The Graduate Employees Union plans to announce it is filing a grievance against the university concerning undergraduate students serving as teaching assistants today.
The union said its contract, negotiated with the university and made effective on May 16, 2002, forbids undergraduates from obtaining teaching positions.
The union is charging MSU with contracting undergraduate students in teaching assistant positions, which reduces the quality of education, union President Scott Henkel said.
The contract defines a teaching assistant as "a graduate student."
"It doesn't say undergraduate," Henkel said. "It doesn't say person from the street, it says graduate student.
"That is where the distinction comes."
But Assistant Provost Bob Banks said the contract does not exclude undergraduate students.
"There isn't any contractual arrangement that undergraduates cannot be teaching assistants," he said.
Banks said this practice isn't new to the university.
"Having undergraduates teaching isn't something that has just been created in the last year," Banks said. "They have been teaching and working in different areas on campus for a number of years."
The union said in the Department of Mathematics last year there were 120 TAs and 30 of those positions have been filled with undergraduate TAs.
Henkel said he believes the increase in undergraduate assistants is due to the budget crunches the university is experiencing.
This practice is not new to the math department though, said Wellington Ow, undergraduate director for the department.
"This practice has been going on way before my time," he said.
Ow has been working in the math department for about three years and said he hasn't seen an increase in the number of undergraduate students in teaching capacities because of budget cuts.
Undergraduate teaching assistants teach recitation sections and are supervised by a professor, Ow said.
Graduate students can teach an entire class consisting of lecturing and grading, he added.
"In the math department, graduate students are assigned first," Ow said. "And the undergraduates only do recitations that are unfilled.
"They are not replacing graduate students in that sense."
Henkel said the union is most concerned with how undergraduate teaching assistants might affect the quality of education.
"High school students don't teach high school," he said. "Graduate employees have the teaching experience and education needed to provide a quality education."
The union was formed in April 2001 and represents 1,200 graduate employees.
