U. of Illinois Grad Employees Strike to Save Tuition Waivers

by Mike Hall, Nov 16, 2009

More than 1,100 graduate student employees, who teach nearly a quarter of the undergraduate classes at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), went on strike today after the university refused to guarantee continuation of the teaching and grad assistants’ tuition waivers. 

The members of the Graduate Employees’ Organization (GEO)/UIUC, an AFT affiliate, say the school’s refusal to include the waivers in bargaining agreement is a precursor to eliminating the tuition waivers that allow most teaching and grad assistants to afford a graduate education. In a statement, the GEO says:  

The administration’s refusal to guarantee the continuation of its current tuition waiver practice not only means that the majority of graduate employees could be forced to pay thousands of dollars in additional tuition charges, but also indicates its plans to implement such a change. 

By making graduate education untenable for all but the most affluent students, the administration is abandoning its responsibility to ensure access to the highest level of public education for all. 

The graduate employees began bargaining with the university in the spring and have been working without a contract since August. In talks over the weekend, the university continued to refuse to include the waivers in the contract. 

GEO/UIUC member Emily Shaw says the demand to include the waiver “is not about grabbing cash in the middle of a recession.” In a column on Huffington Post, she writes: 

It’s about ensuring that the university does not try to reduce the compensation of graduate students in order to address its budgetary problems. If the university cannot meet this demand, it is willingly ensuring that the future of graduate education…is less accessible and a less attractive option for people from all socioeconomic backgrounds. 

On AFT’s higher education blog FACE Talk, Chris Goff writes that without the waiver guarantee in the contract, teaching and grad assistants might “actually have to pay…to have a job.”  

By refusing to guarantee tuition waivers, the university is essentially telling grad employees that they’re more than happy to have them as labor, but they might be out of luck in terms of actually getting a degree. It also creates the potential for a system where TAs and GAs actually have to pay the university in order to have a job. In the bad old days, we called employers like the university “labor sharks.”  

For more information, visit the GEO’s website and Facebook page and follow the strike action on Twitter.

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