MIT and Student Unions

The Tech, the MIT student paper, notes a positive response to unionizing graduate students. They note:

Another survey question asked respondents to select which union-related issues they would want to see addressed in a collective bargaining agreement. Salary, healthcare, and housing came out on top — 65 to 70 percent of all respondents selected them. Most other issues fell in the 40 to 50 percent range, with the exception of safety, which only 30 percent “gave a shit about,” the committee wrote in its email. The exploratory committee that organized the survey consists of four PhD students who hope to initiate dialogue around the issue of graduate student unionization at MIT, although they are not explicitly pro-union. They requested to remain anonymous, for fear that if they were seen as leaders of an unionization movement, they would be subjected to “undue scrutiny” from administrators and disapproval from their advisors.

As I had noted when Harvard started this process, this is very dangerous. Getting a PhD is often an individual process, an examination of the candidates qualities not some groups. Now the article also notes:

167 of the survey respondents self-identified as PhD students, and 38 self-identified as Master’s students. Undergraduates and other MIT affiliates were also able to respond, but graduate student data was extracted and analyzed separately. Respondents ranked their level of support for a potential MIT graduate student union on a scale of 1 (“definitely oppose”) to 7 (“definitely support”). Overall, PhD students averaged 4.86, while Master’s students averaged 5.29.

Thus of the near 5,000 grad students this sample is 200+ which are less than randomly selected. I won't belabor the statistics of selection but in what appears to be an ever growing group-think, proto-socialistic environment, MIT may place itself in a perilous position. Schools like MIT rely upon alumni and Government support. There may come a point when these actions become the "last straw" and result in financial collapse, and loss of academic rigor.