Grad students rally for timely pay
UVA students and faculty rallied outside Madison Hall earlier this month, while, inside, five representatives from United Campus Workers discussed untimely graduate stipend payments with Executive Vice President and Provost Ian Baucom and his team.
Outside, protesters waved signs reading “I just finished my dissertation and I’m here to say cut the checks and cut them today!”; “We deserve a living wage!”; and “Provost Baucom I’ve been paid late 2 times since Aug 2022—How can I feed my child?” Inside, UCW leaders asked Baucom to “commit to spending resources on this issue.”
Graduate students at UVA have long maintained that they are underpaid, and first protested untimely payment of the scraps they do earn in December. “It’s so difficult for us, especially because none of us make a living wage. We are living paycheck to paycheck,” says second-year doctoral student and chair of UVA-UCW Laura Ornée.
“Since I enrolled in the program in July 2022, I’ve had a total of five payments come after the date stated in my enrollment contract,” says first-year doctoral student Crystalina Peterson, “I have to put off buying groceries and paying high-interest credit card bills and student loans. If I can’t eat properly, how am I supposed to continue to do my work for the university?”
Phil Trella, associate vice provost and director of the Office of Graduate and Postdoctoral Affairs, only learned of these concerns in December, when a system-wide error withheld stipends of around 130 graduate students. Administrators were able to complete stipend processing before January 1—the processing deadline. “Students received payments later than they’re accustomed to … and [when] that payment doesn’t come on time that is absolutely a problem. But in terms of sort of like the buffer before the first of the month, we were able to get them processed, even though they weren’t necessarily received,” says Trella. He was proud of how quickly the university united Student Financial Service workers to correct the issue.
UVA tried to mitigate resulting financial stressors by writing letters to landlords and enlisting the support of student legal services. Baucom also appointed a task force—consisting of one graduate student and two members of the Graduate School Council—to create a more reliable system. But, that hasn’t been enough. “So far, we’ve only had one communication from the task force that was like a page-and-a-half update of what they were looking at,” says Ornée. The meeting on April 7 was the first direct interaction between graduate workers and the task force.
“I think the task force could be effective, but they aren’t talking to the right people or asking the right questions,” adds Peterson. “They made a commitment to resolve this before the next academic year’s stipends are processed in June, and they haven’t yet even identified the actual cause, or acknowledged that this is an ongoing issue.”
UCW representatives cited hiring more staff, spending money where needed, and implementing a system where UVA has to pay late fees to the person getting paid late as effective potential solutions. “We don’t think that this can be fixed like just, you know, telling a bunch of overwhelmed staff people to do their job better,” says Ornée.
Trella, however, thinks the solution is more complex. “One of the things that we’ll be pointing to is clear coordination and aggressive deadlines. … And the other thing that I think that we’re focusing in on and keying in on is how to make this process simpler.”
Ornée has been a part of UCW for two-and-a-half years. Even though little change has occurred thus far, graduate students would be at a larger impasse without UCW’s support. “It’s just been really, really great to have a union; to have some solidarity between grad workers with different departments and different areas of the school and also between different jobs. … When you’re trying to fight this stuff individually, nothing happens.”
Friday’s meeting was essential in maintaining communication between concerned graduate students and the university. Nothing concrete was decided, but Trella assures that this is at the top of the provost’s list of priorities. Ornée, Peterson, and their contemporaries are “still skeptical, but committed to keeping up the fight.”—Giulia Silverstein
In brief
Iffy endorsement
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