That must be including lab sections and other fluffy crud. Now that I think about it, every college course I had was taught by a real professor and not the B-team.

I mostly just wanted to say - and I wanted to say this before this present posting - that your discussions and observations on this political race are really the best of any of the many things I read on the web. And I say that as a professional historian obsessed with politics and the current political situation. I hope you can get back to the academic world (if you have left it) because I am sure you would be very good at it, but what you are doing now is very important and you are doing it very well.

Your comments on the 2004 campaign are very insightful - among the best online and better than the SCLM commentators in the press.

As a retired high school social studies teacher, I also echo Herodotus's comments about you as a teacher.  Teaching can be a very rewarding career on all levels.

However, I can't agree with Herodotus that the academic world is a good destination. So many people try to survive as adjunct gypsies, spinning away the best part of their lives clinging to the university.  At 40 or 50, they find themselves drained, out of pocket, and too old to restart their careers.  

The best way to approach teaching as a career is to make it one option to pursue.  If you happen to find a position that is both rewarding and stable, great!  But put most of your effort toward conventional jobs. Not that they are necessarily stable... but almost anything beats a quarterly contract.  

The only thing that made it possible for me to do my grad work were the full ride scholarships i got for 2 years of my master's program and 2 years of my PhD program.  Hallelujah.

TAs are what keeps research universities going.

No, of course they were not in a union, yes the University was taking advantage, as they almost all do.

I wonder if the answer to this problem is to organize the adjuncts and then allow grad students to join that union or to at least to have the union bargain on their behalf.

But to quote my conclusion:

"All in all, though, I guess my position has to be that if any unionization is to take place--an idea I'm not entirely sold on in any case--it has to encompass both teaching assistants and research assistants. Otherwise, it's creating an even more unequal system than the one already in existence."

1.  That $15,000 income doesn't include fee waivers.  If you want grad students to be treated like employees, you might want to include the full costs of employment.  Adding in the costs of annual tuition waivers, graduate student compensation rises sharply.  At UCSD, instate graduate tuition is $8 a year, but out-of-state tuition (and a very large percentage of all graduate students go out-of-state) is $23K.  So an effective income is closer to $40,000.  And don't forget the taxes you save!  If you had to pay for the tuition out-of-pocket, you'd need $40K after taxes, which means your effective income is actually closer to (if not over) $50,000.  Oh the horrors of being middle class!
2.  You don't have to TA.  If you think your time is worth more than $50K a year, take a part-time job to pay the tuition (and taxes) and cover your expenses.  I'm sure you'll have lots more than $15K left over.  And, when you find that 20-hour-per-week part-time job that pays $50K to new college graduates with no useful experience, let me know.  It'd be a paycut, but I'd sure love the extra time with my three small children.
3.  Take out a loan.  If you need more income, either because you're working too many hours to study or dissertate, or because you can't afford even a starving-college-student existence on $15,000 (books must be really expensive), there's always student loans.  Of course, your choice of study may not actually promise enough future income to cover the additional loans, but that may say something important about the marginal utility of an additional English Ph.D.  
4.  Supply and Demand.  There - said it.  GSAs, TAs, RAs, and such are lucky to have these opportunities.  Quit whining.  If graduate programs offered good value for money (in terms of increased future earnings) there'd be no funding problem.  If grad students thought the work-load was too high to justify the potential economic return,  they'd decline the offers to TA, and they'd just do what nearly ALL law, medical, business, and other professional** students (who don't get the luxury of waivers and stipends) do: go to in-state schools, work part-time, work summers, take out loans, get grants or scholarships, live at home, get really frugal, ask your parents to help pay for it, and finish up early whenever possible.

**"professional" in this case refering to students of the professions, not peripatetic eighth-year ABDs whose advisors have forgotten about them.

All education should be more affordable - it is outrageous that states are stiffing students at all levels and including college undergraduates and graduate students.  Just because the Boomers are out of school and heading for the nursing home, they seem to think public education is no longer needed.  How convenient.  But grad students are no different from students on scholarships: should scholarship or work-study undergrads have the right to unionize?  Grad student reform should be addressed along with all other aspects of higher-education funding.  Unionization is (in this case) idiotic.