Support Basic Research in the Sciences
In the Humanities:
Every unfunded or underfunded Humanities research group/individual receives a guaranteed year of support without teaching, in order to do dissertation research. This is called a "Dissertation Fellowship," and it is promised to students in every humanities and social science department, excepting economics, to be taken in years 5 or 6.
Furthermore, most humanities students have guaranteed full funding for three years without teaching (years 1, 2 and 5).
In the Sciences:
Students are not allowed to apply for the dissertation fellowship.
Students teach usually in their first two years, and then join a group. If that group is underfunded, often the graduate students must teach every year until they finish their degree.
In underfunded areas of the sciences (e.g. theoretical physics, astronomy, evolutionary biology, mathematics, some areas of chemistry, paleontology), some graduate students must rely on a teaching salary for their basic funding for most of their 5-7 year tenure at Yale.
Teaching often distracts one from dissertation research, and hinders progress towards the degree.
Casualization?
By demanding that underfunded scientists teach every year to receive basic funding, Yale is able to secure a sizeable and very cheap teaching workforce in the sciences. This enables Yale to get its teaching done in these areas without hiring additional faculty. Multiply this by all the universities following Yale's example, and this makes even fewer jobs available in these areas nationwide.
The recent rise of "postdocs" exacerbates this trend. If universities can get their basic teaching done by graduate TAs, and their basic research done by postdocs and grad students, why hire more than the bare minimum of faculty PIs?
Guarantees of funded time-off from teaching will ensure that we finish our PhD research without spending all our time doing the teaching that we'd like to be hired as faculty to do!
Solutions
Yale should extend the "dissertation fellowship" to students in the Sciences, and in Economics.
Yale should make more teaching-free university funding options available to the sciences.
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This page was last updated on: November 5, 1999 |
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Graduate Employees and Students Organization |
http://www.geso.org |
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