Teaching fellows in the English department at the University of Houston staged a daylong sit-in outside the university president’s office on Wednesday to draw attention to their demands for better pay and working conditions. Stipends for teaching fellows in the department have not increased since 1993.
The graduate fellows are asking to be paid $19,200, which the fellows and their supporters say is the living wage for an adult in Houston. Fellows in the Ph.D. program now earn $11,200 per year, and those in the M.F.A. program earn $9,600. The fellows, who have to pay about $2,400 in fees per year, are required to teach two composition courses per semester, with about 25 students in each class.
Their contracts limit what they can do to supplement their income. The university says that full-time graduate students may not hold graduate assistantships or other on-campus employment titles consisting of a total workload of more than 20 hours per week or 50 percent of full-time equivalency.
“We have tried for months to get the administration to deal with this,” said Robert Boswell, a full professor in the English department. “We’ve worked through all the right channels before getting to this point.”
About two dozen teaching fellows participated in the demonstration on Wednesday. They sat on the floor in the hallway grading freshman essays while their faculty supporters brought them jelly sandwiches and bottles of water.
A spokesman for the university sent a statement about the demonstration by e-mail. “Teaching fellows are students in the graduate program who receive a stipend as partial compensation for providing teaching support as a part of their education,” the statement read. “These stipends are modest and not intended to serve as a living-wage salary—students are here to study, learn, and work with their graduate advisers to help them prepare for their careers.”
The statement went on to say that the university is engaged in conversation with the fellows about their concerns and that they will be among the budget issues administrators will evaluate. “To attract the best and brightest students, we recognize the need to offer competitive stipends within our financial and budget constraints,” the statement read. “This will be one of many priorities the university will be evaluating when building the budget for the next biennium.”
In an e-mail to the teaching fellows on Tuesday, Paula M. Short, the university’s provost, and John Roberts, dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences and a professor in the English department, also said that the administration was taking their requests seriously and planned to deal with them through the annual budget-planning process.
Some teaching fellows called the university’s statement “vague,” and said they were not satisfied with the e-mail they had received. The fellows promised to demonstrate until they received a written agreement to increase their stipend.
“The administration has said to the students, ‘We hear you, trust us, we will take care of you,’” Mr. Boswell said. “But when you haven’t had a raise for 20 years, they’re disinclined to take it on face.”
Talia Mailman, a first-year M.F.A. student in fiction, said she arrived at the sit-in at 7:45 a.m. She said that she and her peers felt disrespected because the administration had ignored them for so long.
“The stress of not having enough money keeps me up worried,” Ms. Mailman said. “I wake up at four in the morning worrying about where I’m going to get money. It makes it difficult to find time to write.”
