Professor does not deny the claim, which of course can also happen, and then things get more delicate and beyond the scope of this comment, but still actionable.
Regardless, for the parent's example, it sounds like a mis-alignment in expectations between the PhD candidate and their advisor.
I wonder "Why is this coming up now?"
For options, I don't know why the PhD candidate can't accept the lesser option, graduate, and then switch jobs. Or...maybe the candidate made a crafty tale to accept another job without getting called out for a disingenuous "love letter."
Even if the student didn't have proof of threats, the situation itself should be enough to get the student a new advisor or oversight with the existing one.
I mean "should" in an ideal sense. I think this kind of shit is common.
As for the honor code I cynically suspect it's more about having an item go use against someone when the university chooses, rather than a true standard that all are held to at all times. If nothing else, it's just tough for a large institution to handle all of its problems at once.
Of course, the ones who showed favoritism were also the ones who practically printed grant money, so nothing ever happened while I was there (and I doubt anything ever will).
Working as a lab instructor a lifetime ago, I graded two students' C assignments that both worked (mostly) but clearly without understanding what was going on.
It took me a while to figure out how they worked; as it turned out, they declared the same variables at the top of each function in the same order.
They didn't have globals, they weren't passing values around: the stack was being allocated across the same memory for each function, so the variables "just worked."
I ran a whitespace sensitive diff and noticed the only difference between the two files was the author name in the header.
The professor sent a sternly worded letter to the class about not cheating, and nothing else came from it AFAIK.
I never said anything about the accuracy of their code, but I was willing to explain how it worked so they could decide if they thought it was accurate. Most did not take me up on that offer, instead opting instead to bug people in their class until they found someone a) smart enough to help on assignments and b) dumb enough to help them. They didn't care about learning how their code worked or why, they just wanted an easy A.
The few who did take me up on my offer tended to be people who didn't understand the assignment to begin with and, after explaining the problem and how their solution worked, went out and did their own work. I always enjoyed those ones, they tended to want to do things legit but either were too nervous to go the professors/TAs or couldn't make office hours and couldn't get timely answers over email.
The people who just didn't care I was more than happy to talk about at at our weekly meetings. If their TAs weren't also tutors, our supervisor would keep them updated on who came in asking for a thumbs up on copied code.
Status quo: take job forced by advisor; student doesn't get dream job
Drop out and take dream job: student doesn't get degree they were pursuing
Advisor is fired over this: student must find an advisor that will resume advising on current thesis or more likely find a new advisor and start on a new thesis... But if it becomes known that this student was related to the firing, student may have a hard time finding a new advisor.
Advisor is disciplined over this: advisor may retaliate by no longer cooperating with student's progress, and then you're back to finding a new advisor.
Institution backs advisor and disciplines student for 'causing trouble': maybe find a new institution.
So... If there's no good outcomes for the student, it's tricky.
Source: was an undergraduate and Masters student at MIT, then left to do a Ph.D somewhere else with a much better/less toxic advisor.
This isn't really the definition of sunk cost, which is the appearance of having tangible impact on decisions while being independent of the future choice. If it has bearing (as in this case) it's material to the decision and not sunk.
Nice career trajectory you got here, but in a field like this one... shame if something bad happened to it...
In the field of Machining most of our new folks come from one particular Community College that offers a Machine Shop with a few CNC machines.
The sole instructor was a friend and would give me heads up on excellent machinists.
Stanly retires and new instructor brought in.
Fast forward a year and a competing companies CEO now sits on board of college.
He gets all the heads ups from the new instructor and we are left with the slackers to hire..
Even if the university offered a new advisor, it would be unlikely to help the student.
In the case that none of the above is possible the institution will probably try to do right by the student, but it's a bit of a crap shoot. Even if the institution confers the PhD, the student is still beholden to the publish or perish culture of academia - and their (former) advisor would have helped navigate them to a thesis which their former advisors peers would accept. If the latter doesn't occur in a big way; then the student won't have a good career ahead.
I've known 1-2 people who for various reasons decided that the grad student life was the optimal career station for themselves as it provided the benefits of an academic career without the overhead of grant applications etc.
