It must be strike season at American universities. Spring seems to be the time when well-paid, privileged, and entitled graduate students look to their unions—unions like the United Auto Workers—to demand even higher wages, other privileges, and, as I posted yesterday, political statements by some universities.
As I reported yesterday, there’s an impending graduate-student strike at Columbia, with the union demanding not only big salary increases for the students, but also that the University do all manner of anti-Israel things, like divesting from Israel and withdrawing from opening a program in Tel Aviv. That seems to me a violation of institutional neutrality, and I trust that Columbia won’t en
Now Harvard is follow suit, threatening a strike about wages, though fortunately there are no demands there about Israel. (It’s unlikely that any union demands related to Israel would be accepted by either university, as they’ve both been subject to lawsuits for ongoing antisemitism.)
As the article in the Harvard Crimson reports, both teaching fellow and research assistants (two ways that grad students can get paid while getting advanced degrees) want raises, with teaching fellows demanding a huge increase in pay.
Harvard is not biting, so a strike may be impending.
Click the link to read the Crimson article:
This is a bit complex; see what you make of it. First, the demands (Crimson quotes indented):
Harvard rejected graduate student workers’ demands for sweeping wage increases at a Tuesday bargaining session, countering with more modest raises and declining to equalize pay between teaching fellows and research assistants.
The proposals come as contract negotiations between Harvard and Harvard Graduate Student Union-United Auto Workers stretch past a year and union members vote in an ongoing strike authorization vote launched last Tuesday.
Last month, HGSU-UAW proposed a plan to close the wage gap between teaching fellows and research assistants, which would raise TF pay by roughly 74 percent — bringing it in line with the equivalent of a 10-month RA salary. The proposal also included a 12 percent increase to base salaries and annual raises of five percent.
Harvard instead offered a 10 percent raise over four years and a nearly 3 percent raise in the first year, amounting to annual raises of roughly 2.5 percent, according to a Harvard spokesperson.
It declined to match TF and RA monthly pay, according to HGSU-UAW president Sara V. Speller.
It appears, though that TF and RA pay is the same for the first four years of graduate fellowships:
Under Harvard’s current pay structure, graduate students earn roughly $50,000 annually during the first four years of their program, typically comprising two years of fellowship funding and two years of teaching fellowships supplemented with salary top ups and summer funding.
But those supplements expire after four semesters and summer funding ends after four years. During the remainder of their time at Harvard, many graduate students rely solely on teaching fellowships — which pay roughly $6,500 per section.
Now $50,000 is certainly enough to live, even in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Notice that this is appears to be a minimum salary, as there is summary salary and diverse “top ups”. After four years, you can either teach or be an RA, and that seems to be when the differential kicks in. I know that in the biological sciences there’s no substantial disparity even after four years, as they somehow find money to adequately support all students, but perhaps it’s in the humanities where they are demanding salary increases. And I’m unable to find out much about the humanities given the time constraints of time for writing posts.
Given that no student has to pay tuition, and the salary is what the university gives them on top of tuition remission, I was told that in biology the students are sitting pretty throughout their entire graduate career, even if they have to teach after four years. They are not making $6500 per year. In fact, they’re getting paid well on top of a free education at Harvard, so one may argue that these kinds of union demands are excessive. One of those who feel that way is reader Bat, who who called my attention to the Crimson article and commented,
Much like scholarship uni athletics and the obscenities of NIL pay [universities now paying student athletes] and free agency portals for colleges, I just think none of this [graduate-student unions] has a place in higher education.
Throw the rascals out. Plenty of hungry and bright applicants in the sea (as you informed Harvard when turning them down for grad school years ago if I recall correctly).
Sometimes we geezers are right. You kids get off my lawn!
Wow. Graduate school is difficult enough without having the UAW involved.
I’m glad that I naively accepted my tuition waver and teaching fellowship pay thinking I had it pretty good. Those gave me all the financial support I really needed to succeed: enough security to immerse myself in my graduate work. My parents sent me $5.00 a week allowance. It was all they could provide, and I appreciated it.
Imagine being a graduate student and having to do battle with the university each year.
Agree
There’s a distinction with a difference between graduate school and skilled trades (as they call them), which themselves involve a “journeyman” or other type training period (I’m fuzzy on details).
Perhaps auto manufacturing – merely one of the numerous skilled trades – requires a training period.
That training period is what is at all comparable to graduate school.
IOW, there’s a reason there’s comparatively little political news about big pharma, medicine, carpenters’, or plumbers’ unions (perhaps they are out there) – going on strike. One of those reasons presumably is that they are (generally) good, stable jobs that at minimum add material value to the world.
So The Two Cultures (C. P. Snow, ~1959 and later) is still relevant today to humanities v. natural sciences.
/PuttingALidOnIt
/HotTake
/WordsBetweenAsterisksGetItalicized 😁
I survived five years of semipoverty as a grad student at U Chicago. It is a hardship to drink $5 pitchers of Busch beer. Now that I have money, I don’t drink mediocre beer. But seriously, if grad students have their tuition payed for, they shouldn’t expect a great salary for their minimal teaching duties, which is part of their education anyways.
Yesterday’s post showed graduate students at Columbia demanding $76,000 a year for a 20-hour work week of teaching or research. Today’s post shows Harvard students unhappy with a $6,500 stipend per teaching section. Granted, New York and Boston are expensive, but let’s zoom out a bit and look nationwide at our regional and comprehensive four-year colleges, which graduate the bulk of our bachelor’s degree holders. You can find many universities in which all the assistant and associate professors in the humanities, carrying 4-3 teaching loads, make substantially less than what Columbia students are demanding for a part-time load. You can also find more than a handful of schools in which the recently-promoted full professors in humanities are paid at or below Columbia TA demands. Moreover, if those full professors don’t find 4-3 sufficiently draining, they can request an overload with a stipend of 50-70% of the one Harvard TAs currently enjoy per section.
