ActPGH 9/26/22 Speech
The following is a speech I gave at this rally on September 26th, 2022.
My name is Pat Healy, I’m a PhD student in Pitt’s School of Computing and Information. More importantly I’ve been on the Graduate Student Organizing Committee since 2019, working, despite Pitt’s multi-million-dollar-efforts to bust us, towards a union of grad workers represented by the United Steelworkers, joining with our siblings at the Carnegie Museums, Carnegie Libraries, the Pitt Faculty, and hopefully soon, the Pitt Staff.
I’m here because I see our struggles as connected. I’m sure not everyone in our campaign may see it this way and I’m not here to represent all of GSOC or USW, but I’ve seen our fight for a union as the same fight as the one to divest from fossil fuels, the fight against tech for ICE down the road at CMU, and fight of this new coalition against carceral tech. When we talk about building a union, we talk about things like increasing pay in the face of inflation, increasing summer funding stability, establishing an external grievances process, and a few dozen other things that we could shape a contract to address. The union campaign isn’t about any one of those things specifically, It’s about power; and, I think, the identity of the University.
When we say the University of Pittsburgh or Carnegie Mellon University, do we mean the institution, the will of a board of trustees as they manage billions in endowment funds, or by the University do we mean a community of academic workers and scholars?
I work in technology, I research serious games and other educational simulations, but like most academics who do research in technology, my pay is significantly lower than those doing very similar work in other sectors like industry or military. My former roommate, who graduated the same time as me with a Bachelor’s in Computer Science at Pitt, currently makes about 5 times what I make as a software engineer in the industry. It hurts a little to think about, but my choice was intentional.
Initially, I chose to go into academia because I had the impression that academia was somehow outside of the destructive incentive structures that define the industry or government work. I assumed our job isn’t primarily to line someone’s pockets or fill prisons but to understand and improve the world. This was a somewhat naïve assumption.
When I started my PhD, I had a relatively cozy situation. My adviser had hooked me up with basically the ideal funding situation for a PhD. Based on data I later gathered with the grad union, I was getting paid among the highest rate of any PhD student in the University, with a guarantee to keep that funding through the end of my program, with summers included. Like a lot of money in academia, my funding came with strings. Namely, my funding came from DARPA, the arm of the US Department of Defense that funds research for future use by the military.
Like a lot of DARPA-funded projects, my project wasn’t obviously morally questionable. It was a form of simulation system that I was mainly using to simulate imaginary pandemics in ways that could be useful from a public health perspective, but of course the military could repurpose that software for simulating systems they’re more interested in. And that’s what a lot of grants in academia, especially in tech, look like – I’m not writing facial recognition tech for policing; I’m writing facial recognition tech purely as a technical exercise because I’m interested in Machine Learning methods. I’m not building a workplace panopticon to prevent unionization; I’m building a creative IoT solution to facilitate workplace cooperation. I’m against developing robotics for warfare, luckily my robots are only used for emergency medicine and rehabilitation. ICBMs are scary but my rockets are only going to Mars.
We pretend our work is at the very least morally neutral, immerse ourselves in a culture that accepts work funded by the United States Military as somehow apolitical. Or look to my peers in GSPIA, which has received significant funding from Charles Koch, a central figure among billionaires funding lobbying opposing environmental regulation and other far-right libertarian causes such as funding sponsorship of the Great Barrington Declaration, an opposition to any meaningful public health response to the COVID-19 pandemic. His name is synonymous with profit over human life, and yet you, at the Center for Governance and Markets, accept his money and pretend your work could have any possible redeemable value whatsoever.
It’s bullshit but it’s convenient bullshit, valuable bullshit. When I left my previous adviser and moved on to other projects, due in part to my discomfort working for the Department of Defense, I took a major pay cut, my summer funding became a question, my workload increased as I was forced to take on additional GSA-ships and teaching; I no longer had the comfy ride guaranteed through my PhD that came from that funding.
I still want to believe the naïve view of academia I came into my PhD with, that as academics it is our job to improve the world with our research. But if this is going to be true, we can’t be faced with the choice of a livable wage or our ethics, and that problem of us, the workers struggling over whether to sell our souls to pay rent while Gallagher and other administrators watch the endowment grow on the scale of billions, is one we can solve as a union. And of course that tool stretches beyond wages as the labor movement once again is realizing its role in building collective power to uplift movements for racial justice, environmental justice, and stop the creep of the corporate surveillance state.
If we claim to live in a democracy, our power is in our labor, may that be in choosing to not dedicate that labor to evil causes, or more critically to organize with our peers, give teeth to the chant “If we don’t get it, shut it down.” If we want the University of Pittsburgh to be a community, or Carnegie Mellon to be a community, or any other workplace that has claimed to be as such, we need to act like it and use the power granted to us by the fact the world runs on our labor.