Wearing cardboard mouse ears and holding mousetraps, about 50 members of Graduate Students United (GSU) yesterday said they had fallen into the advanced residency (AR) “trap,” weeks after the Provost did not recommend a cut in AR tuition.
Graduate students receive full funding in their first four years; AR tuition begins in graduate students’ fifth year, meaning many must find a job or additional sources of funding to pay their bills.
The AR trap, GSU said, causes students to take longer to complete their degrees because they have to work to pay tuition. Many wrote personal messages on the bottom of the traps, which were not activated.
“We want [a] commitment to reducing AR tuition to a level that would allow students to work on their dissertations,” said Duff Morton, a fourth-year graduate student and GSU member.
Provost Thomas Rosenbaum recommended keeping AR tuition at its current level for the next two years, which has been frozen since 2008. Given the historical five percent annual increase, Rosenbaum’s February 25 report said, many graduate students will save $1,350 over those four years. AR can be up to $5,300 per quarter in some departments.
Cathy Cohen, deputy provost for graduate education, stressed the University is addressing AR tuition positively. “If you look at most universities, they are considering an increase in tuition,” she said.
Cohen acknowledged that AR tuition can place a burden on students, but said the University can only meet so many needs with the resources it has.
As they marched from Ida Noyes behind a pied piper, the students chanted, “AR tuition is a trap. Students get a bum rap.” After leaving the provost’s office, they gathered on the steps of the administration building where the crowd rallied around a few speakers.
“The provost did not address the two main sources of student grievances that the committee recognized as valid,” said fourth-year Divinity school student Dave Mihalyfy in reference to adjusting AR tuition and restructuring teaching aid.
Mihalyfy was part of last year’s Provost’s Committee that recommended “making every attempt to reduce” AR, and was disappointed the provost did not follow the report’s recommendations.
Cohen understood the Committee’s role differently. “I was part of the Committee, and we were clear that the Provost might listen to other parts of the community as well,” she said.
The GSU wants to end AR tuition but will accept reform, where graduate students can qualify for financial aid packages similar to ones for undergraduates. AR tuition does not treat all graduate students fairly, they said. “It privileges students who are single and from wealthy backgrounds. And when our graduate programs look like that, our professors look like that,” Morton said.
I commend the students who are acting on this. I couldn’t be there, but I think it’s important to put this in a different context than did the Maroon…
1) The 5% annual increase in AR may be “historical”, but it is over inflation and has never been justified. The AR committee recommended the admin issue a clear justification for what types of services we receive from our AR tuition, but the Provost provided none. So we have only “saved $1,350″ under the terms of the unfair burdens we are arbitrarily forced to take on.
2) Even stranger, AR tuition is not a serious source of revenue for the university; some estimates put it as low as 0.14% of the operating budget. This is one of those cases when the administration can make a huge difference in students’ lives with minimal risk or damage to their bottom line. It is why it was so bizarre that the provost ignored the AR committee’s ideas. Note that the original justification of high AR fees was that they would force students to graduate earlier. Much of this language has now disappeared because it was absurd — AR makes us have to take on more teaching and slows down our dissertations.
3) The deputy provost claims that the “Provost might listen to other parts of the community as well”. Here she is trying to imply that there is a conflict between the interests of students and faculty; that AR tuition reductions will result in fewer faculty hires. As a graduate student, my #1 priority is more tenured faculty hires — it improves the rep of the school, and it helps me find new angles for my dissertation. All we are asking for is that money be put into people. Hire more faculty and reduce the burden on graduate students. Do this by changing our priorities: no more new and unnecessary buildings; no more funneling funds to a single department (Economics and the MFI); no more pointless aesthetic decisions that raise delivery overhead such as those walkways; stop replanting all of the grounds every year; no more ineffective committees designed to mute anger and self-help seminars on debt management; etc, etc.
Let’s just put money into education, teaching and research — which, in the long run, improves the university’s national reputation far more than does olde-timey walkways, or divisive and expensive initiatives such as the MFI.
“Zimmer’s salary was shy of $1 million in 2007–8 fiscal year” and a graduate TA makes $3000/qt (x3) just to get a waiver for AR tuition. What kind of caste system is this?
I think Zimmer needs the cash to support his new girlfriend. The rest of us are forced to do our courting at the Falcon.