Letters to the Editor

Disturbing pay cuts looming

To the Editor:

Despite the correction published in the Dec. 4 issue, your coverage of Graduate Employees Together-University of Pennsylvania's Dec. 2 meeting about wage cuts for School of Arts and Sciences graduate instructors contains some misstatements ("Pay cut rumors prompt graduate student meeting," The Daily Pennsylvanian, 12/03/03). What you called a "rumor" about pay cuts was not a rumor -- despite Dean Licht's admirable attempt at obfuscation -- but a subterranean policy change. Rather than receive a prorated standard SAS compensation package for performing the same duties as a teaching fellow (formerly known as a "teaching assistant"), advanced graduate students in Graduate School of Arts and Sciences will now be compensated at the same rate as employees in the College of General Studies. Graduate student instructors in CGS currently earn approximately $4,500 plus tuition remission, but no health insurance coverage. In my case, this amounts to a 46 percent pay cut from what I'm earning this semester for performing the same work next semester.

Dean Licht announced the pay cut at GET-UP's meeting Tuesday night. It is unfortunate, but typical, for this administration to announce such important policy changes only after it is too late for graduate students to make other financial arrangements.

Dean Licht further explained that the savings from this pay cut will be used to fund incoming cohorts with more "competitive" packages. Licht also asserted that SAS plans to phase out opportunities for funding for advanced graduate students past their so-called "guaranteed funding" packages. These opportunities are already dwindling rapidly.

The administration's willingness and ability to cut our pay less than one month before a new semester is the clearest example of why graduate employees at Penn need a union to bargain a legally-binding contract.

Joanna Kempner

Graduate Student, Sociology The writer is a member of GET-UP.

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