Monday, September 28, 1998
Association to embrace role of active advocacy
GSA: Graduate student influence, recognition as a union hot
issues to face
This summer, the cabinet of the Graduate Students Association
sat down to map out its advocacy agenda for the year. Here are the
issues we plan to address:
* Affirmative Action: While most discussion about the abolition
of affirmative action has been focused on this year’s entering
freshman class, little has been said publicly about the impact of
SP-1, SP-2 and Proposition 209 on graduate student admissions and
funding. This summer, the GSA initiated a study of the aftermath;
results will be available by November.
* Sexual Harassment: Also this fall, a GSA-sponsored task force
will complete its extensive study of the incidence of sexual
harassment among graduate and professional students at UCLA.
* Non-Resident Tuition Fees are at the heart of a United States
Government Accounting Office investigation of UCLA’s use of federal
research monies. The difficult tuition burden placed on
international students – who comprise 15 to 20 percent of the total
graduate and professional student population at UCLA – is a major
issue of concern.
* Departmental Reviews: This fall, the Academic Senate and the
GSA will pilot a program which enables graduate students to
participate more directly in the site reviews of their academic
departments and programs.
* Recycling: The GSA environmental coalition will advocate
improvements in the campus recycling program and in our awareness
of it.
* Campus Social Facilities: Graduate students at many
universities – and the UCLA faculty – don’t have to go off-campus
for a cold beer. We’d like to see that happen for UCLA’s graduate
and professional students.
* Revitalizing GSA: Every year, thousands of graduate students
benefit from GSA sponsored projects and publications; this year, we
want more graduate students to take an active role in shaping the
association’s future.
This agenda is the official outlook on 1998-1999 from the
vantage point of the GSA offices at 301 Kerckhoff Hall. This agenda
was compiled in August, during weeks of unusual humidity and
without the benefit of air conditioning, by cabinet members who
wanted to outline an advocacy role and a set of reasonable goals
for the association.
My job this summer, as GSA president, has been to figure out
what a "reasonable advocacy" role might look like. It has not
always been clear to me what the GSA can or should do. We are
called upon to "represent" graduate student interests in a range of
settings, some where students are fully enfranchised and others
where our input is politely tolerated.
One day, an administrator told me that he thought graduate
students just "like to gripe;" on a happier occasion, the chair of
the Academic Senate told me that students were UCLA’s "jewels."
Accordingly, I have felt varying degrees of possibility and
frustration.
Here’s what I learned over my summer "vacation": graduate and
professional students occupy a strange paradox. We are adults with
households and families of our own, and yet we check a degree of
our agency at the school house door. A good portion of our
paychecks (or fellowships or, more likely, loans) will go to
administrators who manage our lives at UCLA for us.
It is commonly agreed, though the terms of the agreement keep
changing and the discussions rarely include us, that this is the
way things work. Mostly, things do work – we have a good faculty, a
good staff and good colleagues around us; there is, we hope, good
will in Murphy Hall.
Things that don’t work so well, we don’t dwell on because –
between our schoolwork and the work we do to pay for school – there
just isn’t any time.
But sometimes the paradox is strained. Economies of scale and
human politics combine to compromise UCLA’s educational mission
and, more perceptibly, to put a squeeze on our place in it. For
example, a few years ago, affirmative action was abolished in the
UC system, by the decree of a near-invisible Regency and without so
much as a polling of students, faculty or chancellors.
This year, Regent Ward Connerly rattled his sabers about ethnic
studies; Connerly, a land use consultant with a part-time gig in
politics, seems to think he knows how to shape the course of
academic study better than the UC faculty.
The paradox felt most keenly by thousands of UCLA graduate
students is this: we teach and tutor and grade papers, but
according to the administrators at the Graduate Division, we don’t
work here. They say we are not employees but "apprentices" – never
mind that income taxes are deducted from our "stipend" checks;
never mind that we hold these "apprenticeships" for three years or
more, with mediocre chances of securing full academic employment
thereafter.
As apprentices, their logic goes, we do not have the right to
negotiate an employment contract to determine collectively the
conditions under which we work. Their logic is flawed.
Last spring, thousands of academic student employees across the
UC system voted to walk off their jobs sometime this fall if they
were not recognized as employees with collective bargaining
rights.
Despite heavy wrangling by UC lawyers, the state’s labor board
affirmed that tutors, readers and teaching associates at UCSD do
have these rights and certified their union. At UCLA, let’s hope it
won’t take a court order or a major strike before the
administration opens talks with SAGE/UAW.
It’s high time to trade in the old paradox of apprenticeship for
good faith negotiations.
A closing anecdote: One day this summer, I was meeting with a
student from the class I taught (the class for which I ordered the
books, wrote the syllabus, graded the papers, and received a
paycheck). This student is Ethiopian, not a native English speaker.
Occasionally, he asked me for some linguistic clarification and on
this day the word was "paradox."
"Paradox, what does this mean?" he asked, and I gave him my best
ad hoc definition.
"Yeah?" he said, " ‘paradox’ sounds like a ‘lie’ to me."
Brooks is the Graduate Student Association president.
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