Update: Temple University’s graduate students voted to approve the new agreement on Monday, March 13.
After a six-week strike, graduate students at Temple University have reached a tentative agreement with the administration to raise their minimum salary by 30 percent and increase benefits. But some at the Philadelphia institution say that won’t fully resolve the recent campus unrest.
What’s happened at Temple this semester may foreshadow standoffs at other colleges as more graduate students organize unions and push for higher pay.
This is the second tentative agreement the grad-student union and the university have reached during the strike; graduate students rejected the last one. They will vote on the new agreement “imminently,” according to the union.
Under the deal, the minimum salary for graduate assistants would rise to $24,000 in the contract’s first year and to $27,000 in the fourth year, up from their current average pay of $20,700, according to university data provided to The Philadelphia Inquirer. Schools and colleges at Temple often pay their graduate students more than the minimum, the newspaper reported. The union, officially the Temple University Graduate Students’ Association, had initially asked for a 50-percent increase in base pay, to more than $32,000.
Union leaders touted the agreement’s other provisions as “meaningful, material gains,” saying it would secure affordable health care for graduate assistants’ dependents, expand parental and bereavement leave, and improve working conditions. They’ve been negotiating with the university for the past year.
Still fresh on graduate students’ minds, though, is the administration’s decision last month to withdraw tuition and health-care benefits from those on strike. Before the agreement was announced, students faced a March 9 deadline to pay tuition, which is typically waived for graduate assistants, or face late fees. Temple reinstated health-care benefits on Thursday but didn’t address tuition.
Universities often threaten to pull tuition remission and health-care benefits from those on strike, but it is unusual for administrators to follow through, said William A. Herbert, executive director of the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions at Hunter College, part of the City University of New York.
Meanwhile, a faculty union at Temple is considering whether to hold a vote of no-confidence in Jason Wingard, the university’s president, in the next week.
Jeffrey Doshna, an associate professor of instruction in city planning and president of that union, the Temple Association of University Professionals, said he’d heard from faculty members about what they see as leadership shortcomings in a number of areas, including the withdrawal of tuition and health-care benefits from graduate students.
“It was a choice that they didn’t have to make,” Doshna said. He added: “I’m glad that they’ve recognized how horrible a step this was, but that they took it at all in the first place is indicative of a failure of leadership.”
In an emailed statement, a Temple spokesperson, Deirdre Hopkins, said the university is aware of the potential no-confidence vote. Hopkins said the administration would continue to work with Temple’s Faculty Senate “to address our most challenging issues.”
Why Some Didn’t Strike
Not all of Temple’s graduate students stopped their teaching and research over the past few weeks.
About 40 percent of the members of the bargaining unit were on strike as of Wednesday, said Daniel Carsello, a Ph.D. student in music studies and president of the grad-student union. Temple did not respond to a request for its estimate of the percentage of striking graduate assistants; officials said previously that about 30 percent of graduate assistants were on strike.
Mitch Perkins, a communications Ph.D. student who has not been on strike, said that some union members had been disproportionately hurt by Temple’s moves against strikers’ benefits.
Carsello agreed that the elimination of tuition-remission and health-care benefits had endangered graduate students with chronic health conditions. He also criticized the administration for suggesting “that visa holders may face different and more severe consequences” for striking.
Perkins and other nonstrikers have criticized union leaders, saying the group hadn’t done enough to lift up students from marginalized backgrounds. Some students who felt as if they couldn’t afford to lose their pay, health care, and tuition remission said they had been made to feel guilty for crossing the picket line, according to The Temple News, the student newspaper.
Perkins, who is nonbinary, said they decided not to strike because they had felt tokenized by union leaders; Perkins was asked to join the union’s negotiating team without having any prior labor-organizing experience. Perkins said they believe the union did that for “empty diversity reasons,” but then didn’t listen to their ideas, including creating caucuses within the union for marginalized student groups.
“It was no longer worth my time to be a diversity token while the issues that mattered to me (like the need for caucuses) were dismissed,” Perkins wrote in an email.
Perkins said that because they felt unheard by the union’s leadership, they would rather devote their time to organizing with other nonstrikers.
Perkins said they regularly talked with peers who “had become disenchanted with bothering to participate,” Perkins wrote in an email. “Meetings were predominantly white, which was especially problematic because many of the people who had become uninterested in participating were members of color and international students.”
Carsello said the union aims to represent all of its members.
Since negotiations officially began, in January 2022, “all members have been invited to participate in decision making at open sessions,” Carsello said. The union, he said, “seeks to be as inclusive as possible, and we are always looking to hear and represent the concerns of all of our members.”
