Association to embrace role of active advocacy

Published: Monday, September 28, 1998

Monday, September 28, 1998

GSA: Graduate student influence, recognition as a union hot issues to face

This summer, the cabinet of the Graduate Students Association sat down to map out its advocacy agenda for the year. Here are the issues we plan to address:

* Affirmative Action: While most discussion about the abolition of affirmative action has been focused on this year's entering freshman class, little has been said publicly about the impact of SP-1, SP-2 and Proposition 209 on graduate student admissions and funding. This summer, the GSA initiated a study of the aftermath; results will be available by November.

* Sexual Harassment: Also this fall, a GSA-sponsored task force will complete its extensive study of the incidence of sexual harassment among graduate and professional students at UCLA.

* Non-Resident Tuition Fees are at the heart of a United States Government Accounting Office investigation of UCLA's use of federal research monies. The difficult tuition burden placed on international students - who comprise 15 to 20 percent of the total graduate and professional student population at UCLA - is a major issue of concern.

* Departmental Reviews: This fall, the Academic Senate and the GSA will pilot a program which enables graduate students to participate more directly in the site reviews of their academic departments and programs.

* Recycling: The GSA environmental coalition will advocate improvements in the campus recycling program and in our awareness of it.

* Campus Social Facilities: Graduate students at many universities - and the UCLA faculty - don't have to go off-campus for a cold beer. We'd like to see that happen for UCLA's graduate and professional students.

* Revitalizing GSA: Every year, thousands of graduate students benefit from GSA sponsored projects and publications; this year, we want more graduate students to take an active role in shaping the association's future.

This agenda is the official outlook on 1998-1999 from the vantage point of the GSA offices at 301 Kerckhoff Hall. This agenda was compiled in August, during weeks of unusual humidity and without the benefit of air conditioning, by cabinet members who wanted to outline an advocacy role and a set of reasonable goals for the association.

My job this summer, as GSA president, has been to figure out what a "reasonable advocacy" role might look like. It has not always been clear to me what the GSA can or should do. We are called upon to "represent" graduate student interests in a range of settings, some where students are fully enfranchised and others where our input is politely tolerated.

One day, an administrator told me that he thought graduate students just "like to gripe;" on a happier occasion, the chair of the Academic Senate told me that students were UCLA's "jewels." Accordingly, I have felt varying degrees of possibility and frustration.

Here's what I learned over my summer "vacation": graduate and professional students occupy a strange paradox. We are adults with households and families of our own, and yet we check a degree of our agency at the school house door. A good portion of our paychecks (or fellowships or, more likely, loans) will go to administrators who manage our lives at UCLA for us.

It is commonly agreed, though the terms of the agreement keep changing and the discussions rarely include us, that this is the way things work. Mostly, things do work - we have a good faculty, a good staff and good colleagues around us; there is, we hope, good will in Murphy Hall.

Things that don't work so well, we don't dwell on because - between our schoolwork and the work we do to pay for school - there just isn't any time.

But sometimes the paradox is strained. Economies of scale and human politics combine to compromise UCLA's educational mission and, more perceptibly, to put a squeeze on our place in it. For example, a few years ago, affirmative action was abolished in the UC system, by the decree of a near-invisible Regency and without so much as a polling of students, faculty or chancellors.

This year, Regent Ward Connerly rattled his sabers about ethnic studies; Connerly, a land use consultant with a part-time gig in politics, seems to think he knows how to shape the course of academic study better than the UC faculty.

The paradox felt most keenly by thousands of UCLA graduate students is this: we teach and tutor and grade papers, but according to the administrators at the Graduate Division, we don't work here. They say we are not employees but "apprentices" - never mind that income taxes are deducted from our "stipend" checks; never mind that we hold these "apprenticeships" for three years or more, with mediocre chances of securing full academic employment thereafter.

As apprentices, their logic goes, we do not have the right to negotiate an employment contract to determine collectively the conditions under which we work. Their logic is flawed.

Last spring, thousands of academic student employees across the UC system voted to walk off their jobs sometime this fall if they were not recognized as employees with collective bargaining rights.

Despite heavy wrangling by UC lawyers, the state's labor board affirmed that tutors, readers and teaching associates at UCSD do have these rights and certified their union. At UCLA, let's hope it won't take a court order or a major strike before the administration opens talks with SAGE/UAW.

It's high time to trade in the old paradox of apprenticeship for good faith negotiations.

A closing anecdote: One day this summer, I was meeting with a student from the class I taught (the class for which I ordered the books, wrote the syllabus, graded the papers, and received a paycheck). This student is Ethiopian, not a native English speaker. Occasionally, he asked me for some linguistic clarification and on this day the word was "paradox."

"Paradox, what does this mean?" he asked, and I gave him my best ad hoc definition.

"Yeah?" he said, " 'paradox' sounds like a 'lie' to me."

Brooks is the Graduate Student Association president.

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