True Blue
An Investigation into Teaching at Yale
In April 1995 graduate teachers at Yale went on strike for one week. At the end of that week, in a union election, graduate students in the humanities and social sciences voted by a 78% margin that they wanted to be represented by a union. This vote--600 for a union and 166 against--provokes one obvious question: Why do graduate students at Yale University, one of the finest academic institutions in the world, want a union? Yale administrators are unable to shed much light on this question. First, they minimize the role of graduate teaching: President Levin recently claimed that graduate students teach only 3% of the courses above the freshman level.[1] At the same time, the Dean of the Graduate School, Thomas Appelquist, insists that graduate students are generously supported and have no need for a union.[2] In the face of these claims, graduate students have persisted in their drive for a union, and this white paper offers some clues as to why. This paper will show that:
- Graduate teachers spend more time in the classroom teaching Yale undergraduates than full-time faculty.
- Graduate students at Yale are less able to meet their cost-of-living expenses than graduate students at the majority of Yale's peer institutions.
- Yale saves $5.5 million dollars a year by employing graduate student teachers rather than employing full-time faculty.
Graduate teaching is crucial to the central mission of the university: the teaching of undergraduates. Through union representation, graduate students at Yale plan to improve the quality of undergraduate education and to secure fair compensation for the teaching work they do. In this important year, we offer this paper to the Yale community in order to promote a more informed discussion about teaching and educational excellence at Yale.
THE UNDERGROUND ECONOMY OF UNDERGRADUATE EDUCATION
WHY DOES YALE EMPLOY GRADUATE TEACHERS?
The Yale administration answers this question by pointing out that the graduate teaching fellow program has two primary functions: 1) to provide graduate students with "opportunities" to assist Yale faculty that are "integral to...their education and training"; and 2) to provide financial support for graduate students in their third and fourth years.[3]
Contrary to these statements, however, professional training and graduate financial support are not the primary rationales behind the teaching fellow program. Graduate teachers frequently teach outside their specialty, and they often teach the same course more than once. Furthermore, in most departments, teaching is not a requirement for the doctorate degree. Nor is the teacher training program a priority for Yale: last year Dean Appelquist tried to slash the teacher training budget by one-third. Finally, teaching fellow salaries do not provide the graduate teachers with the support they need. All of these factors suggest that the graduate teaching program exists for purposes other than the training and support of future professors.
In fact, the teaching fellow program exists to provide Yale undergraduates with a top-quality education. It is primarily for the benefit of undergraduate education, and not graduate education, that graduate teachers lead sections, work with student writing, and grade exams. In this way Yale is caught in the classic bind of modern research universities. On the one hand, faculty tenure is based on scholarly publication, and therefore faculty cannot be overwhelmed with teaching duties. On the other hand, Yale promises the highest quality of instruction to its undergraduates, including small-group discussion of texts and personal feedback on written work. To accomplish both ends, Yale employs graduate teachers for small group instruction: they bring enthusiasm into the classroom, they are patient and devoted to their students, and perhaps most important to Yale, they are cheap to hire.
5.5 MILLION DOLLARS
How much money does Yale save by employing graduate teachers? This can be answered simply by calculating what it would cost Yale to replace its graduate teachers with regular junior faculty members. Typically, junior faculty teach two courses per semester. We assume that if faculty members were responsible for all discussion sections, office hours and grading for a course, they would not teach courses of more than 40 students. Thus, Yale would have to hire one junior faculty member for every two graduate teacher positions.
In the spring of 1995, Yale employed 384 graduate teachers in the humanities and social sciences, paying each $4,380 for a full semester's work--at a total cost of $1.68 million. If graduate teachers did not do this teaching, Yale would have to create 192 junior faculty positions. Given the average junior faculty salary of $46,200 per year, hiring these faculty for the semester would cost $4.43 million. By using graduate students, Yale saved $2.75 million in a single semester. Projected over a full academic year, graduate teaching saves the university $5.5 million.[4]
These estimates reflect Yale's savings from employing graduate teachers at the 1995-96 wages, without other benefits. Even if teachers were paid a living wage and received the same health benefits as other 20 hour-a-week employees, Yale would still operate its graduate teaching program at a healthy profit. If Yale raised the standard graduate salary and benefits to $6,350 per position per semester, the university would still save nearly $4 million a year by hiring graduate students.
The bottom line is this: graduate teachers provide Yale students with a top-quality education for one-fifth the price of full-time faculty.
