News and views for the UB community
Published March 4, 2019 This content is archived.
The UB Council adjourned to executive session minutes after the start of its meeting on Monday after graduate students seeking an increase in their stipends disrupted the meeting by speaking over council members, despite being advised that the meeting’s agenda did not provide time for public comments.
Before the meeting started, Associate Counsel Jessica Baker reminded those attending the meeting in the Buffalo Room in Capen Hall that the meeting is an open meeting under the New York State Open Meetings Law and the public has the right to attend and observe. “It does not provide the right to speak or otherwise participate in meetings,” she said of the law.
Council Chair Jeremy Jacobs told attendees that council members had heard reports on graduate student stipends in previous council meetings. Provost Charles F. Zukoski reported that UB invested $39.5 million in PhD stipends and tuition scholarships in the 2017-18 academic year, Jacobs said, and had shown council members that those stipends are competitive with those awarded at other AAU institutions. UB’s investment has grown $8.5 million since 2012-13, he added.
“The council acknowledges that much has been done to raise stipend levels, and many students are not satisfied with the progress,” he said. “However, as you know, stipends are the purview of the deans and the department chairs.”
The meeting continued, with council members approving the minutes from their last meeting, as well as resolutions to honor former council member Robert Brady for his service to the council, and to name the Center for Implant Dentistry in the School of Dental Medicine the Buhite-Dimino Center for Implant Dentistry. Work on the center is expected to start in August, Rodney Grabowski, vice president for university advancement, said, thanks to a $1 million gift from “grateful patient” and Rochester real estate developer Frank Dimino. Dimino made the gift after conversations with his longtime dentist Robert Buhite, UB clinical associate professor of restorative dentistry, Grabowski said.
After the resolutions were approved, Willis McCumber, a PhD student in English and member of the Living Stipend Movement, which is advocating for an increase in graduate student stipends at UB, interrupted the meeting, asking council members when they would consider “the budget priorities of a cross-section of essential workers at UB.”
Baker advised McCumber and the other attendees that while the meeting was open to the public, “it was not a forum for dialogue between the council and the public.”
McCumber continued speaking over Baker, who told Jacobs the council could consider adjourning to executive session. Jacobs asked for a motion to adjourn to executive session. After the motion was seconded and approved, Jacobs said the council would adjourn to executive session “to review matters related to employment issues.”
As the council members left the room to go into executive session, other members of the Living Stipend Movement joined McCumber in reading a lengthy statement outlining their position.
Graduate students say UB’s stipends do not meet the cost of living in the Buffalo area and that students have to work another job or two to cover their living expenses.
UB released a statement noting that UB deans and academic departments continuously review graduate student programs and funding packages in order to offer competitive stipends, attract the very best students to UB and ensure their success.
Across the university, graduate students who serve as teaching assistants receive a total funding package averaging about $38,000 per year, which includes a tuition scholarship paid by the university, a stipend, and health and retirement benefits.
Your mask is slipping. This is so blatant in its anti-Living Stipend bias it's ridiculous. The complete lack of empathy toward the victims of Jeremy Jacobs' greed, our underpaid and overworked grad students, is inhuman.
Tim Dunn
This statement is disingenuous in stating the "total funding package" that TAs receive. For one thing, we do not receive retirement benefits. Further, it is absurd to refer to the tuition scholarship as if it were income. It is not income. It is something that every reputable R1 university provides to doctoral students on a TAship. Furthermore, the health insurance is not income. It is an employment benefit. If you subtract the things administration has added in order to pad their meager stipend package and make it look competitive, you would see that TAs are expected to live on as little as $15,000 a year — before taxes and before we pay back some $1,200 in mandatory fees to the university — in a city where UB's own estimates and MIT's cost of living indicator place the baseline cost of living (bare minimum expenses: housing, food, transportation) at $24,000/year. You can obfuscate and pretend that UB pays its TAs a fair wage all you like. It doesn't make it true.
Leslie Nickerson