4A - The Michigan Daily - Thursday, March 24, 2005 OPINION * £ JASON Z. PESICK Editor in Chief SUHAEL MOMIN SAM SINGER Editorial Page Editors ALISON GO Managing Editor EDITED AND MANAGED BY STUDENTS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN SINCE 1890 420 MAYNARD STREET ANN ARBOR, MI 48109 tothedaily@michigandaily.com NOTABLE QUOTABLE He has to be bogus, a pro-life fanatic." - Ronald Cranford, the doctor who testified to a series of Florida courts that Terri Schai- vo was in a permanent vegetative state, com- menting on William Cheshire, a doctor who declared yesterday that Schaivo may be mini- mally conscious, as reported by CNN.com. COLIN DALY TH~f NICICIAIAN Ii. - LIFE 1S SA CE Poi (IN'SE~RT'NEEDLESS DEPNT14HERE)- Harvard, Harvard, Harvard ZAC PESKOWITZ THE LOWER FREQUENCIES he New York Times, among other esteemed institutions in American life, has a Harvard fetish. In the past few months, the Times has entered the rarefied world of Harvard sorority life, mulled over Harvard Business School's response to an admissions scandal, profiled two separate Harvard economists, David Cutler and Roland Fryer, in consecutive weeks of The New York Times magazine, and provided inordinate commentary and analysis on a man named Law- rence Summers. In addition to these dispatches from the banks of the Charles, The Times makes sure to offer its readers liberal dashes of expert opinion from the Harvard professoriate. I've read everything from Lawrence F. Katz's thoughts on black head coaches in the National Basketball Association to Harrison G. Pope Jr.'s on steroids. By combining the simple words "Harvard" and "assistant profes- sor," instant gravitas is conferred to even the most thinly-sourced and poorly researched stories. The Gray Lady would go to great lengths to deny the existence of this infatuation, but I'll let the record speak for itself. Lexis-Nexis tells me that The Times has run 181 stories with the word "Harvard" in the past month. This compares to the 156 articles that have appeared in the paper in the same time period with the word "Michigan." This is not the University of Michigan, just Michigan. This includes everything from a story that men- tions Iraq war protestors on Chicago's Michigan Avenue to a story that refers to the connections between Michigan's Saginaw Chippewa tribe and lobbyist Jack Abramoff. But it's been an especial- ly tempestuous month at Harvard, so doesn't this render this altogether imprecise experiment even less rigorous? Fine. I performed the same exercise for March of 2004 and found remarkably similar results. Harvard garnered 179 distinct mentions and Michigan gets a dispiriting 155. What accounts for this fascination? While Harvard is rich, powerful, old and has some very smart people working for it, there at least half a dozen universities in the United States with equal credentials and are far more impressive in some dimensions than Harvard. Unlike some of its brethren, Harvard is located in the heart of a metropolis, so the university's easy access pro- vides a distinct advantage to the lazy journalist. The University of Chicago, Stanford and Cal Tech are every bit the academic institution as Harvard and are each within a relatively easy drive to a major airport. Maybe these schools get short shrift because they're not located on the East Coast. So I can't explain this obsession beyond stating Harvard gets so much ink precisely because so many people think Harvard is important because it gets so much ink and on and'on in a recursive loop. But what I do know is that when reporters use Harvard as keyhole to the world of the Ameri- can undergraduate, their efforts end in farce. Two days ago, The Times ran a story examining criticisms that a cleaning service run by Harvard students exacerbated elitism at the school. Where most people would see an impressive example of undergraduate entrepreneurialism, the Harvard administration and the campus newspaper limn class conflict. This is a controversy that simply could not exist at any other school in America. Nowhere are faux meritocrats so entrenched that such poorly-reasoned arguments could gain trac- tion. Instead of getting data on American under- graduates, we get dada. The most noxious variant on this format is the Harvard undergraduate as the apotheosis of the American life story. The most dreadful example in The Times is Warren St. John's report on soror- ity life at Harvard. To quote St. John's staggeringly vacuous prose at length: "But while Harvard soror- ities share the same Greek letters as their party- hardy sister chapters at Michigan, Texas and Ole Miss, their social agendas are startlingly whole- some, perhaps giving new meaning to the phrase Harvard Square. They hold kickball tournaments and pajama parties and take apple-picking trips. Their recruitment meetings take place not at bars but at the local Finagle a Bagel and Au Bon Pain. And far from being catty and exclusive, they strive to welcome any woman who might hope to join." In addition to his credulous portrayal of Harvard sororities as bastions of openness, St. John has an acute inability to recognize that his description of Harvard sorority life is indistinguishable from that of any other school. Harvard University, a place that neither war- rants nor needs its outsized place in the American imagination. Peskowitz can be reached at zpeskowi@umich.edu. el LETTERS TO THE EDITOR Uim i~isgui irg real wuge cuffs fir GSIs as incrases To THE DAILy: Why does one accept one wage and the asso- ciated job and not another? What is the value of a teacher? Matt Nolan's letter to the editor (GSIs must re-examine motivations for walkout, 03/22/2005) demonstrates a substantial igno- rance of the answers to these questions. When one attends an undergraduate institution or a professional school, there is an understanding that they are borrowing from their future income to pay for this. Surely Nolan, an aspiring lawyer, understands this fact, as do many of the students at this university. Unlike Nolan, many of us will not be making exorbitant wages as lawyers and cannot afford to go into such debt. Examine the professional schools at which a majority of the people pay their tuition and then examine their subsequent wages. Then ask yourself, would I be willing to do that if I were to earn the wage of an assistant professor until I am well into my 30s? Should academia exist at