GRADUATE TEACHING VERSUS FACULTY TEACHING
Although Yale claims that tenured and tenure-track faculty do the bulk of undergraduate instruction, a comprehensive survey of classroom hours proves otherwise.[5] In the 1995 spring semester, for example, graduate teachers spent 864 hours in the classroom each week, while full-time faculty spent 756.5 hours. When one looks at actual hands-on, classroom teaching hours, graduate teachers do more teaching of Yale undergraduates than the full-time faculty.[6]
PERSONAL INSTRUCTION
Graduate teachers provide many different kinds of instruction to Yale's undergraduates, but all graduate teaching has one important element: the intensive, personal instruction of undergraduates in the classroom. Graduate students teach daily elementary and intermediate language courses, and they teach introductory seminars in writing, literary study and literary history. In the music department, graduate teachers provide the first two years of undergraduate instruction in music theory; in the economics department, they offer introductory seminars in economic analysis.
For the larger lecture courses offered throughout Yale College, graduate teachers lead weekly discussion sections.--These sections, which complement the lectures with a more in-depth, seminar experience, allow students to work closely with course materials and to learn a discipline's basic skills through active participation in classroom discussion.
TEACHING WRITING
In addition to their classroom teaching responsibilities, graduate teachers provide invaluable instruction outside the classroom, particularly in the teaching of writing. Graduate teachers bear the primary responsibility for teaching basic writing skills to Yale undergraduates. In intensive one-on-one instruction, graduate teachers work with students on developing paper topics, reading drafts of essays, correcting stylistic, organizational, and grammatical problems; they also evaluate and comment extensively on finished papers.
BUDGET CUTS
Despite the tremendous responsibility for undergraduate instruction that falls upon graduate teachers, they work without fair and adequate compensation and without recognition of their contribution to Yale's teaching mission. This is the case primarily because the Yale administration refuses to allocate the funds necessary to support graduate teaching. In 1990, the administration implemented plans to cut the graduate teaching budget and the number of graduate teaching positions by 25% over the following four years.[7]
Five years later, with the budget cuts fully implemented, graduate students confront a stripped-down graduate teaching program. In some departments, teaching opportunities are more scarce; in others, where jobs do exist, graduate teachers are often not assigned to their classrooms until weeks into the term, and increasingly face classes of twenty students or more. Since their implementation, these budget cuts have made the intensive teaching of undergraduates possible at Yale only through the good conscience and voluntary overtime of the graduate teacher.
CLASS SIZE IN YALE COLLEGE
The cuts in the graduate teaching budget have had serious consequences for the quality of teaching and education at Yale, and in particular, for class sizes in the college. Overcrowded classrooms are the overwhelming reality for graduate teachers and undergraduate students at Yale. The graduate school does not begin to limit enrollment in a graduate teacher's seminar or discussion section until 20 students have filled the room, and even this limit on class size is frequently violated. Graduate teachers often cope with classes of 20 to 25 students. Although both graduate and undergraduate students have repeatedly argued that the optimal class size for good teaching is 10 to 15 students, the classrooms remain overcrowded-a situation that translates into unpaid hours for the graduate teacher and less individual attention for the Yale undergraduate.[8]
TEACHER TRAINING
Graduate students have consistently taken the lead in calling for teacher training in the graduate school. In 1992, they initiated Working at Teaching, a training program developed and run by graduate students. The administration, however, has yet to match graduate student commitment to teacher training. Since its beginnings, Working at Teaching has operated with minimal resources and has struggled to meet the demand for training among graduate students. In 1995, the program was seriously endangered when the administration announced that its already meager budget of $75,000 would be cut by $25,000, a full 33%. While graduate students rallied and recovered some of the withheld funds, the program remains at risk and opportunities for teacher training remain limited.
TEACHING OVERTIME
Budget cuts and overcrowded classrooms give evidence of an administration that would rather neglect undergraduate instruction than understand its realities. In the job descriptions governing graduate employment we find evidence of an administration that systematically deals with its graduate students in bad faith. In 1992, the Executive Committee of the graduate school surveyed graduate students on the hours they spent each week on their teaching. The survey found that for the most common teaching appointment, graduate teachers spent, On average, at least 22.5 hours a week on their teaching. When the Executive Committee subsequently wrote the description for this job, however, it ignored the findings of its own survey and defined the job as requiring only 17.5 hours per week.[9]
Yale doctoral candidates appreciate the experience of teaching their undergraduates-but they don't appreciate how the university has deliberately misconstrued the time they dedicate to the classroom. Inaccurate job descriptions continue to trouble graduate teaching at Yale and skew the compensation graduate students receive. On average, graduate teachers work 5 hours without pay each week.
SALARIES AND BENEFITS
A LIVING WAGE? NOT AT YALE.
Even the Yale administration admits that its graduate teachers do not make enough to cover the cost-of-living with their salaries. According to Yale's estimation, the cost-of-living in New Haven is $11,700 for nine months and $15,015 for twelve months. By comparison, graduate teachers at Yale's most common appointment level earn only $9,940 (before taxes) during the school year-roughly $2,000 less than the basic living wage for nine months, and $5,075 less than a full year's support.
