This is going to be one of my more “insider” posts, in the sense that it’s less directed toward an audience not invested in academia than others. It will also focus on the specific context of my institution, but I’m sure readers at other universities will see parallels in their own workplaces. There are details I won’t spell out in the text but might be able to elaborate on in comments.

As elsewhere, there has been intense discussion about the future of graduate education here at the University of Chicago in recent years. A central aspect of this discussion – but by no means its only component – has been a campaign to win collective bargaining rights for graduate student workers. The short version of this campaign’s recent history is that in fall 2017 graduate students voted decisively to unionize under Graduate Students United (GSU). Winning that election was a tremendous victory in itself because the university administration has steadfastly maintained that being a full-time graduate student and a worker are mutually exclusive. This despite the fact that the university hires us to fill specific, non-guaranteed teaching positions that require us primarily to advance the education of undergraduates in exchange for monetary compensation that is reported on the same W-2 forms that you would receive for any other form of employment. Unsurprisingly, the university continued to appeal the results of that election. With the constitution of the National Labor Relations Board, which would ultimately decide our case and others, changing as a result of the 2016 election, our union and several others decided to withdraw their petitions so as not to give the new NLRB the opportunity to overturn currently favorable precedent. Instead, we have continued to push our university to voluntarily recognize our rights as workers.

This week, our union went on strike to make our voices heard. I’m immensely grateful for the incredible work that our organizers put into this action and deeply encouraged by the participation and support of colleagues, alumni, and allies. As was to be expected, the administration has continued to refuse to speak to or even acknowledge the union, hiding behind their locked and police-protected office doors.

Instead, they’ve chosen to continue a pattern of communicating with us through a series of patronizing, condescending, and dishonest emails. I’ve included the text of the most recent email, sent by Provost Daniel Diermeier as an image below. (Click to enlarge.)

Diermeier’s statements on “collaboration” are particularly galling to me. I have been only minimally involved in union organizing itself. Instead, I’ve put most of my energy into what I imagine as parallel efforts to improve graduate students’ experiences. One aspect of this has been serving as a representative to our division’s Deans Advisory Council (DAC) the last two years. Several points in Diermeier’s email address but fundamentally mis-characterize this work. I’d like to focus on one in particular:

The University of Chicago is working collaboratively with graduate students and faculty to ensure the continued strength of our doctoral programs. Last year, I charged the Committee on Graduate Education – composed of faculty and graduate students from across campus – with providing a thorough assessment of the present state of PhD education nationally and at the University. They produced a comprehensive report, which was shared with the University community. Faculty and graduate students are guiding efforts and making progress in addressing the report’s recommendations in areas such as PhD funding, mentoring, pedagogical training, grievance policies, health services, housing and transportation, campus climate, and space for graduate students. In addition, various schools and divisions are considering enhancements to student financial support, such as sixth-year funding. Such improvements may have to stop if the University were to recognize a union.

I have three objections to the image of student-faculty “collaboration” that Diermeier has fabricated for the purposes of this propaganda missive. 

My first objection relates to his discussion of the Committee on Graduate Education (CGE). I wasn’t a member of this committee so I can’t speak to its inner workings. It was incredible that this committee, starting work in late spring – the most difficult time of the year to begin meeting with interested stakeholders – was tasked with producing a comprehensive report on graduate education in only eight months. The administration’s hostile stance toward GSU and this artificially truncated time-frame limited opportunities for intensive collaboration with bodies like DAC. Contrary to Diermeier’s messaging at the time, our council was given no input into the selection of student representatives to this committee. Forcing this committee to quickly wrap up its work rather than producing a more durable forum for collaboration has allowed Diermeier to move forward with setting up a succession of issue-focused committees that report to no one but him. This splintering of discussion about how to improve graduate education consolidates decision-making power in the hands of administrators like Diermeier while weakening both faculty and graduate student input. If anything, these committees serve to shield the administration from being directly beholden to the university community, instead allowing them to cherry-pick or contort recommendations from a safe distance.

(Note: my adviser was a faculty member of the CGE. The opinions above are exclusively my own and are based on the observations of myself and colleagues, not any specific information received from him.)

My second objection focuses on a specific issue mentioned toward the end of this paragraph – sixth-year funding – that illustrates the points made above at the division level. Concurrent with the university’s CGE, individual divisions launched their own committees to discuss improvements to graduate education. The committee in my division (Social Sciences) consisted entirely of faculty members. It consulted DAC through soliciting our responses to a series of questions, having several members attend our meeting with the university CGE, and one (frankly, bizarre) follow-up meeting with one member of the committee and our dean. Like the CGE, this committee was charged with producing a report with general recommendations, not specific policies. We were told that the dean’s office would announce appropriate policies in response to the report after further consultation with individual departments. Graduate students played no role in actually drafting this report, making us more research subjects than collaborators. Members of DAC did not know what would be in the report – even in terms of general recommendations – until it was released publicly. (In fact, hints that were dropped in the follow-up meeting a couple weeks before the report came out turned out to be false leads.)

The possibility of extending the standard five-year funding package students receive to six years was of particular concern to us. Firstly because it is an area of obvious need: as the division’s report notes, the median time to degree for students in the History Department in recent years has been 8.25 years. Five years of guaranteed funding leaves the average student needing to put together an additional three or more years of funding, which takes time, causes considerable financial precarity, and negatively impacts the quality of our research and professional development. (e.g. I am on track to graduate in a respectable seven years, but I spent most of this year not knowing if I would be funded next year, which shaped decisions about housing, job applications, and child care.) Moreover, in the run-up to our division’s report, the Humanities Division and the School of Divinity both announced that they would extend guaranteed funding to six years. Since research expectations for large programs in our division, like history and anthropology, are similar to those in these divisions, we hoped our division would follow suit but also that we would have the chance to give input on other changes that might accompany a sixth year of funding, such as lowering the cap on the number of years students are allowed to register. We never got that chance. In fact, the committee’s report didn’t even recommend adding a sixth year of funding. Instead, they proposed expanding existing, non-guaranteed write-up fellowships. Our dean acted upon this recommendation before scheduled meetings with individual departments, instituting a new, back-stop write-up fellowship that is not only not guaranteed but also imposes conditions for graduation that may in some cases be even stricter than those introduced in divisions that added a sixth year of guaranteed funding. In other words, the decision about how to handle this crucial issue was anything but a product of genuine collaboration with students and faculty.

My third objection is simpler. Diermeier notes that recognizing our union might mean that efforts to improve graduate studies like the CGE, DAC, and maybe even our department student association would have to cease. He offers no basis for this claim. Because there is none. It’s a cynical scare tactic unbecoming an employee of an institution that prides itself on intellectual rigor. In fact, he undermines this claim elsewhere in the email when he says that a collectively bargained contract won’t cover all issues of concern to graduate students. Which is exactly why we need both a union and other bodies to work together to improve graduate education.

I don’t want to understate the difficulty that I believe working out a contract will entail. The diversity across our university and even within divisions makes crafting sufficiently adaptable policies difficult, and graduate students can be just as cantankerous as you would expect future faculty members to be. However, this week showed our willingness to come together in the face of unlikely odds and even threats and intimidation from the administrators who are supposed to support us. This is the kind of real, gritty collaboration we need to make a better university and to check the devolution of power away from students and faculty. Not the faux collaboration peddled by Diermeier. It won’t be easy, but if there’s anywhere that doesn’t equate “hard” and “impossible,” it should be the University of Chicago.