Not everyone had the chance to attend Tom Apple’s series of talks last week trying to explain why, exactly, everybody with concerns about the new graduate student rules is being relabeled as a big dumb dummyhead who should stop crying and let them get on with running the schools; and some people who did attend one missed other talks from the week and so missed out on the way the plan changed from day to day. For those who didn’t catch the spectacle, I’d like to offer a composite speech explaining the new system. It’s a little thing that goes something like this...
Well, uh, good afternoon ... it’s good to see such a rousing turnout of interest from the graduate students today. Many of you were clearly afraid these rules would change the way you live and work, and it isn’t fair not to inform you how to react. So: you are to enthusiastically love every one of them, including the rule where if you find a place to park, we get to confiscate your car.
I want you to remember there’s no hint anywhere that Rensselaer is anything but a great university. We’ve got wide swaths of excellence, and a lot of really good excellence, and a lot of excellent goodness, and patches of really gosh darned good, and, well, Ray. But we’ve got excellent excellence in all the things we excel in, and we need the incentive for our goodness to excel excellently. (Pardon?) I’m sorry, I don’t mean Ray, I mean Bob. Er, Tom. Lisa. Ken. Keith.
We all hate to sully good academic policy by bringing economics into it, but consider some of the fiscal problems having graduate students brings. We’ve found graduate students are a massive, unprofitable drain on our resources. Many graduate students meet faculty members on an almost weekly basis for example, taking up time they might otherwise spend writing grant proposals. While there are many more undergraduate students, they represent almost no burden on faculty time, as they only meet their professors the week before final exams to ask how they could save their grades.
When you have the incentive of a report, such as the one we’ve had prepared, which you may not read, comparing our graduate school to those of other universities, whose names we may not tell you, we find we are very underpriced and will not be of an economic value until we dramatically raise tuition. This way we hope to have the incentive to achieve what we see in schools such as MIT, Cornell, MIT, Cal Tech, MIT, Carnegie-Mellon, MIT, MIT, and MIT. Mike’s the splotch. Definitely Kate.
Now, consider what we could do to improve our revenue stream. According to the American Iron and Steel Institute, in 1945 alone the United States produced 53,223,169 tons of pig iron. If we at the University collected just six dollars per year—not even the cost of a rotten Star Trek novel—for each ton, that would be over three hundred million dollars annually. The problem is finding incentive to earn this money—it’s there for the taking!
As we plunge headfirst into this “Grant” model of graduate student support (yes ... Grant was the President who died impoverished) it is important graduate students learn to cling to faculty members who will be in highly profitable fields of research. You can tell the difference since profitable faculty turn blue in ultraviolet light. It’s David, not Kate. I mean Other Ken. Josh.
I’ve heard some concerns about the plan allowing people to be teaching assistants for no more than two years and what impact this may have on undergraduate education. Our study finds that no undergraduate hears a word the teaching assistant says except two weeks before final exams when asking how to save his or her grade, and we’re confident that we can train even novices to explain “You’ll have to travel back in time”.
It’s not Josh. I meant to say Miles. Dale.
We’ve heard some disturbing rumors that some of you took the incentive to excel that we’re providing here and are trying to find ways around this new policy, and all we can say is: We’re really disappointed in you. It’s unfair of you to try to manipulate the rules of the system to get something that happens to be advantageous for you. Where’s the incentive for the school?
Oh, yes, there’s a question in the back there? What happens ... if you use your two years of support ... and your advisor can’t find any grant money for you? Well, you know, what happens if gigantic alien squirrels invade and conquer upstate New York before you finish your degree? We’d be silly making a plan for something absurd, so why waste incentive about something as ridiculous as next year’s alien squirrel invasion? We have to draw the line somewhere.
Now, it’s getting pretty late—yes, I see a lot of you still have concerns about the policy, and all I can say is, don’t worry, we’ll think of something. Let me close by reminding you all how much more incentive you have now, and hope you’ll feel ever-increasing incentive. Thank you and it’s Wendy, not Dale. Now go out there, and sell, sell, sell!
Good incentive. Evening. Good evening.
Joseph Nebus
Graduate Student, Mathematics
