How The University Works

University of Chicago grads march on the provost 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 1/3 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 withus 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 U Chicago campus Friday, April 18, 2-4pm, in Harper hall room # 140, 1116 E. 59th Street, giving a talk entitled “The Waste Product of Graduate Education.”

Recently:

• Happy Fourth?
• Poverty In Higher Ed
• What I’m Reading Now
• Meet the Trustees, Part 1: Trustees Behind Bars
• They’ll Be Watching You
• Maybe He Can’t
• Academic Labor Bookshelf
• Job Listing #666
• Psst! Forward this Link to Grad Students
• Don’t Miss COCAL VIII