Today’s blog
Lynn Murphy Mark
Strike three
This title is a baseball reference, but it has nothing to do with baseball. Rather it refers to an untenable situation that has developed in California. My son, Ted, is a PhD candidate at the University of California, Irvine. This system of public universities has 10 campuses scattered around the state. When I think of public universities I imagine that tuition is more reasonable than private institutions. A quick google search reveals that when all tuition, fees, room and board are added up, in-state students pay about $41,000 annually. If you are an out of state person, you will fork over around $73,660.
As a PhD student, Ted is responsible for teaching classes at UC, Irvine. He and Sarah live in Los Angeles, not an inexpensive proposition. Today, Ted is one of 48,000 UC graduate students who are on strike. They are asking for better wages and working conditions. So far, the UC system has refused their requests. Ted sent me a picture of young people marching and holding up signs and I was most surprised to see that he belongs to the UAW – the Auto Workers union. It is a powerful organization, but so far has gotten nowhere.
In order to afford to live in LA, Ted teaches classes at two other universities to augment his income. This, in addition to working on his dissertation, means that he has very little time left over. He has always been a hard worker, and his employers have gotten their money’s worth from him. This time is no different.
Last night I texted him to check in on any progress. That set off a storm of texts between us until after 11:15 my time. When I went to bed I couldn’t sleep thinking about what he had to say. He is more than troubled that his students, whom he cannot teach, are in limbo at the moment. The end of a quarter is approaching and finals and papers are on hold. This is affecting the 294,662 undergraduate students. This affects the full time faculty, who depend on graduate students to carry much of their work load.
My cynical mantra these days is “follow the money” to find the root cause of many of our problems. For example, the Chancellor at UC, Irvine, makes over a half a million dollars and lives in a gated mansion. The students tried to strike outside his gate and were dispersed by police for “security reasons”. I suppose the strikers could have used their signs to smack the Chancellor upside the head. Another shocker? The head coach of UCLA’s football team made over $5,000,000 in 2021.
So the Universities’ argument that financial requests of graduate students can’t be met pales in comparison to say, what a sports coach makes. Ted has done the math. He knows that he and his co-workers save the universities millions of dollars that they would otherwise have to pay out to the 24,000 faculty members. He is not hopeful that the 36,000 poorly paid graduate students will even get a cost of living raise.
Ted is a man with a conscience. It bothers him greatly that his students are getting the short end of this stick. He texts, “That is what’s upsetting me so much. Even if they wanted to pay us more, they just can’t pay us what they should. If they did, nobody could afford to go to college. It’s just broken.” As we communicated back and forth I couldn’t help but think about his particular student loan debt, which is in the 6 figures. As he said once, he will never own a home, since it will take him a very long time to pay it back. But that’s a whole other blog topic.