As a senior, I'd like to issue a statement about a possible teaching assistant work stoppage-Oh God, please strike.
Why should they strike? They clearly deserve free health care for propping up this allegedly state-funded university. More importantly, it would be a hilarious senior gift to watch the state try to run its flagship university without TAs. I know senior gifts are usually from seniors to the school, but after four years of tuition increases that brought nothing but fewer and larger classes and a fatter check for Katharine Lyall, I'm not in a very giving mood.
And I'm not in the mood for this two-day strike thing, either. I've had TAs who didn't show up for class twice. It didn't impress anybody. Only an indefinite stoppage will do.
Surely, UW would eventually find a solution if the TAs went on strike, like robot TAs, switching to an all-Internet format or offering to turn Bascom Abe into a Swoosh. But for about a week, I bet the state would command the university to go TA-free.
It would be a laugh riot, largely at the expense of professors.
Imagine your lecturers from \Geology 101: Rocks and rock-like objects"" and ""Communications 340: Movies starring your roommates"" performing the tasks your TA normally handles. No more standing in front of a huge hall pointing at a nine-year-old PowerPoint presentation, firing off inaccurate statistics because no student ever called them on it.
Coffee shops would overflow with sport-coated and silver-haired men, eyes bloodshot from staying up for three days straight to grade 200 papers on Rousseau's ""Social Contract."" Bespectacled, middle-aged women would shout, ""But I have tenure,"" as they push TV carts over the bridge so some freshman can use a video in his presentation.
Professors would recall the salad days when they could count on TAs to translate and baby-sit.
Philosophy, political science and history professors would look back nostalgically on when they could say whatever they wanted to the 62,000-student crowd in 125 Ag Hall and count on TAs to explain it away. They might drop a tear remembering interactions like this:
Professor: ""In summary, Sartre empirically abnegated a duopoly amongst battling paradigmatic constructs and debased the political capital of platonic hegemony with the tautological metaphysics of his existentialist nihilism.""
Student: ""What?""
Professor: ""His epistemology was postmodern. Ask your TA.""
These sweet memories would make them angry with the state for firing the TAs. The faculty would mobilize and talk of job action. Madison's nine conservative professors would become the Midwest's most ironic union agitators.
At noon on the Friday of the first week of the strike, they would congregate at Library Mall, banging on buckets, marching in circles and yelling ""Professors unassisted, the state must be resisted.""
Then, the oldest group of marchers in the history of political demonstration would walk up State Street into the Capitol and declare their own strike.
University buildings would be empty. There would be no professors to lecture, no TAs to assist and no students to learn.
Do you know where I would be? I'd be at the Terrace, three beers deep in a Friday afternoon, enjoying my senior gift.
Dan can be reached at dlhinkel@wisc.edu.
