Now I REALLY don't like grad students. They have just lost whatever shred of sympathy the undergraduate body may have had for them. John, Undergrad Penn

Before people start ragging on all grad students...remember that we are not all members of GET-UP, nor do we all approve of activities like this. A Grad Student, NOT a member of GET-UP Center City

As another non-GET-UP grad student, I would like to follow up on the previous post. The main reason why GET-UP doesn't represent all graduate students is because back when they set the rules for the unionization vote in 2003, they defined out anyone who would oppose it (most professional school students, all of SEAS, most of the physical and bio sciences, etc. save those that were TAs). That left 975 people out of 10,000 graduate students. Fewer than 10%. And as a SEAS TA that voted then, I was harassed by near daily emails, phone calls, or visits to my lab by GET-UP. The union idea might have a positive effect for students in departments where students are not adequately funded, yet the problem lies not in the university but in the funding agencies. If the NEA had nearly as much money as the NSF, NIH, etc. (not that those institutions have enough either), then the predominantly liberal arts/humanities individuals that make up GET-UP would not be in such a funding situation. As to their conduct, I don't think that handing out flyers will have any impact. Policy change comes from dialogue with the administrators, and GET-UP needs that rather than pamphlets. Another Non-GET-UP grad student, Grad Student Philly

Distributing such flyers to high school students and their families is outrageous! GET-UP should be ashamed of themselves. If you want to complain, go to your department chairperson. Ranting to teenagers merely embarrasses the graduate students. Graduate students know the situation before they apply. If they do not like the program or the program rules, then don't go to graduate school. Do you see medical students protesting that they have to do a residency? Do you see law students bombarding people with nonsensical flyers because they have to take the Bar Exam? Maybe if GET-UP stopped their complaining and focused on their studies and research the rankings of SAS could match up with Penn Law, Penn Medicine and Wharton! GET OFF your soapbox and GET UP to class! Steven Ebert, C'96, Fels '98, L'00, Attorney New York, NY steven.ebert@ejlaw.net

I spend a lot of time and money in supporting the school. This is a slap in the face to all the alumni who donate their time and money. There are ways of being heard. Bashing the school to pre-frosh and their parents is not one. Unions create anti-competitive markets and will push out the most qualified people. (Hopefully, the econ TAs are not in on this otherwise it would show we need new ones.) I think Get-Up should Get-OUT Scott, Consultant NY

GET-UP has clearly taken an activism seminar or two. They found a great tactic to rile up the Penn community, risking their cause. Sometimes risks like that pay off. I agree with its cause and disagree with the solution of unionization. I found it encouraging that there are thoughtful high school students (and parents) coming to Penn who have balance in their opinion about the cause, the study, and the stats. Penn is in good shape if it can attract people who know that there is always more than one side to the story. Robin, Special Projects Associate Philadelphia

whoah, swallow the vitriol! The handout simply says that tenured or tenure track professors only teach 40% of the classes in SAS. That's just a fact. It's not supposed to keep students from coming to Penn as the GET-UP member said in the article, it's supposed to galvanize the parents to advocate against this practice to the university. They're certainly not calling for graduate students to stop teaching, they're calling for the university to stop employing adjuncts and instead hire more faculty. That will obviously improve undergraduate education and it's something the parents probably support. grad student, student penn

GET UP represents only a tiny group of self interested lackies that are tools of the AFL CIO. I actively worked against GET UP prior to the ridiculous vote a few years back. GET UP's claims were bizarre and twisted, coming from a group of privileged students. Grad students are STUDENTS not employees. We chose this path and no one forced us to come to a school that waives tuition and pays us a stipend to be able to attend one of the most prestigious places of learning.We knew when we came here that the pay was low and benefits (other than individual health insurance) was not included. Teaching is our payback for the privilege and I welcomed the opportunity to be a TA in such a place. It afforded me a wonderful opportunity to work with seasoned faculty and learn teaching techniques in an environment of excellent students. GET UP needs to GET OUT. But the AFLCIO has found a willing group of whining children to be their mouthpiece. So this will probably continue.... Grad Student, Grad Student Penn

Well, I wonder what percent of the non-Faculty taught classes are the language requirement classes. Does it really make since for a tenured professor who makes 6 figures to teach Spanish 101? That would be a waste of University funds. Alumni