Generally, for retirement, faculty try to "draw down" their labs, and there's very often a "I'm going to see X student through to their defense, and then I'm done" as the end of an academic career.
For unexpected deaths, generally there's a scramble to help cushion the students, get them in with new advisors, etc. But often, their former advisor's grants, data sets, etc. are still available. Unless one is really early in the process, the goal is to help the student finish their current work in a timely fashion.
The way vulnerable people are exploited and mistreated in what is, in fact, a work environment; moral hazards and conflicts of interest everywhere; lots of untrustworthy research results and inability to reproduce research.
Universities are big business and ought to be regulated just as much as any other big business
It's fundamentally wrong for one human (the PhD supervisor) to have so much unchecked power over another (the PhD student).
Without changing how the entire system works, I'm not sure how you fix that by means of regulation.
That may look good on paper. Yet a 20-something student vs an academic surrounded by supporters and wielding power and influence, it's only ever going to go one way.
I've personally been on the wrong end of it. After reviewing my options, noting that my supervisor had just been elected Fellow of the Royal Society in London, I decided to bite my tongue, complete my PhD, and leave.
The relationship was so broken I didn't even say goodbye to my supervisor (literally cleared out all my stuff from the lab very late one night), and I've never spoken to him, or had any contact with anyone in his research group ever since.
I have seen it go the other way as well.
Someone is in a position of power over someone else, and is exploiting that, and a response is to claim that this is a "wholly voluntary situation"?
Really?!
Why is this fundamentally wrong? Short of a truly equitable society (which I think most agree would be a dystopian nightmare), I don't see this as fixable. The problem is that the power is abused.
The best way to fix this is high trust societies, not creating one more institution with a disproportionate amount of power.
It's the unchecked nature of the power.
Politicians have upcoming elections to worry about. Tenured professors ... what do they worry about?
Class assignments and number of classes taught per semester, teaching times and locations, class sizes, advising assignments, committee assignments, TA allocations, grader allocations, internal grants, withholding or revoking consulting permission, withholding internal department funding, lack of promotion (there is still a ladder after tenure), and most of all reputation, which in academia has higher currency than currency.
Tenured professors still have a job to do and they still have a boss (lots of bosses, as I said), and if they don't do their job they can still get fired (I've seen it happen), or their lives can be made miserable.
If there's an issue of academic dishonesty then there there are processes at journals, conferences, and funding agencies to address concerns. I've also witnessed these processes work as intended.
We are apparently talking about very different kinds of professors at very different kinds of institutions.
Unless he were to actually commit a crime, I don't think there is anything my ex-boss could have possibly done which could have ended up with him being removed from his post. He was simply too important to the institution in terms of his reputation and his ability to attract external funding.
How he treated his students was really neither here nor there, as long as the money and the citations kept rolling in.
> He was simply too important to the institution in terms of his reputation and his ability to attract external funding.
This reinforces my idea that you should always go with an advisor who doesn't have this kind of clout. Not that you should have known this ahead of time or you did anything wrong, but I have heard sad stories from large labs enough to be thankful for avoiding them in the past, and it's the advice I will pass on in the future.
I think if you wanted to get at the actual problem and a solution to it, I would say the problem is sad narcissistic jerks aiming to become kings of their research kingdoms, and then they act as tyrants when they get a hold of large sums of grant money. That may be the experience some people have had.
A solution to this that you may like if you want more oversight may be to treat a research lab more like a corporation with a board of directors (I can hear the researchers recoiling) or some other governing body over the lab and the students itself. What do you think of that idea?
Rule by committee. So many examples of that working out great.
How about keeping the apprenticeship aspect just having more masters? One year of just comprehend exams, one year where you’re supposed to devote half your time to research with an advisor and half to comps, and three years where you work on six different projects with different advisors in six month chunks? Some of those will be written up as failures, but basically you end up with 3+ Master’s theses. That’s a great deal more love research academia than legal academia and they don’t seem to lack for scholarly work or impact.
- Promotion. Tenure is awesome, yes, but there are two full academic ranks at my institution above associate professor with tenure, and if I want them, I need to continue to do the same things that got me tenure. Graduate students, get grants, publish papers, etc.
