I’ve been reflecting lately on when I knew I wanted to be a professor. The idea fully crystallized for me about 20 years ago as a graduate teaching assistant (GTA) at the University of Colorado. Like many faculty I know, being a GTA helped me understand (and demystify a bit) what a career as a professor might actually be like; after all, I was a first-generation college kid and didn’t have the first clue about this career path. That first GTA position, and many more that followed, inspired my passion for teaching but also helped me better understand firsthand the challenges that instructors and students experience in the classroom.
Remarkably, so little has changed in 20 years. Many of the same experiences I had then — inadequate pay, poor supervision, and lack of professional development — are shared today by our college’s GTAs. We can and must do better to support our GTAs in their roles and provide them with the critical financial and supervisory support, training, and holistic professional development they need and deserve.
Currently, our college is PSU’s single largest employer of graduate students, and I am very proud that we have worked to find creative ways to continue to support as many of these important positions as possible for both our teaching and research mission. But as Dean, I have realized that our college has inherited a system of GTAs (supports, allocations, etc.) that was built at a very different time with very different realities.
When I became our college’s first Associate Dean of Research and Graduate programs in 2016, we had over 300 graduate employees in CLAS. With steady enrollment declines (we’ve lost 40% of our STEM students in six years) and growing inflationary costs, we now have about 200. As the largest investor in graduate employees campus-wide (nearly $6M annually), I have been asking chairs and faculty what might we do if we were to invest the same amount today but build a new model from scratch?
What current practices might we keep? What might we change? How might we develop a collegewide GTA training experience and professional development program that is truly nationally distinctive?
One question that keeps arising is why some units have so many GTAs and others have so few or none? As new programs grow and can demonstrate need, how do we ensure equitable investment and distribution of graduate student support? How does every investment in a GTA directly contribute to enhancing undergraduate persistence and graduation? How can we show this? To ensure that CLAS is a thriving home of undergraduate student success and graduate education, these are just a few of the many critical questions we must now take up as a college.
To help us get to these answers, I charged Associate Dean Heejun Chang with convening an advisory group of CLAS faculty, chairs, staff, and graduate students to take up the critical work on proposing and developing a new model for supporting graduate employees in CLAS.
For further details, the charge, and membership, please check out this website: pdx.edu/liberal-art-sciences/clas-gta-support.
For many of you, sustaining — and ideally growing — support for graduate students, especially GTAs, is one of your highest priorities. It’s mine too. It became a pathway to my lifelong earning.
But like so much of higher ed, it is time to change and, like all of PSU, change is most certainly coming to CLAS.