I encourage all undergrads who are taught by graduate students to learn more about these issues. Grad TAs are vital to what is supposed to be the primary mission of this institution, learning. How can the U of I attract talented graduate students, exchange their labor in classrooms, lab, and offices for their education, and then not pay them enough to live in this community?? It boggles my mind. To get more involved, check out this Facebook group, "I support my TA":

http://www.new.facebook.com/home.php?ref=logo#/group.php?gid=88300152912

TAs are greedy sorry excuses for teachers, I also blame greedy faculty who don't want to teach yet command huge salaries which are primarily funded by tuition dollars, therefore pawning off teaching responsibility to graduate instructors, whom most couldn't teach a fish to swim. To you graduate instructors, you are STUDENTS , no one is twisting your arm to teach. Do what we undergrads do to make ends meet, take loans out and get job at Target or someplace... If its not enough money for your efforts, DON'T TEACH, go find a job off campus and see how much they will pay you!! Not only do grad students water down a education, now they want more money from a school that is already broke? Shame on you people, should be teaching because you enjoy and want to, not for MONEY!! If you want money leave school and get a JOB, not to mention I believe many of you don't even have to pay for school so many of you are already getting a free graduate degree (which is crazy in my book) and now want more money? Pathetic, you people have some real guts.

dude, seriously? You don't seem to know what TAs actually do....

TAs are a horrible concept in the first place but thats a different topic... Paying a premium price for a public school education and getting nothing but amateur instructors is where the problem is. If U of I just wants understands to be taught by graduate instructors, then lower tuition and don't keep making us pay for faculty salaries which we have no tangible benefit from. Graduate instructors also have to realize they are also students and most are getting a free education which is payment enough for their efforts and they also need to learn that they are not pro-instructors, many TAs confuse more students than help I noticed. Mainly in my eyes, TAs are just fillers or shorting comings of a university. A true world class education would only consist of top faculty who are great teachers, nothing less.

I am a TA and I do not support the GEO. In fact, they signed a form to threaten a strike on a previous year when contract negotiating despite even the hard core people that show up to meetings not having a clear concensus that they'd actually be willing to strike.

They also collect dues of which less than 50% goes to actual activities on this campus.

They whined about not being able to get an extra 1/4% last time, when they could have given everyone an extra 1/4% by just lowering dues.

One of the few perks for sending money off campus was that we were given actual negotiators to help work through a contract. They decided to play 'head-games' and use only in-experienced students instead because it would 'get to the university'. They actually use dues to pay students to work on this as a job.

The GEO does not represent the majority of TAs. They represent the union interests.

They forget that the packages offered them are to _attract students_, not to be a salary. That is why the departments that can't raise much money externally for graduate students (say music, or English) don't offer as much. GEO instead keeps propagandaing TO THEIR OWN MEMBERS to try to make them think of their education as a job complete with entitlement to a full salary and perks.

GEO, ask yourself this question and answer honestly: "Did you come here for education or for a job? When choosing schools, did you weigh the education available along with the offers they gave you... or did you just pick the best offered 'job'?"

And yes, I've complained to GEO officers about this when they continue to post propaganda aimed at gradstudents. They ignore their members that don't agree with them. And the GEO will never be able to negotiate well until they also understand where the university is coming from; they instead seem too stubborn to see it, or are unable to try.

Stop sending me propaganda. GEO, you are supposed to be representing your members. Remember when you worked with the university to make a consistent way to handle grievances (from either side). That was great. That added fairness if a difficult situation like harassment was alleged, or numerous other difficult situations. That was supporting your members in a reasonable manner.

Asking for paid maternity leave!? Demanding higher wages? Come on. We are not a workers union. We are a graduate student union.

Whatever your opinion on whether faculty or TA's should be teaching classes, the reality is that the University could not function without graduate employees. We teach over 40% of all 100-level classes. We are also employees who deserve to be treated with respect and provided with a living wage for ourselves and our families. Plain and simple that's all we are asking for.

