The petition
Assembly of the Academic Senate
Academic Council
1111 Franklin Street, 12thFloor
Oakland, CA 94607-5200
Dear System-wide Senate Committee Chairs,
We, as graduate students of the University of California Davis, submit to you this formal letter of protest against the Proposal on the Role of Graduate Students in University Instruction, submitted to the UC Academic Senate by the University-wide Committee on Educational Policy (UCEP) and the Coordinating Council on Graduate Affairs (CCGA). For a multiplicity of reasons, we find this proposal unacceptable for the continued positive experience of graduate students and the working relationships between graduate students and faculty in the UC system.
First, the demotion of graduate student instructors from “Instructor of Record” to “Graduate Teaching Assistant” (GTA) or “Graduate Teaching Fellow,” (GTF) deprives UC graduate students a valuable curriculum vitae building experience. A title of GTA or GTF listed on a CV is likely to be perceived on the job market as not much more than a glorified internship (and indeed, the listed criteria for these new titles suggest that this is what it is), which is not enough to compete in today’s increasingly competitive recent PhD market. The teaching assistantships which are currently offered to graduate students offer only minor benefits to students’ CVs relative to actual instruction experience, including both the creation and independent conduct of an undergraduate course. In order to continue producing competitive doctoral graduates, the UC system must continue to allow that graduate students be listed as instructor of record for courses which they themselves construct and teach.
Second, formal obligatory faculty oversight of graduate student instruction is not only insulting to graduate student ability; it also provides opportunities for the abuse of graduate student worker rights as guaranteed by our union contracts. Not only does the UCEP and CCGA proposal draft state that graduate students will no longer be permitted to assemble their own syllabi and course materials, it further allows faculty to “be available for confidential exchanges with students in the class in order to receive complaints or criticisms about the conduct of the course.” This form of oversight is not even recommended for the current position of TA, as it unnecessarily undermines graduate student authority in the classroom and subverts effective teaching. It would hardly benefit undergraduate student education to introduce confusion about the official instructor for courses taught by graduate students.
Furthermore, graduate students provide a necessary supplement to the teaching ranks at UC schools; our participation allows faculty members to pursue research that would otherwise be entirely encumbered by teaching obligations. By enacting this proposal, faculty members will be obliged to assemble and oversee courses of which they were previously free. They may or may not be able to adhere to these additional responsibilities due to their own preexisting work demands. Therefore, in practice, these responsibilities are likely to fall back into the hands of graduate students; this proposal would unjustly deny us credit for our work. Additionally, the change in title from “instructor” to any form of “TA” may allow UCs to justify cutting the already modest pay of graduate student instructors, denying us the appropriate compensation in addition to credit for the work of teaching.
For all of the above reasons, we fervently oppose the current Proposal on the Role of Graduate Instructors in University Instruction. We strongly urge you to let the “selection, use, and oversight of graduate student instructors” to remain “largely in the hands of the sponsoring departments and programs.” Let this proposal be a call to all departments to individually bear more scrutiny on graduate student instructed courses, but the Academic Senate must not allow the actions of one deviant to shape policy for all graduate students.
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