Updates

As a graduate resident advisor (GRA), I provide guidance, resources, and a sense of community to the undergraduate students that live in MIT’s residential facilities. I live with and get to know my residents, help them build community with each other through social events, and support them as they navigate the challenges of being college students. Interviewing to be a GRA at MIT is a very thorough process, involving multiple rounds of interviews with both housing staff and students. In return for GRA-ing, I do not pay rent for my room. While working for an institution that plans for graduate student-workers to be severely rent burdened, the ability to save money on a graduate stipend is a huge financial advantage.

Starting my first semester as a GRA last fall, I was thrilled to get started and meet all my residents. However, I quickly discovered numerous issues. When I moved into my room, the ceiling leaked every time it rained. It stayed this way for three months. MIT administration has neglected to maintain their buildings for years, all while charging the same price for a crumbling building. Simple tasks like repairing the washer are left on hold for months with no update on when the repairs will be performed. MIT has identified over $2 billion in maintenance backlog on campus, and by their own admission, many of the undergraduate houses are in “poor condition.”

Graduate student-workers come to MIT to conduct research and teach for a better world. We want to understand how things work and are passionate about research. But we also generate billions of dollars for MIT. MIT as an institution has always reaped financial benefits from our work: its funding and worldwide reputation as a top research university follow from the experiments we run and the code we write. However, while MIT’s net assets exploded from $24 billion in 2020 to over $36 billion in 2021, graduate student-workers remain as we always have: severely rent-burdened by U.S. federal standards, paying on average 55% of our stipends in rent due to policies of MIT’s administration.

International students are a vital part of the MIT graduate student community. We are also among the thousands of members and hundreds of organizers of the MIT Graduate Student Union (GSU). The reason we are involved is quite simple — like all of our colleagues, international or not, our voices should matter. As international students, we face many roadblocks to advancing our graduate program that we seek to address through unionization. We are voting yes on the GSU because we deserve:

• adequate resources and support;

• protections when we are confronted with visa issues or travel restrictions; and

• equal opportunity and fair policies — for example, around Curricular Practical Training (CPT) to advance our research, professional development during our program, and Optional Practical Training for post-graduate jobs and a stable future.

Before coming to MIT, I served in the U.S. Army as an infantry soldier. Most of my time in service was spent deployed in Eastern Europe, conducting NATO ally reassurance missions and counter-Russian aggression operations after the annexation of Crimea. Since being accepted to the MIT AeroAstro program in 2019, however, MIT has failed to correctly certify my Veterans Affairs (VA) educational benefits. MIT was noncompliant with federal regulations and unresponsive to my calls to action. These educational benefits are guaranteed in the Post-9/11 GI bill, which provides tuition and housing allowances to veterans who honorably served the country. These benefits enable veterans to gain skills that will help them transition to civilian life through educational and economic support. These benefits have allowed me to begin a new career which is useful and exciting. I joined the MIT Student Veterans Association (SVA) to advocate for the improvement of this situation for all MIT veterans.

Since August 2020, the SVA has highlighted the lack of support for and neglect of the veteran community here at MIT. This has included the lack of a Veteran Support Office, access to coordinated VA healthcare, and data on the identity and number of veterans we have on campus. Even with strong support from the Institute Community and Equity Office and faculty like Professor Amy Glasmeier, the issues brought forth by the SVA are largely ignored or marginalized.

I enjoyed my first nine months in my lab without incident — I got along with my PI and was nearing completion on a body of work that would result in a first-author publication. But one October evening, things changed. My PI sent an email accusing me of breaking equipment that I hadn’t touched in weeks. When I tried to defend myself, she called me “combative” and called my communication style “unprofessional.” She told me that I was a bad lab citizen, even though as lab safety officer I devoted hours every week to managing lab waste and keeping my labmates safe. My PI made several unreasonable demands in the following weeks, including that we work at least 60 hours per week and respond to Slack messages within one hour during the workday, a rule that completely disregards the fact that students have classes and experiments that prohibit swift responses at all times. When I tried to communicate my concerns, I was again accused of “giving pushback” and being disrespectful.

