A strike, averted

On January 5, 2024, the graduate student union at the University of Oregon (UO) announced that they would go on strike, giving notice that it would begin on January 17. On January 15, the union and the university administration reached a deal, averting in the nick of time a strike and the massive disruption that would have accompanied it. This was one of the most interesting recent dramas at UO, and it mirrors dramas at other universities, and perhaps mirrors ongoing dramas involving the faculty union and the UO administration. For these reasons, and because my memory grows hazier with every passing month, I thought I’d write about it. And of course, I can’t help making a graph!

First, a background paragraph that is probably familiar to most readers of this blog. “Graduate students” refers mostly to doctoral students, i.e. those working on Ph.D. degrees, but also includes Master’s degree students. In the sciences, Ph.D. students are supported either by research grants (about 1/2 of physics students) or by teaching positions. In natural sciences these teaching roles are almost entirely teaching assistant positions, but in other departments (for example humanities, math) they can be sole instructor positions. As a graduate research or teaching fellow, one is nominally paid for 40 to 49% of a full-time position (0.4 to 0.49 FTE, to use the jargon of “full-time equivalents”). In addition to this stipend, one’s tuition is paid for. The idea, to which I’ll return later, is that one is partially an employee (about half the time) and partially a student working towards a degree (about half the time). For a grant-supported student in the sciences whose “job” is doing the same research he or she does as a student and scientific trainee, this distinction is meaningless, of course.

All the negotiations and policies apply to all graduate student positions, whether teaching assistantships paid by the university or research positions paid by external funding agencies. Already, one sees a source of confusion: Why should the University administration set the level of salaries it isn’t paying? This is the policy at every university, however, driven presumably by a desire on the part of both the university and funding agencies to minimize salary disparities within institutions.

Disparities exist nonetheless. Stipends in the sciences are larger than those in the humanities, for example, and even within the sciences there is variation between departments. In Physics in 2022-23, the 12-month stipend was $26,317; in Biology, $28,734; in Computer Science, $25,288. The computer science number is strangely low; computer science faculty salaries in contrast are well above other departments, which makes sense given the challenges of competing with industry for hiring. Overall, our graduate stipends were similar to, but lower than, other similar universities. For comparison, here are Physics graduate student stipends at a few other public universities in or soon before 2022: $26,000 (U. of Illinois), $29,000 (Georgia Tech), $34,500 (UC Davis). Comparison between universities is difficult given differences in cost-of living, especially rent, and non-salary benefits, but overall most people would agree that our graduate stipends were lower than those of peer institutions, and that they hadn’t risen to keep pace with the local cost of living. (All this is changing rapidly: the Physics stipend at the University of Illinois, for example, is now $28-29k).

What’s new?

The new 2024 contract will give a 10% across-the-board increase for graduate student stipends in its first year, where the first year starts retroactively in Fall 2023, and a 19% cumulative increase by Year 3. (Specifically: +10%, +4%, and +4% in Years 1, 2, and 3). How did we get from there to here? I’ll describe a few parts of the journey that I think are interesting and perhaps relevant to the future.

The drama lasted for years…

… and ended just where one would have guessed. It’s hard to put a precise date on the start of the process, but in many departments, including Physics, organized discussions and complaints from graduate students began in Fall 2022 — more on this in the next section. Graduate students at the University of Oregon are unionized, and bargaining between the graduate student union (GTFF) and the university administration began in February, 2023; the previous bargaining agreement ended in 2022. The GTFF has a convenient document of proposals and counter-proposals here. From data in these documents, I made the following graph of the the proposed increases in each proposal, plotting them versus the date, focusing on the cumulative 3-year across-the-board (ATB) increase in the annual stipend for a 12-month position:

There’s an earlier datapoint from March 2023 that I didn’t plot — those proposals focused almost entirely on the minimum salary, just mentioning in passing stipend increases for students above the minimum, proposed as 16% and 11% for the first two years in the GTFF proposal, with no mention of Year 3. These increases are crossed out in the administration’s March 2023 counter-proposal. I therefore took August, 2023 as a more comprehensible starting point for the graph. At this point, the GTFF and the administration were proposing 39% and 6% increases, respectively. More than a year and a half later, we ended up at 19%, quite close to the average of 39 and 6 (22.5%).

Perhaps the saga of bold red-and-black flyers, demonstrations with loud chants, and tedious committee meetings was unavoidable, but I can’t help but wonder otherwise.