There's also further ambitions like chair, dean, etc. that are often literally elections.
- Internal allocation of resources. Will one of my students be my department's choice for a fellowship? If there's a space crunch (there's always a space crunch) can I get the space I want? If there's internal funds to help support pilot projects or the like, am I on the short list for those?
- Reputation. This is important to me. I want it to be known that "my lab" turns out good people. And that we do good work. This is not only actually a criteria for promotion, but also something I want (I didn't go into academia for the money). It's what gets you invited to things I want to be invited to.
This also includes things like whisper networks. Students warn other students.
- Grants. A number of grants look at things like mentorship and students.
That is why it is fundamentally wrong. Because it ensures widespread abuse.
But this problem is totally fixable. We need to reduce the role that the advisor plays. Grad students should be able to switch labs and universities like most people switch jobs. Once they publish some set number of papers, they get a PhD. No thesis, no committee. The advisor basically is demoted to a fungible manager.
Maybe this fixes the problem of abusive professors wielding their power in wrong ways, but it creates new problems as well. For instance, it shifts the very nature of a Ph.D. from a deep exploration of a single topic to shallow explorations of many topics. If you tell me I need 4 papers to get a Ph.D., I'm going to get 4 papers from the easiest venues on the most shallow of topics, because why go any deeper?
And are these solo author papers? What if you were 1 author out of 30 on one paper, and 1 author out of 2 on another? Are each of those 1 paper credit?
Do paper credits transfer between universities? Do some schools require more papers than others? Who gets to decide? Do some disciplines require more papers than others? Again who gets to decide? What about journal papers versus conference papers versus workshop papers? Do presentations count? Do poster sessions count?
If you are in my lab and I've spent time and money training you, what's my recourse if you just quit on me to join another lab?
None. Every employer the entire world over deals with this. The fact that this makes you feel entitled to continued labor by "your" students is the entire problem.
When I hire a grad student I do so with the intention that I will keep them on for the duration of their education, which is a commitment of at least 4 years, sometimes up to 10 (do any employers have 10 year plans with you specifically in mind? No, as a 22 year old fresh out of college, you are fungible to them.) The bonds that are created between advisor and student can be one of the longest lasting and most important professional bonds a researcher makes in their whole life. It's so important that academic genealogy is actually tracked and recorded. There's a concept of a "grand advisor" or your advisor's Ph.D. advisor. So for all the negative stories you hear about a narcissistic asshole advisor wielding power and abusing underlings, there are far more stories of amazing intellectual relationships that can take a decade to fully bloom.
Your proposal would serve to virtually eliminate this relationship. The employee/employer relationship looks nothing like this. It's transactional and makes employees seem more like mercenaries than team members, no matter how much corporate culture wants to convince you that you're part of the team and a member of the family. You can actually find that environment during a Ph.D.; I know I did. You can make mistakes (sometimes huge mistakes) and not be fired. You can admit you don't know something or that you lack some skill and that's okay -- it's expected that you are still learning. Professors are happy to spend the time to teach such skills because they know they will be used on their own project, so it's worth while.
Here is what your proposal would do to my hiring practices and the way I run a lab: If you want to be an employee with the freedom to quit at anytime and move from lab to lab, I will conversely be quicker to fire you and to hire other better students from other labs to take your place. If you are going slow on a paper and you miss a deadline, I'm not going to shrug it off and say "Oh well, on to the next". I will probably fire you and hire someone else who won't miss deadlines.
If you make a huge mistake, like frying a $30k piece of equipment (true story), you'll be fired instead of met with understanding that you're just a student. Because that's what happens when you shift more onto the employee spectrum.
It's definitely also going to tighten the market for Ph.D. students significantly. This could be a good thing depending on your perspective, it would give you less competition. But it would also give new students fewer opportunities. I would think long and hard before hiring a grad student as opposed to research staff. If you make Ph.D. students too expensive, you'll just price them out of the market. Part of the deal of being a Ph.D. student is there's a general recognition that they will be working on projects they are not really qualified to work on yet.