The 40% statistic should not be surprising. The American Association of University Professors has been trying to get this news out for years now. The GET-UP members who were distributing flyers to pre-frosh were just bringing it home, and pointing out what it means for grad students at Penn (who now teach more of the undergrad curriculum than professors, and yet do so without any contract or rights as an employee). I can understand why people are angry. I am too. I think it is outrageous that Penn has come to depend so heavily on grads to do the work of the university. But why take it out on the messengers? concerned grad, student Center City

Though I strongly disagree with GET-UP's decision to air the University's dirty laundry to pre-frosh, I would caution everyone on this forum who has taken the time and energy to criticize the studies and teaching of grad students to take a closer look at the study. It does reveal something essential about a Penn education - something important enough for the GET-UP-conducted study to appear on the cover of a recent issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education. This will undoubtedly affect Penn's cherished "4th" ranking in US News and in turn the value of a Penn diploma not to mention the quality of student Penn is able to attract. Needless to say, Penn's obstinacy will soon be doing a lot more to its pre-pre-frosh in preventing them from considering application to Penn than GET-UP has with its pamphlets. Dean Bushnell says "the data [of the study] is skewed" and when asked what makes it "skewed" she has replied that the data "counts the teaching of language and writing classes." I guess her assumption and argument is that those subjects simply shouldn't "count" when it comes to assessing what is taught at Penn and what goes into an undergraduate education. For the sake of my friends entering Penn as undergraduates and in the middle of their educations here, I hope Dean Bushnell's implicit opinion about the importance of composition and language skills is a minority one. The University's policy of employing the cheapest labor it can find (in some cases denying its educators health and dental insurance) to teach its undergraduates is a problem not just for the grad students whose labor is being exploited as part of the apology they have to make for choosing an underfunded profession, but seems an urgent problem for those invested in the quality of undergraduate education available at Penn. Rebecca, comp lit grad student Penn

There is a simple solution! This kind of activism is this administration's fault. The temporary teachers that are bringing up these issues are not to blame. They are merely bringing attention to an inconvenient truth - temporary teachers do most of the undergraduate teaching at Penn today. The Gutmann administration is to blame for ignoring these issues and stonewalling these people. These kinds of concerns can be dealt with if the administration was willing to sit down with grad students and temporary teachers and discuss how working conditions could be improved. The administration has refused to have such meetings and conversations even though it promised to do so in the past. And administrators like Bushnell continue to pretend nothing is the matter - that the study is 'skewed.' Hah! This strategy isn't going to solve anything - it'll just make things worse. As far as the specific tactic - apparently it has brought a lot of attention to this issue. So from the perspective of someone who wants to the truth to be known and the issues addressed, the tactic is perfect and totally justified! Joe, Lawyer Philadelphia

I would like to know how GET-UP calculates the 40% number. My guess is that they count every lecture, seminar, and discussion class equally. So, a Professor's lecture class with 3 discussion sections taught by graduate students probably counts as "25%" taught by the professor, according to these guys. Same problem with language classes, as someone already pointed out. It's the usual manipulation and deceit from GET-UP. former penn grad student, professor university of Virginia

