Temple Student Strike Turns Ugly as School Ends Some Tuition Aid

>"This decision is intended to benefit Temple the business, not the Temple the university."

More and more it seems like academics are just a front for running a hedge fund - one that gets very favorite tax treatment. Growing the endowment is the most important thing in the minds of the leadership.

Well, they hired a university president out of Goldman Sachs and consulting, who wrote a book that basically argues that universities need to base their curriculum on what corporations tell them to do, so I'm not terribly surprised at the path they're taking.

But it is a business. We are not talking about a YouTube channel of lecturers, we are talking about an organization with 2.7 billion dollars of annual revenue.

My Alma-Mater, more interested in hiring administrators than new professors, or even retaining full time professors.

Schools a joke, especially this one.

> some obscure exemption

for-profit companies do not have to pay strikers wages and benefits while they are on strike. Unions have strike funds they use for that.* When workers go on strike, they want their absence to disrupt the profit making of the business, that is their leverage; but they sacrifice to do it.

Part of the claim in this current "unionize graduate students" drive is that they do work and get paid an income to support themselves, that's why they should be allowed to unionize. I mention that because the headline "students on strike" undercuts that claim, when the grad students want to avail themselves of labor law to make it a regular worker-employer dispute.

Another point, universities are non-profits and would be better able to say "pay them with what?" if they are not working (some courts decide issues on the basis of equity, where ability to pay is factored in. ianal)

(*Did you know that most picketers you see, like next to an inflatable rat outside a real estate development or construction project, are not "employees of the site on strike", but are instead union members who happen to be unemployed from elsewhere and get paid to stand there and do it because it's some income, and helps the union.)

There are reports from strikers trying to refill medication that the medical benefit suspension has already unilaterally gone into effect. The university has gone ahead with their threats in that regard (which is especially shitty since it's pretty standard in the US to give employees a health insurance grace period on termination).

I am really confused about what the university thinks they're going to get out of these actions.

Can you point to some of those Twitter comments? I'm honestly curious of which labor laws they are violating. For example, I just did a search regarding healthcare for striking workers, and there is no federal law that prevents cancelling healthcare, to the point that some congresspeople have introduced bills in the last year to specifically outlaw that (but, to emphasize, those are just bills, they haven't been passed).

Are companies not allowed to stop paying wages to striking employees? Or is it that tuition remission is viewed as distinct from wages legally?

I'm not familiar with these Twitter lawyers. Why would suspension of pay and benefits be illegal?

"Generally speaking, those who are part of a legal strike cannot lose their health insurance or other benefits. While they may not receive them during a strike, these benefits must generally be made available to workers after they return to their jobs."

>As a father of a baby I wonder what higher education is going to be in 20 years time. >I see a fairly long, gradual decline in prestige and effectiveness of universities - at least in the English speaking world - going back a couple of decades at this point.

I see a long and continuing decline of all of society in most English-speaking countries right now. I think in 50 years, English may still be the universal language of business and international commerce, but the Anglophone countries are going to be very different from now, probably collapsed and/or broken apart, and definitely not leading the world. They're certainly not a place I'd ever want to raise a child, especially America.

I agree.

certainly calls into question 529 investments today.

OK, but by whom and why?

This is important, because if it depended on administrators deciding to love their grad students again (vs mandated by judge, vs required by law), that cannot be the basis for certainty into the future.

> Bone headed move. They must have miscalculated if they think the students will cave to this pressure

It´s not about caving, I don´t think. It´s about maximum damage. University administration is one of the most ruthless groups you can come across. They´re well aware that they hold the future ambitions of these students in their hands. Even if they get sued, even if they lose, they´re well aware that they can utterly ruin a sizeable portion of the students they hit with this. They simply can´t afford to fight back, or wait to get the situation resolved.

>They must have miscalculated if they think the students will cave to this pressure.

Have they miscalculated?

Not a comment on the right or wrong of this action but the article says this 80% of similar grad students have not gone on strike. Would be good to know how distributed across academic fields this strike is. If it is a few from each, then it seems Temple can just wait them out. If it is focused on just one area maybe not. This article is very light on detail.

If there is any group that is unlikely to back down and fold it's probably students. Of course the university also has an endowment of $873 million and whatever administrator wrote that must have a very cushy job. This seems really poorly thought out.

Certainly a garbage administration. This is a huge signal to prospective graduate students not to apply to Temple University, a clear signal that they care more about money than your education. Grad students being at the bottom of the administrative priorities is nothing new, but threatening to prevent them from taking classes is a new low.

Many grad students are pretty much completely at the mercy of their advisor and university.

Grad students are also very disposable, and, normally, prospective new students will have no idea of the wronged-student body count of any advisor or university.

One exception, in this case, is you have a group of students in the US national news, so it might be harder for this university to get grad students in the near future.

(Though US affluent families will be sending kids to ride out recession in grad school, and there's only so many admissions slots, so some kids can't be picky about where they go, even if they happen to have been paying attention to the news. And there's also international demand for US grad school slots.)

Shitty people push/bend the rules as far as they can, to see what they can get away with. If they lose, they don’t lose much. If they win, it becomes the new normal, in their favor.

I too hope they lose and are shamed (assuming they feel any shame at all). But I think they know what they’re doing

Grad student "tuition" isn't pay. It's a made up number transferred from the university to itself.

A stipend on average of $19,500 a year:

"On average, such workers make $19,500 a year, according to the Temple University Graduate Students' Association (TUGSA), a union that represents nearly 750 affected workers. In recent negotiations, the university had proposed increasing base pay to $22,500 by 2026." https://www.businessinsider.com/temple-university-suspends-f...

