Faced with a changing curriculum, increased enrollments and competition for graduate students' time, many Arts and Sciences departments are working to resolve a shortage in the number of teaching assistants.
Although the shortage is not new in many disciplines, administrators said the problem is increasing. The severity of the problem varies by department, but the need for qualified aides to lead labs and lecture sections has caused some departments to seek other sources. Administrators report that such sources--including undergraduates and other departments' graduate students--have helped to fill the need, but that the shortage of TAs from their own departments underlines the tensions of graduate student life.
One of the principal causes of the shortage has been the ability of graduate students to obtain grants. Many students who otherwise might teach to earn money from their departments are instead able to get external funding.
"We determined the funding packages for students early on in the year, in response to Graduate School packages, so when funds become available later on, we often end up short on TAs," said Reiko Mazuka, director of graduate studies in Psychology: Social and Health Sciences. "If you get a grant for research, you can't also say you want to TA."
Mazuka said her department usually falls short by a few TAs, and that they close the gap either by giving students more teaching hours or by hiring students from other departments, such as sociology or statistics. To be considered students for tax purposes, however, TAs must work no more than 20 hours a week.
For most students, that remains a non-issue if they are able to get fellowships, become research assistants for professors or obtain other forms of support.
"The real tension is between making sure that you have funding and making sure you have progress toward your degree requirements," said Alison Papadakis, a fourth-year graduate student in Psychology: Social and Health Sciences. "If you can do something that will get you closer to having your degree requirements done, I prefer to do that than TAing, which takes time on top of other work I could do."
The shortage in TAs has been exacerbated by recent course changes, including aspects of Curriculum 2000. Under that plan, many disciplines have had to develop new courses to help students fulfill graduation requirements. The biology department, for example, added several large lectures, including a course on AIDS and one on the biology of dinosaurs.
"With Curriculum 2000, we have a lot of non-biology majors taking the science distribution courses," said William Morris, director of graduate studies in biology, adding that there is also a disproportionate number of spring courses.
The biology department has often hired students from other disciplines, Morris said, such as those in the Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences. In addition, biology has hired three recently graduated biology majors as professional TAs.
Morris said the temptation to accept more graduate students to meet the TA need is strong, but would compromise the quality of the department. Lewis Siegel, dean of the Graduate School, said that sentiment is not unique and that teaching needs are a small factor in graduate student acceptances.
"There was a time when a department would bring in graduate students to meet TA needs, and in that case we certainly had departments that didn't need that much teaching that went hungry in terms of fostering intellectual growth," Siegel said.
Some departments have turned to undergraduates to help meet needs. Enrollment in economics classes has consistently risen in recent years while the number of TAs has stayed the same, said Thomas Nechyba, director of undergraduate studies in economics. As a result, the department has frequently hired undergraduates to teach sections, especially in introductory courses, but Nechyba said the move is in part voluntary.
"It gets them to talk about the subject level, you learn it at a deeper level and just talking in front of a group is a great experience for an undergraduate to have," Nechyba said.
He added that the number of undergraduate TAs might increase further, as economics restructures its courses to fit the writing-intensive requirements of Curriculum 2000.
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