Student Response to Provost Action Items

So I was interested to see the email from Provost Rosenbaum this afternoon that proposes "actions [that] will materially improve the circumstances of graduate students in Divinity, Humanities and Social Sciences as well as addressing a broad range of concerns affecting graduate and professional students". I was especially pleased to see that the university is willing to commit $4.7 million which, whilst not enough to rectify the manifest imbalances that exist in the funding of current graduate students, still appears to signify something of an effort to improve graduate life.

Pleased, that is, until I read the details of the proposal. Although I am very happy for our colleagues in the Divinity School will benefit retroactively from the Grad Aid Initiative (receiving $1.4 million over the next four years), I am slightly surprised that the amount of money being made available to current graduate students at Div school is over 47% higher than the money being made available through the slots-for-cash program in the Social Sciences and the Humanities combined. [If, indeed, this money is for graduate students already here, I thoroughly applaud the administration's efforts. I wonder, however, whether the $1.4 million identified includes not only students here right now but also the cost of covering students that will arrive in the fall?]

Carving out the Divinity School, the remaining proposals suggest that the university is willing to provide $3.3 million to improve the lives of current graduate students in the Social Sciences and Humanities. Ten percent of that money will be enjoyed by a maximum of 110 students that receive summer funding over the next two years (assuming no student receives more than one such award). The slots-for-cash program will provide a further $950,000 of funding that can be utilized by the 800 or so students in these divisions not yet covered by the Grad Aid Initiative. If this is divided equally between all of these students, each will receive $1187.50 next year (about $1050 after tax) which is a little less than a third of the cost of advanced residency for a quarter. This, of course, all depends on the rather absurd assumption that this would be evenly divided between all students which is itself rendered impossible by the fact that it doesn't apply to all departments. It is fair to say, therefore, that the slots-for-cash money offers little guarantee of equity between current graduate students, and even if it were to be equitably distributed it would make little difference to graduate students who are struggling to pay their rent at the same time that they are trying to produce their research.

This leaves $2.2million which will be used to fund 15-20 write-up fellowships for the next five years. This is a pretty welcome move, though unfortunately it is a move that can benefit only 75-100 graduate students in these divisions, and only those that are able to get across the gaping funding hurdle posed by a fifth and sixth etc. years without any funding whatsoever, forcing them to teach countless classes being paid whatever low-rent wage the university is willing to offer for the 2008-09 year (which is highly unlikely to reach the dizzy heights of our peer institutions). [Let's face it, when the university administration fights as hard as they did last fall to resist a wage increase of a mere 4% for those employees of the university who literally keep the show on the road from a day-to-day basis, what are the chances that they will be willing to redress the massive gap in pay between TAs at this university and those at peer institutions?] A second, and more critical point here, is that the idea that there exist 80 write-up fellowships in the Humanities and the Social Sciences already, ignores the reality that these fellowships are not available to all students. To the extent that some of these fellowships are available to strictly defined constituencies, this needs to be made clear in the Provost's communication to avoid appearing like he has over-egged the cake.

In total, therefore, the Provost has just announced a series of proposals that will benefit fewer than half of the students that are currently financially disadvantaged by the fact that they are students at the University of Chicago. Even if the slots-for-cash program were to be combined with the increased summer funding and parceled out as 427 awards of $3,000, this would still provide money to little over half of the students in these divisions that lack funding, and still at a level insufficient to pay for even a single quarter of advanced residency. In short, these initiatives are unlikely to be of much help to people who face advanced residency fees in 2008, no funding from the university, and the daunting prospect of writing a dissertation while teaching a bunch of classes for which their colleagues at Yale, Harvard, Berkeley, Brown, Northwestern etc. etc. would be paid two or three times as much.

I don't mean to sound entirely negative, however. I am glad the university is going to investigate further the options for increasing TA salaries. I am glad that the question of advanced residency fees is being investigated. And, as an international student, I am particularly glad that the specific problems faced by international students are being investigated by the university. I also, in the past week, had the opportunity to speak with Professor Cohen, and Kim Goff-Crews, both of whom I found to be engaged and genuinely concerned with issues of graduate student life. I think that the meetings they have been holding with students are an admirable and important contribution to addressing the concerns of current graduate students. However, the proof of the pudding is in the eating (to continue this cute little baking metaphor). If the proposals that these new committees produce are inadequate, if the university continues to demand that already underfunded students pay advanced residency fees, and if we continue to be offered salaries for TAing that are radically at odds both with the work required and with the salaries being paid to our colleagues at peer institutions, then the university cannot expect its graduate students to continue to support a structure of employment that perpetuates significant disadvantages for those it employs--at both a financial and an academic level. If the university cares about graduate student life, then it has to act as if it cares. Constantly coddling us with words of affection does little to pay the rent.

Best regards,

Daragh Grant
Department of Political Science
University of Chicago