Notes for GAU Response to CLAS "Debt"

 

Notes for GAU Response to CLAS "Debt" Section 1: The GAU Resolution Against the Plan Section 2: Why GAU is against the Five Year Plan/ What this Plan means for Graduate Assistants @UF Section 3: "Corporate U": Higher Education as a Private Privelege or a Public Right?

 

Section 1: The GAU Resolution Against the Plan

• 1. The “crisis” is manufactured: We feel that this supposed CLAS debt has been seen by Tigert as an *opportunity* to intimidate and discipline certain departments, particularly those in the humanities (and many of those departments where union participation is highest).

 

• 2. It was a hurried document, and in our discussions with the board of trustees, it was needlessly hurried. (BOT did not expect a resolution by September 1.)

 

• 3. It violated basic principles of democracy in the workplace—none of the workers who make up the key teaching and research components of the university in general, and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences in specific, had been notified or even involved in constructing a solution to the “crisis.”

 

• 4. As far as we can tell, it has been the workers of the University of Florida who have raised the institution to such a respectable position nationally (i.e according to all of the external reviews). Yet, despite our successes as workers who have consistently achieved more with diminishing resources, those workers will, once again, bear the brunt of what is essentially a screw up in management.

 

• 5. The way the “crisis” had been handled from the beginning was irresponsible. Before any of the unions on campus had been contacted about any possible change in the conditions of employment (as per Florida Labor Law), “someone” leaked to the press the potential for layoffs and program cuts. This helped create a windstorm in arts and sciences, and acts as the “common sense” foundation for any sort of administrative change that will serve to preempt rational discussion for a resolution.

 

 

 

Section 2: Why GAU is against the Five Year Plan/ What this Plan means for Graduate Assistants @UF

• The plan called for a decrease in the number of graduate assistants, so people’s jobs were at risk. As the union that represents graduate workers we have legal obligation to be involved in this.

 

• Even in departments that would see an increase in the number GA positions resources will be severely cut back. (Example: Botany has lost 2 departmental administrators at a time when we are still using People Soft.) Those GAs will have to do more with less resources.

 

• The Plan called for “New CLAS guidelines” for graduate assistants. The “rule of thumb” is that each TA be responsible for about 60 students (3 labs of 20 students each) for a third time appointment (13 hours/week). In many cases this violates the GAU contract: it is an increase in work load without an increase in pay.

 

• Plan gets more out of us, yet the debt is used to deny us sufficient cost of living raises. In other words, our labor creates more value, and we are not compensated accordingly.

 

• Wage Inversion: At the same time that the administration claimed insufficient funds to give us the GAU-requested 8% raise (that would have compensated for the increased cost of living in Gainesville), some incoming students were being offered 33% larger stipends than returning students in the same department.

 

Correlative to the wage inversion issue: Because departments were not given more money from the administration to raise the pay of graduate workers (TAs and RAs), they were forced to come up with new ways to meet standards for pay for graduate assistants at UF’s peer institutions. The ways that many departments did this was to shrink the number of TAs and RAs in an incoming class. Thus, there are fewer TAs and RAs in these departments this year than last year. But the overall workload hasn’t decreased. So, once again, you have a smaller number of GAs doing the bulk of the work. In addition, if departments want to continue with that increase stipend level without $$$$ coming from Tigert, they will have to continue to shrink their departments.

 

• The problem of “productivity” and graduate employees:

One of the Provost’s requirements for the plan was that it be transparent, but the rubric designed for evaluating departments can be “gamed.” The Provost considers lowering academic standards an acceptable strategy for “gaming” it. Rather than academic excellence this idea of productivity based on Ph.D.s produced and student credit hours generated (this is based on corrupt data) changes the fundamental purpose of a university; we’re no longer about academic inquiry which is not circumscribed by time as much as we are a degree production factory, a Starbucks for undergrads.

 

Section 3: "Corporate U": Higher Education as a Private Privelege or a Public Right?

1. The status of workers in a corporatizing university—apprentices or workers?

• UF’s position towards its grad assistants—(“You are apprentices, not workers”) is fundamentally contradictory and changes to suit whatever argument it tries to make to fulfill its agenda. For example, UF seems right now to be highlighting the position of GAs as apprentices over GAs as workers. By doing this, it makes it easier for the admin to cut GA positions and GA programs with little input from those GAs (“we’re doing what is best for you, apprentice.”). It is also easier to deny a GA rights this way—you don’t have a right to a living wage, you don’t have a right to have a say on your healthcare, you *must* pay student fees because you are not workers, you are students. (That’s a quote from the bargaining table.) If you can’t make ends meet on $8K per year, well because you are a student, you need to take out another loan.

