Stop splitting hairs
Who are the graduate students?
They are teachers. They are researchers. They are learners.
But, apparently, they are not "research assistants."
The university has wrongly refused to permit research assistants to participate in the graduate student union and to vote in an upcoming union election.
The problem is that this stance overemphasizes the distinction between "graduate assistants," who are allowed to participate, and "research assistants," who are not. Both are graduate students - broadly speaking - and both contribute significantly to the university, though in different ways.
Most importantly, this issue is not simply about graduate students getting fair support; what graduate students deserve is a separate question. At stake is a question of scope: Who should be included among the union's membership, and who should benefit from its deals?
There seems to be no meaningful way to divide graduate students so that one group benefits while the other does not. At most, the shift is simply in emphasis. Graduate assistants do a fair deal of teaching, while research assistants focus more heavily on research.
And as Midland graduate student Mike Hoerger indicated in his letter Monday, research assistants often do some teaching. It becomes increasingly challenging to see the distinction as anything but superficial.
What's essential is what they have in common: They are young scholars whose research contributes to the university and, in many cases, their field of study.
Their particular slate of duties does not change this. (Or if it does, at what point does one focus sufficiently on research to be a "research assistant" as opposed to a "graduate assistant," and is this distinction actually meaningful?)
Hoerger indicated that a university lawyer stated that research assistants do not contribute to the primary goals of the university. This comes across as double-speak: Graduate assistants and research assistants are, by and large, on a par as graduate students, and the university cannot praise one while denigrating the other. CMU cannot have it both ways.
Before either the union or the university can get clear on bargaining terms, both parties need to be clear on whom their deliberations will affect. It comes across as intolerably arbitrary to exclude research assistants.
At minimum, the university should provide a more detailed explanation for the graduate student union. It ought not to defer simply to precedents at other universities, as their situations could have been relevantly different - or their decisions also could have been arbitrary.
The university needs first to provide a criterion by which some group contributes to the primary goals of the university. Then it needs to indicate, in a non-arbitrary way, how graduate assistants do this while research assistants do not. Similar concerns linger over administrative assistants, who also are now excluded from the union.
Such an explanation does not seem forthcoming. For now, the decision to exclude research and administrative assistants should be repealed, and discussion should be resumed.
