After a spring semester filled with broken promises, protests and a disappointing meeting with administration, there’s finally been some payoff for the dozens of University of Virginia graduate student workers who say they are not receiving their stipend payments on time.
How much it will amount to is still to be determined.
Earlier this month, university leaders told a delegation of the United Campus Workers of Virginia at UVa, the labor union representing the graduate student workers, that the school would bring on new personnel under the Division Resource Teams to assist with the payments and offset the burden on the individual financial departments within the Arts & Sciences college and graduate schools.
“This commitment of resources is obviously a huge win for us,” Olivia Paschal, a graduate student worker who is a PhD student in the school’s history department, told The Daily Progress. “We’ve been saying for a year and a half that they needed to commit more resources to the problem, hire more people, and the fact that they’re doing that … just shows how much this organizing campaign worked and how our pressure on them forced them to make a change that we are hopeful will result in far less late payments for grad workers.”
Paschal said the union is “really excited” by the administration’s promises to hire nine to 10 new employees, hoping the additional hires will finally resolve what has been referred to as a “systemic issue” of late and inaccurate payments. The union has pegged the blame on chronic turnover and inadequate salaries for staff. Late and incorrect payments have plagued UVa graduate student workers for years, but the worst crisis occurred in December 2022, after the school failed to pay roughly 180 of its own graduate student workers.
Paschal and her colleagues in the “Cut the Checks” campaign walked away from a meeting with administration back in April disappointed, but they say the most recent meeting on July 2 with the same group of administrators was a step forward.
“It seems like that continued pressure and the amount of research that we have done, and just the amount of attention and sustained attention that we’ve been able to keep on this problem, resulted in a win,” said Paschal.
Though Paschal was reassured by the university’s commitment to hire more staff on July 2, UVa’s subsequent response has raised some doubts.
“To clarify, we don’t yet have exact details on the number of or start dates for the planned new hires,” UVa spokeswoman Bethanie Glover told The Daily Progress. “They will be supplementing the administrative capacity of the departments within the College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, whose responsibilities include processing graduate student aid. Additionally, the GSAS finance team added another full-time staff member earlier this year.”
Yet, Associate Dean of the College & Graduate Student Kerry Grannis provided a more direct answer to the graduate student workers in their meeting, according to one graduate student worker who was there, Caroline Erickson.
“In our meeting, Kerry Grannis informed us that the hiring process for the 3 Division Resource Team Leads was underway, and, when pressed, offered a number of 9-10 total new hires by the end of the academic year,” Erickson told The Daily Progress in an email.
UVa did not provide any further details when The Daily Progress followed up about a timeline or adjustments to staff compensation. In the eyes of the union, a pay raise for department staff is not too much to ask of a university with an endowment fund of $13.6 billion.
Glover’s statement did confirm that additional personnel will be coming aboard. The school actually has not acknowledged that this undertaking is a consequence of staffing shortages. Despite the frequency and volume of incidents, university officials have insisted for months that the errors are not the personnel’s, but rather the byproduct of a complex and nuanced process.
This sentiment was reiterated in a June article Glover penned in UVa Today, a university media outlet affiliated with the communications office, written in response to “several questions about delays and inaccuracies in the delivery of funds to graduate students.”
In a Q&A with Director of the Office of Graduate & Postdoctoral Affairs Phil Trella, the piece explains how the school manages more than 10,000 different payment packages using multiple financial systems for its roughly 2,000 funded graduate students.
Regarding the question “Is low staff causing issues in processing funds?” Glover writes that “a lack of staff was not the primary cause of the error that occurred in 2022,” emphasizing the university’s message that the payment errors are confined to December 2022.
However, the graduate student workers have many other records of such instances, which began well before the December 2022 affair and continued throughout last semester. For example, Paschal said she was expecting to receive a $6,120 stipend in advance of the spring semester this December. Instead, she received a check for $2,448.
The graduate student workers are not the only ones who have stressed the issue of staffing shortages. According to Erickson, Vice Provost for Academic Affairs Brie Gertler handed the group an information packet before the July 2 meeting. “Pandemic and post-pandemic staffing shortages” were identified under “challenges” facing the Division Resource Teams.
Erickson says the packet also specifically mentioned that there were “not enough resources to sustainably hire more staff in all the departments who’d like more staff.”
The university’s official statement on the July 2 meeting asserted that the discussion focused on measures the school has already “taken to ensure the timely delivery of graduate student aid.”
Without identifying what factors may have caused the untimely delivery of payments, UVa said it has instituted a new GradBridge loan program “to assist students who may be switching between different funding sources” as well as an improved reporting mechanism.
That reporting mechanism is a form created by the Office of Graduate & Postdoctoral Affairs in conjunction with the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Student Council in the fall. Trella told The Daily Progress in March that his office had received about a dozen responses to the form at that time.
However, graduate student workers, including Paschal, have said they are unlikely to report their issues via the form, preferring to directly contact staff members they are familiar with.
“One thing that is something to be desired from their responses, they have kept placing the burden on students to notice when a payment is incorrect, and that, to us, is something that we would expect the university to figure out,” said Paschal, who said they were told it was impossible for UVa to devise a system to automatically track late payments. “Many of us do track that very closely … but, in an ideal world, the burden would not be on the student.”
In addition to discussing the late payments on July 2, the union delegation took the opportunity to bring up another point of concern with university officials: the charges against 11 of their fellow students by the University Judiciary Committee.
“There are staff members of some of the deans who are in the room who were arrested,” said Paschal. “So we’re just continuing to signal to them and tell them, when we have the opportunity, that there’s still fallout from May 4 that needs to be addressed.”
A total of 11 students — part of an encampment protesting the Israel-Hamas war broken up by Virginia State Police on May 4 — await trial before the committee, a student-run body that adjudicates alleged violations of the university’s standards of conduct. If found guilty, students could be expelled or, for those who were meant to graduate this past spring, their diplomas could be withheld.
Paschal said the administrators had no response when the union broached the topic.
“We would love to see the university drop the UJC charges and to grant degrees to the four students who are still having it withheld,” Paschal said. “I think that’s where our focus of the chapter is. Also, on watching that further late payments don’t occur and that administrators raise staff compensation levels to the new wage in Charlottesville.”
Source: www.dailyprogress.com