 

• Average pay based on division within CLAS (University average around 11-12K):

CLAS division	Average Stipend, 2006-07 AY	Special Notes
Math & Statisitcs	$14,318.98
Lab Sciences	$13,414	Stipends really high in Chemistry and Zoology, significantly lower in Botany and Biological Sciences
Humanities	$11,248	High degree of $$ variation in English as many English GAs approach full-time workload status
Social Sciences	$10,377	Well below the University Average

 

• And so we have an increase in the number of loans taken out by GAs, with the assumption that eventually, as apprentices, we’ll get the cushy, tenure-track job at a university/college of my choice. Then I can pay back my loans (just like a med, vet, or law school/ professional school student.)

 

• Unfortunately for PhDs, it is even less likely than it has been in the past to receive a tenure-track job out of the PhD program. Increasingly, recent PhDs are having to take post-doc positions or adjunct, non-tenure track positions because all universities nation-wide are dealing with funding crises and resorting to cheap, casual labor (i.e. no job security, or the equivalent of an academic “day laborer” like graduate assistants, post-docs, and non-tenure track adjunct) to do the work of the university.

 

• Why should undergrads care about this labor issue? Well, for one, GAs consistently score higher than professors in student evaluations. Furthermore, if those best instructors are your TAs, wouldn’t you want to give them job security so that they can be an asset to the institution? Wouldn’t you want them to not have to devote half their day at a second job in order that they can receive health care? Or even a second job to meet their financial obligations?

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1. The continued dis-investment in state-sponsored higher education.

• In order to combat the problem of dwindling revenues, UF (and Universities nation-wide) needs to find economic resources and act more like a business--- generate its own profits—a self sustaining institution. Legislatures refuse to invest in higher education for whatever reason—no capital return on investment, no taxes, anti-big government, whatever. Increasingly, Universities are having to turn to different methods of raising revenue.

 

• Method A—Private, corporate investment. We see this at UF with its deals with Pepsi, Mankato, Phillips Petroleum, Follett Bookstores, Pearson/AB Longman Books, etc. Companies can now invest in the research and teaching done at the university, but at what expense? As academic workers, we have the fundamental obligation to academic freedom (which is also protected in the GAU and UFF collective bargaining agreements)—to assure that the pursuit of knowledge is unfettered by economic, private interests in order to fulfill our responsibilities to the public and the people upon whose backs this institution has been built (i.e the poor, working class).

 

• Method B—Raising tuition. Higher education is increasingly viewed no longer a public asset to be enjoyed by all regardless of income, class status, etc., but a private business transaction between students remade into consumers and their educators remade into service workers. What was originally intended as something meant to benefit and develop citizenship and participation in democratic principles (i.e critical thought) now becomes a measure of customer approval ratings and customer satisfaction.

 

Even worse, we’re in danger of using education to further establish class divisions rather than as a means to social equality—the working poor will be left out of the institutions that have been built on their backs. Essentially, when public education becomes inaccessible economically from a larger portion of the public it supposedly serves, we lose sight of the idea of higher education as a human right in favor of higher education as a (measure of) privilege.

 

 

Or the problem of undergraduate debt (credit cards, college loans, etc): It is expected that undergrads/students will go into debt, and debt is a way to keep people under the thumbs of large business interests for the foreseeable future.

 

• Method C—Fast-food education

This method cuts back even more numbers of tenure track instructors in order to “serve” more students (imagine a McDonalds’ sign—“Over 100 Million Served”)

The example of “distance learning” /mechanical teaching/ TV courses. In order to reach a larger population of students, administrators strapped for cash often turn to the “mass market” principle (with students viewed en mass as “consumers”), assuming higher education instruction can be a mechanical, repeatable, automatic action. In order to meet high educational demands without increasing overhead, administrators often turn to mass communication technologies (TV courses to teach freshman comp, ala the Writing Program circa 2003-04). Students in this situation get little personal feedback from the instructor, and are deprived of a vital element of the learning experience.