Notes from graduate student meeting
Regent’s meeting room, 7th Floor, Administration Building
4pm-5pm, Monday, September 21st, 2009
By Brian Marks, Instructor, School of Geography and Development
Present:
David Talenfeld, GPSC President
President Shelton
VP for External Affairs MacCarthy
Several ASUA staff and senators
Several GPSC senators (Lucy Blaney from Humanities among others)
Shain Bergan, reporter for the Daily Wildcat
(See story at: http://wildcat.arizona.edu/news/shelton-ua-won-t-cut-graduate-benefits-1.525569 )
Bud Foster, reporter for KOLD 13 TV news
(See story at: http://www.kold.com/global/story.asp?s=11172596 )
Myself
About thirty people in total.
The meeting convened just after 4pm. In its opening minutes President Talenfeld asked President Shelton if he could commit to no cuts to Graduate Assistant benefits, wages, or tuition remission, to which Shelton responded that there were no plans for any cuts to GA benefits, wages, or tuition remission. Shelton explained that the U of A protected $105 million from cuts in its financial aid budget, if this had not been protected the cuts to departments would have been smaller but they decided to protect financial aid. So GA health care, wages, etc. are not being cut.
GPSC Humanities Senator Lucy Blaney told Shelton about the workload increase for GTAs in the humanities, how there are now more students per TA than before due to dismissals of TA lines and increasing enrollment, she estimated each new student requires about 20 minutes of TA time/week (Blaney is, I understand it, speaking of the experiences of Spanish and Portuguese teaching assistants). She objected to Shelton’s earlier statement, as she phrased it, that he ‘ wasn’t worried’ about more working hours for GA’s. She also expressed concern about the future possibility that the university may change its health plan and that would mean a reduction in health care benefits by choosing a cheaper plan.
Shelton responded by saying that the average weekly work load is what’s important, if people are working more hours on average than their TAship calls for that’s a problem, but if people work a few hours over on one or another week, that’s not a worry.
GPSC President Talenfeld then announced that Shelton was prepared today to commit to a process of forming a board to draft a Statement of GTA rights and responsibilities, which he said was ‘unprecedented’ at this university. To this, Senator Blaney responded ‘Yes, at THIS university,’ and asked what would the terms of this statement be.
A woman seated at the back of the room (perhaps a GPSC official, I believe she was a graduate student from the College of Sciences in some capacity), spoke up and explained that graduate students were suffering from bad morale, large workloads, comments from the administration and discrimination/defamation of character from supervisors and administrators in their colleges and departments. She said that graduate students could be Shelton’s greatest allies but this bad morale / defamation of character prevented this. Shelton responded by saying that if anyone in his office was disrespectful he could do something about this and he understood the value of graduate students.
He continued by saying that it comes down to if Arizona will decide to support higher education. It’s important that people on this campus stand on factual information and not act based on rumors. He said he has tried to communicate to the campus but this apparently doesn’t always work, given the rumors.
Several people commented about the lack of information or communication by some department heads and deans about budgetary decisions in some units of the university. They felt this lack of communication meant graduate students were more afraid and anxious. Shelton said the administration gives budgetary information to deans and departments, it’s their decision to disseminate that information or not. He said you can mandate things but it’s another thing to get them done, plus many colleges and departments are still negotiating their budgets so there’s not yet anything to publish.
There was considerable discussion about the nature of this proposed Graduate Assistant rights and responsibilities document. Much of the questioning and comment came from Senator Blaney, President Talenfeld, and two other graduate students present. The discussion touched on what role the document would serve, would it deal with budgetary aspects (wages, benefits, health care, remission), about grievances and disputes of grad students with advisors and supervisors, and about greater graduate student role in shared governance.
Senator Blaney said that the issue spurring this meeting was budget and TA support – she said the problem stems from the priorities of the university, the instability and precarity of TAs and the need for protection of graduate student employees’ jobs and conditions.
Others commented that while their department head was well-qualified and didn’t cut jobs in their budget, it depends on departments and graduate student job cuts, disrespectful behavior, etc. occurs in some parts of the university.
