Well then maybe we need to work to make this happen for ALL TAs, not just a rare few whose professors happen to be great guys or like somebody. As opposed to throwing out the baby with the bathwater here. Make sure ALL professors know how they are supposed to be interacting with their TAs so it is a fully satisfying learning/teaching experience for everyone involved. Then you won’t have people thinking it’s just a run of the mill job and they are being taken advantage of…

I disagree about the unpaid internships too. Those are great opportunities for kids to work and meet people at all levels. We’ve had HBO, The Daily Show and MTV as companies kids can intern at…as well as Goldman Sachs, and even politicans.

What average kid is going to rub elbows with people and companies like this EXCEPT through an unpaid internship. Many middle and working class kids will take a summer to work at one of these unpaid internships and their parents will support it knowing that it’s a great opportunity for them. AND many internships pay carfare plus lunch money…so there are no out-of-pocket expenses for the students.

Many average students participate, not just connected ones.

You are all very wrong there.

Uh oh… maybe I’m out of the loop and don’t even realize it.

Sally, ok I see. My dept is kind of a mix, the nicer profs try to make sure their students can fulfill their requirement by TAing for them in a subject they enjoy and can competently teach, but it’s not as structured as your fellowship arrangement. Also, it doesn’t always work out perfectly. :\

I’m not talking about social connections, I’m talking about the professional ones, i.e., via human resource personnel, staff and administrators, both at the colleges/universities and the orgs. sponsoring the internships. And it’s very much a New Girl’s Club from my experience, and in fact, for others too who have written about the change in dynamic.

That’s ok, we don’t want you feeling sorry for us, and I’m flattered that you think I’ll make a lot of money. Hope you’re right. Actually, I think it’s pretty cool you went back to grad school after raising a family. I’d rather not get into a contest over who has suffered most for their education. Many people in my dept. didn’t start grad school straight out of undergrad. A couple are in their 40s or 50s, and several more are raising families. A union for grad students if very much for them too, not just the 20-somethings.

And all that stuff that Sally said… very insightful, thanks. I’m gonna mildly disagree on TAships as training just because if you apply for academic positions, they will look askance at you if you have no teaching experience, and a TAship will count for something there. It’s more of a negative reinforcement sort of thing… having a TAship may not gain you lots of great teacher training, but NOT having had one makes you look bad.

>one needs to be connected to the New Girl’s Network

Well, I’m not at your school and I think not in your field, but every job, internship or academic position — with one exception — that I’ve gotten through a social connection, that connection has been a man. There are actually not a lot of women in my field.

As Sally said, the unpaid intership system has become quite a racket.

What you are suggesting is that we do the same thing with graduate school: make it accessible only to the independently wealthy. If grad students are expected to work for free, only trust-fund babies will be able to go to grad school. The financial barriers to grad school are actually much higher than those to taking unpaid internships, because while a lot of students might be able to scrape together the money to work for free for a summer, very few people are going to be able to support themselves without pay for the six to ten years that it takes to get a PhD.

I guess I don’t want a society in which the flow of ideas is controlled by people who grew up rich. And if you make independent wealth a requirement for working in academia, entertainment, the media, or the arts, that’s what happens. That strikes me as a problem for everyone, not just for people trying to put themselves through grad school.

If grad students receive generous enough stipends that they can afford to live on them, I think it’s just fine for them to be expected to T.A. In a sense, they are being compensated for T.A.ing. But that’s not usually the case. I know it’s not the case at the institution at which you work, because one of the reasons I didn’t apply there is that a professor there told me that it was impossible to support yourself on their graduate funding.

Finally, it’s pretty clear to me that TAships are not about graduate training. The number of T.A.s is determined by the needs of the professors and departments, not by the number of students who could use the work experience. T.A.s typical receive no training in pedagogy. There are no guidelines to encourage professors to pick T.A.s who could benefit from the “training” or experience. And everyone realizes that departments could not get by without T.A.s. People who argue that T.A.ships are training, in my opinion, are either disingenuous or just don’t understand how universities work.

It’s not unusual for a company to tell its employees that they have to avoid doing a particular thing because “it’s illegal,” rather than saying “it’s legal, but our lawyers said not to do that.”

Because like I was at that time, they are STUDENTS, not employees of the school. The training they are getting by working for a full-fledged professor is for free, just like any other apprendice who is learning by working with a master at his craft? Right.

Wrong. Apprentices in trade unions do not work for free. (Their wages are substantially less than those of journeymen, naturally.) Why should a school offload its labor costs onto students?

I don’t think so - this has been happening for decades and while I’ve heard some minimal grumbling, I’ve not heard any “screaming to holy hell” coming from men. However, now that women are advantaged and the majority in college and university (actually since the early 1990s), I hear some well-reasoned arguments for abolishing affirmative action for women and focusing instead on men, and that seems to cause hysteria in feminist circles. Seems to me the only “screaming to holy hell” I hear is from women like you who are afraid of losing your special privileges and treatment vis-a-vis the advantages you’ve been granted due to affirmative action and other chivalrous activities.

I’ll say it again: Hugo, you can choose your students using subjective standards as long as you can list the criteria you’re using to do so and justify those choices on the basis of “diversity” and “critical mass.” Your institution might have its own specific guidelines on this, but it’s quite legal to do this in the U.S.