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US students hit by extra demands

Physics World June 2020

Physics World

 
News & Analysis Physics World  June 2020

US students hit by extra demands

Graduate students under COVID-19 lockdown complain they are being unfairly asked to carry out more tasks such as online teaching, as Peter Gwynne reports

Taken to task Many US students complain that they are being unfairly given extra teaching duties following the COVID-19 shutdown. (iStock/wavebreakmedia)

More than half of higher-education institutions in the US have very limited experience with virtual education, with the result that most of the tasks are being offloaded to graduate students. That is according to a report by the management consulting firm McKinsey and Company, which finds that many middle-level and senior professors in the US have difficulty dealing with the quirks of Zoom and other forms of remote education technology that are now demanded by closed-down institutions. Given these challenges, many professors have given their graduate students the tasks of setting up and presenting virtual classes and marking the resulting tests and papers.

The move has added to the burden facing students who also must deal with the usual issues of finding and funding appropriate research projects and earning enough to pay their tuition and living expenses. While some graduate students can afford the time to work on the extra duties because their equipment is in locked-down laboratories, others must try to fit in the extra tasks to their normal working days. Yet many individuals are loath to complain about the new duties because their professors have the power of judging their research and recommending them for future positions.

Safer workplace

At Harvard University, the issue of teaching hours was already a bone of contention between the university’s administration and the Harvard Graduate Students Union-United Auto Workers, which represents about 4000 graduate students who teach classes, mark papers and manage research laboratories. Negotiations over the graduate students’ first union contract “for a safer and more equitable workplace” began in October 2018 but by the end of last year, with little progress having been made, students went on a 28-day strike. The two sides reached a tentative agreement in March that would require graduate students to teach no more than two classes or work more than 20 hours per week.

But the absence of a signed contract, the students say, gives them little opportunity to remedy their complaints about the new duties imposed on them by the university’s move to all-online classes. A survey by the union revealed what one graduate student called “workplace abuses”. In addition to having to deal with technical issues in unfamiliar virtual teaching technology, other problems include the need to offer several versions of classes and hold extra office hours for undergraduates in different time zones.

Harvard has given faculty members seeking tenure an extra year to complete the requirements for their applications owing to the disruptions of the move to online instruction. But it has made no such provision for doctoral students. Thomas Plumb-Reyes, a PhD student in applied physics, complained to the Boston Globe that because he cannot visit his laboratory, he will be unable to complete his thesis in the coming months and receive his degree before his funding runs out. Plumb-Reyes adds that he and his fellow graduate students are also having to redesign the undergraduate courses – including lab work – so they can teach them remotely. He estimates that his teaching workload has increased by around 50%.

The absence of a signed contract gives students little opportunity to remedy their complaints about the new duties imposed on them

Reward and recognition

Harvard graduate students are not alone in experiencing problems related to the COVID-19 pandemic. The graduate students’ union at the University of Massachusetts Amherst has called on the administration to pay its student employees throughout the summer and to guarantee their jobs for next year. In early April, meanwhile, graduate students at the University of California San Diego agreed to end a one-month “grading strike” and submit the marks of undergraduates they had taught owing to the changed circumstances caused by the pandemic.

Some university departments have recognized the challenges by awarding higher pay to their graduate students. Pennsylvania State University’s history department, for example, has given its graduate student teachers $1200 each. The University of California Berkeley’s school of public policy, meanwhile, has agreed to pay its (unionized) graduate student teachers for an average of four extra hours of work per week. And the University of California Santa Cruz has responded to the COVID-19 issue by extending by one year the amount of time that it allows graduate students to show the necessary progress they need to advance towards their degrees.

  • More stories of how physicists are coping with the COVID-19 pandemic are available on the Physics World blog.