[IP] grad students or indentured labor?
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/US/GoodMorningAmerica/student_labor_040120-1.html
Indentured Students
Student Labor Is Grinding America?s Academic Wheels But Is It Right?
By <mailto:ljacinto2002@xxxxxxxxx>Leela Jacinto
ABCNEWS.com
Jan. 20 Sitting in her professor's house, supervising workers as they
trudge in and out, Lisa B. cannot quite figure the connection between
house-sitting and a literature thesis, but she knows there's a link
somewhere and it makes her mad.
A 29-year-old doctoral student at a Northeastern university who asked that
her name be changed, Lisa was summoned the day before her academic adviser
left for the holidays last month and was asked to "watch over" her house
for two weeks.
It was a request, not an order, she affirms. But as her adviser well knew,
the doctoral student effectively had no choice. The professor was on her
dissertation committee, and in the tough, sometimes capricious world of
academia, riling your adviser can be tantamount to career suicide before
your professional life has even begun.
Potential academic disaster averted, Lisa is still fuming.
"I'm an adult, I'm almost 30, but yet you're made to feel so infantile,"
she complains in a phone interview. It's her lack of power, she said,
"coupled with the frustration that there was no other answer I could have
given."
They enroll in institutions of higher education seeking wisdom,
intellectual stimulation, and a degree that they hope will be their
passport to self-reliance in the "real world." But in universities across
the country, thousands of graduate and undergraduate students find
themselves performing tasks that are on the ethical borderline of what is
expected of them as students, research assistants and fellows.
With a growing number of universities facing budget cuts and under
increasing pressure to find new ways of making profits, student labor is
grinding the wheels of America's academic machinery. They man phones,
photocopiers, teach undergrad courses, grade papers, conduct research,
analyze data often at near-subsistence wages.
In a nation that prides itself on its higher education institutions, where
cutting-edge research accounts for the lion's share of Nobel Prizes each
year and faculty "superstars" secure recognition, awards, funding and
lucrative patents for their research, the bulk of the grunt work is
accomplished with the help of student labor.
Faking Data
But while formal and informal guidelines often govern the use of student
labor in most cases, sometimes the system can go horribly wrong.
In a case that shook the criminal justice system last week, a California
judge ruled that the Scott Peterson murder trial be moved out of Modesto
based on a study conducted by California State University, Stanislaus,
students.
The survey concluded that Peterson, who is charged with murder in the
deaths of his pregnant wife and their unborn child, could not get a fair
trial in his late wife's hometown.
But in a potentially damaging turn of events, it was later discovered that
the study was, in fact, faked.
A day after the ruling, a number of criminal justice students at the
university campus told the Modesto Bee they had fabricated answers on the
survey.
The project, which made up 20 percent of their final grade, was assigned by
criminology professor Stephen Schoenthaler two days before Thanksgiving,
said the students, who asked to remain anonymous. Faced with the prospect
of falling grades coupled with a difficulty getting through to prospective
jurors and having to make lengthy long-distance calls, some students simply
"made up" the answers.
Doing a Job Unsupervised
Cheating on school assignments is a serious academic offense and university
officials have launched an inquiry. The Stanislaus County district attorney
also issued a notice asking students in the class to come forward with
information. And Schoenthaler appears before a California court today with
records and university representatives for a hearing.
But within the academic world, the incident has raised serious questions
about the increasing use of graduate and undergraduate student labor for
professional research work by professors.
"Universities used to say that a Ph.D. student would be put through a
mentorship process, that students will be learning the craft of research,
of teaching," says Kate Bronfenbrenner of Cornell University's School of
Industrial and Labor Relations. "But these days graduate students work as
teachers and research assistants they aren't being supervised, they're
just doing a job. They're not taught how to do it, they just do it."
Although Bronfenbrenner says she has never heard of a case of false
research such as the Cal State incident before, she admits it could well be
happening elsewhere. "Students have always cheated for generations," she
says. "The change we're seeing is that students are taking on more and more
work."
While the number of students at U.S. universities has rapidly increased
over the years, the number of full-time faculty positions have not kept up,
leaving the bulk of the academic work to part-time instructors and grad
students.
According to the Department of Education, in the year 1989-90, about 9
percent of the total number of graduate students had teaching and research
assistantships under work-study programs. In 1999-2000, that figure had
jumped to more than 23 percent.
With the increasing university workload being undertaken by students, there
has also been a rise in the student-worker grievances, with more and more
graduate assistants forming or joining unions across America.
As the president of the Graduate Employee Organization, a union of graduate
employees at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Chris Vials has
addressed a number of issues affecting graduate-workers from getting
health coverage and addressing compensation claims and bogus assistantships
to securing intellectual property rights for research assistants.
A Ph.D. student at UMass' English literature department, Vials says student
disputes over research credits and intellectual property rights are most
acute in science faculties such as physics and engineering, which tend to
attract substantial government and private research funding. Research
patent disputes have sometimes ended up in the courts.
In recent years, university online education programs are especially
dependent on graduate student labor in their development and
administration, says Vials, and the potential for abuse is especially high.
?It?s a Question of Responsibility?
But Mark Alter of New York University's Steinhardt School of Education
believes it's a misconception to characterize the current situation in
terms of student workers.
"It's not a question of student labor," says Alter. "It's a question of
responsibility. At a research institute, our primary responsibility is to
educate the students on how to conduct research and to provide an
opportunity to participate in the collection, interpretation and analysis
of data."
Vials does not disagree in part. "Many of the professors are not raging
abusers," he says. "But if you're a research assistant and the professor is
a raging bastard, if you were to come forward with your grievance, the
professor will retaliate in ways that can't be redressed. He will not write
that letter of recommendation, for instance that sort of retaliation is
most common."
Bronfenbrenner puts it down to the "power dynamic" of the professor-student
relationship.
"If you have the power of grading students, you have to be careful that you
don't abuse that power," she says. "Students are always doing clerical
work, they've always done baby-sitting. The change comes when employers
lose sight of the fact that they're in power."
From her professor's home, Lisa heartily agrees. "This [house-sitting] is
totally just a favor, one that can't be reciprocated because I can't ask
her [the professor] to walk my dog, can I?" she asks. "I would never ask my
[undergraduate] students to do something like this. They're paying for
their education, they're not paying to do me an favor."
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