EDITORIAL: Picking the wrong fight in higher education
Tuesday morning Gov. Rick Snyder signed into law a fast-tracked bill denying graduate assistant students at Michigan public universities the right to unionize, while denying collective bargaining rights to those who already have.
The legislation is an unnecessary attempt by the state's Republican Party to score points with voters. Further, while it is the most significant higher education undertaking made by either Gov. Snyder or the state's legislature in recent history, it does little to address the issues at the core of the financial crises at state universities.
This fringe issue deserved to be addressed only after underwhelming funding, slack oversight and skyrocketing student debt. The fact that a ban on graduate student organization was rushed through both the state House and Senate and is now being touted as part of Snyder's "pro-education" message makes his startling inaction on other critical fronts loom even larger.
Michigan students at all levels are in desperate need of solutions for many problems; graduate students potentially organizing to collectively demand better working conditions and compensation hardly qualifies.
While the reputation of unions has been sullied beyond reclamation in many industries, organized labor exists at face-value to defend working groups from exploitation.
There are few non-unionized groups in Michigan that work more for less than graduate "assistants" at our public universities.
For relatively little compensation and at the expectation of long hours spent both in and outside the classroom working on teaching tasks unrelated to their own coursework, graduate students have become a critical piece of the teaching team here at Central Michigan University and at universities across the state and country.
To call them students and suggest that they do not fill roles as teachers shows either a disconnect between the assumptions made by state Republicans and the facts on the ground or a willful ignorance prompted by an anti-labor ideology.
Either way, the law is unlikely to save significant money. At a time when actions are needed, gestures like this serve only to reinforce the notion that legislators do not understand the state of higher education.
The effectiveness and role of unions can be argued, but when it comes to higher education, much greater problems deserve scrutiny first.
