Actually, I'm going to disagree just a bit with the other responses that have been given here. Traditionally graduate teaching assistants (which is what this sounds like to me) were not considered employees. Two consequences of that approach were that graduate teaching assistants could not collectively bargain over pay and working conditions (in other words join union, which is the most common way collective bargaining occurs) and they didn't have to be paid (though some colleges and universities do pay them). But interestingly enough, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) held in 2016 that graduate teaching assistants are employees and thus have the right to collectively bargain. Thus one could argue that if they are employees for the purpose of collective bargaining then they are also employees for the purpose of paying wages, in which case they would have to be paid at least minimum wage for their work. There is at least now one union specifically for graduate teaching assistants. My point is that there may indeed be an argument here that graduate teaching assistants should be paid, not that there is a clearly an obligation to pay them. The matter has not yet been tested in court, but I expect that will be coming. You can look into this issue and contact the union, too, if you are interested in really trying to push for pay for this work.
(There must be something weird in the stars today — this is the second post today I've discussed recent NLRB rulings, the other was on a different forum. Ordinarily the decisions of the NLRB don't come up much in discussion on consumer legal forums.)
That is an Ivy League case. OP is not at an Ivy League institution. Many public institutions of higher learning had unionized long before this. There was at least one Big Ten university that had unionized gradate students almost 20 years before this case.
Furthermore, if I've guessed correctly, OP's institution's graduate students are already represented by a labor union.
Finally, within academia, if one feels that they have a grievance, one does best exploring the proper channels and whether they have a proper grievance. Going off and threatening legal action when there are internal mechanisms is a bad idea.
I am not gonna argue with your first point.
But your p.s is obviously wrong on multiple levels.
1- The subject you are learning should be related, with your logic why don't they make every PhD trim the campus trees to learn gardening?
2- A whole semester spent on grading 50+ students' homeworks won't teach me anything. Grading 2 or 3 sets of assignments is enough. There are many other important things to be tought in a "supervised teaching" course.
If everyone has your attitude, nothing will get fixed.
And you would be incorrect. Although many who pursue PhDs do not go on to pursue academic careers, those that do benefit from having some hands on experience. And many of the skills you learn doing these tasks transfer to other areas. I see nothing wrong with expecting PhD students helping instructors manage, teach, grade, interact with students outside of class and, if appropriate, plan and give a lecture in the course. Learning how to plan and deliver lectures, how to organize course topics, and other tasks related to teaching a course are very important skills.
A former Colleague From Hell (CFH) could have benefitted from doing such tasks in graduate school at the Tier 1 institution where he got his graduate degree. Instead, he got booted from tenure track, and has subsequently been booted from every other institution he dabbled at teaching in. He didn't last in nonacademic employment either. Last I heard he was an adjunct in remote Alaska... Because he *couldn't* effectively write or grade exams, for one thing, and couldn't resolve student complaints about his grading methods.
But those of us from lesser ranked graduate programs had no problem passing our tenure track assessments. We had years of class management experience before stepping into the classroom as a faculty member.
Your institution recently (within the past 5 years) added this requirement, in an effort to better prepare their PhD students for future employment.
But hey, listen solely to the people with no academic experience. And even less to those with academic experience in an engineering college.
