From CNN: California university fired 54 grad students who were striking for higher pay
(CNN) — Fifty-four teaching assistants at the University of California, Santa Cruz were fired after they refused to turn in final fall grades as part of an ongoing strike for higher wages.
“It is extremely disappointing to us that we have to take such a drastic step, but we ultimately cannot retain graduate students as teaching assistants who will not fulfill their responsibilities,” Lori G. Kletzer, the school’s interim campus provost and executive vice chancellor, wrote in a letter to students and staff on Friday.
About 200 graduate students at the northern California campus starting withholding grades in December, demanding an increase in wages of $1,412 that would help them cover rent near the school. Earlier this month, the students started holding protests on campus and many stopped teaching, holding office hours and conducting research.
The strike, which is not authorized by the union that represents the graduate student employees, is in violation of the current bargaining agreement, the university said.
(Featured image is “Picket Fence by Graveyard” by Yercombe. Used under creative commons license.)
Good for the students. Bargaining agreements or not, wages need to reflect both the work (which is heavy and arduous for graduate teaching assistants) and the cost of living. Academic environments are just as unequal as any other workplace and direct action is always preferable to sitting on the sidelines and whining. The university could also probably pay these folks by redirecting some of the overhead they take off research grants -which in many cases for on campus research is as much as 66%.Report
Ehh, no one forced those kids to accept a stipend in exchange for TA duties. Back when I was in grad school, being a TA wasn’t a big time commitment, usually limited to grading exams and quizzes, sometimes writing the tests themselves, and occasionally leading the sudy-group portion of the class. On the flip side it helped train the uninitiated into university-level teaching requirements. The problem I found weird and a bit dicey occurred with students in the PhD programs, who, after receiving their masters, led their own classes, effectively performing the duties of Professors, again in exchange for the benies and a stipend.
All in all, I don’t have a lot of sympathy for the greivers except in the context of Universities relying on graduate student instructors to cut overall costs by not hiring more professors to fill those positions, but eevn then I’m on the fence. These PhD candidates need to learn how to teach!Report
Santa Cruz like almost every other part of California is going through a huge housing shortage crisis that shows no signs of abating because everyone refuses to do the right thing and build, build, build. Santa Cruz used to be a sleepy college, surf, hippie, and sometimes tourist town (their famous Boardwalk). Now it is a commuter suburb for San Jose and Silicon Valley.
Housing is the ultimate Bootlegger and Baptist problemReport
It seems like universities have what most companies would love: highly trained, largely self-funded, poorly paid, just in time labor. If this collides with the housing market, maybe they should build grad student housing.Report