Service to the Profession

When I was in grad school, I did a lot of what academics call "service" and in general found it fairly satisfying. Most prominently, I was a senator in our Graduate Student Senate, then parliamentarian, then vice president; later I did a little bit of work for the Graduate Employee Union as the "guide" for the local. I also spent five semesters at one of two assistant directors for the Freshman English Program. Beyond those things, I served on a lot of committees, and so on. (I've previously talked about these experiences here and here.)

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I was reminded of the former last week because it's actually the tenth anniversary of when the UConn GEU was certified. I wasn't terribly involved in this process, but I was present throughout it. I was incoming vice president of the GSS when our health insurance was unilaterally changed by UConn HR; basically, they had ended up in an untenable financial situation, but their solution was to take it all out on us. When it was presented to the Senate, they span it so it looked like an upgrade, and it was really only once the new plan went into effect that summer that we began to realize just how awful it was. I actually had a dentist call me wanting to know why we had made such a terrible switch!

The GSS worked on solutions through its official avenues, but we were pretty limited in our power; meanwhile, outraged graduate students were kicking off the process of setting up a union. As long as I had been at UConn and involved in the GSS, people would come to meetings wondering if we were going to unionize... but it had never gone anywhere because to be honest, we had it pretty good. UConn paid above average for stipend and had great health insurance. The only people who wanted to unionize were the "true believers," those committed socialists who just love forming unions, and they had no ability to win over your average graduate assistant. The health insurance switcheroo showed everyone, though, that no matter how good you had it, the boss could always make it terrible at their discretion.

My big memory of this all was a meeting where the Dean of the Graduate School (who I did really like, and I think was pushed into an awful position by a bunch of other people's decisions) came to the GSS to tell us that the GA health plan was still losing money, and thus needed to be made even worse—and he was going to let us advise him on how to make it worse. We saw this as an attempt to gain our "approval" for whatever change was imposed; a group of people involved with the union introduced a motion rejecting the false binary and demanding UConn recognize our right to collectively bargain.

A year later, we had the fastest union card drive in higher ed history (something like that anyway) and whatever UConn saved by pushing us onto crappy health insurance was more than cancelled out by the kind of gains the GEU was able to make in collective bargaining.

So in honor of the tenth anniversary of that, the GEU invited a number of us from the early days to come and speak (mostly via Zoom) at a membership meeting. It was fun to see some people I had not thought about in a long time, and hear about some of those successes we had had. It was a reminder to me that with committed people on your side, you can really accomplish something.

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I was also reminded of the latter, working in the Freshman English office. Here at UT, our Director of Academic Writing recently left the university, so the department and the Dean have ended up restructuring the position somewhat; it's been split into a Director and an Assistant Director, which are voted on by the department. (The old Director had the position as part of his contract; it never changed.) A number of people asked me if I was going to run, so I did; I thought other people might run, but in the end, I was unopposed. The Academic Writing Committee recommended me to the department, and at our last department meeting of the academic year, I was elected to the position.

I posted about it on facebook, and a friend sent me a congratulatory text, asking if it came with "with more money and security," I think envisioning it as a sort of promotion. The answer is, of course, no; I get a course release, so I'm down to a 3/3 load. Other than that, I am doing the exact same job I was doing!

But I am excited about it. The split of the old position into two works in a way that I think benefits both the assistant director and the program. The director deals with all the administrative bullshit, while I get to work on mentoring faculty and developing program pedagogy. I think (we'll see what I think in a year) that this means I get to do the fun stuff, while also it ensures this kind of important work isn't neglected by the director because of his focus on scheduling and putting out administrative fires.

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At the GEU Zoom meeting, someone talked about how as a graduate student, you get thrust into leadership positions quickly because there's such churn among grad students. This is true but I hadn't really thought about it before; I was Assistant Director of Freshman English in my fourth year (second year of Ph.D.) and I was GSS vice president in my sixth (fourth of my Ph.D.). Here at UT, I am in my seventh year as faculty, but just now reaching the point where you start to get tapped to do significant leadership in service.

For me this is a real boon; it has allowed me to stretch myself and find more pleasure in a job that can sometimes feel thankless. I enjoyed doing service in grad school, and think I am finally getting to do so again here.