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PLATFORM / REPORTS / TIMELINE / PRESS
Graduate teachers and researchers deserve better conditions
and a say in their work:
• Democratic and transparent process for allocating teaching positions
• Equal pay for equal work
• Tuition waivers and free health care for all teachers
• No unpaid teaching or extra teaching responsibilities
• Paid teacher training, if needed
• Sufficient institutional support for graduate teachers (office space, desk copies, etc)
• Limits on section/class size
• Accurate job descriptions, with specifications of exact duties
• Intellectual property rights
Related GESO reports:
• The [Un]Changing Face of the Ivy League [.pdf] February 2005
• Blackboard Blues: Yale Teachers on Yale Teaching [.pdf] 10/10/2003
• Casual in Blue: Yale and the Academic Labor Market [.pdf] Spring
1999
• Casual Nation: A report on the academic casualization crisis by the CGEU [.pdf] 2000
History:
Spring/Fall 2006 |
GESO's committee on Academic Life and Labor initiates a teaching survey as the beginning of a campus-wide program to identify problems with, and improve, working conditions for graduate teachers at Yale. By the end of the year, hundreds of graduate students have been polled. The results of the survey are the basis for a new GESO platform, ratified and released by the membership in December of 2006.
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Spring 2005 |
GESO joins with graduate teachers from Columbia University on a 5-day walkout for organizing rights and a binding contract for graduate employees.
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Spring 2004 |
Departments in the Humanities and Languages submit formal grievances to the administration demanding pay equity for all TAs and an end to the wage gap between lower-year Ph.D. candidates, on the one hand, and upper-year P h.D. and professional school TAs on the other. Humanities and Languages graduate students send a letter to President Levin and Provost Hockfield concerning the current crisis in the teaching of literature at universities. GESO members hold a rally outside HGS protesting the two-tiered TA pay structure, in particular its effect on upper-year graduate students. |
September 2003 |
GESO works with ungraduates from the Undergraduate Organizing Committee to inform prospective parents and students to of data collected by GESO on the staffing of teaching at Yale. GESO publishes Blackboard Blues: Yale Teachers on Yale Teaching [.pdf]. In collaboration with the UOC, graduate students and undergraduates hold forums on the quality of teaching at Yale for interested parents in New York, Miami, San Francisco Bay Area, and Chicago.
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Spring 2001 |
The Graduate School decides not to increase teaching salaries to correspond with its latest stipend increase for the first time. This effectively creates a wage gap between teachers teaching during their “stipend years” and those teaching in their upper years. This gap has grown with each announcement of a stipend increase.
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December 2000 |
The Coalition of Graduate Employees Unions (CGEU) and GESO jointly publish Casual Nation, [.pdf] an analysis of some problems plaguing academic teaching.
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March 1999 |
GESO releases Casual in Blue, [.pdf] documenting that TA’s provide 40% of the classroom hours at Yale. The New York Times covers the report and the President of the AAUP states, “this hard-hitting report should be read by all policy makers in higher education, who should consider the long-range implications of the significant downturn in job opportunities in academe.”
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Spring 1998 |
GESO circulates a “Petition to the President” calling on Yale to “negotiate in good faith, with graduate students, a written and binding agreement governing graduate school policies including, but not limited to, the terms of the Teaching Fellows program and health care benefits.” 1053 graduate students, a majority of those in residence, sign the petition.
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