I focused on the across-the-board stipend increases because they’re the most important numbers — the changes in salary for a large number of people. These numbers were never highlighted, however, during the bargaining. Especially for the first several months, posts from the graduate union centered on the minimum stipends or on benefits. Our benefits are generous — apparently the GTFF members want to continue having 36 massages per year. Given the young population, lavish health insurance is simply a pipeline of money from the university to the insurance company — money that could otherwise have gone into students’ pockets — but the union doesn’t see it that way. There’s a strong sense of their wanting to signal support for the downtrodden, regardless of the tangible consequences. But there’s plenty to critique on the other side as well.

Very little about this topic makes sense

Physics graduate students organized themselves in 2022 and conveyed to the department through meetings and documents that their stipends should be raised by a few thousand dollars. Good conversations ensued. The physics faculty agreed, even if it meant supporting fewer students. You might think that was the end of it, but it was not, because no department has the power to set its students’ stipends, even for the students who are externally funded on grants. The university administration determines the salary. We could request to be allowed to increase the stipend, which we did; our request was refused. The same was true of the other natural sciences departments I’m aware of — Chemistry, for example. You might think that departments, which have the most knowledge of their needs and of strategies for recruiting Ph.D. students, would have autonomy, subject to an overall budget constraint. This is not the case.

Given the centralization of decision making, one might hope that the decision makers are well informed. I served on a committee made up of natural sciences faculty and the dean of our Graduate School — an entity whose purpose and purview I still don’t understand after 18 years at UO. In addition to stipend amounts differing across departments, the FTE level varies as well, which is important to consider. A 0.4 FTE type end at a base rate of $60,000 is the same as a 0.45 FTE stipend at a base rate of $53,333. The variation in FTE, however, was news to the Dean, and we received suggestions which were infeasible or absurd.

The committee met twice, and then its third meeting was canceled, with no other meetings ever to occur. This was November, 2022 — long before any of these issues were settled, and at a point where there were still faculty perspectives that would have been useful to consider further. It is perhaps the least satisfying committee I have ever served on. (It’s at least in second place.)

We now have higher graduate student stipends. That’s a great outcome. I think so, and that also seems overwhelmingly the view of Physics faculty. The arguments on both “sides” of the negotiation, the graduate student union and the university administration, were rather poor, however. The key point, which hardly anyone seems willing to state, is whether our stipend allows us to recruit the best students we can, who will be valued as teachers and as members of our research groups, in the latter case pushing scientific discovery as best as we possibly can. All other points are peripheral. It doesn’t matter, in contrast to some administrative arguments, what the differences across departments are if those reflect differences in the landscape of recruiting. It doesn’t matter, in contrast to some students’ arguments, how much more money one can make doing something other than being a graduate student — this is true by construction, as one is a student as well as an employee.

That last point, however, connects to a broader issue: the entire structure of graduate education in the U.S., at least in the sciences, is an incoherent pastiche. Are graduate students students or workers? Both, often simultaneously. Are graduate students being paid or paying for their work? Again, both, often simultaneously, though they don’t pay the tuition costs themselves and are often unaware the costs exist. Will the increase in student stipends leads to a reduction in university-funded positions? Undoubtedly, but we’re not told how much. Are departments, and individual research labs (like mine) expected to operate like businesses, attending to income and expenses? Yes, but without the autonomy of businesses.

Coming soon to a campus near you (if it hasn’t already)

These sorts of graduate labor conflicts, as mentioned at the start, are being mirrored at other universities in the recent past, the present, and the future. Most notably, graduate students throughout much of the UC system (Berkeley, for example) went on strike in 2023, the result of which was a roughly 25% salary increase, a sizeable drop in graduate student positions, and (I’ve heard) lingering animosity.

Relatedly, institutions with deep pockets (i.e with cash flows from large endowments abetted by nonsensical tax exempt status) can pay large stipends. Princeton’s, for example, is about $48,000 per year. There’s of course nothing wrong with this — it’s a much better way to spend money than many things universities do — but it highlights the growing divide between richer and poorer institutions.

There’s an upcoming drama here at the University of Oregon that the graduate student issues foreshadow: we have a faculty union, faculty salaries that have long been considerably lower than those at similar institutions, and bargaining between the union and the university administration that has recently begun and that shows no sign of rapid resolution. Will the Fall term bring a faculty strike?

Today’s illustration

A watercolor and colored pencil copy I made of Wayne Thiebaud’s watercolor-on-etching “Lemon Meringue” (1989), shown below. Wandering through the Art and Design library on campus, I came across a book of Thiebaud’s hand-colored prints, and checked it out. My quick freehand drawing has a poor treatment of perspective; Thiebaud makes it seem effortless!

— Raghuveer Parthasarathy. June 21, 2024