Look for the Union Grader

By Romesh Ratnesar

When she entered graduate school at UCLA five years ago to pursue a Ph.D. in English, Connie Razza, 26, hardly expected to be a campus activist. But she also didn't expect a workload like this: for one undergraduate literature course this semester, Razza gives lectures, runs a discussion section, grades papers and exams, and holds office hours in a basement room where 40 other teaching assistants share 29 desks and one computer. For 30 hours a week of such labor, she earns about $1,400 a month--which doesn't even cover her rent, tuition, books and car payments. "It's not really part of my education," she says of her teaching tasks, which have prevented her from finishing her dissertation. "It's still work."

So Razza joined a drive to unionize UCLA's 1,700 nonprofessional instructors, most of them graduate students who double as teaching assistants. Last month they voted, 718 to 269, to get their union cards from the United Auto Workers. Similar unionization votes are scheduled at seven other U.C. campuses later this year. University administrators had threatened not to negotiate with the union but backed down after the vote. The UCLA vote was the latest in a string of labor victories on campus. Nationwide, graduate students have organized at close to 20 universities and colleges.

The movement is driven less by ideology than by economics. Part of graduate school's allure has always been the promise of a cushy professorial job and the likelihood of tenure within a few years. But today that career path looks grim. Of the 8,000 students receiving Ph.D.s in the humanities between 1996 and 2000, less than half will land full-time "tenure track" jobs. Increasingly, colleges farm out teaching to part-time instructors, who earn skimpy salaries and rarely get benefits. So, many graduate students figure, they need to haggle for all they can get now--and they think Big Labor (including the U.A.W. and the American Federation of Teachers) can deliver at the bargaining table.

The boldness of the grad students pits them against some of the professors they work for, who warn that collective bargaining will defile teacher-student relationships. Such high-minded claims are undercut by campus realities: many profs shirk face-to-face, small-group instruction and dump teaching responsibilities onto graduate students. Last month the Supreme Court upheld an Ohio law that prescribes a minimum number of hours that professors at state universities must devote to teaching. Says U.C. Berkeley grad-student activist Ricardo Ochoa: "We do about 60% of the contact with undergraduates. Our working conditions are the undergraduates' learning conditions." For activists and apolitical students alike, getting professors into the classroom would be a radical cause indeed.

--By Romesh Ratnesar. Reported by Laird Harrison/Los Angeles

With reporting by Laird Harrison/Los Angeles