The University environment is best characterized as a community of scholars, and this includes faculty and students. Introducing a non-University component into this relationship will alter it, transforming a mutual set of interests and goals into a relationship of management and labor. There are approximately 1,400 teaching assistants at the University of Washington. Recent data show that graduate-teaching assistants are responsible for teaching 18 percent of the primary class meetings for all undergraduate courses. Most graduate assistants are not involved in teaching primary classes, but rather are engaged in teaching support functions such as staffing quiz sections and laboratory sections.
Some graduate assistants teach primary classes at the freshman and sophomore level.
These include the freshman composition sections, beginning foreign languages, and beginning levels of mathematics. Faculty are assigned as supervisors to oversee and coordinate instruction whenever TAs are involved to ensure unit learning objectives are met. Thus, there are regular professorial faculty to whom teaching assistants report. We expect that if a strike occurs, student learning experiences will be continued, examinations proctored and grades completed. The University takes its obligation to students seriously.