How do these wages compare with the wages at Yale's peer institutions? Very poorly. In fact, Yale ranks near the bottom in a comprehensive survey of the differential between standard graduate wages and cost-of-living. Among peer institutions, only Penn, Chicago and Columbia are less committed than Yale to making graduate teaching a viable means of financial support. Brown, Cornell, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Berkeley and Stanford-all these universities compensate their graduate teachers at a level equal to or above the cost-of-living in the area.
Even at state universities, which cannot claim Yale's $3.9 billion endowment and depend on public funding, unionized graduate teachers are compensated more fairly. Massachusetts-Amherst, Michigan, Oregon, Rutgers, and Wisconsin-Madison all pay their graduate teachers a salary equal to or above a living wage.
BALLOONING HEALTH CARE FEES
Graduate teachers, even those who work over twenty hours a week, do not receive any health benefits from Yalc and to make matters worse, health care costs have skyrocketed while graduate wages have stagnated. Among Yale employees who work at least 20 hours a week or more, graduate teachers alone are denied basic health insurance benefits.
Four years ago, the Administration gave assurances that health care fee increases would not outstrip the rate of inflation-and Yale has broken its promise every year except for the last. Currently, a year of basic health care coverage costs $696-reflecting an increase of 123% in the past five years.
Worst of all, Yale's ballooning health care fees have hit hardest the group that can least afford them-graduate students with dependents. Teachers with spouses and children have to pay anywhere between $2750 and $4000 to provide health care for their families. Many graduate students therefore must spend up to half of their nine-month salary on health fees. The structure of Yale's health care system strongly discourages doctoral candidates from raising a family in the course of their residence here, a period that lasts between 5 and 7 years. Although graduate students are generally between the ages of 25 and 35--prime years for family-planning to begin--Yale refuses to recognize that its graduate students are also husbands and wives, mothers and fathers.
TEACHERS SADDLED WITH DEBT
If Yale refuses to pay a living wage, and if it jacks up the cost-of-living by raising health care fees, how do graduate students cope with their difficult financial burdens?
In the main, graduate students have resorted to a desperate mixture of ingenuity and frugality second and third jobs, student loans, creditcard debt, shared apartments-and they have still come out behind. Loan officers estimate that about 400 graduate students in the humanities and social sciences take out loans from Yale each year, and a recent survey confirmed that 45% of graduate students in the humanities and social sciences are in debt to Yale.[10]
In response to GESO appeals about cost-of-living, the graduate school has consistently refused to release detailed information about the financial conditions of graduate students. Recently, however, the administration has publicly claimed that graduate teachers overstate their predicament, and that only 10% of all graduate students have taken out loans from the university.[11] For graduate students in the humanities and social sciences, this statistic is dead wrong; even financial aid officers have higher estimates. It is also misleading on several counts. First of all, the statistic includes graduate students in the sciences as well as in the humanities and social sciences; Ph.D. candidates in the sciences are regularly funded by outside sources, at levels commensurate with the cost-of-living. Second, any statistic estimating debt to Yale does not include the vast amount of debt that graduate students owe to non-university sources--debt that takes the form of credit card bills, bank payments, and informal (but pressing) loans from friends.
PAYING FOR THE PRIVILEGE
Yale stakes its claim of generosity to graduate students on the assertion that they waive four years of tuition fees for 90% of its Ph.D. students. What Yale fails to mention in this claim is lhe fact that among its peer institutions, Yale is almost unique in charging four years of full tuition: most of Yale's peer institutions only charge (and waive) two years of full tuition. Such comparisons aside, the question remains: why does Yale appear to be so generous with its Ph.D. candidates when it comes to tuition fees?
The answer is simple: graduate students are an important part of the university's workforce, spending more time in the classroom than full-time faculty do, and performing vital research in every discipline. In addition, Yale can afford to be generous because the tuition of the graduate school only exists on Yale's ledger-paper. Graduate teachers see the money only on their bursar statements.
The real scandal of graduate tuition at Yale involves the sizable number of graduate teachers who do not receive tuition waivers. These teachers have to pay as much as $19,000 for the right to teach here, even though they are not taking classes. This system results in patent absurdities on a regular basis. A graduate student without a tuition waiver might teach a language course five days a week in the morning, work on research in the afternoon, and prepare for the next day's course in the evening. What would be the fruits of this hard work? First, he or she would owe Yale $9,000 for the privilege of teaching for nine months; second, he or she would have to take out $11,000 in loans to pay for basic living expenses. Every year, this graduate student would be going $20,000 into debt for the right to work for Yale.
YALE'S SHAMEFUL RECORD ON DIVERSITY
In a recent Yale Bulletin on affirmative action, President Levin states: "Our commitment to equal opportunity, affirmative action, and fair treatment of individuals governs the pursuit of our educational mission."[12] Because the educational mission of Yale is the primary concern of graduate teachers, Yale's record on diversity has emerged as an issue for a graduate teacher union.
