“You’ve never read Mike Adams, have you? He writes satire”
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Is this satire? An assistantship comes with fully paid tuition on the backs tax payers. Is this supposed to be sarcasm. I’m not laughing.
An assistantship comes with fully-paid tuition from the private university’s substantial endowment and tuition receipts (at private universities, like Penn when I got my doctorate) or tuition receipts and yes, tax-payer subsidies (at state universities, like the one where I teach, conduct research and help keep the math department running administratively).
In either case supporting teaching assistants helps keep costs of running the undergraduate program down, and thus is a benefit to the tax-payers even in the case of state universities, rather than something about which to complain. (Not that it helps enough to overcome the main driver of tuition costs: the expansion of university administrations — by my local case in point 50% over the past decade in terms of number of personnel, and much more in terms of payroll, even as the number of faculty shrank 0.4% over the same time).