GESO has released
2 Casual 2 Blue. Th report tracks the casualization of the sciences, the corporatization of research and intellectual property at Yale, the gendering of the massive dropout rate of science Ph.D's from the academy and the lack of a democratic voice in the laboratory. The solutions they come up with are innovative and really interesting.
The YDN reports
here.
Meanwhile, Alyssa Rosenberg writes,
"If all we took from the recent strike was a shallow history lesson about the ongoing tension between Yale and locals 34 and 35, then we are not very good students. Unfortunately for the workers at Yale-New Haven Hospital and for Yale police officers, we may have another chance to learn."
Michael Jo, a Yale College Alum and current GESO organizer
answers Jon Butler's
defense of transient teaching/temper tantrum in yesterday's paper, as well as the YDN's obnoxious, uninformed editorial about
Blackboard Blues earlier this week.
I'm one of those transient instructors. After reading the report I don't feel demeaned, and as a former undergraduate, I applaud it as the best appraisal of Yale's undergraduate education that I have yet seen. It greatly improves on last year's academic review, which consulted not a single graduate student and disappointed even the News
here's more:
Does the News really think GESO members are insulting themselves? Does Butler really think that graduate students don't want teaching experience? Instead, the report argues that part-time positions should not substitute for the full-time faculty students need. A similar point was made by the News' editors; "visiting professors should supplement full-time professors, not replace them." Also, I agree that we need "a critical examination of the role of non-tenured faculty." How long do they stay here? Do they receive the support they need? A new study, perhaps sponsored by the Yale College Council, could provide impartial answers.
The point is that those who teach at Yale, including lecturers, should be given the job security and institutional support they deserve. As the American Association of University Professors declared in 1978, "The teachers who must go, hat in hand, every year (or every two years, or every three years) indefinitely into the future, to ask if they may stay, are not teachers who can feel free to speak and write the truth as they see it." (Incidentally, it was the AAUP, not GESO, that coined the term "transient faculty.") This is hardly an insult to lecturers; it is a demand for due respect, for both teachers and teaching.
If you're looking for insults, go to the last line of the News' editorial, which argues that the administration should not seek input from teaching assistants because they are narrowly concerned for their own job security. "Blackboard Blues" shows the mendacity of this assertion. Its pages are full of graduate students expressing dedication to teaching and the desire to improve it. I don't see how the News construes this as narrow self-interest.
Jo concludes
We may disagree on details, but we all want the same thing -- the highest quality education possible -- and we should be working together to secure it. However, as long as graduate student teachers -- including GESO members -- are excluded from the dialogue over teaching, and their contributions met with misreading and hostility, we will never be able to honestly discuss this issue. As long as faculty, graduate students and undergraduates fail to see our common interests, we will never achieve more than token adjustments to undergraduate education at Yale. Surely we deserve better than that.
Amen.
