The Point: Admin’s Grad Assistantship Reallocation Plan is Bad Policy

10/31/2024

This week’s Point is written by Alex Mueller, Professor and Graduate Program Director in the Department of English.   The essay below addresses the Administration’s new policy for allocating Graduate Student Assistantships which creates an unnecessary layer of bureaucracy, ignores shared governance, and will be actively harmful to many graduate students and many graduate programs. The accompanying attachment is a “Resolution on Graduate Assistantship Allocation Policies” that will be considered at Faculty Council meeting on November 4^th.

Graduate Assistant Reallocation without Compensation, or Bureaucratic Excellence in Graduate Education?^[1]

“Bill: What should I say?

Ted [shrugs]: Make something up.

Bill: Be excellent to each other.” --- Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989)

“Excellence draws only one boundary: the boundary that protects the unrestricted power of the bureaucracy. And if a particular department’s kind of excellence fails to conform, then that department can be eliminated without apparent risk to the system.” --- Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (1996), p. 33.

Like so many of you, I believe in the ideals of a public research university that provides access to higher education and supports research in scientific and humanistic areas of inquiry, all in an effort to pursue knowledge and achieve the common good. Yet, as Bill Readings warned decades ago, the University writ large has become less interested in knowledge and has become more focused on the highly ambiguous and often obfuscating idea of “excellence.” I mean, who doesn’t want to be excellent? Even Bill and Ted told us to be so.

What does it mean for UMass Boston to be excellent? Just a quick look around will tell you that we all must want it. Consider the Center for Academic Excellence, the Office of Inclusive Excellence & Belonging, The Center of Excellence for Veterans . . . Excellence has become so ingrained in everything the University imagines itself to be doing, so much a part of its “common sense,” that it cannot be questioned, which makes its presence and use so powerful. It has even accumulated a vocabulary of its own, including terms like “best practice,” “holistic approach,” and “student success, which again, we all want and feel almost obliged to endorse. Consider especially our strategic plan, For the Times, where you find these terms everywhere.

For the topic I want to address today, graduate education, we also find on the Graduate Student website that we provide “a strong emphasis on academic excellence,” a goal that is supported by the funding we offer, particularly through graduate assistantships (GAs). Graduate students who receive this funding typically receive one .5 (or ½) Teaching Assistantship (TA), which requires nine hours of work per week, often supporting an instructor of a large lecture course. In return, they get their tuition reduced by half and receive a stipend of $5088 for one academic semester. For most students, this means they receive this tuition benefit for the entire academic year and double that stipend, a mere $10,176. If you compare this to their colleagues at UMass Amherst, you find that Amherst students receive over two thousand dollars more per academic year, with better health benefits, including free vision and dental care. Now, some might object that it is unfair of us to compare our “excellence” with the flagship campus’ “excellence,” but when we compare the cost-of-living differences using MIT’s Living Wage calculator, we can see that a student who lives in Boston must earn approximately $15,000 more than a student who lives in Amherst in order to live comfortably.

This doesn’t sound excellent at all, does it? That is why the Graduate Employee Organization (GEO) is attempting to raise the stipend in their new contract negotiations. Thankfully, our Office of Graduate Studies (OGS), specifically our Associate Vice Provost of Graduate Education Tracy Baynard, has recently informed College of Liberal Arts (CLA) Graduate Program Directors (GPDs) that they “intend to increase the budget for GAs in order to raise stipends and want to be intentional in our planning to build increasingly stronger financial support for GAs starting next year.”^[2] Unfortunately, this plan to increase funding appears to be dependent upon the adoption of a new GA allocation system, which would dramatically change graduate education on this campus. In the rest of this essay, I will first explain what makes this policy new and how it would transform the way we have historically assigned assistantships to graduate students. To explain how this allocation model would create unnecessary competition for resources and would harm graduate programs, I will end by focusing on two (of the many) problems it represents: a violation of shared governance and an expansion of bureaucracy. If these problems are not addressed, I fear that our graduate programs will not only fail to “be excellent.” They may be eliminated. 

Graduate Assistant Reallocation

Each year in the recent past, sometime in December or January, OGS informs graduate programs of the number of GAs they will receive for the upcoming academic year. Graduate programs use this information to determine how many students they can accept into their programs with the promise of funding. Because this funding has been so consistent from year to year, doctoral programs are able to make multiyear commitments to their admitted students so that these students can make informed financial decisions. Similarly, Master’s programs have been able to select students based on factors aside from access to personal wealth. Significantly, GPDs have been empowered to assign assistantships to students based on their applications, which include information about their research and teaching backgrounds, as well as professional experiences, that GPDs determine have been entrusted to use to determine which GA positions are most appropriate for them.

In an October 2^nd memo to deans, Provost Joseph Berger announced a new allocation model that adopts an entirely new, putatively “holistic approach” to these assignments.^[3] Rather than entrust GPDs with the authority to make assignments for graduate assistantships, allocations will now be determined by upper-level administrators based on “instructional needs of our schools and colleges,” which are identified through a new (and somewhat opaque) application process that requires each department to offer rationales for each potential GA position. Applications will be evaluated by a review committee, the composition of which has not been clearly determined, who will prioritize requests that:

• Demonstrate a direct contribution to instructional capacity and effectiveness
  • Provides [sic] GAs with explicit professional development, specialized skills training, and academic learning.
  • Prioritize support or [sic] doctoral students, while providing opportunities for Master’s students
  • Demonstrate clear objectives, duties/responsiblities [sic]
  • Demonstrate clear outcomes for the program and the GA.