Shelton responded that he didn’t want to define what the Graduate Assistants’ rights and responsibilities document would do, what he wanted was for a small group of graduate students and others to convene and quickly produce this document. He called for a meeting again in one month to discuss this further. Overall, Shelton said, we have to face that we have to do less. We have already lost 600 positions at UA and we have to do less because we don’t have the resources.
The student from Sciences (I think) spoke again about how it was necessary to separate graduate students more from undergraduates, our needs in areas like health care are different, many of us have families and children, we have a status between students and employees. Shelton took up this point and said that yes, that’s a question (student or employee status of grad students), you can think one way or another. From experience in California with the UC system and grad student unionization, he said, he’s worried that graduate student unionization changes the relations between grads and faculty to an employee status, not a collegial one. The venues for redress (of grievances of grads) become those of employees, not of students and colleagues.
A few people reiterated how there were differences among the deans and department heads, some are open, others are not regarding budgets – this causes people’s concerns, fear, lack of confidence. I asked Shelton if he could mandate budgetary transparency of the colleges and departments, while the units have decentralized responsibility to distribute their budgets there can be a centralized requirement to publish before the public what the departmental budgets are. Shelton said that again, it’s difficult because many budgets aren’t decided yet and the administration is open with its figures and it’s the responsibility of the departments to disseminate their own data. He wouldn’t want and we wouldn’t want, he said, for the administration to directly determine budgets.
Shelton ended by asking us how he can convey information to everyone on campus, tell him how to get accurate information out. The state is asking us to project a 15% cut for next year – that’s $50-77 million, which equals 2-4 colleges. Legislators respond to their constituents, so people should contact their representatives. And Shelton and Talenfeld ended by agreeing to meet again in one month and to convene their respective staffs to constitute a board to draft this statement of rights and responsibilities.
***My comments on the meeting***
Senator Blaney was by far the most articulate and consistent of those present in raising the wages, hours, and productivity concerns of graduate teaching and research assistants. She raised the question, but was not able to get a clear answer from Shelton, on the direction of the university’s Transformation. (She didn’t get any support for this line of questioning from others, including myself, in attendance through follow-up questions.) As I understand it, Transformation is moving money towards ‘hard’ science hires and funding in hopes of drawing more NIH, NSF, etc. money to UA, paid for with the differential cut and increasing class sizes and online courses especially in the general education sector, in humanities, and in social sciences. Apart from her one comment about this, no one else raised the transfer of undergraduate tuition out of general education, humanities, and social sciences towards sciences research and the ‘Taylorization’ (online, higher enrollment, ‘clickers,’ etc.) of some general education classes as sources of the structural crisis that some deans and department heads are mitigating by cutting TA lines, staff, etc. Saying that departmental budgetary decisions are made by the departments does not negate or absolve the role of central administration in structuring the overall budget in which those departments must operate. Nor does the role of the State Legislature in defunding public education make the form of restructuring the UA is implementing inevitable or unalterable. No one raised the question of distributing budgets according to tuition dollars earned or hours taught, one way to redirecting money back to those programs and TAs bearing a large burden of general education teaching.
Blaney’s point about what wage, hours, working conditions, benefits language would be in the rights and responsibilities document was not sufficiently answered. Nor is there any answer as to how binding this document will be or how it will address the concerns of some students in the sciences present at the meeting about respect and communication issues in their departments.
The recent cutting of domestic partner benefits by the State, or any response by the administration to it, also went unmentioned in the meeting.
Overall, the meeting provided no significant concessions on the part of the administration, especially about money. They only confirmed facts already in evidence (if not apparent to everyone on campus), that GA benefits and wages aren’t being cut by the administration. The response of the administration, this document on rights and responsibilities, isn’t a collective contract and while it’s not yet clear what it will entail, wasn’t presented as a means of addressing our concerns about wages, hours, workload, number of students, and job insecurity. Shelton got out very easy from this meeting, promising only to hold meetings towards a document on rights and responsibilities that’s left undefined as to its relation to the grievances over work and compensation that are animating graduate students and brought GPSC to write its letter to Shelton last week.
