The Temple University Graduate Student Association has been on strike for about a month. They’ve been protesting the fact that the university demands full-time work for $19,500 a year, and expects them to live on that in a major city on the East Coast. I lived in Philadelphia 23 years ago, and I can tell you that even then $19,500 would have been starvation wages. I don’t know how they’ve been coping in 2023.
I guess the answer is that they haven’t, and that’s why they’re striking.
Now Temple University, which has always played up their role in serving the working class and poorer communities in the region, has decided to send out a little surprise message to the striking workers.
As a result of your participation in the TUGSA strike, your tuition remission has been removed for the spring semester. You now owe the full balance listed in TUpay, which is due by Thursday, March 9.
If your balance is not paid-in-full by the due date, you we be assessed a $100 late payment fee and a financial hold will be placed on your student account. This hold will prevent future registration,
Who is running that place nowadays? Some cartoon villain?
Well, at the rate we’re going with our current “education” “system,” no one will be teaching about real villains, so everything bad will be blamed on cartoon villains.
Oh look, the company store is back.
My first professional job as an engineer in silicon valley paid $15,900. That was 1978. Its absurd to believe someone can live here now at that salary. It sounds like somebody at Temple had their fee-fees hurt.
One wonders how Temple thinks they’ll get away with this. It is clearly retaliation for the strike and thus absolutely a violation of both state and federal labor laws. It’s not like Pennsylvania is some right-to-work (for nothing) state. I’m sure the TUGSA is going to court even as we speak to contest this and force the University to back down.
They need some union representation.
I’d suggest they contact the Teamsters & see about joining up.
vereverum, being the USA and all, I think a police union would be the go.
They look after their members rather well, or so I hear.
(Yes, I’m being snarky)
All you really need to know is that successive governments in Pennsylvania have gutted funding for the state universities (of which Temple is one) and replaced trustees and other high-ranking figures with like-minded political appointees who believe that state universities have two jobs: football, and training teachers/nurses.
My suspicion — I haven’t looked into Temple in particular, but I have into another Pennsylvania institution — is that on the one hand, budgets really are (unjustly) severely constrained… and that all of the top decisionmakers are now hard-core anti-union “reduce all costs to the minimum” managers who wanted to get into Wharton† but couldn’t, so they’re now taking it out on everyone whose parents couldn’t write a check for grad school and living expenses. That is, on everyone not Just Like Them. Which would exactly parallel what the state legislature wants to do with several units of Penn State.
† Part of the University of Pennsylvania… which, despite its name, is not a state school.
Grad school was a high wire act with no net. Never having more than a few $$hundred in the bank, I could never have afforded a tuition bill (about 1/3 my annual stipend!) I would have been done. Cast into the street.
So, basically Temple fired them all without having to fire them. Cartoon villain indeed