Two blog posts in one day after two months off? Well, apparently I have a lot to say today (and I don’t want to prep my class on trig identities for tomorrow).

On MARTA on the way home tonight, I was reading an article from Inside Higher Ed about the Graduate Employees Organization at the University of Illinois going on strike. Why have they gone on strike? My short version of it is simply that unions are bad for graduate students. They create an unnecessarily adversarial and hostile relationship between GTAs/GRAs and the administration. This strained relationship leads to breakdowns in communication, and those breakdowns lead to pure craziness.

The craziness here is just plain dumb. The GEO and the administration are bargaining a contract. It’s not surprising that tuition waiver policy would come up in such negotiations. The GEO proposed language “requiring the university to bargain in the event of ‘any changes in the tuition waivers of any bargaining unit member or members.’” That seems reasonable, until you realize that it would mean the administration couldn’t make any change to the tuition waiver of any GTA or GRA, even one who was totally ignoring his/her responsibilities and needed to be terminated. According to the IHE article “[t]he university rejected that language, opting instead to agree to bargain any changes in ‘tuition waiver policy’ made by the Board of Trustees.” That also seems reasonable, until the GEO points out that the board’s policy only covers the in-state portion of tuition.

A reasonable group (such as the Georgia Tech Graduate SGA) representing the graduate students would say “Hey, this is all about semantics, let’s get it worked out.” However, the GEO being a union, a conspiracy theory is in order. They immediately assumed the administration is up to something nefarious because of their proposed choice of language. According to the union, the administration, in proposing language that would, if strictly interpreted, apply only to the in-state portion of tuition, must be scheming to take away the tuition waivers of out-of-state students! Let’s go on strike!

A rational representative of graduate students would realize that the University of Illinois would be incapable of recruiting nonresident graduate students (the majority of graduate students most places) if they didn’t offer them tuition waivers. A research university of the size of Illinois cannot operate without graduate students. The administration, no matter how dire the budget situation, is not going to do something so stupid as cutting tuition waivers for nonresident students. However, when graduate students unionize, rationality goes out the window, and nobody stops to ask what the issue is. They just assume the other side has hostile motives and prepare for war. Usually these battles are stopped before an actual strike, but not in this case.

I should close by pointing out that while I’ve not collectively bargained a contract, I have had to intervene on behalf of graduate students whose employment classifications and tuition waivers were impacted at one point. I sat down with the appropriate administrators, learned why it was being done, and got the data on how many students were being impacted. We then figured out a way to minimize the adverse impacts on the handful of masters students being directly and immediately impacted. (The policy change was important go prevent abuse of graduate students and tuition waivers, and so was implemented with a few individuals grandfathered in.) A successful solution was found in a collegial way. If we’d had a union, I can only imagine the strike threats that would have run around over that issue, since it was a bigger deal than what the issue at Illinois.