Despite the fact that Yale has convened 18 committees to study the recruitment and retention of women and minority faculty over the last thirty years, Yale has one of the worst records on diversity among seventeen peer universities. On the number of tenured women, Yale ranks 15th out of 17; on the number of tenured minorities, Yale ranks 11th out of 17. In junior faculty hires for women and minorities, Yale ranks 9th and 15th respectively out of 16.[13] Yale's recruitment and retention of minority graduate students also lags behind.[14]
WHERE TO GO FROM HERE?
Most graduate students come to graduate school in order to become professors. Recent trends in higher education, however, show that universities are increasingly relying on the teaching of adjuncts and graduate students and are cutting back on the number of tenured faculty positions. For graduate students at Yale who have spent many of their years here providing "cheap teaching" for the university, the depressed job market they face upon graduation is a bitter reward.
While other universities have responded to the job market crisis by offering their graduate students professional development resources, Yale has not. In fact, while universities such as Harvard now employ full-time career counselors for graduate and professional students, Yale has repeatedly cut graduate career services and staff support over the last four years.
Yale's lack of committment to placing its graduate students is starting to register on the job market. Last year, out of a survey of 10 humanities departments at Yale, 103 graduate students went on the market: 23 of those students received tenure track jobs, and 5 found adjunct or temporary positions. This is a total placement rate of 27%. While it is true that the humanities job market is suffering nationwide, it is interesting to compare Yale's placement statistics for the English department with other comparable universities. Even though the Yale English department was just ranked the best English graduate program in the country, only Penn State's English Department had a worse graduate job placement record than Yale.
ENDNOTES
1. New Haven Register, March 1, 1995.
2. Yale Weekly Bulletin and Calendar, April 3-10, 1995, p. 2: "[F]inancial assistance for graduate students is comparable, if not superior, to that of most of our peer institutions."
3. Yale Weekly Bulletin, p. 1.
4. These estimates are inevitably somewhat inexact because the Yale administration refuses to make teaching data available to the public. Nevertheless, the above estimates are conservative, using only the number of graduate teachers employed at the TF 3.5 and PTAI levels, the most common teaching appointments for graduate students These estimates do not account for the role of graders, TF1s and 2s; while these TAs do not lead sections, their absence would undoubtedly have to be made up for by increased faculty hiring which is not reflected in these numbers. Nor do these figures account for the effect of faculty benefits, which are significantly more generous than those awarded TAs.
5. This discussion of teaching focuses on graduate teaching in the humanitiesand social sciences where graduate students are relied on most heavily for teaching.
6. These numbers were assembled from the Yale College Programs of Study bulletin and its Winter Supplement and do not reflect the teaching done by part-time, casual instructors who are not con- sidered part of the faculty nor the graduate school.
7. Yale Daily News, January 31, 1990, p. 1. The proposal, voted on by the Yale Corporation and implemented by the deans of the college and graduate school, Donald Kagan and Jerome Pollitt, was known as the "Kagan-Pollitt plan." To make up for the cutbacks in graduate teach ing, the Kagan-Pollitt plan originally suggested that faculty should either teach discussion sections or replace them with an extra lecture hour, or that sections should be made optional altogether. While the budget cuts have now been fully implemented, these other proposals have not, with the result that graduate teachers continue to bear the responsibility for teaching sections and do so on a budget that has been slashed by at least 25%.
8. In 1994, GESO surveyed graduate students in the humanities and social sciences; 74% replied that the optimal class size was 15 students or less.
9. Yale University Graduate School, Programs and Policies, 1993-94, p. 246. This job description was written over the objections of the student representatives on the Executive Committee and remains the current description of the job.
10. GESO anonymously surveyed graduate students in the humanities and social sciences, asking whether or not they had taken out loans from Yale, and the extent of their loans; 261 completed the survey.
11. About the Graduate School, September 1995.
12. "Statement by the President," Yale University Affirmative Action and Equal Opportunity Policies and University Grievance Procedures, November 7, 1994, p.1.
13. First Report of the President's Committee to Monitor the Recruitment and Retention of Disabled, Minority, and Women Faculty, Spring 1991, p. 11. The following schools were included in the report: Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Pennsylvania, Princeton, Stanford, Yale, Berkeley, UCLA, Chicago, Duke, Michigan, MIT, Northwestern, Texas (Austin), Wisconsin (Madison). Some of these schools did not provide complete data in some categories and were therefore not included in those categories.
14. Report of the Committee on Recruitment and Retention of Minority Group Members on the Faculty at Yale, May 16, 1989, p. 3.
This report has been researched, written and compiled by graduate students in the departments of American Studies, Economics, English and Philosophy. For more information, contact GESO at 624-5161.
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