On a recent Sunday evening, nine graduate students at the University of Missouri at Columbia met in a cramped room on the third floor of Ellis Library. They were leaders of the newly formed Forum on Graduate Rights, and after two weeks of organizing protests and jousting with the administration over the working conditions of graduate students, they were catching their breath and plotting their next steps.
The forum came together last month, somewhat spontaneously, to fight a university move to cut health-insurance subsidies for graduate students. In the wake of a public outcry, the administration reversed the decision, if only temporarily, and now the forum and other graduate students are figuring out how to turn the newfound grass-roots activism on the campus into a sustained campaign. Their goal: Make graduate-student needs a top priority for Missouri administrators.
They argue that the university has long neglected them and cite a list of complaints: the closing of a child-care center, the elimination of student housing, and low Ph.D. stipends. They argue, for example, that the minimum stipend, of about $12,000 a year for a graduate assistant fellowship, is far from adequate and falls below what most major research universities offer.
For the students, resentment over their treatment was a powder keg that grew over several years. And though the university’s administration has taken a variety of steps to make the graduate experience better, the forum plans to take future action, and might even form a union.
As graduate-student advocates elsewhere watch the campus to see how the showdown will be resolved, Missouri illustrates just how quickly and easily such frustrations can boil over — and provides something of a cautionary tale for other universities.
In an era of tight university budgets, the needs of graduate students are getting lost as a priority, says Brian Wilkey, president of Student Advocates for Graduate Education, a national group. The health-care issue at Missouri brought the poor treatment of graduate students to the fore, but the challenging environment for master’s and doctoral students has primed many campuses for a surge in protests and complaints.
Graduate-student debt is at an all-time high, and tenure-track jobs are getting harder and harder to land as the number of new Ph.D. recipients outpaces new academic jobs. All of that is resulting in “more activism and more regular banding together of graduate students,” says Mr. Wilkey, a Ph.D. student in the department of human development and family sciences at the University of Texas at Austin.
The Spark
If anger about graduate students’ working conditions at Missouri was a powder keg, the spark that lit it came in the form of an email. On August 14, Leona J. Rubin, associate vice chancellor for graduate studies, sent a message that said that changes in federal law would require the university to eliminate health-insurance subsidies for graduate students, and that their insurance would expire at the end of the day.
Missouri isn’t alone in dealing with this issue. Many university lawyers have interpreted the Affordable Care Act as preventing universities from providing subsidies for student health-insurance plans, and higher-education associations have asked the Internal Revenue Service to clarify the rules.
But students felt Missouri had made its decision prematurely, as many other universities are awaiting clarification on the matter before they act. And no university gave such little notice as Missouri did.
Shortly after the email went out, a group of students quickly researched the issue of coverage and organized a forum three days later to explain it to their peers. When a standing-room crowd of hundreds of graduate students showed up at the university’s Walter Johnson Auditorium, and voiced broader frustrations, organizers say they seized the moment to channel the passion into a structured group, the Forum on Graduate Rights.
Primarily using Twitter and Facebook, the forum and its supporters publicly shamed the administration for its treatment of graduate students. Graduate students at the handful of universities that have also opted to cut subsidies, like Louisiana State, joined in, raising the level of the online protest.
The uproar seemed to catch university officials flat-footed, and they did not react quickly to the students’ confusion about health insurance. At first, R. Bowen Loftin, the university’s chancellor, apologized for poorly communicating the cut in subsidies. Then, a week after Ms. Rubin’s email, he said the decision to end coverage would be deferred a year.
But by then, the Forum on Graduate Rights had drawn more than 1,200 Facebook members and showed no intention of disbanding. If the university had reacted more swiftly, at least one graduate student says, the new activist group would never have formed.
After the university’s reversal, members of the group organized a campus rally attended by more than a thousand students and faculty members. The members are now informally surveying the graduate-student body to find out whether there is enough support to start a union.
The August email “was a moment of clarity,” says Jason Entsminger, a first-year Ph.D. student in agricultural economics. “With that one unilateral action, graduate students saw the light of how unilateral governance on this campus has been. It underscored how fragile our dignity as human beings is.”
Balancing Priorities
Administrators at Missouri sympathize with the graduate students’ concerns, but say the concerns must be seen in the context of the university’s larger budget challenges.
Like most public universities, the university is being asked to do more with less. Data provided by administrators show that state money covered 70 percent of the university’s operating budget in 1990, but only half of that today. The university recently gave buyouts to 111 tenured faculty members to free up funds, and the Columbia campus says it has more than $500 million in deferred building maintenance.
Even with tight budgets, the administration has increased the minimum stipend twice since 2014 and says it has not ignored graduate-student needs. Earlier this year it formed a panel to examine graduate students’ problems and hired consultants to study their housing needs.
When asked about the campus’s new graduate-student activism, Mr. Loftin, the chancellor, glanced out his office window in Jesse Hall and told the story of Mr. Loftin, the Rice University Ph.D. student in physics.
More than 40 years ago, Mr. Loftin’s $158-a-month stipend meant his staples included day-old bread and a three-pound tub of generic peanut butter. After he and his fellow graduate students argued to the department’s faculty that their stipends were not livable, Mr. Loftin was appointed to a two-person committee to study stipends, and eventually they were increased.
The story illustrates Mr. Loftin’s main message to agitated graduate students at Missouri: Work with us to solve these problems. In the wake of the recent protests, the university formed a task force led by a dean and with graduate-student members to figure out health-care options. The university plans to raise stipends again, to be more competitive with other public institutions in the Association of American Universities.
“Perhaps it’s possible for us to objectively find a measure we could all agree on and make that the minimum stipend,” says Mr. Loftin.
As for graduate students who argue that the best chance for fair treatment by the university is to unionize, he says: “They have a right to form a union, but doing so won’t create more resources.”
National Echoes
As graduate-student issues continue to simmer at Missouri, master’s and Ph.D. students elsewhere are looking to it as an example of the type of public activism that is needed to make substantial changes on their campuses.
“The graduate-student issues at Missouri — stipends, housing, child care, feelings of being overworked and underappreciated — have been echoed to me by students across the nation,” says Kristofferson Culmer, a fifth-year Ph.D. student in computer science at Missouri.
Mr. Culmer, who is chair of the Forum on Graduate Rights’ steering committee and president of the National Association of Graduate-Professional Students, says the demands on graduate students’ time and their precarious roles at universities mean organizing for better working conditions can be difficult, but dormant concerns could erupt at any time, as they did at Missouri.
Mannie Liscum, a professor in the biological-sciences division at Missouri and a former associate graduate dean, agrees. While “the system has been taking advantage of graduate students for a long time,” the situation has become more volatile lately. “I think the pressures have just built to this point where the students are ready to explode,” Mr. Liscum says. “This isn’t unique to Mizzou.”
Vimal Patel covers graduate education. Follow him on Twitter @vimalpatel232, or write to him at vimal.patel@chronicle.com.
