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Is it possible to go to graduate school and live in financial comfort? Join the discussion in Table Talk's Education area

R E C E N T L Y

Debunking the myths of the Puritans
By Maria Russo
A revisionist argues that historians have turned the authoritarian, conformist Puritans into reflections of their own complex, Harvard-educated selves
(11/25/98)

It's all about parties -- and the bottom line
By Jason Zinoman
Every year the Radcliffe Publishing Course inducts another group of recent graduates into the glamour and drudgery of publishing
(11/23/98)

The breakdown of consciousness
By Paige Arthur
Confronted by the discoveries of artificial intelligence, some philosophers are questioning the very minds that keep their profession afloat
(11/20/98)

Historiographic revisionism
By Christopher Shea
DNA evidence shows that Jefferson fathered at least one of Sally Hemings' children, and his academic defenders are scurrying to cover their tracks
(11/18/98)

What do Jefferson and Clinton have in common (besides randiness)?
By Christopher Hitchens
Answer: They're both protected by a group of credulous historians
(11/18/98)

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Will the upcoming strike by University of California graduate teaching assistants raise them from their serflike status -- or spell their eventual doom?

BY SEAN McMEEKIN | This week, graduate students employed as teaching assistants in the massive University of California system plan to kick off the holiday season by going on strike. California's graduate TAs have clashed with university administrators frequently in the past decade over such matters as health insurance benefits and tuition fee remissions, but this will be the first time they have walked out simultaneously on all eight U.C. campuses. Never before have the graduate student teachers of U.C. been so well organized, or so unanimously focused on one goal: collective bargaining rights. Union recognition of TAs is the bête noire of the U.C. Regents, the university's conservative governing board, and of the individual chancellors who carry out their policies. So far, the Regents have stubbornly resisted the drive for TA recognition in the courts, and university administrators have survived brief, largely uncoordinated strikes for union recognition staged at individual U.C. campuses each of the last three years.

But the December action promises to be different. Rather than try, somewhat quixotically, to shut down enormous public research universities, TA strikers will deploy a "porous" picket line and even encourage their undergraduate students to continue attending classes. Having learned from the notorious public relations failure of a semester-end strike at Yale three years ago -- when TAs graded assignments but refused to release their grades, thus incurring the wrath of undergraduate students and their parents -- California's striking TAs will simply withdraw their labor for the month of December, in effect daring their universities to hire scabs to grade finals. The December walkout, which is organized and underwritten by the United Auto Workers (which has branched out deeply into the clerical and educational fields), may turn out to be, in the words of Christian Sweeney, a leading TA organizer at UC-Berkeley, "the largest graduate student labor action ever."

Although it has carried a lower media profile than the curriculum wars and the ongoing struggle over affirmative action, the ever-tightening academic labor crunch is unquestionably the central issue facing higher education in America. The underemployed Ph.D. has become a cliché in a job market that has seen the number of annual tenure-track job openings decline for most of this decade, even as undergraduate enrollments boom and class sizes inexorably rise. As universities have struggled to scale back budget outlays in response to decreasing public investment in higher education, they have increasingly filled classrooms with cheap, temporary labor. Large state schools such as the University of California have primarily done this by using a surplus pool of graduate students, whose numbers have exploded in the 1990s despite diminishing prospects in the academic job market. Smaller universities and community colleges, lacking extensive graduate programs, have largely relied on non-tenure-track "adjunct" professors, who now make up well over 40 percent of the academic labor force nationally, and are expected to outnumber full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty by 2001.

The lot of the adjuncts is not a happy one. Spin magazine recently published an exposé by ex-doctoral student Eric Weisband on "Sucker Ph.D.s," who were gulled by a now infamous 1989 Mellon Foundation report into believing "that an expected wave of faculty retirements beginning in the mid-'90s would threaten the health of higher education unless more college students could be persuaded to apply for doctoral degrees." Professors have, as expected, retired in great numbers in the 1990s, but their tenured positions have been retired along with them. Because they constitute an amorphous, transient and migratory work force, adjuncts have no unions and are consequently even more poorly compensated, on an hourly basis, than most of the unionized clerical and custodial employees of the schools where they work. Even graduate TAs, such as the U.C. strikers, make a better wage than adjuncts -- although adjuncts have Ph.D.s and graduate students do not. Alarmed that once-full-time faculty positions have been downsized into cheaper, part-time teaching junkets, the Higher Education Department of the American Federation of Teachers has issued a special report on "The Vanishing Professor."

A labor conference held at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in April 1998 has raised limited hopes that adjuncts in the nation's largest urban college system might win recognition through CUNY's faculty union, the Professional Staff Congress. But adjuncts are still outnumbered 9-1 by full-timers on the Staff Congress -- although they make up nearly 60 percent of the CUNY faculty. The prospect of collective bargaining rights for adjunct professors remains, for most, a laughable pipe dream.

N E X T_ P A G E .|. "The University Works Because We Do"