all? Others transform our wages into full-time, year-round equivalent wages and often come up with amazingly large numbers. Graduate student instructors often argue with these calculations, but maybe we should not. How much value do we produce? The average economics graduate student instructor teaches two 30-person dis- cussion sections each semester. In-state tuition is $8,535, and out-of-state is $26,754. Let's say that the average revenue per student is about $11,758, and each student takes four classes. This is derived by assuming average tuition is about $15,458 (assuming 60 percent of undergraduates are in-state) and the average scholarship award is about $3,700. Suppose now that the GSI and the instructor split the teaching duty for that sec- tion and that 40 percent of revenue goes towards buildings and equipment, calculations show that the average GSI generates approximately $53,000 a year for the University. Is $14,000 plus benefits and a tuition waver that unreasonable? Maybe we should not be asking why GSIs earn so much but rather why students have to pay so much. Finally it is worth noting that the current con- tract gives GSIs nominal pay raises of an average of 2.5 percent a year. This is equal to the average rate of inflation in the Ann Arbor-Detroit-Flint area since the year 2000. The administration is proposing average nominal pay raises of 2.25 percent in this coming contract. This is a real pay cut and not a raise. Peter Morrow Whatever could warrant such a frivolous waste of resources? That's right kids, it's the 43rd Annual Graduate Student Instructor Strike/Weenie Roast. For reasons known only to the higher power, I read your flyer. Standard fare, up until a fascinat- ing nugget you snuck in at the very end. I quote: "Crossing a picket line is actively siding with the University against us." I tried to comprehend the phenomenal arro- gance it takes to write a sentence like that, but my ears started bleeding. To lighten the load on my hemorrhaging brain, I did some math: $22,000 dollars a year for tuition. Two semesters. Four classes a semester. Twenty-seven meetings of each class. Flip the two, carry the one, work the shaft and lo and behold, I came to a figure of $100. One hundred dollars that I pay for every class I attend. Two classes on Thursday means (Wait, could one of you meet me at Espresso Royale to help with the figures? My hours are 11:30 a.m. to 11:33 a.m.) $200 that you're asking me to forfeit by staying away from Angell Hall. "Crossing a picket line is actively siding with the University against us." Funny, and here I thought crossing the picket line meant not throw- ing $200 into the toilet. Two. Hundred. That's two week's pay for me. Could one of you, preferably the one with the goatee and the bullhorn, please try to explain to me why your money is more valu- able than mine? You're the invaluable educators, so please try to explain that otherwordly math to a lowly English major. You want my help? Fine, but all I ask in return is 200 bucks and that 12 of your burliest follow me to my professor's office hours and loudly demand that he not lower my grade for missing class. Maybe we can print some flyers. Those things always work. "Crossing a picket line is actively siding with the University against us." No matter who you are or what you do, if your boss is giving you a hard stiff one, I urge you to fight back. I commend you for doing that. But to spout off some tripe like the above sentence, guilt-tripping the hard-working and high-paying students of this University into doing your work for you is inexcusable. If none of you geniuses are creative enough to come up with something better than an Angell Hall picket line, then maybe you should walk, because I sincerely doubt you have anything to teach me. Matt Sheehy LSA senior TS%,w ho are:cia: to the deew fr lac acid ratnt To mtiE DAILY: and in order to hone their teaching skills. Most of the time, this is a fairly natural and symbiot- ic relationship, with GSIs getting needed fund- ing and experience, and the University getting more than 25 percent of their teaching com- pleted without spending more than one tenth of 1 percent of their instructional budget. At the moment, GSIs are renegotiating their contract with the University because, after three years, it has expired. Renegotiation gives GSIs the chance to address aspects of their rela- tionship with the University that are no longer symbiotic because of inflation, the rising cost of living in Ann Arbor and the changing legal and political climate in the United States. Specifically, in the new contract, GSIs want their wages to be adjusted for inflation. They want, given Ann Arbor's high cost of living, to be given a raise so that they might be able to afford rent and other necessities (Ann Arbor ranks 140th out of 187 cities in terms of afford- ability.) They also want to protect students' ability to insure their partners, regardless of sexual orientation. A letter to the editor (GSIs must re-examine motivations for walkout, 03/22/2005) charac- terized many of these concerns as frivolous and greedy. The underlying assumption in this letter was that GSIs have it easy and don't earn what they're paid or deserve the right to ask for fair treatment. That the position of GSI exists is something we are grateful for, but that gratitude doesn't absolve the University from providing us with the resources we need to maintain a good quality of life. It is not frivolous to ask that: our families have health insurance, international students be treated fairly, the University keep old prom- ises about child care subsidies, our wages keep up with inflation, that we are able to afford safe housing and healthy food or even to ask that hourly wages be constant, whether a GSI works 20 hours, 10 hours or two hours a week. It's in the best interest of not only graduate students, but the University as a whole, when teachers stand up for their rights. Contrary to what was suggested in the letter to the edi- tor, the Graduate Employees' Organization works hard to negotiate with the University and only considers a strike when there are no other options. As teachers, GSIs don't take canceled classes lightly. While a strike may stop classroom learning for a day, it is intend- ed to be the impetus for positive long-term outcomes, which in the long run will benefit learning for all. 0 0 0 t. !? > Rossie Hutchinson