As a 22 year old undergrad, you don't know enough about the domain to be useful. I need to invest years into you before you're even going to be publishing papers; if you can just leave me after that training to work on another project, I see no reason to invest that time in you in the first place. Instead, I'll just hire staff researchers who know what they're doing. Yeah they're more expensive monetarily than a grad student, but they also don't take up all of my time and make stupid mistakes that burn out expensive and one-of-a-kind electronics.
All in all, I believe your proposal is really throwing out the Ph.D. babies with the asshole professor bathwater. Honestly I joined academia to escape corporate hell, so as far as I'm concerned I'm going to keep treating my students as students rather than employees.
Universities are rather analogous to sweatshops in how they operate and the economic reasons for doing so. And I suspect that, in much the same way, this state of affairs represents a sort of Nash equilibrium that cannot be significantly altered except by an outside force changing the rules of the game.
An example of a specific labor standard you'd like to see implemented would be welcome.
Also just to be precise, tuition isn't just to pay for classes, it goes to pay for all of the resources you use as part of the university community. If you are done your requirements you will still have to pay tuition. And students don't stop taking classes by the end of year 2 (or 4 depending), they stop taking required classes. Since your advisor pays your tuition, you can negotiate with them if you want to take more than the minimum. You are done your requirements after 2-4 years and don't have to take more classes, but of course you can (I did). Maybe this is something unions can help with.
My indulgence for "I spent three months going down this rabbit hole because it might have proved interesting" is way hired for graduate students than it would be for research staff, because that's part of them being students.
Could you explain further?
People who have experience with academia would think your story is commonplace and borderline uninteresting.
This has been my experience with telling and hearing stories like this.
I guess the calculation is that the tuition hit would be leverage? Like what, is a union going to force a code of conduct for professors? How is it going to be enforced when it already exists and half of these comments are about it being ignored?
I don’t get the union solution here. The incentives are wrong. Particularly on the Ph.D. track, how would a union specifically help address illegal behavior to the extent that you just “HTH” it as the obvious answer?
The resources a union have typically amount to (a) a grievance process, (b) work stoppage, and (c) a pittance of a legal fund. Work stoppages don't occur because one professor mistreats one student -- there's no rule against that, but unions are democratic and that motion would simply never pass unless the harm was particularly egregious and the victim was especially charismatic. Politics be. A grievance could "succeed" but ultimately they're pretty toothless -- the university has little leverage over a prof, the union has less. So we're left with a pitiful legal fund -- know how everybody hates dues? Unions are weak as a result. The student could potentially sue their prof through the ordinary legal system. They could be awarded monetary damages, but they would not be awarded a degree.
The professor is the judge, jury, and executioner for the doctoral thesis. Other professors in the department will be working alongside the offending professor for the rest of their lives so whatever politics be in the union, they're way more intense in a department of professors. And even if you do find a sympathetic ear with another professor in the same department, they're probably not in your specialty, because when there are two profs with the same specialty in a single department, one hired the other and they're bosom buds. And this is the real reason that individual grad students don't speak out, file grievances, etc. against professors, and known rapists carry on for decades: to act is to throw away your degree, and with it, your entire career.
Would we love to not operate on threats and counter-threats? Sure, but that would require the mutual consent of both parties, and the ones in power have rejected that outright.
I’m from a three generation UAW family, married into IBEW, and I was on the line at eight years old. I’m not exactly hearing about unions for the first time here. I’m also struggling to understand how they’re the obvious answer to education problems shared in this thread, in your estimation. Think you can share 10 or, even, 20 words to help clarify?
If someone ready to pay you twice as much with normal hours and less drama doesn't improve conditions, I'm not sure if a union can.
They also negotiated to discontine coverage for various women's health issues.
Just before COVID, UC Santa Cruz went on a wildcat strike because the union negotiated pay for that campus below the cost of living. A bunch of foreign students lost their visas as a result.
In the second two cases, the grad students tried, but failed to organize against the union.
Most obvious routes to correcting the situation are illegal. In particular, organizing a strike against the union, or organizing a replacement union would have been illegal.
> the union negotiated pay for that campus below the cost of living
...and the graduate student workers voted to approve the contract? Every negotiated contract goes back to the members for approval.
What would this have looked like in the absence of a union? You are saying that with negotiation, UC Santa Cruz got pay below cost of living, but if they didn't have that negotiation, management would have freely paid them more than cost of living? What was the negotiation over?
