Graduate fellows sat in the Ezekiel W. Cullen Building in protest of their $11,200 annual stipend. They hung up posters to advertise their cause and pressed the administration until they were heard. PHOTO BY SHAIMAA EISSA
Fellows take a seat to
MAKE A STAND After 20 years without an increase to their stipend amounts, the UH English teaching fellows decided they’d had enough. On April 2, the fellows held a sit-in in the Ezekiel W. Cullen Building, eventually meeting with Interim Provost Paula Short, Chief Financial Officer Carl Carlucci and College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences Dean John Roberts and eventually had a deal brokered with President Renu Khator the following week. The issue began when the fellows discovered that they were being charged an extra $121 in fees from which they were told they would be exempted. The national poverty line rests at $11,490 with the doctoral candidates receiving approximately
40
$11,200 a year and the Master’s of Fine Arts students getting $9,600 annually. Of this, an average of 20 percent and 16 percent goes toward paying for fees for doctoral candidates and master’s students, respectively. “You look at Cornell, for instance, and that annual stipend is $26,000 per year — and that’s in Ithaca!” said Beth Lyons, one of the fellows, to the Houston Press. “Denver’s at $18,000, Athens is $15,000; USC and UCLA are $20,000. And most of these places also have a lower cost of living, too.” The Office of the President does not control individual salaries, Khator said in a statement, but she has the power to allocate money to the
deans who will handle the matter. She also affirmed that a task force would be created to monitor graduate teaching assistant success. She finished her statement by saying that the provost asked for an external review of the English department for the first time in nine years. “The review will help the dean and provost evaluate competitive information, learn best practices, get advice from aspirational peers, show accountability to the public and help rectify not just the wage issue, but all issues related to the learning and working environment of the teaching fellows and teaching assistants,” Khator said in a statement. BY JULIE HEFFLER