Correcting earlier half truths about GET-UP First and foremost, allow me to reiterate Peter Gaffney's explanation that we are not trying to embarrass the school or discourage people from coming here. (Penn Preview attendants have generally already decided to come here.) Rather, we are trying to raise awareness about the administration's labor policies and how these policies affect the quality of undergraduate education. Read the report and make up your own mind. It's at: http://www.getuponline.org/casualization/CasualizedPenn.pdf Lecturers and grad students are generally good teachers who do care about their students. Nonetheless, when they're insecure in their jobs, working other jobs across town, and constantly applying for tenure-track positions, they are not as engaged as tenure eligible professors. If you want the best teacher-scholars in the classroom, you need to give them tenure or they will go elsewhere to other schools or other careers. Now, on to some specific responses to previous posts. I second the 7th post (why all the vitriol?), and I would like to add some corrections to some of the half-true claims. First and foremost, post # 3 argues, "Policy change comes from dialogue with the administrators, and GET-UP needs that rather than pamphlets." Now if only Amy Gutmann would follow through on her promise to meet with us--a promise she made before she took office in 2004. Instead, her office ignores every invitation we make for dialogue. In post # 4, Penn Law alum Steven Ebert argues that grad students "know the situation before they apply." Again, this is a nice thought, but unfortunately the administration regularly changes the rules on grad employee funding. When many current student employees applied, dissertation fellowships were the norm. Now, thanks to SAS administration policies of cutbacks, such fellowships are increasingly rare. Further, in persuading grad students to vote against unionizing, the school website promised five years' funding and health care for grad employees. Yet many students today are being told that 4 years or less is plenty, thank you. Next, post # 3 insists that GET-UP rigged our representation unit because we only included graduate student employees. Well, the point of a union is to negotiate on behalf of employees. In a school with several gigantic professional graduate programs, a small minority of graduate students will be paid graduate employees of the university. We seek to represent that group, and according to DP exit polls, we won that right in 2003. Unfortunately, the school impounded the ballots. To borrow from Dr. Gutmann's book titles, this is neither deliberative democracy nor democratic education. In post #5, Scott insists that unions "push out the most qualified people." That doesn't seem to happen in any of the major league sports whose players are represented by unions, and it doesn't hold true in Hollywood, either. Union shops consistently provide the kind of pay and benefits that ATTRACT the most qualified people. If Penn gave its grad employees better pay, longer packages, and more meaningful on-the-job protections-all effects of a union-then it would further improve the already high quality pool of candidates for these positions. Since we teach ten percent of SAS undergrad lectures and a super majority of recitations and labs, this would directly improve the quality of undergraduate education at Penn. Finally, many have questioned the research methods of the report, but these critics admit to not having read the report. (For instance, in calculating the 40% figure, if a Prof teaches a large class with 3 recitation sections, only the professor gets credit for teaching that lecture. The recitations count separately.) Read the report yourself at: http://www.getuponline.org/casualization/CasualizedPenn.pdf At least one post trumpets the administration's mistaken notion that first year language and composition classes somehow do not count. First of all, these classes are a vital part of a college education. Even cutting out these classes, tenure-track faculty still only teaches 60% of remaining classes. I am glad to see that this report has earned so many people's attention. If only the administration would sit down with us (rather than blaming the messenger) and talk about it, we could all work together at improving the quality of a Penn education at all levels. Sincerely, Bill Herman, Spokesperson, GET-UP Philadelphia

well . . if you hate graduate students so much, then it's all the more reason for you to be concerned that they are teaching so many of your classes. As has been said, all these graduate students are doing is giving parents and prospective students important and material facts that the university would never provide in its own promotional materials to them. While it's true it's in the graduate students' interests for universities to limit the number of non-tenure-track professors that are used, it's also in the parents' and prospectives' interest: teachers with a short-term contract have no investment in the school and its mission, are unable to develop advising relationships with their students, and (in part because of the low pay, which forces them to take on too many courses at once or have outside jobs) are unable to devote a sufficient amount of time to each course. Who is in the best position to encourage Penn to reconsider these disturbing policies? Not current students: Penn already has them as a sure thing. Rather, prospective students and parents are in the best position. But it's precisely these people who are most unlikely to know of these problems (not being mentioned in the University's shiny brochures). What's wrong with finding some alternative means of getting these people highly relevant information that they would otherwise not get? A. Friend Cambridge, Mass.

I just went to that link, and the second page says this "study" (using the term very loosely here) was limited to the School of Arts and Sciences. I guess GET-UP doesn't think Wharton, SEAS, and Nursing are a part of Penn undergrad, even though they account for about 40% of all Penn undergraduate enrollment. Or (more likely) including undergraduate classes at those three schools would produce results that GET-UP wouldn't like. anon grad student

I just read the entire thing. The methodological problems are even worse... for one thing the entire College of General Studies was excluded, even though most CGS classes are open to all undergraduates and CGS is a division of the School of Arts and Sciences (so claiming that 40% of "School of Arts and Sciences" are taught by tenured/tenure-track faculty is an outright lie given that CGS courses, which make up a significant portion of all SAS courses, were not counted). I also don't think it's defensible to exclude all courses in graduate departments that allow or even encourage undergrads to take their classes. The law school, for example, encourages Penn undergrads to take law classes for undergraduate credit and publishes a list of courses open to undergraduates on its website. Given that undergraduates can, and do, take these courses, it does not make much sense to exclude them. But once again, including those departments, CGS, Wharton, SEAS, nursing, etc. would probably get results that are unfavorable to GET-UP, so there's no chance they'd ever calculate them. Perhaps someone should do a study that exposes GET-UP's duplicity. anon grad student anonlawstudent@gmail.com

Anon grad student: if the College of General Studies was included, the percentage of courses taught by non-tenured faculty would be even higher. None of the regular faculty want to teach CGS students (night courses with pretty close to open enrollment), so as a result it's mostly graduate student TAs who teach them. A. Friend, Cambridge, Mass

have been a number of luxury in the Acura, and for its cheap prices, have also been by the majority of .