This application process creates a competition for assignments that will be phased in over three years: one-third of the assignments will be eligible for reallocation in the first year, a second-third will be eligible in the second year, and a last-third will be eligible in the third year.

A Violation of Shared Governance

Whenever Administration develops new policies, they are expected to abide by the guidelines set out by the UMass Board of Trustees in what is known as the Wellman Document.^[4] This document makes clear in a section titled “Campus Governing Bodies,” itself defined as “senates and assemblies, departments, schools, and colleges,” that administration must consult, “when appropriate,” these governing bodies who “will have the privilege of contributing to long-range planning, the preparation of the annual budget request, and the allocation of available resources” [italics are mine]. In the development of this new GA allocation policy, the Provost and OGS did not consult with GPDs, the most appropriate governing body, particularly since they make the GA assignments within their departments. Instead, the new allocation policy shifts the focus away from the needs of particular graduate programs and their students to the “instructional capacity” of undergraduate colleges and departments (a shift in focus that portends a move from providing an affordable education to students to providing a cheap labor force for the university). This transfers the authority and priority of making GA assignments from GPDs to chairs and deans.

An Expansion of Bureaucracy

This violation of shared governance is troubling because the new allocation policy adds a new layer of bureaucracy to existing procedures for making GA assignments. As Baynard notes, this new application process is the result of the University’s efforts to align their allocation resources to the strategic plan, which has resulted in new a Beacon Budget Model and a new “faculty hiring plan.”^[5] The comparison to the “faculty hiring plan” is telling because departments are now no longer able to replace tenure line vacancies with any sort of surety or ease. Instead, these lines are absorbed into a pool of lines that departments must compete for through an application, which is clearly the model for the new GA allocation application. The completion of these applications requires multiple meetings among faculty and staff to decide upon priorities, the delegation of tasks, and the completion of application worksheets. In the case of faculty lines, most departments wait for months with bated breath only to hear that their applications have been denied. In the end, these bureaucratic efforts are all sound and fury, signifying nothing.

We are supposed to be reassured that these processes are fair and equitable because they align with our strategic priorities, which are all aimed at academic and inclusive excellence. As Bill Readings has warned us, however, the invocation of “excellence” creates a “boundary that protects the unrestricted power of the bureaucracy,” which amplifies the authority of the managerial class, who can disguise cuts as “reallocations” because they are all done following “best practices” that support student “success.” Following Readings, we can predict that, in the case of the new GA allocation policy, these reallocations will likely shrink or shutter graduate programs whose “kind of excellence fails to conform” to the bureaucratic principles the Administration have created, again, without consulting GPDs. For example, any of the research-focused graduate programs that do not currently have professional development or training programs, which would prepare their GAs to teach their own classes, would presumably be placed at a disadvantage.^[6] These programs would not just lose any guarantee of consistent GA support. They would also increase exponentially the work of their chairs, GPDs, and staff to meet a bureaucratic mandate that might be all for nought. If departments don’t have the capacity to provide such training programs, would they have to rely on other departments or units to train their students? Or would they just lose funding?

Further, the explicit de-prioritization of MA programs fundamentally shifts UMass Boston’s intellectual direction, threatening longstanding programs that have educated generations of Boston’s best and brightest simply because they do not result in a doctorate. The impact of this withdrawal of support – which there is no indication the administration fully considered since it was announced without any input from the graduate programs affected – will be to shutter programs that have afforded opportunities for thousands of students to pursue advanced degrees. The magnitude of this cannot be overstated: without funding, these programs cannot survive – and without Master’s students, many PhD programs will face existential threats of their own.

A Resolution on Graduate Assistant Allocation Policies

To make matters even worse, departments are being asked to complete these applications for their college deans before December. In the case of CLA, each department must identify every possible GA position in their department, adjacent positions in other units, and provide rationales for each, even when necessary information, such as enrollment estimates for large lecture courses, cannot be known. Because this policy is being implemented without appropriate consultation in an unreasonably short timeframe, GPDs across the university, as well as the CLA Senate, have composed and signed the attached resolution, which will be discussed and voted upon at the Faculty Council meeting on November 4^th. The resolution demands that this policy be paused until a committee of GPDs has the appropriate opportunity to evaluate its merits and offer their own contributions to any new allocation system going forward.

As FSU members, we must also support the GEO’s bargaining efforts and support the Administration’s stated commitment to raise their stipends. If you ask any GPD, I am confident they would agree that wages for graduate workers are a priority any new allocation policy needs to address. However, decimating graduate programs with cuts to existing GA allocations is a cynical path to achieving that goal, and it suggests that graduate workers must choose between commitment to education and commitment to a living wage, which is a false choice Administration should not be presenting. And without any sense of a shared goal or outcomes, faculty and staff are faced with a bureaucratic brick wall that will exhaust any who attempt to scale it. And that, as Bill and Ted remind us, isn’t excellent. It’s bogus.