I slaved as a graduate student instructor and teaching assistant at a reputable California university for 7 years, and was involved in organizing a pretty gnarly union recognition drive (with strike) for non-faculty teachers, like the one at Yale in recent years. Sixty-five percent of the contact an undergrad would have with a warm body at said U (let's call it "San Narciso State") would be with a starving, overworked person like me. For this parents and various funders are laying out the big bucks for tuition, which is outrunning cost-of-living and inflation like Jesse Owens racing Strom Thurmond? Not that I sucked at it, mind you, it's just that after putting in 30+ hours a week on my teaching and the gazillion hours needed to keep up with four grad seminars, not to mention my moonlighting (tutoring football players, among other things, yechh) I just didn't have the energy to do the complete opposite of suck, which my professional pride would have preferred. "Oh, but you are professional apprentices, not workers," was the university's line. Right: it's not a job, it's a holy crusade. We're intellectuals, not plumbers! So I'm supposed to live on honey and locusts? So many of my colleagues have wound up as itinerant adjuncts in the intervening years, living on year-to-year contracts with little or no health benefits ...

Nanochick wrote:
] ] 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