We’re sad. The lab is our source of pride. A volunteer student group that offers free printing, and computers, and a lounge…if not for anything else I don’t want to be the guy in charge of closing such a service.

End of an era? I hope not. It won’t be easy, but we have every intention of bringing back the lab when we have the space to provide it. And in the interm, we can make sure web/mail services aren’t disrupted, as they have been during every, last, move, all of which involved increasing our space rather than compressing.

There is still another semester before we have to move. Enjoy it while it lasts. Come say hi to your friendly OCF staffers.

A halfway accurate representation by the union would indicate that far less than 50% of current GSIs approve of the union’s tactics—which, according to their latest email, failed to simply renew the current contract which is more than reasonable for me.

And lastly, you claim (and the report does state) Berkeley accounts for about 1/4 of graduate student population—and yet, random (and rather unscientific) sample of the signatory list would indicate that Berkeley is underrepresented among the signatories—I really don’t want to be lumped in together with other UC campuses, as if they are peers with UC Berkeley (UCLA possibly excepted from this insult), especially when the group supposedly representing all of us is under-representing Berkeley.

http://grad.berkeley.edu/news/berkeley_graduate_profile.shtml .

The rest are Master’s (primarily professional) degree students who very rarely GSI. Also, in the same document it states that 1,000 out of these 6,000 PhD students are first-year students, who almost never GSIs.

So this leaves 5,000 second-year and above PhD students, including all those in Engineering and in the Physical and Biological sciences that don’t have to teach every semester since their lab has external funding. The 3,000 GSIs figure for Berkeley seems realistic.

To see why this is the case, look at UC statistical summary of students and staff:
http://www.ucop.edu/ucophome/uwnews/stat/
(I’m using the Fall 2009 report, Table 4: General campus enrollment per campus, discipline and level)

Berkeley has 9,500 grad students, but around 2,500 of them are professional students in Business and Law who don’t GSI. Another 1,500 are in Engineering and typically only GSI for two out of their 10 semesters on campus. After removing a few hundreds to account for the other professional programs like Social Welfare or Public Policy, you have under 5,000 students left in Letters and Science and other GSI-heavy departments, but even those don’t GSI every semester (you said that Physics, a department of over 200 students, only employs 100 GSIs).

Therefore 3,000 is probably not far from the actual number of GSIs at Berkeley at any given time, and Berkeley has 1/4 of the total graduate student population of the UC system (from that same report).

As a beloved New Jersey governor put it, it’s like Hotel California—you can check out, but you can never leave!

So, let me correct my claim—some of those numbers are cooked—but something is definitely cooked and there is definitely anti-University propaganda going on, to the detriment of both GSIs and students that we are supposed to be teaching.

When the truth is, 6,000 signed, *maybe* somewhere from 500 to 1000 were from UC Berkeley, which represents *tiny* fraction of those that UC Berkeley GSI union is supposed to represent (extend it to the UC system if you want, the truth holds; not that many GSIs support what the union is doing now).

So maybe it’s not that they are faking the 6,000 number, but they are untruthfully representing the 12,000 number, if not by outright lie than by highly misleading representation. In the end, the fact is that the union is acting deceitfully.

Actual UC GSI, Not a signatory, a very reluctant, member-by-force, member of UAW 2865 for 3 years.

Andrew

Get your propaganda right, and stop condemning those working to prevent your further exploitation.

Cut
actual UC ta, actual signatory
UC San Diego Dept of History

Rebecca Fraynt: UC Santa Cruz