All large public universities employ TAs, who are developing specialists in their fields and who are trained teachers. Student evaluation numbers for TAs and Professors are typically comparable, with any differences explainable by the fact that TAs often teach the entry-level classes that are in themselves less popular. I have known hundreds of TAs and have been one myself, and there is no reason to think that they are any less or more committed to teaching than faculy on average. It is appropriate--a good and efficient use of resources--to use faculty labor for more specialized classes and in supervisory roles. If the U of I employed only tenure-track faculty, it would have to quadruple tuition to pay for it. If you want tuition low you should love your TAs: they provide an expert service on the cheap. This is not because Professors at the U of I are greedy, either: they typically work more than full-time hours for salaries that are less than what comparably accomplished people would earn in the private sector. TAs, at least in humanities fields, are paid less at the U of I per class than at other comparable universities. I'm a departmental administrator, and I support the grad students in their effort to secure fair wages. I think U of I students and their familes should do the same: without TAs, the quality education the U of I delivers would cost much, much more.

To say that TAs are horrible teachers is really an over-generalization. Like all professionals, some TAs are skilled, some are highly dedicated, some are passionate but untrained, some are uninterested, etc. Making general statements about TAs is not adding anything constructive to this conversation.

The fact is that all major research universities employ specialists-in-training, as the comment above states. And, honestly, having had both professors and TAs as instructors before becoming a TA myself, I can say that being a professor does not necessarily make you a better teacher.

When you're tempted to say that TAs are greedy, think about how the university values your education: they treat your graduate instructors as if they were interchangeable and disposable, paying them less money than they need to survive and care for their families. That’s what they think your education is worth (although I think it’s worth a lot more). All the graduate employees are asking for is to be given a modicum of respect for all the hard work they do. They're here, and they stay, because they care about education. They grade your exams and papers, meet with you in office hours, answer your emails, and write letters of recommendation because they want to support you in your endeavors. But they also need to care for themselves and their families without having to take second jobs that would take away from the time they can spend on their own education and prepping classes.

Earning an advanced degree takes years, a PhD can take six or seven. Therefore, becoming a graduate student is a significant life choice. It’s not one graduate students take lightly: it should not be one the university does either.

Lastly, according to the “grey book” of salaries (http://www.archive.org/details/UniversityOfIllinoisSalaryList2008-2009) embattled administrators Chancellor Herman made $395,500 in 2008-2009 and President White made $450,000. I understand there is a financial crisis, which makes the needs of the university’s lowest paid employees all the more pressing. Instead of fighting the GEO’s desire to ensure all graduate employees earn what the U of I itself says is the minimum living wage for Urbana-Champaign ($16,086), why not ask why the administrators pay themselves hundreds of thousands of dollars while those who work under them, who are in the classroom every teaching you, can barely scrape by? Shouldn’t training, rewarding, and keeping good teachers be a priority of the U of I?

Faculty are greedy...you think its fair that a faculty member makes 130k a year and only teaches one or two classes (which consists of basically him or her reading off power point slides 3 times a week and holding a office hour or two)? You do realize of the 150k about 80K-90k of it comes from tuition dollars?

Been here for 4 years, I have yet to find a TA that actually cares. Going to graduate in spring with $120,000 in debt for nothing but 2nd class instruction. Actually the community college I took classes at over the summer had a lot better instructors for about 1/8th the price.

You think having classes with 500 students is a quality education? Get real

1. where did you get those figures??!! Tuition dollars account for only 15.9% of the UI budget -- http://www.uillinois.edu/our/publications/pdfs/08Budget.pdf

2. Why do you assume that the only tasks that professors have concerns teaching in the classroom. Educate yourself - there are dozens of other responsibilites invovled.

Gaze beyond your navel -- there are numerous TAs who appear on the List of Excellent Instructors, based on STUDENT evaluations, each term. Certainly some of them are doing a very good job.

Faculty salaries differ a great deal by department--there are very, very few humanities faculty members who make anything close to130k. And areas where salaries are higher are often areas (engineering, business, law, accounting, etc) where there are private sector jobs that set the pay scale. If you want experts in these fields, you have to pay them. There is such a thing as a national job market, too: the idea that faculty are greedy seems to suggest that they set their own pay-scale, which is not at all true. Is it greedy, in any industry, to accept the prevailing rate? Think about it before scapegoating people. Also, the idea that faculty do not work full time is just wrong. I am 100% sure that there is nobody on the faculty at U of I who works only while they are in the classroom. People prep classes, run labs, do research, serve on committees, teach independent study classes, do service for their professions etc. You may not like to believe this, but that's the way it is. And all of these tasks are either directly related to the teaching and administration work of the university or to the production of knowledge that is the other part of the university's public role. If you think faculty work only during the hours they are in the classroom, you are just ignorant. And if you choose to persist in this belief, well, then there is nothing I can do to change that, I guess. If you are not getting the education you feel you want/deserve, that is unfortunate. But it simply has nothing to do with faculty or grad student greed. It may mean instead that college--or a large, public one--is not right for you.

but why exactly do TA's and RA's need living wage? I'm not going to complain if these folks get me more money, but I work 10 hours a week, get $10,000/year in tuition waivers, a couple thousand in fee waivers, and a few hundred bucks a month on top of it. My 25% RA gig is giving me at least $18,000 in benefits... again, for 10hrs/week of work.

