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About the Author
Marc Bousquet is an associate professor of cultural studies and writing with new media at Santa Clara University. His book How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation has just been released by New York University Press with a foreword by Cary Nelson. He serves on the national council of the American Association of University Professors and was the founding editor of Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor.
About Brainstorm
Mark Bauerlein
Marc Bousquet
Laurie Fendrich
Dan Greenberg
John L. Jackson Jr.
Stan Katz
Stephen Joel Trachtenberg
Brainstorm Alumni
Marty Nemko, guest bloggerBob Zemsky
Recent Posts
The Churchill Case Goes to Trial | Comment [44]
The AAUP and Ward Churchill | Comment [16]
AP Profile of Cary Nelson | Comment [29]
5,000 Postdocs Choose UAW | Comment
Major Corporations Whine About Market | Comment
Student Unrest in Chicago
crossposted from howtheuniversityworks.com
University of Chicago grads march on the provost’s office to protest unequal stipends
Chicago remains one of the few bastions of labor militancy in the United States and graduate employees have had enough at the biggest private and public campuses in the city.
Last week at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where unionized graduate student employees teach one-third of all credit hours, 150 UIC-GEO members rallied against a sleazy “tuition differential” fee structure that adds as much as $10,000 to the cost of graduate education for some members. The fees are not included in the “general tuition” waived for graduate student employees and offload such costs as high salaries for business faculty onto student workers.
Increasingly students find that the administration is using the fee structure to get around the contract and consume these working students’ already meager stipends. Numerous students arrive on campus believing that their assistantships covered their expenses only to find that the fees eat up half or more of their extremely modest stipends.
Amber Cooper of UIC-GEO says that the grads will rally at Springfield on April 30:
Thousands of other higher ed union workers from universities and community colleges across Illinois will be there with us to make sure they fund higher education so that our Deans and Board of Trustee won’t have to look to us to balance their budgets.
At the University of Chicago, students have been rallying since February against a plan by administrators that substantially raised stipends for graduate students newly enrolled in 2007-2008 to $19,000 while continuing to pay earlier-enrolled grads as little as $5,000. Many of the latter are eligible for food stamps and unable to pay medical bills. Read more on their blog. According to a report by Robin Wilson, some of the disgruntled grads are talking about unionization.
I’ll be on the University of Chicago campus Friday, April 18, 2-4 pm, in Harper Hall Room No. 140, 1116 E. 59th Street, giving a talk entitled “The Waste Product of Graduate Education.”
Posted at 06:45:25 PM on April 13, 2008 | All postings by Marc BousquetComments
Commenting is closed for this article.
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It is heartening to see that students are still committed to social justice issues.
As a part-time community college faculty member, I can alert the students to the fact that TAs often make more than the average salary of adjunct faculty at two year institutions who perform the bulk of those instritution’s teaching.
For a view of the top-heavy salary structure at American institutions of higher learning, particularly junior colleges, see this article:
http://www.app.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080414/NEWS/804140386
— Constance Lavender · Apr 14, 05:01 AM · #
Thanks, Constance. One thing that’s often overlooked is that many faculty working contingently, either full-time or part-time, are also graduate students.
One of the things I’ve struggled to do—not always successfully—is think about graduate students and contingent faculty as an overlapping group with a large common interest. I’ve been nagging both CGEU and COCAL to hold their summer meetings jointly for years!
— Marc Bousquet · Apr 14, 10:24 AM · #
Thanks for opening another connection for me, Marc. I appreciate the feedback.
Here’s a link to yet another NJ county college demonstrating, even more clearly than the link I posted above, the political ramifications of salary structures.
http://www.app.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080414/NEWS/804140387/1070/NEWS02
What is particularly irksome about this institution is that I’ve applied for a fulltime position here, and I’ve not been called for an interview despite having extensive teaching experience in my discipline at a two-year institution in a neighboring county.
I suppose my “political” credentials didn’t match up; it’s hard to know, as those qualifications weren’t listed in the job advertisement.
— Constance Lavender · Apr 14, 06:55 PM · #