Some Teaching Fellows Are Organizing For Better Pay and Better Communications

A teaching fellow at Harvard is a latter-day Minotaur--half student, half teacher--who is wholly ill at ease in either role. As a graduate student he sits in lectures taking frantic notes like any undergraduate. But as a section man he becomes an instructor and judge. The teaching fellow finds this ambiguous status baffling. Perhaps more than baffling--frustrating, irritating, even insulting.

If the TF's problems had been chiefly concerned with intangibles, the chances are that little more would come out of their difficulties than long talks over coffee. But many of them worry about more elemental things: too little money and too much work. They point to other universities that pay their teaching fellows more than Harvard does, and they complain bitterly about the cost of living in Cambridge during an inflationary era. They often add that they are overworked, loaded down with sections, labs and tutees. They claim they have too little time either to work closely with their undergraduates or to prepare for their own generals and theses.

Disenfranchisement bothers them as well. Being neither student nor teacher, the teaching fellows are as unwelcome at faculty meetings as at the conferences of undergraduate organizations. Much of the direct contact with undergraduates is their responsibility, yet they feel they have little to say about how undergraduate courses are taught. They have reservations about graduate programs but no means to express them. In general, their influence in the University seems to them incommensurate with their numbers (Harvard has more than 900 TF's) and their importance. They hunger to be consulted on the issues that affect them, and they want some kind of recognition of their function as teachers.

But no one speaks for the teaching fellows. They are scattered throughout Harvard's departments, isolated from one another by the institutional arrangements and by their own widely divergent interests. Unlike faculty or undergraduates, they haveno common life, and there is no spokesman in the University who represents their special point of view. They feel cut off and atomized.

Out of the atmosphere of vague discontent has grown the Federation of Teaching Fellows. The Federation is less than a week old, and even its most ardent supporters do not believe that it can solve all the TF's problems. Its specific demands are nebulous, and even its general purposes and the scope of its membership are still uncertain. But it has given the teaching fellows a vehicle for expression, and at least until it has had a chance to prove itself effective or ineffective, it is likely to serve as a focus for a multitude of complaints and proposals.

Genesis

The Federation's genesis was a meeting of eight teaching fellows in Phillips Brooks House last Nov. 17. The group drew up a short list of grievances and decided to call an open meeting in a month's time.

It was that first open meeting which gave the organization its initial impetus. Eighty-three enthusiastic TF's appeared, though the publicity for the meeting had been rudimentary. The crowd vociferously supported the idea of an association, and even the meeting's organizers conceded that the response had exceeded their wildest expectations. "Somehow we had tapped a source of discontent among teaching fellows," said Susan B. Schwartz, a member of the original group.

The teaching fellows organized a steering committee with an eye toward the possible formation of a union, perhaps affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers. But when the steering committee met Dec. 18, some of the drawbacks of unionism had already become clear. The first was what one member of the group called "the spectre of Berkeley," where only a few days before a militant union of teaching fellows had played a major role in leading the much-criticized student demonstrators. The Harvard group knew there was no comparable discontent in Cambridge, and they feared that setting up a union with the power to call a strike would frighten away moderate teaching fellows and would guarantee administration and faculty hostility to the organization.

The organizers also felt that a union--especially one connected with the AFT--would have a straight wages-and-hours bias both inappropriate for the university community and inadequate for the variety of issues to be considered. They worried that the concept of trade unionism also might offend some teaching fellows, who often consider themselves professionals or future professionals.

Content Without Form

Still interested in testing the ground, the steering committee decided to call meetings in each department to elect representatives for a new committee and to gauge just what kind of support TF's would give to an organization. The group also wanted to look into the possibility of having the organization designated as the official bargaining agent for Harvard's teaching fellows--the content of unionism without necessarily the form.

But when the reconstituted steering committee met on Feb. 8, the idea of a union received what was probably its death blow. First, the committee discovered that both the National Labor Relations Board and its Massachusetts counterpart excluded "charitible organizations"--such as universities--from their jurisdiction, and would not supervise an election to designate their group the TF's official bargaining agent. Second, they found that the teaching fellows at the departmental meetings approached the idea of a union very gingerly. As one departmental representative said, "The response was overwhelmingly chicken. Nobody wants to have a confrontation." The teaching fellows had no desire to set themselves at odds with the usually moderate and flexible Harvard administration, at least until the possibilities for compromise had been exhausted. The path seemed clear: create a loose, reasonable sort of association, the kind that the maximum number of TF's would feel comfortable supporting. The steering committee therefore decided that the new organization should call itself, in conveniently ambiguous terms, a "federation."

