Will Tuladhar-Douglas

Unsurprisingly, _Science_ published an attack on academic unions. It portrays successful struggles to improve pay and conditions for PhD and postdocs as anti-individualist (!) and an attack on innocent research group leaders.

https://www.science.org/content/article/student-and-postdoc-unions-proliferate-academia-scrambling-adapt

Among other gems:

'Individual faculty members, who support grad student researchers and postdocs out of their own grants, are having to take a careful look at their budgets as well. “Every lab is in many ways its own little microbusiness,” says Lisa García Bedolla, vice provost for graduate studies and dean of the graduate division at UC Berkeley. '

and

'“less research is going to be produced per dollar of [grant] money,” Nestler says. "This is the way the … research enterprise will have to change.”'

Nov 12, 2023 at 8:44amWeb
Show threadWill Tuladhar-DouglasNov 12, 2023
Just a bit of further commentary - given that universities take away a huge percentage of any research grant that academics win in order to pay the salary of managers, it's an unsubtle bit of bullying for one of those managers to talk about PIs losing funding.
Show threadDr. Heather EtcheversNov 12, 2023
@yetiinabox As a tenured scientist in another country's academic system, but out of UC Berkeley, I absolutely support cutting back on support staff management salaries & positions everywhere in order to provide child-care subsidies, facilities and support for families and reasonable working hours for our younger colleagues. Is this even controversial? Pshaw.
Show threadHeloise BerkowitzNov 12, 2023
@yetiinabox
🤦‍♀️ gosh
@devivijay @jelena3121
Show threadtdietterichNov 15, 2023

@yetiinabox This seems like a balanced news story to me. I'm not sure why it was labeled as an editorial.

Stepping back, it would be nice if universities could find a way to provide "funding gap insurance" for labs out of their returned overhead. A new union contract is not the only kind of financial shock that research managers face. Nice to see that some universities are stepping up to help

Show threadJames Hawley, PhDNov 15, 2023

@yetiinabox It's the same argument as "we should scrap carbon taxes because families are having a tough time affording transportation and heating". It pretends that the current state of affairs (subsidizing fossil fuels, keeping grad students near poverty) is sustainable and any change will hurt the people at the bottom.

How much research / $ will you be getting if all the PhDs leave academia because no one can afford to work as a grad student/postdoc?

Show threadjonny (nonvenomous)Nov 16, 2023

@yetiinabox
Fucking lmao YES no SHIT fighting for survivable wages commensurate with the amount of labor done means less research per dollar. Thats not just a bad argument, it isnt an argument at all. That there are people who believe we should try and squeeze as much labor out of people for as little pay as possible is exactly why we need Unions.

Also, If this person thinks in terms of a quantifiable "amount of research" someone produces, I can guarantee their research is rote salami sliced boring bullshit.

Show threadjonny (nonvenomous)Nov 16, 2023

@yetiinabox
I am Begging Faculty to Organize Their Own Unions to address their own working conditions that include immense precarity, bloated admin that scrapes off excessive overhead, etc. Rather than trying to push the impacts of their own failure to organize down onto their grad students who are almost always paid poverty wages.

Faculty dont fight on the wrong side of the class war challenge 2023

Show threadJuan Nunez-IglesiasNov 17, 2023

@jonny @yetiinabox this hits hard today, we had a town hall on research assessment at Monash Fac. of Med. Highlight was that individual article metrics were inadmissible because we *must* use internal Monash data, which comes from Elsevier Pure, which (shockingly) emphasises journal metrics. We use a thing called “Cumulative Impact Factor” I shit you not.

Faculty head didn’t love it but had a “my hands are tied” attitude. And I’m like how can this possibly be??? How can we be so powerless???

Show threadJuan Nunez-IglesiasNov 17, 2023
@jonny @yetiinabox separately I learned at a Union meeting that membership is ~12% across the sector. So, it adds up I suppose. But it all feels so stupid.
Show threadBrian VastagNov 16, 2023
@yetiinabox This article doesn't read to me as an attack on unions. It reads like pretty balanced reporting. Some academic unions have made gains and some administrators are worried about it, grants haven't kept up with rising COL, etc.
Show threadJán BogárNov 16, 2023

@yetiinabox
I feel like we read a different article, it seems neutral to me, maybe even more in support of the unions. And from the last citation, you left out an important bit right in the middle, Nestler is pro wage raise:

"less research is going to be produced per dollar of [grant] money,” Nestler says. Still, the need to pay graduate students and postdocs better is clear: “We have to do this. This is the way the … research enterprise will have to change.”