The Wake

Amidst brightly colored advertisements and various important-sounding leaflets, is a simple flier with a sorry-looking scraggly gopher. The flier, hidden in the mess of student group information on almost every bulletin board on the Minneapolis campus, shows an interestingly simple equation:

Pay – Fees = Poverty

The flier and the equation are the brainchild of the Emaciated Gopher, a group (or a network, as they like to call it) of mainly graduate students. Their mission is to improve education at the University of Minnesota, starting with grad student issues that tie into most of the major issues currently surrounding the U of M. Like whispers in the wind, they’ve grown to a large network of more than 150 university students. The Emaciated Gopher more or less began last year and with every passing day, the Emaciated Gopher gains another member who wants to talk about things like pay rates, budget cuts and grad student harassment, who’s interested in a community for grad students, and who want to talk about grad issues outside of GAPSA.

“We’re trying to raise issues that graduate students are raising across the campus,” Raphi Rechitsky, a fourth-year sociology grad student, says. Despite the image of a soulless robot grading undergraduate papers that pervades the undergrad student mentality, the grad students of the Emaciated Gopher see their issues as issues that affect the entire University.

“The idea is that there are all of these issues out there, and we’re just trying to give a unified voice to them,” says fourth-year sociology graduate student Jesse Wozniak. “We’re still in the process of finding out what are the concrete issues to come together on.”

Budget issues are among the top priorities the Emaciated Gopher wants to address. While they believe University President Robert Bruininks’ salary freeze is a good start, members of the Emaciated Gopher wonder whether adjunct, research and teaching positions will face the same freeze, or even budget cuts. Such a move would be disastrous, they claim. Graduate students, depending on the type of position they are hired for, make a starting salary of about $35,000 a year, with tuition benefits offered by the University.

However, as graduate school costs rise to about $11,000 a year for state residents and almost $18,000 a year for non-residents, most of that money pays the tuition bills. Specific graduate programs charge more fees for credits, raising the average graduate student’s tuition payment to more than $20,000. As Wozniak claims, on paper it seems like a fairly decent living. In reality, graduate students make about $12,000 to $14,000, enough to pay for necessities and not much more. Since many graduate students are paid somewhere around the minimum salary, graduate students are afraid budget cuts will mean lowering their salary, or even freezing it while inflation increases.

“If you cut 5 to 10 percent of [University President] Bruininks’ salary, that’s just fine, but if you cut 5 to 10 percent of my salary, I’m out of my apartment,” Wozniak says.

The university thus far hasn’t revealed any more cost-saving measures, although everyone else seems to have their own opinions. The Minnesota Daily editorial staff called for Bruininks’ salary to be cut by at least 10 percent late last month, citing the recent statistics released by the Chronicles of Higher Education that list Bruininks as the 7th highest paid public university president in the country this year, with a $733,421 salary. However, Bruininks’ retirement package benefits will vary over the next five years as part of a payment plan created by the Board of Regents. His salary will not reach over $700,000 next year, negating the possibility for a $73,000-plus windfall for the University in coming years. This is small comfort for the graduate students who discovered there are about 1,500 administrators who make over $100,000 a year tinkering and helping the university machine run properly.

These graduate students also think the cogs on the university machine spring out of place more than they should, especially when it comes to university departments and their graduate workers. The Emaciated Gopher would like to see more transparency in a department’s assignment of teaching and research assistants. While departments do allow graduate students to show their preference to teach a certain class, it seems to these graduate students that departments don’t put their preferences to use.

As Nathan Clough, a fourth-year geography graduate student, describes it, in many cases there are issues in departments where a TA is assigned to a class he or she doesn’t have a suitable background to teach. Clough explains how in the geography department, there are both classes that are very scientific and mathematical and classes that teach more social and liberal aspects of geography. A graduate student who specializes in scientific research probably wouldn’t be the best fit for a more liberal geography course. In some cases, graduate students have even apologized to a class they teach, as Wozniak did this semester. Wozniak describes how in one of the classes he taught he would point students back to the readings they didn’t understand if they approached him with questions about the material.

“If they want feedback or anything, they’re simply just out of luck. The students are suffering just as much as we are,” he says.

Poor teaching placement is just one of the workplace issues that members of the Emaciated Gopher say happen. One of the stories posted on the Emaciated Gopher’s Facebook group page mentioned a TA feeling more than unappreciated when a professor told him if one of the core classes in their department wasn’t taught every semester, the graduate students wouldn’t have a job. He expressed outrage at the implication that the department had to offer a certain class so it could pay graduate students their tuition money. No one really wants to grade a whole bunch of papers every week, teach 20 sections and read a ton of emails from undergrads who want to get out of class, or so the student who posted this story reasoned. Yet teaching assistants are asked to do this every semester, without tenure.

“There are all kinds of issues in academic culture, things that wouldn’t be tolerated in a regular workplace,” Clough says. “As a student you’re supposed to suck it up…but we really, something we really want to push for is a degree of respect.”

Clough and other members are quick to caution that these and other tales such as the ones described previously don’t happen everywhere on campus. They aren’t pervasive. All of the members who spoke with The Wake say they love being at the University of Minnesota, and they hope to use what they learn here to one day become professors. The issues they want to discuss across the campus are simply issues the whole of academia face at this moment.

In many colleges across the country, graduate students slug it out with the work load they’re expected to keep, all the while struggling to pay the bills. With or without the current recession, tuition costs will rise higher and higher at campuses across the country, phasing out lower-income students from being able to afford higher education if current trends continue, according to a recent report from the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education. At the University of Minnesota alone, tuition for both undergraduate and graduate students has more than doubled in the past ten years. Departments are forced to compete with one another for students’ class credit tuition so they may still function, making the University of Minnesota more of a business than a place for education, or so members of the Emaciated Gopher, as well as other students and experts, believe.

What’s even worse for graduate students (and higher education in general) is the clear job market crisis where there are simply too many graduate students achieving Master’s and Doctoral degrees and not enough positions for them all in the nation’s college system, as can be seen in Mark Bousquet’s academic work. Bousquet, an associate professor of English at Santa Clara University, serves on the National Council of the American Association of University Professors and is a well-known proponent of the theories behind higher education’s turn towards corporatization.

In spite of the fear that one day they may have little job security and no benefits as adjunct professors, members of the Emaciated Gopher still wish to reach out to graduate, undergraduate, faculty and staff members to start talking about issues affecting the University of Minnesota. They hope to one day transform the Emaciated Gopher from a loose network of students occasionally meeting, discussing education issues and researching graduate worker troubles to opening up a dialogue with many university groups, whether it be the Graduate and Professional Student Association or the Minnesota Student Association. That’s why they made the lonely flier attached to bulletin boards campus-wide. They hope the flier will do more than just flutter in the wind, lost amongst the crowd.