The same meeting resolved another troublesome question for the organization: should it try to establish itself as a body with no specific objectives, or should it immediately attack a single question to rally support? The first course appealed to those who feared a disasterously narrow appeal from the single-issue approach. They preferred to set up the organization first, and then let issues feed into it as they arose. But the departmental reports had also indicated that most of the teaching fellows, even in the more apathetic departments, were interested specifically in wages and work load. Kenneth A. Waltzer, one of the proponents of the single-issue approach, explained later, "There has to be an issue which galvanizes people. You can't form an organization just by getting it on the books." The steering committee finally elected to take the economic issue approach at the start, and delegated a subcommittee to formulate salary demands.

Ingenious Petition

At the second general meeting on Feb. 15, 150 teaching fellows gathered in Burr to endorse overwhelmingly the committee's recommendation that the organization address itself initially to the wages and work load problem. The subcommittee had ingeniously proposed that a petition be used to present the salary request to the University. Once approved, by the organization, the petition would be signed by as many TF's as possible, giving the leadership a fairly legitimate claim to representing the teaching fellows in salary talks without actually being their bargaining agent. The meeting approved the subcommittee's petition as a "guideline" for talks, and requested a figure of $1600 per fifth as a minimum salary for teaching fellows, $400 more than the top rate a TF presently receives. As for the fifth itself, the complex measuring unit by which the University calculates how much work a teaching fellow is doing, all the assembly could decide was set up another committee to study the question. The meeting also gave the organization a name--the Federation of Teaching Fellows--and a temporary executive troika.

The other issues originally involved in the TF's discontent--a role in the formulation of academic policy and a voice on other issues--have been set aside but not forgotten. The concept of teaching fellows' helping to set course methods and content or speaking out on general issues like the draft has a higher alienation potential than the relatively safe demand for more money to live on. The Feb. 15 meeting voted that the Federation should deal with issues of undergraduate education, but for the moment, the Federation will probably play it safe until it has had a chance to set its foundations firmly with bread and butter issues.

There are still two distinct, unresolved conceptions of what the Federation should be and how it should operate. One group sees it as a consultative body, a forum through which teaching fellows could communicate with each other and with the Faculty and administration. The other group sees the Federation as a pressure group that would actively push for material benefits for teaching fellows. The two conceptions are by no means mutually exclusive, but they would eventually prove devisive.

Meaty Percentage

At the moment, the Federation is not yet over the hump. Several serious problems remain for it to deal with. The first is simply to drum up interest among the other TF's. Though its general meetings have been well-attended, the Federation has only reached a fraction of the teaching fellows in the University, and, as one organizer said, "Nobody's going to listen to any proposition we make until we have a good meaty percentage of teaching fellows behind us."

There is also the question of how much power the Federation will have to represent before the University will heed its demands. This is not a problem of numbers so much as it is a problem of militancy. With the organization in its present loose form, the University may not be required to take its requests seriously. If the administration chose to politely ignore the Federation, the leadership would have to confront the tough question: what do we have to do to make them listen to us?

But the organization still faces a basic concern in not alienating too many other teaching fellows, undergraduates or faculty. The TF's are in considerable part planning on academic careers, and their futures may depend on a favorable recommendation from a Faculty member. And, as aspiring professors themselves, they may already share a faculty viewpoint without actually being part of the faculty.

Life of its Own

Another difficulty is continuity. Since most teaching fellows stay at Harvard for only three or four years, the organization will have to develop a life of its own that will sustain it when the present set of leaders is gone.

But the ultimate problem seems to be Harvard's decentralization. There is very little but wages and hours that can unite a teaching fellow in Geology with one in Music on some common course of action. Perhaps the solution will be truly federative--an interdepartmental organization linking strong departmental groups. But at the moment it is impossible to predict what form the Federation will finally assume.

The future of the Federation is sure to become clearer in the weeks ahead, however, as it moves toward its first official contact with the University. Most of the Feb. 15 meeting took place under two words which were scrawled on the Burr A blackboard during the first minutes of discussion: "Fairness" and "Effectiveness." If the Federation can resolve the two to the satisfaction of most of Harvard's teaching fellows, the unhappy TF's may at last have found the voice they want