Open Letter to the Higher Education Community
August 11, 2009
Imagine the following scene: graduate students arrive for their first semester at a major Ivy League university, each with a letter promising a stipend and tuition waiver in exchange for working as teaching assistants. On the first day of class they show up to their various classes and sit waiting for the instructor. After ten or fifteen minutes, one after another they head to the department office to tell the staff the instructor has never arrived. They all receive the same answer: “You ARE the instructor.” Unfortunately, we are not imagining the scene. We are reporting on it, minus the name of the institution.
Or consider this: graduate students begin a multi-year degree program with a letter telling them what financial support they have for their first year but without any indication whether or when they will find out about future years.
Clear and adequate enrollment offers and appointment letters are not a universal staple of American graduate education, most often not for any reason other than a failure to think seriously about what information such letters should include--information like precisely what the student’s duties will be, or when health care coverage begins and ends.
Detailed appointment letters are just one of the good practices the AAUP urges in Graduate Student Employees, a revision of our Recommended Institutional Regulations on Academic Freedom and Tenure. We will be publishing the full text this September in our journal of record, Academe, inviting comment from faculty members, students, and staff around the country. Take an advance look at Graduate Student Employees and send us your comments. After taking the suggestions we receive into consideration, we will add the statement to our volume of Policy Documents and Reports, popularly known as the Redbook. Meanwhile, we will begin distributing guidelines about how to put these recommendations into practice.
Graduate Student Employees is a prime example of how AAUP members nationwide work together to respond to the needs of a changing profession, in this case a profession making heavy use of graduate student employees in increasingly uncertain times. Please forward this email to graduate students and undergraduate students planning graduate study. We believe that ensuring clarity and due process for graduate student employees, who are a major segment of the academic workforce, serves them well as students and employees, and that it also serves the interests of the students that so many of them teach.
Cary Nelson, AAUP President
Gary Rhoades, General Secretary