> In particular, organizing a strike against the union, or organizing a replacement union would have been illegal.
What do you mean? Just get 30% of your members to sign a petition and you can hold an election to change unions. That is literally what organizing is.
If you can get 30% of your members to go on a "wildcat strike" against UC Santa Cruz & UAW, then you can get 30% to sign a union replacement card.
> If you can get 30% of your members to go on a "wildcat strike" against UC Santa Cruz & UAW, then you can get 30% to sign a union replacement card.
Are you speaking based on California public sector union law or the federal National Labor Relations Act? The federal NLRA doesn't apply to state public sector workplaces, including UC Santa Cruz, with that being handled by state law.
If things were department wide, or even campus wide, the UAW wouldn't last a year in the departments I'm familiar with.
Instead, what you're proposing would require a statewide campaign against one of the most powerful political groups in California. The UAW is well aware of this, and has no incentive to act in its members' interest.
This is pretty normal with all unions. They negotiate higher pay and benefits for journeymen-level members at the expense of apprentice-level incoming members. Management then does their best to purge the journeymen while bringing on tons of apprentices.
Management and union leaders work in concert to ensure the above scenario happens a predominant amount of the time. See also: MLB, UPS, other entrenched and long-running union shops.
It's great if you're a tenured member. Not so much if you're new.
Hey, wait a minute... that sounds a lot like academia now with more steps...
Imagine a world with two or three unions per employer and you could actually pick which one you were under. They’d actually have incentives to deliver!
But we’ll never have that because it means less lobbying money and smaller campaign contributions to our representatives in government.
The actual "competition" wouldn't be among which union the employees joined - rather they would compete to undercut each other on contract negotiation, which would only bolster the employer's hand.
There are good reasons why this is not common practice - but there is also no law preventing multiple unions.
If there are no competing unions and you're in union C, then you've got no options but to quit or try and topple the union (impossible, effectively).
This depends, of course, on how exactly the new unions are allowed to form. It seems unlikely that the NLRB would implement policy in a way that allows dozens of unions, each with a handful of workers; but I guess if that happened, it would end up just like what you're saying.
The idea is that different kinds of workers could be in different unions. A department store might have, for example, cosmetics specialists, tailors, accounting staff and so on; and these groups are distinct enough, from the NLRB's perspective, to have their own unions.
Then I don't understand your ambivalence. Who would complain about getting more money?
And that money came from somewhere, probably partly from profits, but also from other investments (buildings, teaching material, ...). Overall teacher got a little bit more, but both the org and the students lost a lot, comparatively.
Also, university administration lover building pyramids of hierarchy. When you add a level to the pyramid, everybody gets a raise. Executive salaries are ludicrous -- and similar to the bank execs in the '08 bailouts, they cut themselves bonuses for "saving money" on handling disasters of their own creation.
By and large, university endowments are treated as separate investment vehicles and are no longer used to ease times of hardship.
Universities have largely been sold out. What was once a venerable public institution is now run like a profit-driven business. Welcome to wal-mart.
If some company habitually breaks the law and causes damages to a large group of people you can either pray that the Attorney General takes the case (but they won't, they want to advance their political career) or a law firm will take the case out of pure financial interest. I'll go with the law firm.
It might be interesting to consider how much worse the pay or conditions could have gotten in the union's absence.
The best choice of my life was not going back to school. I think I might do it through my employer but at this point I just do machine learning as a hobby.
The problem with grad school in general is the fact that other than being a gerontocracy is that the optimal strategy for scientific research requires more failures than successes and getting tenure becomes more and more difficult because other than people living longer you don't need more professors instead you just need more TAs / GAs to teach people and educate people to get the people to keep the system working.
Right now Mathematics (specifically Calculus) makes money for a college and or university in contrast to psychology, philosophy and other humanities don't. If this was automated then Mathematics will have less and less professors and or grad students so if the current trends continue then we will probably only see computer science professors dominating universities.
Overall I am not really convinced grad student unions really make much of a difference in practice, at least as far as everyday stipends and working conditions. I am at a non-unionized place now and we don't work the students any harder. But in principle it's certainly a good idea, and I have indeed seen the union be a useful advocate in certain special situations.
