Opinion

Checkmate?

The undergraduates of UW are seemingly between a rock and a hard place. On one hand, they have their TAs — rightly or wrongly, locked in a ten-month struggle for a contract. On the other hand, students have their grades, their education and their future. We call on students to realize the TAA put them in this position. It is the TAA that would victimize students in an effort to gain political momentum at the bargaining table.

TAA members are currently considering a strike through an internal vote. Many students have seen these ballot boxes around campus, often tended by a TAA member donning a red shirt. That vote is due to end Monday, when TAA officials will count ballots. According to sources close to the union, if results give the green light to a strike, a two-day walkout would take place some time in the last week of April, provided negotiations do not reach a resolution. If that still does not yield a compromise that suits it, TAA has said it will go on a grade strike. The exact nature of this grade strike is still unclear, but sources say more than 1,000 TAs and PAs, from 30 departments, could participate.

Regardless of whether one does or does not sympathize with the TAA, union negotiators know that with undergraduates fearing for their own academic futures, students will feel pressure to join the protests, rallies and marches against the state’s proposals. Indeed, many will need those grades to meet enrollment requirements for graduate, law, business, or medical schools. Many more, facing skyrocketing tuition costs, need grades for scholarship applications and renewals as well as insurance discounts. The TAA surely knows a grade strike will have negative effects, otherwise there would be no point in threatening one at all. Furthermore, it knows this pressure will lead students to join in its cause.

However, these tactics constitute the academic equivalent of putting a gun to students’ heads: “Support us, or we’ll lay waste to your grades and, in turn, your future.” Students must realize that the state has not forced the TAA into a grade strike. There are many other forms of protest that do not interfere with undergraduates, like gaining support through a faculty senate vote or organizing a march to flip off the state Capitol — both of which the TAA can continue to utilize. The TAA would enter a grade strike of its own free will.

But are undergraduates somehow responsible for their negotiation problems? Why does the TAA find it acceptable to take out their frustration on these students? What did they do to deserve such treatment?

What’s more, the TAA has the biggest soapbox from which to argue their case to undergraduates: Discussion sections. Many TAs have used those classes to make their case. Students must ask themselves if their ever-increasing tuition should pay for some teaching assistants to push their own agenda rather than actually teach, an act intrinsic to the term “teaching assistant.” This board wonders what would happen to an undergraduate who openly dissents from his or her teaching assistant’s views — especially within such classes.

Which brings us back to a fundamental point regarding these tactics; did the TAA threaten to strike when the state legislature significantly raised tuition for undergraduates?

The answer — a resounding no — leads us to pose a simple question to the student body: Should it let the teaching assistants sacrifice undergraduate academic futures when those same teaching assistants were unwilling to sacrifice for the undergraduates?

The TAA is willing to use students as pawns, regardless of whether it hurts undergraduates. So much for solidarity.