This is a guide for you as a Steward or rank and file member to help you with getting in touch with faculty members in your department about current demands and needs of grad students. You can tweak this to make it suit your department, but here’s a script which includes all the important links and arguments that will make it hard for a faculty member to say no! It encourages faculty to stand up for us at an institutional level so that it’s not a fight of us versus our faculty, but rather us versus unfair and precarious conditions.
Dear XYZ,
I am forwarding this letter in order to kindly call for your support for Graduate Students and particularly for the demands that are urgently being fought for.
All of the demands have been endorsed by the Graduate Student Senate.
Thanking you in advance for your support,
Best,
XYZ
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Dear Graduate Program Directors and Chairs,
We write to you as part of the Graduate Student Covid Coalition in order to share students’ experiences and needs given the pandemic crisis. Graduate students have been hit hard by the Covid-19 pandemic. A number of students are facing food insecurity (the Amherst Pantry saw an over 800% increase in requests), housing and rent crisis, funding insecurity. On top of that, academic progress has been completely derailed. These problems are exacerbated for international students who are uncertain about their legal status in some cases, cannot access unemployment benefits, or the stimulus checks. Please see a quick summary of our results here.
We ask you to support graduate students in your department and in the university at this time. The Graduate Student Coalition and GEO International Caucus have formulated allied, overlapping and co-endorsed sets of demands to the administration. We share these letters with you (here for general demands, and here for international-specific demands) and ask for your institutional support as Graduate Program Directors and Chairs. We know that departments are strapped for funds and can only do so much at an individual level given these limits. We ask you to stand with us and collectively advocate for graduate students to the university, against an austerity response that harms the most vulnerable of us. We hope you would be able to do one or more of the following:
1) As department faculty, consider writing a collective letter to the Chancellor asking the university to support graduate students and provide financial, health, and housing security, along with a year long universal extension equivalent to junior faculty. Here is a template from Northeastern. Many Yale departments have written collective letters of support as well. See here for example.
2) Collectively co-sign a letter as Chairs and GPDs asking the University to support graduate students at this hour.
3) Sign the letters individually, forward to faculty members, and provide testimonials in the International Caucus Letter about why, as an administrator, you believe that the university must use its resources to provide secure living for students during a pandemic.
We welcome any other forms and ideas of support and thank you for standing by us in this difficult moment.
Thank you for your consideration,
Swati Birla, Co-Chair GEO-UAW International Caucus
Ragini Jha, Co-Chair GEO-UAW International Caucus
Anna-Claire Steffen, Servicing Rep, GEO-UAW 2322