I'm in grad school because I believe that having a Master's will increase my salary and open up more opportunities to me in the future. There are plenty of loan programs available to me to offset any additional costs. I'll pay for my lost income and loans after I graduate, but I believe it is worth it in the long run, I'm prepared to deal with it.

About the only argument that is somewhat valid is that having a lower stipend hurts the school in recruiting... above and beyond that, I don't have much sympathy for individuals who have Bachelor's Degree's who couldn't figure out if grad school made financial sense to them before applying.

Faculty seem irrelevant to you mainly because this is a large state school. If you are really looking for a quality active learning environment, you are at the wrong school.. U of I is place where you basically work on your own and use faculty mainly as consultants rather than teachers or mentors. I would suggest a small private school (my sister goes to Duke, she has been there for 3 years, and yet has to see a TA or a class that is larger than 20) I agree, it shouldn't be that way, but unfortunately thats way the system is.

Have to realize, no matter what U of Illinois marketing material say, this is a place of research, education is just a bi-product. Research will always trump teaching at Illinois. So you can throw out any notion of having high quality instructors. During your college search you should of seen this in many publications that ranks schools; U of Illinois ranks in the top 5 for TAs teach too many classes, top 5 were professors are scarce etc... Can only blame yourself, you elected to come here.

keyword: SOME...not all or most and now they want more money, awesome!!

I did too, took a chem and a math course over the summer at Harper College near my home, the quality of class and care of the instructors put any class I had at U of Illinois to shame. Sad given U of I charges like 5 times more. Something is not right here, with the money this school is charging and what we get in return... There is a huge gap between tuition and services rendered to students.

Many of us are already taking loans to pay for some costs of advanced degrees, but we're not all going into high paying professions (social work, libraries, etc.) so we can't just "deal with it" in the future.

Not to mention, grad school shouldn't be an option only for those who can pay out of pocket and/or have the financial support of mommy and daddy.

Congratulations if you can make ends meet with your current salary + loans while you're here for a year or two. But PhD students can be here 5 or 8 years, and that's a long time to eat Ramen--especially if they have a family. (Or should graduate education only be affordable to 20-somethings fresh out of college without families?) Why should graduate students agree to work for less than they need to live on? Isn't every worker worth a living wage? And newsflash to the unhappy undergraduates: large universities work because they ration teaching duties between professors and teaching assistants. (In a related phenomenon, healthcare costs are rising because Americans want to see a doctor when a physician's assistant or a nurse would do just as well. Survey courses are to university education what a cold is to medical care.) The university needs graduate students to teach sections and labs, and it should adequately compensate them for that. Yes, that includes both a tuition waiver and enough to live on.

One of the things many people are forgetting is that your TA is working non-stop. I am a graduate student and a TA. I spend easily over 20 hours a week prepping for my class and about 25 hours a week working on my research. Then when I find time, I actually do my homework for the full load of classes I am taking. While I do not complain about my salary, because I am doing research and this field tends to pay its TAs a bit more, most TAs make much less. Either way, the work that graduate students do (and publish) brings a great portion of funding to the University, but our pay does not always reflect that. Furthermore, the new agreement that the Unviersity proposed is taking away more of our rights. I'd be happy if they just kept it the same.

Moreover, because of cut-backs, TAs are taking on more classes than ever. Ten years ago, each TA would teach 1 discussion or lab of 20 students, but now we are juggling up to 3 classes of 20 students. If you want better TAs, then you should help fight for us to have more rights instead of just complaining about how you don't like your TA. That would benefit you, us, and our classes.

"Get a JOB"? Guess what: teaching is a job.

I'm sorry that you have such vitriolic hatred for TAs, but you clearly haven't thought through the alternatives. At the school where I got my undergraduate degree, there were almost no TAs (I had two in my entire four years). The classes were all huge and most professors didn't keep office hours. So if you had a problem, you were basically on your own. You have no clue how good you have it here.

