Administration unconvinced by GESO report

COURTESY GESO NUMBERS GAME: GESO claims its new statistics prove that the number of Yale teaching fellows has grown at a faster rate than that of other colleges.

"Seventy percent of the undergraduate teaching at Yale is performed by non-permanent teachers--graduate students and instructors not on the tenure track." This is one of several seemingly alarming statistics cited in the Graduate Employees and Students Organization's (GESO) new report, entitled "Casual in Blue."

But according to Provost Alison Richard, "GESO's numbers are extremely misleading."

GESO will hold a rally with local unions 34 and 35 and national labor leaders to raise campus awareness of the report and the issues it raises on Fri.,
Apr. 9. The organization will also discuss the report at its semi-annual membership meeting on Wed., Apr. 14.

Yale still refuses to negotiate with GESO organizers. "The University does not recognize GESO and does not meet with GESO, since its sole purpose is to establish a union of graduate teaching assistants, which the University opposes," Tom Conroy, deputy director of the Office of Public Affairs, explained.

The main purpose of the report, which was released on Tues., Mar. 20, is to raise awareness of what GESO believes is Yale's increasing tendency to make"casual laborers"--graduate students and adjunct instructors who are employed to teach undergraduates but who are not on the tenure track--responsible for a large portion of undergraduate instruction and grading. "Casual laborers" are described in the GESO report as "part-time hires who are paid lower salaries without benefits, job stability, or a permanent relationship with the school."

"Casualization once used to be associated only with secondary state schools, but now it has penetrated into the Ivy League," GESO chair Curtis Mitchell, GRD '03, said.

The report argues that casualization stifles the development of original scholarship at Yale. "Temporary instructors are less likely to exercise their nominal academic freedom, to follow controversial lines of scholarship, or to advance and defend unpopular positions, because their future employment is particularly contingent," it states.

Yale has not answered the report's "casualization" premise, but the University has rushed to discredit the report's statistics. "The method used in the GESO report
to analyze teaching at Yale distorts the
educational experience of Yale undergraduates," Graduate School Dean Susan Hockfield said.

GESO claims its method of determining the percentage of Yale classes taught by graduate students, which counts the number of "contact hours" between students and instructors, is more accurate than the University's current method of weighing teaching by the number of students being taught. According to Mitchell, GESO researchers obtained lists from the Registrar's Office and were careful to cross-check all information with teaching assistants, statistics from specific departments, and evidence from Yale-sponsored studies.

But Yale isn't buying it. In a letter to the New York Times, published on Thurs., Apr. 1, Yale College Dean Richard Brodhead, BR '68, GRD '72, used History Professor Glenda Gilmore's American Politics and Society course to illustrate the discrepancy between GESO's and the Administration's method of "measuring teaching." The course consists of two one-hour lectures by Gilmore and eight one-hour discussion sections led by graduate students each week.

Brodhead wrote, "GESO would claim that graduate students teach eight hours while Professor Gilmore teaches two. Yet, from the perspective of a Yale College student, Professor Gilmore teaches two of every three classroom hours."

University President Richard Levin, GRD '74, also disagreed with the statistics presented in "Casual in Blue." According to Levin, graduate students are the primary instructors in only seven percent of undergraduate courses, which adjunct professors teach 26 percent of courses. "[Adjunct professors] include many highly qualified, full-time foreign language and freshman-English instructors, as well as numerous distinguished teachers from outside the academic world who teach here part-time," Levin said, citing William F. Buckley, Jr.,
DC '50, as an example.

Brodhead added that, according to the University's figures, approximately 67 percent of Yale College courses are taught by ladder faculty, including assistant, associate, and full professors--"almost the exact reverse of the numbers cited by GESO."

According to Richard, Yale thinks it can provide a clearer picture. "The Administration will work to give what I believe is a more meaningful rendering of the way in which graduate students contribute to undergraduate education--which is a great contribution, but as an enhancement of the teaching done by faculty."

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