Following a tentative agreement negotiated with the help of Gov. Phil Murphy, Rutgers’ approximately 9,000 faculty and graduate workers suspended our strike after five days.
While the striking academic workers had numerous demands, two core economic requests were particularly tricky for management. The first was for living wages for graduate workers and postdoctoral trainees. The second was for equal pay for equal work for part-time faculty, who teach more than 30% of courses, do not have stable contracts and do not receive benefits.
Some of Rutgers’ challenges are idiosyncratic to our university — for example, seven years ago, we adopted a budget model that has provoked internal competition, hindered long-term investment and somehow managed to make leadership at all levels of the university feel disempowered.
But labor’s core demands address problems that are far from unique. Underpaying graduate workers, postdoctoral trainees and part-time faculty is a systemic issue throughout public higher education.
And these challenges aren’t simply a matter of laboring conditions for current academic workers. By making advanced training and academic careers less feasible for those without independent wealth, they undermine efforts to diversify the scientific workforce and sap the competitiveness of our national research enterprise.
Systemic issues
Gov. Murphy’s assistance appears to have been critical in breaking the zero-sum conflict between management and labor that led to the Rutgers strike. The tentative framework agreement holds out the promise that, working together, Rutgers and the state can model how to build a better higher education sector. Full details of the agreement have not been released, but announced elements include pay increases for graduate students and part-time lecturers, as well as the potential for longer-term contracts for those lecturers.
It is great for New Jersey to lead the way. But systemic issues ultimately require systemic solutions that extend beyond a single public research university in a single state. We need policy leadership from Washington — and the Biden administration, which has prioritized both science and labor, ought to be providing it. Without such leadership, public higher education across the country will remain deadlocked in conflicts, and academic and scientific careers will remain costly and out of reach for many.
Graduate and postdoctoral salaries are one area where the federal government has substantial untapped power. Typical of public research universities, roughly 15% of Rutgers’ budget comes through grants, mostly from the federal government. Unlike with many federal contracts, there are typically no wage or working condition requirements attached to these grants that go beyond basic federal and state law. Indeed, it is often left entirely to the discretion of the professor leading a project how much money to request for trainee salary — a discretion, I would say, that few need or desire.
As Dr. Shirley Malcolm and American Association for the Advancement of Science CEO Dr. Sudip Parikh wrote in the journal Science earlier this year, “A slow-motion crisis is underway among graduate students and postdocs in the United States who comprise today’s indispensable research and teaching workforce and tomorrow’s scientific leaders … Only federal funding agencies … have the influence to align incentives for administrators, researchers, and others toward a healthier environment.” It’s time for the Biden administration to show leadership on this issue.
With White House leadership, the federal government could set common expectations, applied across funding agencies, about wages and working conditions associated with research grants. Perhaps these could be tied to government pay scales, which already grow over time and reflect differences in the cost of living around the country. Given the current bipartisan support for the expansion of federal research funding, agencies could also supplement existing grants to bring them into compliance with these new standards. While the federal government has little direct leverage on wages for graduate students and postdocs funded from other sources, the marker set by researcher funding agencies will have a powerful pull when it comes to other salaries.
Let’s rethink this funding
In a broader perspective, it’s also time to rethink how — and not just how much — graduate and postdoctoral researchers are funded. In the United States, these early-career researchers are typically funded through grants led by senior researchers. By enhancing the power imbalance between senior and junior researchers, this approach creates the potential for abuse.
A 2018 National Academies report on sexual harassment in academia therefore called for a shift toward providing a greater share of research funding directly to trainees. Little systematically has happened on this recommendation in the intervening years. Options for shifting funding models toward a more trainee-centered approach — for example, a dramatic expansion of programs like the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship Program, which funds students directly — could also be addressed in an interagency process.
The growing dependence on faculty who are on short-term contracts and have no health care benefits is a harder issue to address; ultimately, it arises from budget constraints on public universities. But systemic solutions are possible.
The U.S. land grant system, for example, has a century-long history of federal-state partnerships to support the faculty who deliver training, research and community engagement at the nation’s 106 land-grant universities. Expanding capacity funding at these public institutions — and perhaps extending it to a broader set of institutions — might help end the growing dependence on part-time faculty. Indeed, an expansion of capacity funding could potentially be tied to expectations such as equal pay for equal work.
Systemic problems require systemic solutions; they cannot be effectively addressed one university at a time. Without policy change, we will be faced again and again with zero-sum conflicts between management and labor, with students and the American research enterprise potentially suffering in the battle. Positive-sum policy changes, by contrast, can build a better higher education sector for everyone.
We need organized labor, scientific societies and universities to work together with White House leadership to build a more just and competitive future for higher education.