Professor-in-Training: Status Control of the Teaching Assistant

I examine the role of apprenticeship status in controlling labor unionized graduate student teaching assistants (TAs). In her book Coerced, Erin Hatton identifies as a basis coercion—particularly nontraditional regimes—in which managers control workers’ access to status-based rights, rewards, and punishments. expand Hatton's concept coercion distinguish between two types: despotic, prevails, hegemonic, consent prevails. argue that TAs is relying on their investment system course instructors are source professional advancement, opportunity, support outside TA job. draw autoethnographic fieldwork analyze one expression control, participatory management. this model, faculty instructor invites collaborate design encourages routine discussion strategies, hidden made regulable through “confession”. Identification with limits autonomy by disrupting alliances TAs, students. conclude sketching variations management discussing broader mechanism extraction contemporary university.