A union might increase productivity by both
a) De-stressing those who are actually doing the work of academia. Ensuring that they are financially taken care including living wages, sustainable working hours, and stable employment.
b) Reducing the need/available time for academic make-work.
c) Negotiating with funding bodies to correct lop-sided funding policies where students are funded but researchers are not.*
is there much evidence for this claim? If one takes a look at the habits and biographies of groundbreaking researchers they all have one thing in common, they have dedicated virtually their entire time to work.
Looking at countries with exceptional educational outcomes broadly you see the same thing, time and resources spent on tutoring and schooling is extremely high.
I'd argue that most ground breaking researchers had the benefit of researching their own ideas for prolonged periods. Putting in 40 hour a week on your own ideas for 10+ years is an awful lot of time. Many ground breaking researchers such as Feynman and Einstein had extended sabbaticals of one kind or another which lead to their best work.
It may be out of ignorance, but I'm not aware of any famous researcher who accredits their success to an 80 hour work week.
The Nobel Prizes are still awarded to individuals but often only because that's how Nobel decided the prize had to work over a century ago. Prizes are most of the time awarded to the heads of research groups who's discoveries are made of the backs of dozens of researchers and graduates often working 80 hour weeks, and in some cases hundreds or thousands of technicians.
The only prize that regularly meets the lone genius researcher trope is when the physics prize is awarded to a theorist (partially since it can't go to the hundreds of physicists responsible for verifying the theory).
Newton could see so far from standing on the shoulders of giants, the modern researcher can see so far from standing on the pyramid of overworked untenured researchers.
On the flip side, is this partially responsible for the declining productivity of science? We're effectively tying brilliant new talent to the whims of elders. ultimately as anyone who runs a large organization will tell you - you aren't going to get ground breaking work from a large org.
Do we need more diffuse science?
One of the greatest mathematicians ever, Paul Erdős, absolutely did - to the point of using methamphetamines to work harder, longer, and sharper.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Erd%C5%91s
Greatness is rarely healthy.
I once read a theory, I think it was in the book "At Home: A Short History of Private Life" by Bill Bryson, based on an observation (the accuracy of which I can't confirm or deny, some of the things in the book stretched credulity) that a surprising number of inventions in England were made by rural clergymen. The theory went that these people were usually the well-educated sons of wealthy families, who were parked in some small village that needed a priest, where they had almost no responsibilities apart from occasionally holding mass (they didn't really need to prepare sermons themselves, they could just buy a big book of sermons every now and then and read from that). So they lived lives of leisure and relative luxury, and some of them took an interest in science and technology and actually advanced the fields they got interested in.
The core idea behind academia is probably based on a similar observation: there's a small set of people who will do amazing things if you just let them figure things out without setting goals for them or applying pressure on them to produce something specific, so let's just give these people a decent wage and leave them to their business. But identifying who is a good candidate for such an arrangement isn't easy. In the days of the rural clergymen, this was essentially left to chance (after a basic intelligence filter of having to study to enter the clergy). We don't want to leave it to chance, so we set all kinds of goals and metrics to identify good candidates. But these metrics can be gamed, and for some academics gaming the metrics essentially is their job.
My friend, today you get to actually experience what sci-fi writer Frank Herbert called "Traveling without Moving:"
The year is 2022.
A virus wreaks havoc on the nations of the world.
A lone free software warrior named gorhill roams the internet to fight for justice, protect the underdog[1], and block ads[2].
At UC Davis (and possibly other schools) the grad students have been unionized now for at least two decades.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kung_Fu_(1972_TV_series)#Plot
2: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-origin/cjpa...
The thing is that academia is not a growing field anymore. So, if a professor graduates more than one student, they're feeding a glut of candidates who will be competing for one job at some point. For instance, in the field of engineering as a whole, 7.8 students graduate with PhDs per professor over the length of an average academic career [0]. In environmental engineering, that number is a whopping 19.0! (Also from [0]).
