As one of the many graduate students working to organize a Tufts union with the United Automotive and Academic Workers (UAAW), I'd like to take this space to clarify a simple-but-important point. In recent weeks, I have noticed that some people, including our very own Tufts administration, seem to be perplexed about our student employee union movement. "What do you mean, you need a union? Graduate students aren't 'employees.' You're students," these folks may say. In fact over these past few weeks, the Tufts administration has been making just this basic argument - disputing the employee-status of Tufts graduate student workers in state hearings of the National Labor Relations Board in Boston (NLRB).
Since the Association of Student Employees at Tufts (ASET) filed a petition with the NLRB to hold a union election this spring, the administration, rather than acknowledge the legal right of graduate students to unionize, has committed its resources to a confused and somewhat insulting line of persuasion. Instead of figuring out concrete ways to address graduate student concerns, the administration has been shelling out large amounts of money to lawyers who have been trying to convince the NLRB that graduate student workers on this campus are not employees at all.
But how can this be? I myself am a graduate student and a teacher here at Tufts. I lecture for the English department, providing a service for which I am paid, and upon which the University depends. I am both a student and an employee of Tufts University. Three days a week, I spend my mornings preparing for and teaching 10:30 class of about a dozen students. (On the off days I attend graduate seminars, with professors and fellow grads.) Once or twice per week I hold required office hours for my students.Moreover, I frequently schedule additional conferences with students outside of office hours. My afternoons are devoted to studies towards my PhD. But my nights are filled with hours of reading, reacting to, and grading student papers, while my late nights are occupied with planning lessons and classroom discussions, as well as previewing written and audio-visual materials for future class units. Occasionally I use late late nights to work on an essay or an academic article of my own.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining about the work. I love my job. In fact I often love it so much that it consumes my life. Planning. Preparing. Performing. Assigning. Conferencing. E-mailing. Grading and commenting on papers. My point is not that I have a problem with my work; instead it is simply that the work I do for Tufts is indeed work. I am an employee, as well as a student, and Tufts should acknowledge me (and other grad students like me) as such, and so respect the ongoing union movement as the proper legal course for graduate student workers who want to have a say in their conditions of work.
I know from experience that as a graduate worker it is possible to forget the employment aspect of our relationship to Tufts. The courses I teach - English 1 and 2, are critical thinking and writing courses, in which I pick the essays, books, and films that my class will study. It follows from this that a good deal of the preparation I do for my course intersects with topics, issues, or writers that interest me.
In this, I seem to be like many graduate student employees, as well as many full and part-time faculty here at Tufts. As academic workers, we often have the privilege of teaching topics and materials that we are familiar with and which we either enjoy or find useful. Such personal pleasures of academic work go with the territory.
There is a danger of confusion here. I've heard some say that our work is not real work, just because we enjoy it or learnfrom it. Because a graduate student in English or philosophy, or biology happens to enjoy thinking about Faulkner or epistemology or genetics - according to this logic - his or her teaching within that respective area is not work, but a form of "training" or a non-economic "labor of love."
But should labor - upon which the University depends, which Tufts directs, and for which I'm paid - not count as work, just because I enjoy it? Certainly not. Frankly, I doubt that one could be truly fit to teach an academic subject unless one has an independent, extra-economic interest in that subject.
One's ability to communicate (and inspire with) knowledge is intimately related to one's engagement and interest in that material in question. (If you've ever had a teacher who had no independent, genuine interest in what he or she was teaching than you know what I mean.) At a world class university like Tufts, love of one's work should be a requirement for academic workers, not an excuse for degrading the work we do into an exploited form of leisure. Even if I loved or learned from every second of my labor as a teacher, that does not change the fact that I am in fact working as a student lecturer for this University.
The fact is of course, that though as a teacher I am often reading and re-reading texts that I enjoy, the work I do for English 1 and 2 at Tufts is seldom identical with the work I do for the sake of my own graduate studies. While practice may make perfection, the fact remains that reading through ten six-page essays to fix grammar and sentence structure is hardly in any clear sense, preparation for my PhD (at least no more than, say, practicing my typing skills as I write this Viewpoint is preparation for writing my dissertation).
In fact, the irony of my position as a PhD-seeking lecturer is that it's often difficult to find the time to devote to my PhD work. This is not only because teaching is addictive, exhausting, and time-consuming (as it should be), but also because like many other graduate TAs and RAs, I've had to find outside jobs, either at Tufts or off-campus, to simply make economic ends meet.
The cost of living in the Medford/Somerville area is very high, and costs for simple necessaries like books and health insurance are often too much for me to afford. Like most Tufts graduate students, the salary I get for the work I give Tufts does not meet my basic human needs. Sadly, contrary to that Don Henley Eagles' tune, when you're hungry love alone will not keep you alive.
Like many graduate students workers, at the end of the day, I do indeed love my work. I take pride in my work, and I work hard for Tufts students. Teaching is my job, and it's an important job that is essential to the functioning of this University. I take this job seriously, and so the terms and conditions of employment matter to me dearly, both for the sake of my students' learning, and for my own sanity and survival.
I'm convinced that forming a graduate student union is the best, most proven way to improve graduate student working conditions, and the UAW has more experience working with graduate students than does any other union. As a student employee, I take my employee status seriously, and that is why I'm working for a union with ASET/UAW.
Would my students want me to view my teaching as anything less than a real job? Shouldn't teaching Tufts students be valued not only in the abstract, as academic endeavor, but in the concrete, as the productive work that it is?
Joe Ramsey is a student at Tufts' Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.
