When one of America’s first graduate-student unions was recognized at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, in 1969, organizers embraced a key principle: Graduate assistants should get equal pay for equal work.
At the time, teaching assistants in some science and engineering disciplines were earning twice as much as those in the humanities. The students banded together to push for a more equitable model, eventually persuading the university to set campuswide stipend rates for graduate teaching assistants.
Today, graduate students say the university wants to break the compact the union helped forge.
‘Who’s to say a teaching assistant in science works harder than one in English? And who’s to say that the value one brings to the university is any more than the other?’
In an effort to make Wisconsin’s flagship campus more competitive in attracting the best doctoral students in science and engineering disciplines, administrators want to allow individual departments to be able to set their own maximum stipend rates. Most universities provide such flexibility, and officials at Madison say that despite the agreement with the union, departments often find outside funds to pay their graduate assistants more money.
But some graduate students argue that such a step would favor students in disciplines that have better access to federal money or philanthropic gifts — notably those in science and engineering — and would violate the university’s long tradition of equal pay for graduate students. While they concede that in practical terms, parity was more of an ideal than a reality, they say the principle remains important.
“Who’s to say a teaching assistant in science works harder than one in English?” says Sergio Gonzalez, a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in history at Madison. “And who’s to say that the value one brings to the university is any more than the other?”
Administrators on many campuses are grappling with how much to compensate their graduate assistants, the students who help faculty members teach courses and assist with research. In setting stipends, universities and departments must balance a variety of concerns: budget constraints, competitiveness with peers, and mitigating what can be a significant pay gap between students in different disciplines.
At Wisconsin, the students’ concerns center on fairness: It’s true that engineering graduates typically command higher salaries than history graduates on the job market, but why should that dynamic exist in graduate programs?
Mr. Gonzalez, who is co-president of the graduate-student union, uses the example of his most recent job. As a middle-school teacher, he earned the same pay whether he taught social studies or science.
“The idea was that both of those content areas were equally important to create a whole student,” Mr. Gonzalez says. “Instead of raising wages for some workers, why doesn’t the university find a way to raise wages for all workers?”
Complicating matters is that the graduate-student union, known as the Teaching Assistants’ Association, is a shell of its former self.
The group used to represent all graduate teaching assistants on the campus, but now it has only 600 or so members among the university’s 5,800 Ph.D. students. It is no longer legally recognized since Gov. Scott Walker succeeded in curtailing collective-bargaining rights in the state. Previously, Mr. Gonzalez says, the restructuring of graduate-student pay would have had to be done through a process under the university’s contract with the union. Today, he says, graduate students weren’t consulted about the move to allow departmental stipend rates.
William J. Karpus, dean of the Graduate School, acknowledges that students should have had a seat at the table. He recently decided to delay the effective date of the change by a year, to May 2017.
‘Radical Restructuring’
While students call the stipend revision a “radical restructuring,” Mr. Karpus says it is mundane. Departments already have ways to pay graduate students more in addition to the base stipend, through bonuses, fellowships, and grants. Letting departments set their own stipend levels — and capping graduate assistants’ working time at 20 hours a week, rather than 30 hours — would allow prospective students to compare financial offers from other universities with less confusion, Mr. Karpus says.
Moreover, the money that departments receive from the university to pay graduate students a standard base stipend of about $15,300 annually for teaching assistants working 20 hours will still be distributed equally regardless of discipline, Mr. Karpus says.
“In order for, say, physics or chemistry to be competitive and attract the best possible students, they have to set a stipend that is competitive,” he says. “The proposal won’t cut anyone’s stipend. It will allow departments the flexibility to set the upper limit of the stipend.”
Albrecht Karle, chair of the physics department, says competitive stipends are needed to increase long-term diversity among graduate students. Universities in Madison’s peer group are also trying to diversify their programs, so students who rely on stipends for living expenses are more likely to take better offers. “Stipends might not matter as much to students who are from a privileged background,” Mr. Karle says.
But leaders of the TA association say the change has symbolic meaning and would further the gap between haves and have-nots among Ph.D. students.
“An informal practice of pay inequality and an administrative sanction of pay inequality are two different things,” Mr. Gonzalez says. “Under our current system, collectively agreed upon by administrators and graduate employees, the need to be competitive in one discipline puts upward pressure on wages campuswide, because central administration needs to raise rates for all graduate employees.”
Vimal Patel covers graduate education. Follow him on Twitter @vimalpatel232, or write to him at vimal.patel@chronicle.com.