As a graduate student, once you realize the field isn't growing, you can actually see the phenomenon at work. Just look around in all your classes. That same handful of people you see in most of your courses, especially those leading into your intended specialty, those people are probably your competition. Now multiply that by every university in the country that teaches in your specialty. You very quickly come to the conclusion that you'll probably have to wait for someone to either retire or die before you get an academic position, and that's actually 100% the truth.
---
Moreover not everyone who graduates with a Ph.D. wants on the tenure track, and universities are increasingly creating non tenure roles to meet this demand. I'm not on tenure track and I don't think I'm missing much compared to my TT counterparts. I don't even want tenure, it's not at all what it's cracked up to be.
Your citation also leaves a lot to be desired. From your link:
> Nowadays, less than 17% of new PhDs in science, engineering and health-related fields find tenure-track positions within 3 years after graduation
Two of the things we ask during hiring are:
- "How is your research agenda different from your advisor's."
- "What funding agency will you target for your first grant proposal and what research will that be based on?"
Most newly minted PhDs cannot answer those questions satisfactorily. It sometimes can take 2-3 years doing a postdoc to be able to find a suitable research agenda that is sufficiently differentiated from your advisor's.
Moreover:
> We recognize that in using a simple model, several parameters that are not part of our analysis may pose limitations (Ghaffarzadegan et al., 2011). One consideration is that many engineering doctorates are not interested in academic positions and may not even compete for tenure-track positions in academia. Another consideration is that some engineering graduates are foreign citizens who take academic positions outside of the USA.3 Another factor is inter-field hiring. Engineering doctorates might obtain positions in other fields such as science or business, which would also diminish the gap.
Okay, so they discount people who don't want to work in academia, and also foreign students who won't work in America. I'm sorry but what? Foreign students who won't be working in America after they graduate are most of our students. Probably 70% of our grad students right now (and the situation can't be much different at MIT). It's pretty hard to take this paper seriously when they just handwave all that away and say "but in the steady state..."
And then the grand conclusion of the article is to throw up their hands and say (paraphrasing) "there's probably nothing we can do about this so we just have to be more forthright with students about their prospects." Okay then...
I'm not saying it's not hard to get an academic job, but at the same time the measure shouldn't be academic tenure track jobs. There are lots of non-TT positions across the country at top research universities, SLACs, and community colleges.
The effects are: slightly better working conditions, slightly less discrimination, slightly better healthcare. Just look at what say, the grad student union at University of Michigan is able to gain for their students.
Neither apocalyptic nor utopian predictions are anywhere near the mark.
Versus the alternative, “we’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas.”
There are good places and good people, but the system is dysfunctional and too many critically problematic behaviors and dynamics are incentivized.
Society at large isn't helpful either, as outside influences tend to be politicized badly on both ends of the spectrum in multiple ways, even when the other side is trying to improve things in good faith.
Everywhere I’ve seen this, the principal complaints are wages, housing, acknowledging they are workers, and working hours.
Grad students are used as slaves. This is trivial to avoid just by paying them what they actually need to live. This is a university, what they can’t figure this out? No, they just overplayed their hand at the bargaining table.
An argument against a union at MIT came from un-tenured graduate student Kevin Wang : https://thetech.com/2021/10/21/why-we-do-not-need-a-gsu
TLDR: he didn't think paying the 1.44% annual union dues (~$620/year) is going to be worth it. He based this on comparing MIT salary increase history to other universities with and without unions.
Also, KW was previously in Germany & UK so he's presumably familiar with the stronger worker unions in Europe.
The MIT union vote was 66%-for and 34%-against. The 34% have various reasons to not join a union but I think we can guess that many of them think the $620/year salary deductions will not be worth whatever benefits the union can negotiate.
I'm not saying KW is right but I think it's more constructive to consider the opinions of MIT grad students who actually vote (e.g. Kevin Wang) rather than your synthesized quote from tenured professors. The collective bargaining unit will negotiate with university administrators (not the tenured professors) who set salaries etc.
He gives Columbia as an example. The new Columbia contract is great! https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/01/07/columbia... $100 million in extra spending for students over the next 4 years.
> The 34% have various reasons to not join a union but I think we can guess that many of them think the $620/year salary deductions will not be worth whatever benefits the union can negotiate.
Well.. they are wrong.