“But those schools are nonselective.” Yes, and you will find among those teaching in such universities quite a few graduates of top-twenty PhD programs in their respective humanities disciplines. Underpaid? Definitely. But I chuckle when I think of what the future in academia holds for many of the privileged snots on the “picket lines.”
I think the time when unions filled a useful purpose ended long ago. Now they are just tools to get a much for their members as they can, regardless of the bigger picture.
Comment by Greg Mayer
While the relationship of a graduate student and a graduate school (especially the major professor) is not well-captured by the relationship of an employee and an employer, it is nonetheless the case that graduate students cannot support themselves by taking other jobs while in graduate school (not if they want to do well in graduate school), and thus depend upon the university for financial support. This comes from teaching assistantships (called teaching fellowships at Harvard), research assistantships (via grants from NSF, NIH, etc.), and various sorts of fellowships and traineeships.
The exact amount of financial support that is needed will vary from place to place and time to time, and how much is needed at one time and place may not be obvious. As anyone with significant experience in higher education knows, university administrators cannot always be be counted on to make wise decisions that promote the university’s goals of the increase and diffusion of knowledge. Thus, that graduate students should have a voice in the means and amounts of their financial support is entirely reasonable. I’m not sure union-management negotiation is the best model for the expression of this voice, but I am sure that some process by which the graduate students and administrators can reason together is far preferable to administrators having sole control of graduate student support.
GCM
(Norm and I were at grad school together, and Jerry was there a few years before us.)
I am ballpark same vintage as you Greg. An alternative communication: After several weeks discussions between ourselves regarding our stipends (probably over beers), a few of us physics grad students asked the dept chair and one of our better thesis advisors to sit down and talk with us. We aired our concerns; they made us aware of the funding sources, possibilities and constraints. I think that the result was few hundred dollars a year increase the next year. I think the stipends in those days were $2700/9 months + 1000/summer (+tuition paid transparent to us); so two or three hundred dollars was significant. Assistantships which required teaching a lab or grading papers were taxed while fellowships which had no duties were tax-free.
Like Norman, I was very pleased to be paid to study and not have to wait tables or draw beers at night…I could not believe my luck. But we had it good in the sciences where professors wrote grants to NASA, NSF, DOE, etc and had line items for grad students plus some “indirect costs” some of which came back to the dept. My friends getting graduate degrees in the humanities were not so lucky.
I continued to be lucky after graduation in working for NASA which was, much of the time, like being in grad school, but with a larger stipend and, the best thing, no homework problem sets due!
I could not agree more.
Of course, in the sciences, it is different. Grad students do not pay tuition. But in the biomedical sciences as well as other disciplines in the science, they do need a stipend. They are expected to work on their research, which usually demands upward of 50 hours/week (more in times of pressure). They simply do not have time to work an additional job. In essence, their schedules are determined by their experiments. If a reaction or observation takes 24 hours, or an animal needs treatment, the student has to be in the lab. Hell, even as a professor, I often had to be in the lab till 3 a.m., or come in to the lab at that hour.
Still, 50k/year is excessive, considering that their work is really on-the-job training folk their benefit.
And given that the majority of non-science students do not put in anywhere near that kind of work, it seems to me that a disparity in graduate fellowships between the hard sciences and other disciplines is warranted.
“And given that the majority of non-science students do not put in anywhere near that kind of work, it seems to me that a disparity in graduate fellowships between the hard sciences and other disciplines is warranted.” Greetings, Starwolf, but take care: mention of this matter should be sotto voce, to avoid stirring up even more “Physics envy” (and NSF/NIH envy) in the other campus territories. Could it be, I wonder, that envy syndromes of this sort are the whole basic, psychiatric explanation for the appearance of what is called “Postmodernism” in those territories? Pm started growing like a tumor about one generation after the Sputnik-induced funding of science graduate student life.
What is the 9 month salary for a beginning assistant professor of English? Grad students will almost certainly make more $/hr.
As I commented yesterday, my grad school required all grad students, even in the sciences like me, to pay full out-of-state tuition. The uni DID NOT disclose this on their website or any official documents. We didn’t find out until our first day of grad student orientation: “Your full tuition is due tomorrow.” WHAT??!!
At my grad uni, grad students were not allowed to have outside employment, even in our field of study. We had to sign a document stating that if we did, our department would expel us. The only way to earn extra money was tutoring. Some students did have outside jobs, but they risked a lot.
This is a bone of contention for me. Having graduate students complaining about their stipend/salary (whatever you want to call it) when they are getting a free ride. Another complaint is when a PhD graduates and immediately becomes a PBM with a drug company. They should have to payback their tuition or at the very least the company should pay back their tuition to the university. I know many PhDs that have gone this route and they admit that they did it for the big $$ and that they really don’t use any of their knowledge gained during their PhD.
I sympathize. Prior to taking a student in my lab, I went to great lengths to discern his/her reasons for wanting to get an advanced degree. I did not want to invest my time and energy in training a student who wants to work for a drug company.
And four some reason, I was successful. My Ph.D. Students have all gone into pure research of one sort or another. I was less lucky with M.Sc. students—about a 50% success rate. This was partially due to uncertainty on their part—they did not know if a career in a lab was suitable for them. It is easier to filter Ph.D. Students: “Are you sure that 5 years of this kind of hard work is what you want to commit to?”