On Tuesday night, the Stanford Graduate Workers Union announced it has called off an expected strike as its bargaining committee had reached a tentative agreement with the University. The union was set to strike Wednesday morning.

The below letters were sent in response to Jonathan Berk’s Op-Ed. Berk is the A.P. Giannini Professor of Finance at Stanford Graduate School of Business.

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At first, I was simply irritated by Professor Berk’s op-ed. His language drips with disdain and contempt for the graduate workers that rely on him. But upon further reflection, I now find his argument quaint. 

It is the artifact of a conservative, classist sensibility. Conservative with a lower-case “c”: the status quo likely served Professor Berk well enough, after all. It is charming in its simplicity. It makes its point acerbically but without actually engaging his opponents’ reasoning. He lives in a world where most students, such as many of his MBAs, will easily make up lost tuition and wages after they graduate. He does not live in a world where tenure-track jobs are declining by the day; where adjuncts make less than $30,000; and where underemployment is rampant among Ph.D.s. It is a world where economic relations have nothing to do with power. Fair, for him, is the price the market demands. I envy him. It seems like a much nicer world to live in. It’s a world in which I — a future graduate of a prestigious law school with a high-paying summer job lined up — am valued quite highly. It is a world where many of my colleagues in the Stanford Graduate Workers Union are not. 

Professor Berk should strongly consider rewriting his piece, applying the research and argumentative methods he likely teaches his students. If he would like help forming those arguments, I would recommend he enroll in one of the many wonderful seminars taught by his colleagues in the humanities, social sciences or here in the law school. At Stanford Law School, we are often reminded that respectful disagreement is possible, even on contentious issues. But respectful disagreement requires actually respecting those with whom you disagree. In a new draft, I hope Professor Berk will consider treating his interlocutors with respect — after all, they are his employees and colleagues. I look forward to reading a better written essay from him on this subject in the future. 

Bryce Tuttle BA ’20, JD ‘26

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Dear Editor,

Like Professor Berk, I quit a well-paying job (I was an engineer) to start a Ph.D. My colleagues, too, looked incredulously at me. In my case, it was because I wanted to study education, a field in which I would essentially be leaving behind any hope of high-paying future work. 

It is only thanks to my engineering career that, now into my third year of my Ph.D., I have been somewhat buffered from the stress of food insecurity. I work about 60 hours per week on academics or research. After I pay my rent to Stanford, I typically receive between $0 and $377 every two weeks in my paycheck from the University pre tax. I pay about 44% of that as my federal and state tax. That leaves at best $105 each week, or $15 a day, for all expenses. 

I try to avoid debt or living in unsafe housing by dipping into my savings. Other peers, who come from wealth or are married to STEM professionals, have similarly managed to avoid these stresses. But are those the only graduate workers we want Stanford to educate? Independently wealthy people or those who go into high-paying fields, like finance? 

What is the purpose of Stanford? To be a medium for the reproduction of social inequality? Or to train scholars who can help solve society’s greatest challenges? If we only serve the wealthy or those who study in high-paying fields, then we are such a medium. I suggest we hold Stanford to a higher standard. 

Haley Lepp is a Ph.D. candidate in the Stanford Graduate School of Education.

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Tomorrow, Stanford graduate students will strike for the first time as an affiliated union. This work stoppage is not something that anyone has sought. Rather, it’s the intransigence of the administration that has led us to this point. If the University’s unwillingness to respond to the Stanford Graduate Workers’ Union’s (SGWU) reasonable economic demands is based on the faulty reasoning and lack of understanding exemplified in Professor Jonathan Berk’s recent op-ed, it’s no wonder that graduate students have taken the drastic measure of withholding labor to demonstrate the importance they hold in maintaining University operations.

It is worth recapitulating some of those economic demands before deconstructing the bad arguments against them. Although Stanford announced a five-year funding guarantee to great fanfare a few years ago, the administration refuses to enshrine that promise into a legally enforceable contract. After years of historic inflation, with no commensurate pay raises for graduate workers, SGWU is calling for a pay increase so as to bring graduate workers back to a pay level equivalent to that which they used to make just a few years ago. Graduate workers are also seeking assurances that their pay raises won’t be eaten up immediately by rent increases from Stanford-controlled housing – moving money from worker pockets into University coffers. SGWU also seeks protection from power abuses, as well as an enforceable grievance procedure, which the University has refused to accept.

All of these demands amount to a request for a living wage. Despite Professor Berk’s derision toward the idea of a living wage, the demand to earn “enough money to buy the things that are necessary in order to live, such as food and clothes” is one that must be met in order for graduate workers to continue providing value for Stanford. Only someone truly out of touch from the lived reality of working for one’s keep would scoff at the request for a salary that can cover basic needs. It betrays the attitude that graduate education is meant only for the wealthy: those who can afford to take on jobs that do not pay enough to live.

The University touts that current pay rates for graduate students are competitive with peer institutions. Looking at the raw numbers, one may believe this if they ignore the differences in cost of living. A dollar in Silicon Valley does not go as far as a dollar in New Haven, Princeton, or other peer institution locales. In the same way that we normalize our experimental data for analysis, normalizing salary to local cost of living is essential for making a valid comparison. Perhaps Stanford Law School and the Graduate School of Business do not instill the necessity of handling data properly, as exemplified by the attitudes of our Provost and President. When half or more of your paycheck goes to rent, the total dollar amount is a cold comfort at best.

The worst argument that Professor Berk makes is in trying to muddy the waters by claiming that tuition benefits are an actual part of the compensation graduate workers receive. No, they can’t eat tuition money — and moreover, this is a huge sum that graduate students never have any control over. That is why the University fought hard against the proposed provision in the Trump tax bill that would have charged graduate students tax on tuition as if it were compensation. If tuition is really meant to count as compensation for graduate students, bringing their total to over six figures, then, by contrast, the thousands of postdoctoral researchers employed by Stanford at a minimum of about $70,000 are being severely exploited and underpaid. In what world does it make sense for someone who has received a Ph.D. to suddenly, upon pursuing postgraduate research, get a pay cut of over $40,000 from the same employer? The University cannot have it both ways.

The truth about tuition money is that it is a transfer of funds from grants obtained by professors into central University funds. I would expect a professor of finance to understand how to keep track of money as it flows during University accounting, but apparently that is too great a demand on the intellect. Professor Berk would rather spend his mental efforts justifying the existence of charlatans in high-skilled professions. Graduate workers never see the tuition money, and this is a major cost professors face. 

This is why SGWU has proposed covering pay raises by eliminating graduate tuition just like Princeton University did, a suggestion rejected out of hand by Stanford. That approach would raise pay for graduate workers and ease the burden on faculty grants, but administrators refuse to even consider the option. SGWU has provided several other avenues by which their proposed pay raises could be implemented without harming other university stakeholders. The ball is in the court of the University.

Tim MacKenzie earned his Ph.D. in the Department of Chemistry at Stanford. During that time, he organized with the Stanford Solidarity Network, the forerunner to the Stanford Graduate Worker Union. He also worked as a postdoc in the Department of Genetics.