If you look at unions like University of Michigan or University of Toronto the healthcare benefits they get compared to MIT are worth more than $620/year. The MIT grad student healthcare plan is very bad and expensive. And the working conditions as a TA are not good compared to other places. You have very few protections as a TA. For example, I know someone who was forced to teach an extra section for no additional pay, because another TA had to leave for medical reasons. That's totally unacceptable and would never fly at UMich or UofT.
If their members were really convinced of the value that tragedy of the commons wouldn't occur.
The fact that many workers would not pay optional dues does not prove that the workers don't see value in the union.
Obviously the purported value of a union is in the ability to collectively bargain on behalf of its members (and to provide tangible support for workers participating in strikes or who are pursuing legal action against an employer). Unions may do this or not, but the argument that gp made is not a good one.
You know, like not contributing your Union dues.
It’s called a Tragedy for a reason.
There is simply way too many questions on the academia stackexchange about how to confront a superior without making them feel confronted (or wrong). The power dynamic is ugly.
I'm sure the university will be happy to claim that they'll discount bad letters just because it will be politically helpful, but as long as the hiring committee sees them all, it won't matter. They'll choose the best package.
Not that it matters, because most of this happens by word of mouth. I've seen professors write glowing letters of recommendation to cover their butt. Then they privately bad mouth the person.
More likely they will be involved in labor disputes involving how much TA work the grad students have to do.
A "research precariat" is what keeps German universities going as well. This is an international issue; even the OECD seems to have studies on the subject. Would be interesting to see a cross-country comparison of who really has the "best" universities --- or university systems, as this kind of issue does not tend to be specific to one institution.
But honestly, professors are also increasingly far away from the levers of power to create more permanent positions. There's a lot of bureaucrats making decisions who are mostly accountable to themselves.
I've been soured recently by one big event that happened at a place where I sometimes work. One guy was accused of doing something unwoke in his time off the job. Normally, this guy was a big union booster and even a union rep in some negotiations. It turns out, though, that didn't matter because the other union reps wanted his promotion. He had zero relationship with the management because he was frequently aggitating for this union cause or that union cause. So when push came to shove, the management hated him and they were able to cite the lack of support of his so-called union buddies as proof that he was bad.
I think students think that the union will bring them some kind of lightweight version of tenure. It could help in a few negotiations or some extreme cases, but I think that all too often it will just be another layer of self-interested semi-managers who are just as corruptable as the regular managers.
I am personally kinda done with people, who don't understand basic technology. They should be retired. They should not have any real influence on what the current generation is doing.
Changing supervisors without 1) losing your funding and/or 2) having to start over on your dissertation is extremely difficult at many universities.
As a result, academic supervisors wield excessive power over their graduate students.
[1] Engineering students at least. Humanities students are paid just a bit less than the minimum wage they'll be earning after graduation.
The more an organization/community says one thing, the more likely the opposite is to be true. Think about Google and “Don’t be evil.” Or companies that tout “work/life balance.”
Right, unionization will just make this worse. Protect the insiders, those already with jobs.
I think the abuses of seniority are much less than in the past—both wrt extraneous labor (hey, help me paint my house) to sexual pressures.
Re unionization—-its complex and a function of teaching load as a TA versus, class work as a student, versus your own research with mentors.
Academia likes to cast itself as a true meritocracy. If you work hard and publish good papers you'll do well. In practice it's more of a gerontocracy where senior members can single handedly destroy a young investigators career. (It happened to me and I saw it happen to several people). There is little to no recourse against this.
Arguments against unionization from already tenured faculty usually sound like: "If you want to be the best in your field you have to work harder than everyone else. Forming a union won't change that fact and may even discourage students from working so hard. This might interfere with their career goals."
However, the power structures in academia are heavily skewed and toxic. Individually graduate students have little recourse when they are wronged. Life in academia is hard. You have to work long days, the chance of success is very low. At every stage the probability of getting that next job is very low.
A lot of the field agrees that something needs to change, but no one can agree exactly what needs to change or how to get there. The people with the power are the tenured professors who "won the lottery" and are out of touch with the problems they are causing. They aren't going to be the mechanism of change even though they hold all the power.