Campus is in turmoil. With the possibility of a strike by graduate student workers on the horizon*, now activities on campus will be partly suspended in response to health concerns about the possible spread of COVID-19. Starting tomorrow, faculty are called upon to run their classes through remote learning. How will the shift to online education affect the COLA movement going forward? How will the health-driven move to distance learning affect the academic mission generally?
Graduate students are pivotal to that academic mission–not just as teachers, conducting most face-to-face instruction, and thus determining the quality of undergraduate education, but also as research assistants, seminar participants, and colleagues. Faculty benefit from the talents and dedication of our graduate students as much as or more than undergraduates do.
It’s because graduate students play so many roles in the academic community that they have a power largely denied to the expanding numbers of lecturers at Berkeley, who are themselves in negotiation with the university about a new contract. Lecturers teach some 40% of student credit hours at Berkeley, and the percentage keeps on creeping up. Nationwide, the trend is toward a diminishing elite of tenure-track research faculty and a massive army of lecturers. So far the GSIs are in the middle, often paid more than lecturers, but facing the prospect of joining the ranks of underpaid lecturers after receiving a Berkeley Ph.D. In fact, it is this unsustainable model of a public university run on the cheap that is partly propelling the COLA movement to begin with.
This leads us to a final cautionary note. The mirage of mass education provided with minimal state investment has also made online education a constant lure in recent years. Proselytes of distance-learning “platforms” sell education as reproducible “content,” a commodity for packaging and distribution. As we exercise precaution in response to the COVID-19 virus, we need to make sure that the current crisis doesn’t remake teaching in the image of a “gig” economy. There is no replacement for state funding for the UC if we are to continue serving our public mission. Serving (saving?) that public mission requires that we make common cause with the unions in their efforts to resist precarity.
*The latest news from the General Assembly Meeting today (Monday) is that 15 departments are ready to strike, starting March 16th.
Michael Burawoy and Celeste Langan for the Berkeley Faculty Association