Graduate Students Rally for More Aid at the U. of Chicago
http://chronicle.com/jobs/blogs/onhiring/474
"About 150 graduate students at the University of Chicago marched to the provost’s office this week to protest the administration’s financial-aid policy.
Last year the administration unveiled a plan that gives graduate students in the humanities, social sciences, and the Divinity School $19,000 each per year for five years, plus $3,000 each for two summers of study. The package, which the administration said would cost $50-million, is available only for graduate students who enrolled beginning in the 2007-8 academic year.
Graduate students who were already attending Chicago have complained that it is unfair to leave them out. They have lobbied the administration to provide the same benefits to about 800 graduate students who enrolled before 2007-8. Half those students, said Joseph Jay Sosa — a graduate student in anthropology — earn only $12,000 a year and have no summer support. And about a quarter of those enrolled before this year have fellowships that amount to less than $5,000 a year, he said.
The graduate students have established a blog where several tell stories about earning so little that they and their children qualify for food stamps and can’t pay their medical bills.
Julie A. Peterson, a spokeswoman for the university, said it simply wouldn’t be financially feasible to give the new aid packages to graduate students who were enrolled before this year. On Thursday the administration released a plan that will give $4.7-million in additional aid to graduate students left out of the new package.
But the students say that the offering isn’t enough and that they are considering taking steps to start a union."
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2 comments:
"...earn only $12,000 a year."
"earn" is not a word I'd use to refer to stipends. If people want to "earn" more, then perhaps they should reconsider graduate school. There is plenty of money to be earned elsewhere.
Now, teaching is something altogether different. There, a discussion about "earning" seems not only appropriate, but necessary.
I disagree. University of Chicago grad students very much "earn" their stipends. Graduate students at this University do all sorts of work which is unpaid, off the radar, and under the table, and obligatory due to their status as grad students. These range from research tasks, workshop duties, writing, event planning, teaching, grading, mentoring, favors for professors, committee participation, all without pay, and solely because they are the only qualified people to do so, and because they would incur informal penalties within their Departments. Because funding is so scarce, informal reputations are important here, and are strongly correlated with who actually receives institutional support. Hence, any graduate student who wants to survive is going to have to perform free labor off the books at multiple points during their career, and the fact that we are extremely restricted in terms of our outside employment options by the very fact that we receive the sub-standard support that we do our capacity to "earn," as you say, in the traditional, formal sense is limited, to say the least.
And frankly, I find the notion that we should "reconsider graduate school" facetious and offensive. The fact that we chose to earn our degrees at Chicago, or that we chose to earn PhDs at all, doesn't authorize this or any institution to treat us like indentured servants, especially for a measly $12,000 a year and sub-par health care. Teaching is not the only way in which many of us earn our keep around here.
... to say nothing of how challenging and competitive our programs are.
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