By Peter Schmidt

Graduate students who work as teaching assistants and researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign suspended a labor strike Tuesday night after informally agreeing to the terms of a new contract with the campus's administration.

More than 400 members of the Graduate Employees Organization, a union of graduate student workers which is affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers, unanimously approved the new contract at a meeting on Tuesday evening. The organization's strike committee then voted to immediately suspend the strike, which began on Monday.

The actions taken by the union members set the stage for a formal ratification vote later this week on the new three-year contract, which is retroactive to this past August.

A spokesman for the union, Peter O. Campbell, called the new contract "an enormous victory" and argued that it heralded a revival of student labor activism on the nation's campuses.

Bargaining teams representing the union and the campus's administration had tentatively settled on the new labor pact Tuesday morning, after the university removed a final sticking point by agreeing to guarantee it will not unilaterally reduce the tuition waivers offered teaching and graduate assistants who are not Illinois residents.

In a statement issued soon after the tentative agreement was reached, Robert A. Easter, the campus's interim provost and interim chancellor, said, "We value the contributions our graduate assistants make to the campus, and we feel this tentative agreement represents the best possible contract given the financial constraints we face."

Over the weekend, when the strike was announced, administrators of the campus had said they had no intention of denying tuition waivers to graduate employees, but were worried that the guarantee sought by the union was so broad it would limit their ability to deny waivers to students who failed to fulfill their end of the bargain.

The tentative agreement reached Tuesday said graduate and teaching assistants will not have their tuition waivers reduced so long as they hold qualifying assistantships, are in good academic standing, and are making adequate progress toward graduation in the academic field in which they began their studies.

Cary Nelson, who is president of the American Association of University Professors and a professor of English at the campus, praised the graduate students' handling of the strike, which was heavily planned in advance. "It was well-run," he said. "It was well-organized. They did not do it until they knew they had their ducks in a row, they knew they had their people committed."

Other provisions of the proposed contract, which both sides had already agreed to as of last weekend, call for the university to increase the graduate students' minimum stipends and subsidies for health insurance and require it to take steps to accommodate them for some period following the birth or adoption of a child.