Many of us spend extremely long hours in the lab, on top of our "day job" of teaching ungrateful whiners like yourself. No, we don't teach because we "want to". We do it for the money, so that we can support ourselves for the 5+ years it takes to get a Ph. D.

Without us, the university would have bigger classes, higher tuition, and almost no research to speak of. Telling us we're "greedy" for demanding a living wage is asinine at best.

Alright, just to preface where I am coming from:

I'm from the South Side but I went to prep school and then attended U of I for 4 years, earning a B.A. in anthropology in 2007.

For the last 2 years I have been working in higher education, specifically, the admissions/advising/student service area of an urban community college near Chicago.

So I see this from multiple perspectives: someone educated in social science, a 4-year U of I student, a person from a middle class background who went to elite schools, and now an educational professional.

The first thing everyone needs to realize is that higher education is a business. No matter what anyone says about "teaching, research and public service," this college is a business. In order for this thing to work, it has to sustain itself economically. No college, especially not a state university in one of the brokest states in the USA, is going to give teaching assistants great compensation and benefits, they would go bankrupt. They don't even pay adjunct instructors a living wage, much less TAs.

One of the central precepts of business is supply and demand. Joe White and Dick Herman happen to be bad at what they do, but they make such impressive salaries because not just anybody can (or would want) to be a University president and chancellor. These are very high pressure, selective, specialized jobs, and so the people who apply for them expect lots of money in return.

On the other side of this, PhD candidates for English are a dime a dozen. If you don't want to come study at Illinois because there aren't enough perks or the waivers aren't to your liking, U of I could care less, just go to another school and somebody else will take your place.

Community colleges are just like anyplace else, some instructors and classes are great, some suck. Duke may be a great education, but it also costs a ton of money since it's a private school. Some state schools are better than others. It depends a lot on your major, your classes, your teachers, and your attitude. I've had and met professors and TAs that were great and some that were idiots.

There is no perfect solution and there is no perfect school. Just find out the best place for you. If you hate someplace, then consider going someplace else. Life is short, don't do things you dislike for no good reason.

Peace everyone

Thank you for being honest about your position, and I'm glad that you feel that you can get by on what the University is paying you, and feel confident that you can repay your loans once you graduate. You are very fortunate to be in your position. However, you need to realize that not all grad students are in your position, and expecting all other grad students share your experience is ignorant of the facts and disrespectful to the true hardships your colleagues are facing.

While you decided to go to grad school in order to earn more money in the future, I (and many of the PhD students I know) chose to go to grad school because they were passionate about learning and teaching. Indeed, the experience of grad students varies widely by discipline, and whether an individual is seeking a Master's or PhD. You, apparently, are in a field where earning a Master's degree promises a lucrative future. However, this is not the case in all fields, and it's important to acknowledge the fact that earning a Master's degree is a much shorter enterprise than earning a PhD (2 years vs. 6-9 years). Thus, while it may seem practical to take out loans to help you get by for two years, it's ridiculous for you to expect others who have embarked on a much longer course than you (many of whom graduated from college with large student loans) to be able to do the same.

Also, it's important that you acknowledge that your experience in being well paid for working a mere 10 hours a week is by no means characteristic of the experience of graduate students at UIUC. I have a 33% TAship (which on paper is supposed to be 13 hours, but in reality--teaching two sections with a total of 70 students--is more like 25-30 hours a week) and a 25% RAship (10 hours a week), and I still make less than a living wage. On top of the 35+ hours a week I perform the labor which enables the University to function, I have to write my dissertation, which is another full-time job. Thus, I work almost 80 hours a week, and yet still do not earn a living wage. Many of my colleagues are in similar (or worse) situations, and thus I support the GEO not only for my own benefit, but for the benefit of all campus employees.

Lastly, you write: "I don't have much sympathy for individuals who have Bachelor's Degree's who couldn't figure out if grad school made financial sense to them before applying." The proposals which the University has offered the GEO are regressive, introducing policies which would have definately encouraged me to choose another grad school if I was making the decision today. One example: the administration wants the ability to furlough grad student employees and provide in-kind compensation, which they justify by citing the "financial crisis." Unfortunately, this ignores the reality that this year's budget is LARGER than last year's, and is quite frankly insulting in light of the fact that UIUC administrators already making six figure salaries received 8-9% increases.

Perhaps you will never support a fight which stands to benefit those who are less fortunate than you, but please don't stand in the way of others who are fighting to win the compensation we (as the workers which enable the University to operate) deserve.