Last week, Stanford graduate students authorized a strike to begin as early as Tuesday, November 12. If the strike takes place it will be a first for our Stanford community but becoming increasingly common for graduate students across the country. As faculty, we have been following the events closely, reading both the University’s frequent updates on the bargaining process and the Stanford Graduate Workers Union’s (SGWU) FAQ. In the spirit of robust debate, we want to offer a response to our colleague Jonathan Berk’s recent op-ed, in which he criticizes graduate workers’ demand for a living wage as “selfish.”

Berk’s op-ed is misleading on several different levels, including some basic facts. For example, he writes that, “If you add Stanford’s tuition waiver to its current offer (about $53,000), you’ll find that the University is offering a subsidy to all of its graduate students to the tune of about $110,000.” Berk says this salary “is real.” It is not. Students are only enrolled in actual classes for the first few years of their doctoral degrees, spending the majority of their time researching, teaching and writing their dissertations. In those years, what exactly would Berk say they are paying $53,000 for?

There is also an overall misunderstanding of graduate student labor. Graduate students are both students and employees whose labor is essential for any university to function. Most of us were graduate student workers before we became faculty. Among the profound distortions in Berk’s op-ed is his use of personal experience as a reference point for graduate studies in general. Berk’s own Ph.D. in finance at Yale may have required little to no labor of doctoral students beyond their pursuit of their own research. If this is his reference point, then it is no wonder that he regards our students as selfish. What he misses, of course, is that our students are often performing a tremendous amount of formally stipulated labor (as an example, in the Graduate School of Education, many graduate students are required to work 20 hours a week through various assistantships), which in many cases makes it very difficult for them to advance in their own research. 

Berk further argues that our graduate students deserve a “world-class education, free of charge” but not a “living wage.” What does this mean for our University? Not everyone can “dip into” their savings, given that college debt stands at $1.7 trillion. Should we make it impossible for Stanford Ph.D. students to come from the ranks of public school teachers, social workers and the like? Or should academia only be open to those with Wall Street careers or family wealth, or those willing to starve themselves and forgo health insurance for themselves and their families? 

The Bay Area has some of the highest housing costs in the nation, and even subsidized housing on campus is expensive. According to The Stanford Daily, in the 2020-21 academic year, graduate students on a salary working as teaching or research assistants typically spent about 40% of their income each quarter on on-campus housing. This has led to considerable financial stress for graduate students. A 2022 Stanford survey revealed that nearly 75% of Ph.D. students at the university experience financial stress, with 24% indicating that it affected their academic performance, 15% saying it impacted their research or dissertation work and 11% considering a leave of absence or departure from Stanford as a result. Additionally, 23% reported that in the past 30 days, they had to stretch their food or food money due to running short on funds.

This situation is even more troubling for the many graduate students raising families on campus. While Berk seems to believe that any financial stress experienced by the students of his generation should inexorably be replicated for succeeding ones, we do not believe any student should experience financial hardship while trying to get an education at Stanford.

It is no longer the case that a Ph.D. alone will, as Berk seems to believe, lead to “millions of dollars” via a “job in the private sector” or to the “luxury of getting paid to think about whatever you want.” Of course, it was arguably never a fair system to subject people seeking advanced education to apprenticeship models, where a half decade-plus of low wages and service to an advisor could be paid off with a guaranteed tenure-track job — nevertheless in this current environment, where post-Ph.D. placement numbers have cratered and adjunctification is on the rise, the model is untenable. 

Indeed, for every STEM Ph.D. student who leaves Stanford with a high-paying job in industry, there are dozens from history, literature, area studies, philosophy and many other fields essential to the mission of the University that will struggle to find stable work. As just one example, 68% of faculty members across U.S. colleges and universities held contingent appointments in fall 2021, compared with 47% percent in fall 1987. It is no wonder that our graduate students no longer wish to accept substandard working conditions to do essential research and teaching work for the University. The health and sustainability of a diverse array of fields of inquiry are at stake. 

Berk’s focus on what he calls graduate workers’ “preposterous” demands for a living wage also ignores this fact: if you ask graduate students what upsets them most, they will tell you that one of the most important issues they are bargaining over is a workplace free from discrimination and harassment. These are issues that disproportionately affect women and gender non-conforming graduate workers, as well as graduate workers of color. Labs can produce great breakthroughs, but they can also reproduce toxic behavior, bullying and sexual harassment. It is naive to think that enrolling at Stanford University automatically provides a great education, when so much of graduate student training is premised on putting these students at the bottom of a very tall ladder. A union is a vehicle that ensures students are healthy and safe as they work hard. Their work makes Stanford work. 

Finally, we adamantly reject the argument that our graduate students are “selfish.” Whether or not you agree with the specific salary demands, faculty must recognize that our students are putting a huge amount of time and energy into these organizing efforts. Many, especially those who will soon graduate, will not even gain personally from this contract — yet they are still fighting for what they see as justice for future generations of graduate students. Calling for a strike in a context like Stanford, where this has never been done before and many faculty, including Berk, are antagonistic, is taking a huge risk. Disregarding our graduate students as “selfish” is insulting to their integrity and their principles. 

It is worth also mentioning that Berk’s op-ed attempts to pit our graduate students against our undergraduate students, making the completely unfounded assertion that an increase in graduate worker wages might come out of undergraduate financial aid. Suggesting the money would come from other students’ financial aid is a well-aimed but baseless scare tactic. With a $36.5 billion endowment, there are more than a few other places the money could come from. Perhaps, as the union has suggested, the raise could come in the form of lowered rents at Stanford-owned graduate housing. We encourage our colleagues to see through this fearmongering and embrace the strike as an opportunity to collectively reflect on our mission and ethical commitments as a university community. 

SGWU has already achieved a major victory by initiating a public debate about what constitutes sufficient financial support and the necessary conditions for graduate students and the broader Stanford community to thrive. Let’s support our students in exercising their legal right to withhold their labor and express their voice in their workplace. 

Rebecca Tarlau, Associate Professor, Graduate School of Education 

Jonathan Rosa, Associate Professor, Graduate School of Education 

David Palumbo-Liu, Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor of Comparative Literature

Subini Annamma, Associate Professor, Graduate School of Education 

Ramón Antonio Martínez, Associate Professor, Graduate School of Education 

Eujin Park, Assistant Professor, Graduate School of Education

Natalie Zahr, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, School of Medicine

Antero Garcia, Associate Professor, Graduate School of Education 

Marci Kwon, Assistant Professor of Art & Art History

Sharika Thiranagama, Associate Professor of Anthropology

Gabrielle Hecht, Professor of History 

Joshua Buckholtz, Research Fellow, Department of Psychology

Joel Beinin, Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History, Emeritus

Usha Iyer, Associate Professor, Art and Art History

Josh Leung-Gagné, Academic Staff, Sociology

Jocelyn Maeyama, Qualitative Social Science Researcher, Stanford School of Medicine

Meghan Warner, Lecturer, Stanford Introductory Studies

This article was updated to reflect that SGWU has postponed its strike to Wednesday and to add several additional faculty signatures.