I came to MIT excited for an excellent graduate education in Materials Science and Engineering. After my first few weeks, it became clear to me that much of the work of crafting an education for both graduate and undergraduate students fell to the TAs. They were responsible for attending lectures, drafting problem sets in advance, teaching multiple recitation sessions each week, preparing review sessions, holding office hours, updating and configuring Canvas, drafting exam questions, proctoring exams, and grading problem sets, term papers, and exams. They do all of this while still being expected to conduct world-class research and take on many additional administrative and maintenance tasks.

The Black Graduate Student Association (BGSA) is proud to publicly endorse the MIT Graduate Student Union (GSU) through a landslide community vote of 92% in favor.

We acknowledge that the Black student experience at MIT is not monolithic, but nonetheless the vast majority of Black graduate students have gravitated toward the union. There are many reasons for this support, including the fact that with a union, we can use our collective power as graduate workers to win a contract that implements changes the BGSA has advocated for in the past but MIT has failed to address.

More than 5,000 graduate workers act as MIT’s research engine, accounting for around 65% of the research workforce. We meticulously plan experiments that no one in the world has done before, iterate until the results are scientifically sound, and assemble manuscripts that ultimately contribute to the world’s body of knowledge. As the workers closest to our work, we are the experts on what resources we need in the workplace to successfully produce MIT’s world-class innovations and discoveries. A majority of graduate workers have signed our union cards because we fundamentally believe that we deserve a voice in our workplace — and unionizing is the only way to guarantee us legally-enforceable negotiating power to win the tools that we need to be outstanding researchers.

In June 2019, President Rafael Reif wrote to the MIT community that immigration and international exchange are the “oxygen” of innovation and prosperity, appearing to express a commitment from MIT to support international student workers. However, the following year, MIT threw hundreds of international students into crisis by suddenly ending remote appointments that had enabled them to work from their home countries during the pandemic. This was not an isolated event, but rather an intensification of a pattern of precarity and disempowerment that international student workers frequently experience. During this crisis and in the months since, we’ve spoken to many fellow international student workers who believe that MIT’s policies often do not reflect or respond to our needs and that forming a graduate student worker union at MIT is the best way we can compel the Institute to respect our rights and well-being. Here are some of the stories we have heard.

As graduate student-advocates, we know the needs of our community and the harm that happens when student voices are not part of the conversation. We know that graduate student-workers need stronger protections against harassment and discrimination, robust investment in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs, affordable housing, and a living wage. To this end, we joined committees, councils, task forces, and advisory boards, determined to positively impact the experience of MIT graduate workers. Instead of making progress, we witnessed the MIT administration unilaterally ignore inconvenient recommendations, dismiss and exploit the service of graduate student-workers, and resist the changes we urgently need.

Since the MIT graduate student unionization campaign began Sept. 27, the strength of our collective voice has grown. Worker after worker after worker has come forward with issues impacting their research and student life at MIT, and a majority of graduate workers have already signed their union cards in support of unionization. Through thousands of conversations with our fellow graduate workers, we’ve highlighted student issues like affordable housing, COVID relief policies, and funding and compensation. In the wake of the resounding endorsement of the MIT Graduate Student Union (GSU) by MIT’s Black Graduate Student Association (BGSA), the MIT GSU wants to highlight our prioritization of one of the most-voiced graduate worker demands at MIT: a material, institutional commitment to racial and social justice.

All MIT graduate workers know that the cost of living in the Boston/Cambridge area is exorbitant. Now, imagine being hit with a surprise $6,000 medical bill — this is the nightmarish reality for some graduate workers at MIT.

Despite MIT’s extreme wealth, many of its graduate workers with chronic health needs do not receive affordable care with the currently-offered student insurance; moreover, relief funds meant to help with unexpected medical costs are poorly publicized and can be denied on arbitrary technicalities to the graduate workers who need them most. To secure comprehensive healthcare coverage and to make sure that every graduate worker can afford to receive the healthcare they need, we must come together to form a union.