I have a very ambivalent relationship with my department at the moment. The GM slipped a change into our contract a few months ago (and the union rep and I only found out when the professor we're both working for this quarter mentioned it in a meeting two days ago) increasing the number of students we have to grade from 70 to 85. That in itself is annoying, but not enough to generate real anger. However, sneaking it in, and then justifying it by saying the following, is:
1) It was originally 100! (Classic post-facto negotiating non-negotiation)
2) We should feel lucky to even have funding! (Fuck you)
The real reason they did this was to maintain their enrollments so they could maintain their budget level, which they cannot do normally this year because they failed to admit enough incoming graduate students (not to mention particular kick-ass applicants, you know who you are). Yes, schadenfreude and all, but I wish they would just acknowledge that they are taking their bad decisions out on us rather than these lame justifications.
On the other hand, I found out what the salary is for the summer class I'm teaching in July, and I was shocked. But this time in the good way. It's more than three times what they pay us normally, which makes sense, given that you're running your own class. But I was totally expecting it to be the same as our current salary, and, if anything, I just had my fingers crossed that there would be a few hundred extra tacked on, or that it wouldn't be less than the standard salary. So while I'm thrilled I won't be working at the Nascar store at the mall this summer, I'm amazed at how a few years here has trained me to devalue the work we all do to the point where I'm grateful for any crumbs they throw our way. It's like the inverse of what law school/law firms train you to do, which is to overvalue your time to the degree that it seems, if not reasonable, at least expected that the firm will bill clients for your time at hundreds of dollars an hour and then pay you a portion of that. This is especially absurd when 80% of your time as a summer associate is spent at lunch. It's not that the university doesn't also charge the students a pile of money to take these classes, it's just that they don't actually do the "paying us a portion of it" part. Did I just say that a private company was better at caring for their employees (at least financially) than a public educational institution? Yuck.
I feel the urge for a strike. But I think I would have to be in a different career for that to happen, because students are just not important/productive enough to have much impact, UNAM aside. I have my grandpa's genetic need to lead wildcat strikes and get blackballed for being communist (though I thankfully don't have a predisposition to Stalinism). Instead, I think I'll just try to stay as far away as possible from the department this quarter while I read for comps and remind myself that I'm lucky to even have funding.
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3 comments:
Good Strategy - and I offer a gratuitous "fuck you!" to your department for the grading scam and the many ways they screw over graduate students to cover up their inadequacies and screw-ups.
And by "your department" I assume that a certain nameless director shall take much of the blame. What a knob.
As it turns out, the department is lucky to have you. And the only way it could do that was to entice you with a (paltry) funding package. The GM once tried to cow us/me by suggesting that the department not offer any more funding (I think this was in one of my one-on-one conversations). But this bluff is easy to call. They won't get any students if they pull funding and he knows it. So, you do have a comeback if you want to use it.
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