By
the Wildcat Opinions Board
Teaching assistants are an important asset to the University of Arizona. This is a given fact considering the UA is a research-based institution, requiring its professors to not only teach classes but also spend countless hours digging up info for the books.
Hence the need for TAs - one UA President Peter Likins is slowly beginning to realize - is crucial in that it alleviates work for professors and offers students a better incentive for attending the University of Arizona for graduate school.
At last month's Arizona Board of Regents meeting, Likins announced that more teaching assistants would be hired starting this fall to alleviate their current workload from 25 to 30 hours per week to about 20 - a small step in the right direction.
Yet, the keyword in that sentence is "small." The UA has acknowledged its growing need to offer incentives for its TAs in order to keep graduate programs booming and professors from being overworked. But it has yet to offer TAs a cohesive incentives package for their efforts.
Take graduate housing for example. Christopher City, slated to be demolished sometime this month, was the only available graduate housing available through the UA.
And what about tuition costs? The UA is only in the 54th percentile in the nation when it comes to monetary compensation for TAs. This percentile would rise to 88 if registration fees were waived and even then, an estimated $2.5 million would be needed to compensate for the loss of those fees.
Likins himself said he wouldn't mind offering TAs tuition waivers but that it's not his decision to make - currently, members of the Arizona Board of Regents are the only ones with the freedom to allocate waivers.
ABOR has said it doesn't have a problem granting Likins the authority to waive tuition for TAs yet if the state does not have the appropriate funds to cover for waived fees, the tuition cut would literally be useless.
"There are many ideas concerning how waivers might be paid for," Jason Auxier, an optical sciences graduate students and president of the UA's Graduate and Professional Student Council, said in March regarding the proposal to eliminate tuition fees. "If the cost is minimum, then they will accept it. If the state must pay for the entire amount of waivers, then they might reject it."
The list goes on and on - parking pass expenses, fees for books and supplies and not to mention money for gas and food. Essentially, being a TA means living like an undergraduate student with the added weight of teaching up to 30 hours a week.
So yes, offering to deduct a few hours of the total workload is an ideal incentive for TAs campus-wide. Yet, what this university needs to do is focus on offering its teaching and research assistants a more complete package for attending the UA - a package that would include deals on housing, tuition and living expenses in addition to workload compensation.
What it boils down to is that several small steps should by now be resulting in one large step. Then and only then will the UA be an attractive place that graduate students will want to attend.
Staff Editorials represent the collaborative stance of the Wildcat Opinions Board.