> Grad students tend to have extremely flexible schedules, freedom to pursue their intellectual interests, the ability to attend seminars and travel to conferences, etc.

The flexibility doesn't mean less hours. A majority work 40 hours or more. Many work way more:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-03419-8#:~:text=G....

It's amazing how we continually look down on others for wanting better conditions. In general, not many on here would trade places.

We possibly have encountered graduate students with differing lifestyles, but a lot of the grad students I know in the natural sciences have grueling schedules between taking classes, TAing, and conducting research. The way these activities are structured may not correspond to a typical 9-5 but they’re still intense in their own right. To add onto this - attending conferences isn’t always on the universities dime, often it comes out of grants and other associated project costs that are allotted for your research. Maybe the university does foot the bill in other cases, but these are marginal costs when compared to the realizable value brought by graduate students in the form of monetizable knowledge and subsidized teaching costs. The latter point is at the crux of most tension between graduate students and university administrations, and there’s a large imbalance between the tangible value that grad students (and most academic researchers) bring to universities and the way that they’re compensated.

I don't like "grad students" as a category.

Master's students, or early stage PhD students, are typically continuing their undergraduate education. They should be considered students for all intents and purposes.

People doing research for a PhD should be considered junior professionals rather than students and paid accordingly. When I was doing it, the pay was 2/3 of what you could reasonably expect in the industry. That was a fair sum, considering the freedom and flexibility that came with the job. When I look back at that time, it was the period in my life when I had the best balance between income and free time.

"Free" education, except that they have to work for the university, and, as you note, they lose out on all the income they could have earned during those years. It's effectively quite expensive.

Some of the complaints from prior strikes were rather basic issues like not being able to afford nessesary dental care.

Who is going to teach anyone in your equation, if everything was about money there wouldn't be professors to educate the STEM majors. There is more to building a society than balancing the checkbooks.

They have to work a ton. They're being used for cheap labor.

Yup - quite the same as healthcare prices in the US. Because all the white collar folks have good insurance those costs are hidden and the insanely astronomical amounts are only ever levied against those without any recourse. The actual graduate program prices are just paper numbers to make accounting go brrrr - and suddenly a bunch of people (and bear in mind grad students are usually super broke to begin with) will need to come up with those BS charges and face escalating late fees if they fail to comply.

Tuition remission isn't pay or compensation. Very explicitly so. Universities even lobbied to maintain this status quo during the TCJA process.

80% of their grad student labor is continuing to work.

Still complete and utter dipshit move from the admin.

> Free or reduced tuition provided by eligible educational institutions to its employees may be excludable from gross income as a qualified tuition reduction. Whether a tuition reduction is a “qualified” tuition reduction and excludable from income depends on whether it is for education below or at the graduate level and whether the tuition reduction represents payment for services.

https://www.irs.gov/government-entities/federal-state-local-...

Higher education is like what they say about airline pricing: No two people on the plane paid the same price for their ticket. When I was in grad school, we referred to tuition as "funny money." The tuition level is arbitrary and simply represents a worst case maximum. What each student pays is determined by some other means.

There was also a threat to tax the tuition waiver during the Reagan administration, when I was in grad school. It caused a lot of consternation among students, but the university eventually told us that we'd be taken care of, and we didn't worry about it.

That was the focus of a fight when Trump was pushing for tax reform in 2017. Students would need to pay taxes on the remitted tuition which can be a few hundred to a few thousand dollars, which is a lot of money -- many don't even have $20k in total annual salary. In the end that part of the law did not change and students did not pay that extra tax.

Tuition remission is just a made up number. It's not like money you get paid or have to pay tax on our anything like that. Half the time you don't even have any corresponding coursework.

Like imagine your job decides not to pay you (fine) but then finds a loophole to charge you twice your salary.

During COVID temple was gratuitously cruel in allowing students to cancel and forcing in-person teaching. I'd assume any cancellation window is as minimal as possible.

In my experience the union pays, both with fees and also through fundraising. See: the Harper collins union strike was able to go 50+ days, including holidays, with the crowdfunding of a supportive literary community.

The union does. That's one of the things your union dues go towards.

Your intuition fails here. Resources generally scale with the size of the group, while the price per individual goes down. If you order in sufficient quantities, you should be able to get a decent t-shirt with a single-colored print for ~$5.

A free market means people can always walk off the job. They can do it in an organized way, as that just requires talking to each other.

It's just a matter of bargaining power in the end. The, so called, fair negotiations you speak of.

Along the same line of argument - why do employers feel entitled to continuously cut the effective wages of employees? The real wage in America has been on a steady decline while worker productivity has been increasing.

Why do these employers get to play the victimhood card when denying employees fair benefits and wages?

One of the benefits the unions is asking for is an extension of parental leave (maternity leave but for both parents). Grad students are currently allotted five days - a week after giving birth they're expected to be enthusiastically back at worth.

I loathe this entitlement/victimhood argument because it's absolutely baseless - nobody is entitled to anything at all - no higher being came down and said "And thine workers shalt have two weeks of vacation gaining an additional week every five years" - things like those are benefits that are fought for and strikes are one of the ways we fight.

It's funny that you complain about the 'ideological narratives of victimhood' while directly crafting a narrative where poor companies are victims to the vicious labor force. That said, you seem unfamiliar with the history of unionization and why these laws came into place. I recommend looking up what the Pinkertons did in order to stop companies being 'victimized' by workers.

Honestly it is - when an employer starts pulling crap like this it's a pretty clear sign that the labor action is necessary.