Lawrence Sherman: Striking and disrupting the community over $58 an hour

As a faculty member who has spent many months raising external funds to provide stipends, tuition and health benefits for graduate students, I am moved to speak out against a proposed strike of Penn graduate assistants.
It is very important to be clear on the facts. The press coverage of this issue has stressed the idea that $15,000 a year is not very much money to live on. But it is far more than many Penn faculty members, including myself, were ever given as graduate students, or than many other Penn grad students get today. It is also a lot more money per hour than anyone has reported, with 42 percent of the working hours left over in the calendar year to earn more money (22 weeks out of 52).

In order to attend the best graduate school for my own scholarly interests (Yale), I paid 100 percent of my tuition costs, health insurance and living expenses until I completed my coursework (at which point I won a peer-reviewed National Institute of Justice grant to support my dissertation research). I completed my coursework by borrowing money under federally subsidized loans, which took over a decade to pay off. My adviser and department chair at Yale told me I was lucky, because he had to work his way through a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago without any federal loans.

Today at Penn, many other graduate students are also paying their own way. They value their graduate education enough to invest in it. Economic research suggests it is an investment that generally produces a high return.

For those students who are paid a stipend, their compensation is best represented as an hourly rate. These students are expected to work 20 hours per week for a 15-week semester or 300 hours per semester, for 600 hours per academic year. At $15,000 per academic year, that works out to $25 per hour, not counting the value of the health benefits or tuition. If we factor in six courses per academic year at over $3,000 per course ($18,000) and about $2,000 for health insurance, the total compensation is $35,000 for 600 hours' work, or $58 per hour.

Students on full stipend plus tuition and health benefits are not forbidden to earn extra income during the calendar year. They are completely at liberty to work for other income in the summer and winter vacations. In the 22 weeks a year that this is possible, some graduate students tend bar; others work for federal agencies or other employers at rates from $10 to $15 per hour. These jobs usually pay a lot less than their Penn stipend of $25 per hour, but enough to increase total annual earnings to well above the 2004 HHS federal poverty line of $18,850 per annum for a family of four and over twice the $9,310 poverty threshold for a household of one person. (For the record, I would condemn these levels as way too low, but Penn graduate assistants can or do earn above any reasonable poverty standard).

Perhaps the most distorted claim in Thursday's Philadelphia Inquirer article is that graduate assistants are now given less training in how to teach than they were in the good old days before Penn and other institutions went "corporate." The claim is that Northwestern University offered three weeks of training for graduate assistants in how to teach. Perhaps it did. But Yale did not, and neither did Cambridge or other grad schools I had contact with in the 1970s.

The more common view at that time was that university scholars learned their discipline and that knowledge alone prepared them to teach. That view is now in great decline, and Penn's School of Arts and Sciences spends far more money training standing faculty and other teachers than any other university I know. Yet teaching, like surgery, can only be learned by doing it, not by studying it in the abstract. To the extent that Penn offers graduate students opportunities to serve as apprentice lecturers, that is a benefit for the students, not an abuse. It is also one that I have never even granted to my graduate assistants at Penn, since my classes are too large to be used for such training.

I believe that Penn is a community of scholars, not a factory. I believe that Penn is among the handful of great research universities in the world. I believe it is a privilege for any of us to be here, not a right. I also believe in universal health care, child care and Head Start provided by a government that should raise taxes rather than cut them. I believe that workers should have the right to unionize.

I also believe that no one has the right to disrupt a scholarly community. The attempt to shut down this community by setting out picket lines is something those who love learning should resist with all our will. I, for one, will cross those picket lines and teach my classes as scheduled. I urge my students to attend them. I urge my colleagues to join me in teaching on. And I urge all Penn graduate assistants to continue their scholarly work.

Lawrence Sherman
Greenfield professor of Human Relations and chairman of the Department of Criminology.