Lakey/My View

Graduate assistants at Florida State University are an easily exploitable and disposable labor force that means little to the university as a whole and next to nothing to FSU’s Board of Trustees. By devaluing its teaching and research community, FSU makes it clear that substandard education and research are acceptable.

This is the message FSU’s bargaining team, and the Board of Trustees it represents, is extending to more than 3,000 graduate assistants in its negotiations with UFF-FSU-GAU (FSU’s graduate assistant union). But what happens in bargaining affects the university as a whole, sending a message to current and incoming students as well as the parents who help them pay the tuition bills and living costs.

FSU graduate assistants teach 28 percent of all undergraduate courses as the instructor of record. But while FSU trusts GAs to be responsible for the education of its undergraduates, its pay and other employment practices tell the real story. FSU’s actions say: We trust you, but we don’t care about you and the classrooms/research projects you control.

FSU has an average GA stipend of $13,900 per year. Making things worse, FSU requires that GAs pay over $1,800 a year in student fees to work. After fees, the average GA income is $12,100. Even though FSU’s chief negotiator said that “FSU doesn’t want its GAs living in poverty,” an annual income of $12,100 is only $430 dollars over the 2013 federal poverty guideline.

How does this translate for incoming students? It says FSU does not care to pay for quality work and so does not care about the quality of your undergraduate education.

Florida State — unlike Florida A&M, the University of South Florida and the University of Florida — does not offer full health insurance reimbursement for GAs. The University of Florida, FSU’s rival in pre-eminent status, gives full health insurance reimbursement, has a minimum stipend for full-time GAs that is 25 percent higher than FSU’s, and has begun addressing the high cost of student fees through a fee-relief program.

FSU says that it “can’t afford” to waive the GA fees-to-work. Really? Right now, GA fees total around $6 million a year, but FSU’s total operating budget is over $1 billion a year. Covering GA fees would take only 0.6 percent of FSU’s budget.

Trustees Chair Allan Bense, the BOT and its bargaining team are communicating loud and clear: We don’t care about GAs, we don’t care about high-quality research and teaching, and we don’t care about the quality of education at FSU. The question remains: Can the students, GAs, faculty and alumni take back the higher-education standards of our university? Will we all just sit by and let FSU’s BOT peck away at our academic integrity?

UFF-FSU-GAU stands for GAs and values higher-education standards at FSU. It is time for FSU’s trustees to stand up and act as if they value education by demonstrating that they values graduate assistant teaching and FSU’s research community in bargaining negotiations.

Lakey, her full legal name, is public relations chair of United Faculty of Florida-Florida State University-Graduate Assistants United (http://www.fsugau.org). Contact her at butterflylake@gmail.com.