Attention University of Chicago Students, Staff, and Faculty

On Wednesday May 28th and Thursday May 29th, we call upon you
to hold your classes outside to show solidarity with graduate
student employees and their demands for fair pay, guaranteed
teaching opportunities, and health care benefits.

For over a year, we have been calling attention to the
shockingly low wages paid to graduate students teachers. Our
pay has not increased in over eight years. Whether we grade
papers as Teaching Assistants ($1,500 per quarter) or instruct
a course ($3,500 per quarter), our pay remains the lowest
among peer institutions and most area universities, and far
below the cost of living. Furthermore, none of the teaching
positions we hold include health care insurance or other
employee benefits,

The work we do is essential to the functioning of this
university, but we are paid as if we are disposable.

In response, Graduate Students United and the Graduate
Council’s Graduate Funding Committee have been collecting
petitions, holding rallies, and organizing students to fight
for a change. While we have won some improvements in graduate
stipends, summer funding, and dissertation fellowships, these
limited changes have not met the needs of current students.

And it was only at the start of the Spring Quarter that we
were successful in getting the Provost’s Office to convene a
student-faculty Committee on Teaching to review these and
other employment issues.

While this committee will likely recommend a much-needed raise
in teaching pay, these recommendations must be approved by
many of the same administrators who have failed year after
year to increase pay!

To help support the work of the Teaching Committee, Graduate
Students United and the Graduate Funding Committee is calling
for a two-day Teach Out so that the university can see how
much teaching we do as well as how much support we have from
students, staff, and faculty.

Who: All Students, Staff, and Professors

Where: Outside on the Main Quad

What: A Two-Day Teach Out in Solidarity with Graduate Students

When: Wednesday May 28th and Thursday May 29th

Why: Graduate students demand fair pay and health care
coverage for all university employees!

For more information or for a PDF copy of the event flyer,
contact:

Toussaint Losier: tlosier@uchicago.edu

Joe Bonni: joebonni@uchicago.edu

Sponsored by: the Graduate Funding Committee and Graduate
Students United

For more info:

http://uofcgradfunding.blogspot.com/

http://www.uchicagogsu.org/

I’d like to take a moment and thank the members of SGFC for staying true to the spirit of Scav Hunt when they heard the budget for Scav Air this spring. Their silence made it possible for the Scav Judges to fly eight unsuspecting Scav Warriors to Las Vegas.

By all accounts (Maroon, Scav Blog) it was an excellent addition to this year’s festivities. I’d like to take a moment to acknowledge the committee for its role in making this possible.

I’d also like to lay out the SGFC request which was for $4,686.97, which was not included in the official minutes. This is the first time we’ve ever had a ’secret’ budget and it only really worked due to this year’s SGFC surplus.

The $4,686.97 went to fly 11 students, eight warriors and three judges, to Las Vegas and then put them up in Hotels for the adventure. Scav does not normally receive any SGFC or Annual Allocations funds.

It is with great pleasure that I would like to announce that One Campus has been elected as your new Executive Slate, and Brian Cody and Aliza Levine have been elected your new Liaisons to the Board of Trustees. In this election we had record turnout with 2,755 Students voted for Executive Slate and both Liaisons, of these 1,916 were Undergrads and 839 were Graduate Students (see breakout of divisions and historic turnout at the bottom of the post).

• One Campus - 1266
• Connect 4 - 629
• YEP - 393
• Moose - 261

• Aliza Lavine - 854
• Tex Dozier - 672
• Louis Potok - 342
• Nick Zhou - 261

• Nick Rodman - 196
• Kati Proctor - 166
• Christina Melander - 176
• Gabriel Gaster - 135
• David Grossman - 133
• Greg Gabrellas - 120
• Akshay Birla - 97

• Jarrod Wolf - 241
• Prerna Nadathur - 227
• Aaron Goggans - 224
• Jay Kim - 209
• Sam Feldman - 195
• Alison Feenstra - 178
• Nick Zhao - 95

If you were at GC’s Open Forum with the Provost on Graduate Funding on Monday, you know Provost Rosenbaum mentioned the University’s Annual Report. The latest Annual Report I could find was the 2005-2006 Report. If you scroll down towards the end, you can see the University Balance Sheets (pages 32-52) and other general financial information. I am looking for the 2006-2007 report and will get more information as soon as I get it.

I was one of a handful of undergraduates who attended Monday’s Open Forum with Provost Rosenbaum.

Overall, I was really disappointed with the way that the provost addressed the numerous questions that he received about graduate student’s position in the budgetary process. He continually referenced the fact that he has to make decisions about university priorities: crumbling buildings, security, three gymnasiums south of the Midway, etc.  However, what I think gets to the core of the issue is that the issues of graduate student funding have an immediate effect on the lives of hundreds of people.  These are students in their mid or late twenties, thirties, and beyond, who have chosen to sacrifice the ability to almost certainly make significantly more money in the private sector for the opportunity to engage fruitfully in the life of the mind.  Shouldn’t this sacrifice and dedication to the intellectual principles of the university warrant more than a hand-wave as a passing gesture?  Don’t current graduate students constitute a meaningful part of the campus environment in which we all engage?

While I applaud the efforts of the administration to speak publicly about these issues, I urge them to consider the transparency of their decision making process, and their faltering rhetoric about institutional priorities.

Graduate Students

Deserve Better!

Show your support for the people who make the life of the mind possible by coming out to:

The Rally on the Quads on Wednesday, March 12th at Noon!
Complete with bands, demands, and guest speakers!

