By an edhat reader
There’s a protest on UCSB’s campus, it appears to be a UC-wide protest over wages. Does anyone know more?
Protest at UC Santa Barbara
Anonymous
January 22, 2020, 5:20 am
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Wages? If they dont get back to class and a decent education they wont be getting any wages.
Found this in the UCSB Daily Nexus….A number of UC Santa Barbara graduate student teaching assistants plan to call in sick and hold a demonstration at Storke Tower on Wednesday from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. in support of the ongoing strike for living wages at UC Santa Cruz….LINK _http://dailynexus.com/2020-01-21/graduate-students-to-call-in-sick-on-wednesday-in-support-of-ucsc-strike-for-cost-of-living-adjustment/
The professors they are working for should just right in bigger numbers to support a living wage for their researchers in the grants they are chasing.
Ok boomer
“Hell no! We won’t go! Hell no! We won’t go!”
Ooooops! Wrong decade. I am having a senior moment.
I guess you meant write? They are not primarily protesting the wages paid by professors to help them do research. The low wages are associated mostly with being graders and teaching assistants in large undergrad classes. In a lot of those classes you never interact with the professor, your TA is your primary educator.
Everyone is complaining about how much debt that students are facing when/if they graduate. But no one talks about the fact that colleges are doing nothing to control costs and that employees generally make much more for doing the same thing than employees of private enterprise. Now I don’t know anything about the specifics of this particular wage dispute but in general UCSB (and other colleges) need to reign in costs and spending. Only then can we get a handle on student debt.
We do, in fact, know things about the costs associated with attending UC schools. First, most “professors” find lucrative work associated with “research” in conjunction with some private laboratory or think tank. They leave the actual teaching to TA’s. Second, professors and private publishing companies have increased the cost of class materials extraordinarily for the sole purpose of making money for the companies and the professors. This is aggravated by the fact that they put out new editions every year making the used book market obsolete. Third, the chancellors and others in administration have decided that they are akin to corporate executives who make profits in the marketplace. They think this means big salaries and benefits for them. They have forgotten the idea of academia and public service. To feed this appetite they do stupid things like increasing the number of out of state students (even though such students are allegedly only paying the actual cost of their education) and encouraging the exploitation of teaching assistants and other serf like persons. So this sort of protest is legitimate. I hope it has some success but getting information into the mind of a distracted public is pretty hard.
RHS, I think you really nailed it. I agree the textbooks have become a total scam. Making new editions every year to prevent students from being able to buy used books is bad, but it gets worse. The publishers sell cheap paperback black and white versions of the exact same books overseas. They are not supposed to be sold in the USA, but the free market always finds a way to bring a willing buyer and a willing seller together. We found a website back in the day where we were able to buy most of our books from overseas for about 1/10th of what they were charging for the fancy hardcover copies they tried to force us to buy at the local bookstore. Why in the world are we paying an order of magnitude more for the same books as students in other countries??? It sounds like corruption / racketeering to me, and I suspect this practice may even be illegal under 15 USC chapter 1.
The admin costs of our public universities have gone up tremendously compared to the costs of teaching. I have never really heard a good explanation for this- why we need a bunch more admin staffers and managers per 1000 students compared to 20 years ago. Unless they are subject to the law of bureaucracies- that they have to grow until they run out of tax money?