Town Hall on Strike Settlement: Decentralization and Training Needed

There was an online "town hall" yesterday via Zoom for Academic Senate members dealing with the aftermath of the student-worker strike hosted by EVP Darnell Hunt. The meeting ran from 3:30 - 5 pm so it would be difficult to summarize all the points made. Over 130 people were listed as participants. (There didn't appear to be an official recording made.) 

I would group the discussion - which was partially statements and partially Q&A from the audience - into four categories.

1) Immediate budget. Assistance will be available through a $5 million "bridge" fund for one year. It isn't automatic; it has to be applied for. It will not pay for all costs. And it will apparently vary between money for TAs vs. RAs. In any event, there will be no bridge funding once we get to 2024-25.

2) Political. The governor is not sympathetic to requests for more money for UC to cover the costs of the settlement. His attitude is that he will propose in his May Revise giving UC what he proposed in January and given the tightening of the state budget situation, UC should be grateful for that from the governor's perspective since other programs are being cut. (This coming Friday is the reported day on which the May Revise will be unveiled.) The legislature is unlikely to be more favorable to UC than the governor. There have been conversations with congressional folks regarding federal research grants and an attempt to point to developments with regard to student-workers throughout higher ed, not just at UC. But don't count on anything from Congress anytime soon.

3) Larger issues of graduate education. There was some general talk about how the "model" for graduate education needed to change. In the meantime, however, it was said that departments needed to be "conservative" in their graduate admissions.

4) Complaints about the collective bargaining process. One of the key features of the negotiations was that they were conducted by UCOP. However, conditions vary considerably on the various campuses concerning the mix of departments, the practices prevailing in the use of TAs and RAs, etc. Even within campuses, there are variations across departments. One topic that came up, for example, was a practice of "top ups" in which grad students are given something above their regular pay by some departments. It was said that this practice varied across campuses. Participants complained that they did not know how the contract applied to their situations with regard to top ups. There are other practices that are not explicitly dealt with in the new contracts. As a result, there have been tensions between RAs and faculty over what is required. Another example was the division between work-as-employment and work-as-learning. The division between the two can be fuzzy, but the latter is unpaid. The boundary between the two is a potential source of friction. Finally, there were complaints that the union was telling its members things that were not correct.

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Here are some views from yours truly:

The highly centralized model of bargaining with UCOP handling the negotiations and the campuses (and departments and faculty) passively on the sidelines needs to be modified. It is possible to have bargaining for an overall master contract (systemwide) but with local agreements also part of the framework. Such arrangements exists in other industries. In addition, given the diversity of local arrangements, it will never be possible to have a contract that covers every possible variation. Usually, a grievance and arbitration mechanism handles situations in which there is disagreement over what the contract requires in a particular situation. There are various options for expedited grievance and arbitration mechanisms that need to be put in place.

While there may be general agreement that the "model" of graduate education needs to change, it was unclear to me whether - if participants had been pushed - there was a consensus as to what the new model would be. For example, there was talk of separating graduate student financial support from employment of grad students as TAs and RAs. But even if funding magically arrived from the outside powers-that-be (or philanthropy), and grad students were supported apart from employment, who would do the work now done by RAs and TAs? With the governor and legislature pushing for more undergraduate enrollment at UC, there will be a need for more TAs, not fewer. If grad students don't take those roles, other kinds of instructors would need to be hired. The cost of hiring professionals (post-docs?) rather than students might be more than hiring conventional TAs.

Finally, because graduate students are also apprentices, faculty play a dual role as both mentor-instructor and employer-supervisor. There will need to be some training of faculty for the latter role in the context of contractual obligations. There were various calls for more "transparency" by participants which yours truly translated as a need to know what to do.