RSVP on Facebook here and here.

Learn more at the Graduate Funding Blog.

Background Article:

University of Chicago Receives a Failing Grade in Graduate Student Funding

CHICAGO – University of Chicago graduate students unveiled a “Grad Funding Report Card” on Thursday in the form of a 7-foot banner, which they carried through the University’s main quad. Over the past four days nearly 500 students participated in a survey to voice their opinions on how well recent University actions met student needs. The results were released last Wednesday.

Students were not impressed. Students felt the university continued to fail to resolve key concerns. The administration received an “F’ concerning teaching pay as well as a ‘D-“ for health care. Dissertation grants and stipends both received “C-” grades while summer grants won the highest grade of “C.” Student leaders also gave the university an
‘F’ for participation as Provost Thomas Rosenbaum has yet to meet in an open forum with students.

This is only the latest action in the growing demand for improved funding for Humanities, Social Science and Divinity school graduate students at the university. Last week, 150 students marched from the library and up the five flights of stairs to present apples (a symbol of education) to Provost Rosenbaum. Each apple signed by students asked the
Provost to advocate for better funding on their behalf.

The poor funding situation was highlighted last February when President Zimmer promised $50 million dollars to fully fund all future students in
the Humanities and Social Sciences. However, this new plan ignored the approx. 2000 current students whose funding falls far below the cost of living.

Teaching pay has not been raised for these divisions in the past 10 years. Student teachers at peer universities currently make as much as four to five times what the University of Chicago currently pays. The University also fails to compensate student employees with health care benefits.

Throughout the past year, graduate students have been working with the administration trying to improve current student funding. In response,
the Provost released a plan last Thursday, February 21^st to make some limited improvements in funding for those left out of the $50 million dollar funding initiative. However, these improvements fail to make
systematic changes to teaching pay and health care and only committed 10% of the funds that were needed to provide full funding to the university’s graduate students.

Student leaders will continue to press the university for increased funding and plan to hold another larger event– a rally featuring student and faculty speakers– on Thursday March 12^th . Students will
be presenting demands for increase teaching compensation equal to peer institutions, baseline stipends for all current graduate students,
summer research support, health insurance for all students employed by the university, a guarantee of quality teaching opportunities and dissertation-writing grants for all students.

The Provost, Thomas Rosenbaum, will be discussing the Report on Graduate Aid and the action steps recommended in the report on Monday, March 10th at Noon in Max Palevsky Cinema (aka Doc Filmn).

The Provost and Cathy Cohen, the Deputy Provost for Graduate Education, will answer your questions about the Action Steps and discuss other issues of concern to graduate students.

Hosted by Graduate Council, all students are encouraged to attend!

The recent Provost Report on Graduate Funding DRASTICALLY overestimates the cost of funding all current Social Sciences and Humanities students at the same level as new students for this current year and the next three years.

By $23 Million

How does this happen? The administration estimated the cost of adding a 5th year of coverage by including ~$36,000 in annual tuition. So calculating their cost to them, for students in Advanced Residence Year One as ~$36,000 + $19,000. In fact, Advanced Residence’s tuition is estimated on the bursar’s site to cost $15,000. This tuition estimate has been confirmed by the administration in light of this news.

If you see this spreadsheet it goes into greater depths explaining the math. The cogent facts can be summarized as:

• By mis estimating tuition, the administration overly inflated the estimated cost to support graduate students
• Whereas before it would have taken $57 Million over four years to support current Graduate Students at the same level of incoming Graduate Students, this amount is actually closer to $33 Million
• To cover Graduate Students for the next three years it would actually cost $17 Million (~$3 Million has already been pledged) where before it would have cost around $35 Million for the next three years.

Disclaimer: because our calculations are themselves based off the working report’s numbers, we can’t be sure of the exact figure on the bottom line. But it shouldn’t be wildly different from the $33 million and $17 million respectively.

It is extremely disappointing and disheartening that the Provost Report was allowed to be released with these bad numbers. Student Government hopes that this accounting error is not indicative of how serious the administration is focusing on this issue, and instead is just a simple mistake. Mistakes like these place a burden of mistrust upon this process and it is now on the administrations shoulder’s to bear and overcome this burden.

Substantive steps should be taken to show this matter is being treated with the utmost seriousness and that the administration will be one hundred percent truthful and accurate in all future reporting on this matter.

Especially given that four of the Provost’s recent proposals involve setting up new committees of inquiry. The veracity of these committee’s reports and of the information they have to work must be verified and guaranteed by the administration for future inquiry into these matters is to proceed.

This information was discovered thanks to the hard work of Daragh Grant and I was notified by our Graduate Liaison to the Board, Erica Simmons. Thursday the 28th, the Graduate Report Card on funding will be released on the main quads to respond to the Provost’s report.

If you want to post on the Forum or the Blog, you need to create a new account. Your CNET ID is not valid for these. You can use the same one but you still need to register as a new user. To do this on the forum, go to the ‘Register‘ Link on the top-center of the header and follow the directions. To post on the blog click on the ‘Register‘ link on the right side of the main blog.

Sorry for the confusion.

This text is intended to make more accessible the diverse activity surrounding the effort to increase funding for current graduate students at the University of Chicago, activity that is a direct response to the new funding package aimed only at new graduate students. For any students who want to get involved or want
more information, this document is meant to make that effort significantly easier.

Synopsis of Graduate Funding 2-15-08