While the boisterous chanting of the Teaching Assistants' Association strike was impossible to ignore for many, Tuesday and Wednesday passed without disruption for numerous other UW-Madison students enrolled in schools outside of the College of Letters and Sciences.
Picketing outside of Education Hall, Humanities, Social Sciences, Van Hise, Van Vleck and Vilas, the TAA focused its strike on the L&S-dominated east side of campus. The west side of campus, which houses the undergraduate College of Engineering and College of Agricultural and Life Sciences among others, was left largely undisturbed.
\I think aside from L&S and perhaps [the School of] Education, there was very little effect on any of the other schools,"" UW-Madison Provost Peter Spear said of the strike.
Richard Barrows, Associate Dean of Academic Student Affairs for the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences, expressed a similar opinion.
""The effect on CALS is very small compared to L&S,"" Barrows said. ""But our students are still affected because they take the same L&S courses, such as chemistry and math.""
CALS has approximately 2,000 students and, according to Barrows, has virtually no TAs. Yet the College of Engineering, the second-largest school on campus, has several. Engineering TAs did not collectively choose to participate in the strike although the TAA does include them.
""We made very careful decisions of which departments to ask [to strike],"" TAA Co-President Boian Popunkiov said. ""All of these departments happened to be in L&S and the School of Education.""
One reason why Provost Spear feels the TAA made this decision is because L&S and the School of Education combined contain approximately 19,900 of the 29,000 UW-Madison undergraduates.
Popunkiov continued to say the TAA would have picketed more buildings if it had more resources, but it felt it was better to have solid picket lines outside of fewer buildings than have to cover more buildings with ""picket lines of three or four people.""
However, the larger picket lines did little for those who rarely head in Bascom's direction.
""I would say it had a very minimal effect,"" engineering senior Dan Gloudemans said.
Gloudemans said none of his engineering TAs mentioned the strike and that he saw no information concerning the strike around the engineering buildings.
""If I hadn't read the newspaper I wouldn't have known what was going on"" he said.
