The passage of the Teaching Assistant Association’s strike plan has triggered mixed student and faculty responses. Teaching assistants are scheduled to engage in a walkout April 27 and 28 as well as a grade strike if the state and university fail to meet the TAA’s salary and health-care requests.

English TA Mike Quieto, a TAA board member, strongly supports the strike. He explained that although the present fight concerns TA paychecks, improving undergraduate education is a TAA main objective.

“[The strike] is a way to educate the community, university and state of Wisconsin about how important the work we do really is,” Quieto said. “The work we do happens to be educating the best and brightest of Wisconsin’s future and we take that very serious — seriously enough to consider disrupting the university.”

However, some individuals think the strike diverts attention from the source of the problem to negatively target and affect the students. Students who are graduating, transferring or applying to colleges within UW worry their grades will not be submitted or counted this semester.

“I have a difficult time supporting the TAA since their actions are now crossing into what I pay for and what I expect from this university. Therefore it is hard for me as a student to support what they do because they have infringed on the benefits of my education,” a UW junior who wished to remain unidentified said.

Other students question the supposedly sparse salaries that TAs receive.

“A lot of TAs are extremely hard workers and care a lot about their students, and I think that TAs and teachers in general should be paid more for the quality of schooling that we are getting here at Madison. One of my TAs is a single mother that needs to support a family,” UW sophomore Allison Hesla said.

If the state and university refrain from drawing amenable contracts, more than a thousand TAs will strike from more than 40 departments next week.

UW professor David Brown, a finance, investment and banking instructor in the School of Business, said though none of the TAs in the School of Business are striking, he understands both sides of the struggle. He said TAs deserve what he would consider adequate compensation but that the grade strike would cause disruption and delay for the students.

UW research assistant and graduate student Matt Borden, who would benefit from TAA progress in negotiations, said he thinks current proceedings are unfair.

“[The strike] is unfortunate because the issue is between the TAA, the state of Wisconsin and the university, [but] the effects are going to be felt by the students who did not create the problem and probably, by and large, do not understand the root of the problem.”

To alleviate any confusion that undergraduates may have about the TAA strike, students are encouraged to join a discussion session tonight at 6 p.m. at the Memorial Union, where TAA members will be on hand to answer questions.