Monday, December 7, 1998
Institution has lesson to learn from graduate students
SUPPORT: TAs employ faculty for guidance, plead economic support
as future professionals
By Chon A. Noriega
In 1968, 10,000 high school students in East Los Angeles staged
walkouts in protest of the dismal education they received. They
wanted something better for their future. More students were going
to Vietnam than to college. In response, their teachers and
principals called in the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD).
Student leaders were tried for conspiracy. The LAPD Intelligence
Division would later identify some students as "involved in the
violent disruption of the establishment" in testimony before the
U.S. Senate. Why? Because they had managed to go to college!
Harry Gamboa Jr., one of these students, became a conceptual
artist who exposed such abuse of power. In his recent book, ‘Urban
Exile’, he sums up this period with the following parable: "A small
child is slapped in the face by a stranger on a public street
corner; the parents approve and pay taxes. Where is the comedy in
desperation?" Where indeed. One marvels at how this basic dynamic
has not changed in the past 30 years.
In my department, I have seen how the strike has taken the
greatest toll on the graduate students, bringing them into conflict
with each other, with their own students and with their teachers.
These conflicts are structural and existed long before the strike,
but they are lived as a personal crisis. What bears special notice
is that these people are not small children, nor even adolescents.
They are adults seeking our help in becoming the next generation of
professionals in our rapidly changing society. But we persist in
the notion that the faculty-graduate student relationship can
somehow be based solely on a medieval guild system of mentorship.
According to this view, to impose an employer-employee relationship
would result in a disservice.
One word should dispel this notion: tuition. By the very law of
the marketplace, these graduate students are already our employers.
When we offset their tuition and provide a small stipend in
exchange for teaching duties, we only complicate a pre-existing
economic relationship.
We do not impose one.
What the ideal of mentorship obscures is the very thing that the
governor, legislature and university system refuse to put on the
table. Namely, that because the state has cutback its support of
higher education (in order to build more prisons), there is an
increasing need for cheap, skilled labor. Nationwide teaching
assistants and adjuncts provide upwards of 50 percent of
face-to-face teaching; in 1970 that figure was 22 percent.
Our graduate students teach well beyond the needs of being
mentored; and they line up in order to teach even more, not because
they need more mentorship, but because they need to pay the rent.
What’s more, they are terrified that we are preparing them for an
economy without sufficient job opportunities. More than 1 million
doctoral graduates are currently unemployed.
For those graduate students hoping to become professors, the
next step is often a prolonged period of working as teaching
assistants and then as adjunct or part-time instructors. They end
up teaching more and being paid less than a faculty member while
also being expected to produce tenure-level amounts of scholarship
just to get a regular faculty position.
Our graduate students want something better for their future.
They have hired us to guide them along the way so that sometime
soon they can join us as colleagues. We help them make that
transition when we train them to teach; they also join us in a
common cause when they share the load of teaching our undergraduate
students. Now that they ask for some level of equity and security,
we would do best to acknowledge the truth of the matter. The
problem lies not in their demands but in the economy. If we share
their dream of the future, we can start by providing a portion of
it in the present. Recognize the union.
Comments, feedback, problems?
© 1998 ASUCLA Communications Board[Home]