Echoing the greater University of Michigan community's own statement, we the undersigned academics condemn the university administration's  continued use of intimidation and retaliation in response to the Graduate Employees Organization (GEO) strike. We urge the administration immediately to negotiate in good faith with the GEO to achieve a living wage for our graduate student colleagues and fellow instructors. 

 

As academics, including faculty, graduate students, staff, and undergraduates around the world, we are appalled by the escalating tactics taken by University of Michigan leadership against GEO members. In response to five months of negotiation in which the university did not make a meaningful counteroffer to GEO’s living wage platform, the administration immediately resorted to filing a court injunction  to force striking graduate workers back to work instead of negotiating at the bargaining table. More recently, the university has preemptively withheld wages for our GSIs, who face already immense precarity, with 80% reporting to be rent-burdened and many others living paycheck-to-paycheck. We are deeply disturbed by the news of the administration mobilizing campus police to detain graduate student protestors who were attempting to confront President Ono as part of a public protest action.  

 

If the university is to espouse the values of a community dedicated to diversity, equity, and inclusion, then it has a fiscal and moral obligation to make an offer that reflects all of its members’ right to a living wage. Yet, the administration’s 11.5% proposed wage increase remains well below the MIT Living Wage calculation, let alone below the combined 15% inflation rate from 2020-23. It is plain that many graduate students at UM struggle to make ends meet in a city where the cost of living has skyrocketed in recent years. This has a direct impact on our ability to recruit and support a cohort of graduate students from a diverse range of socio-economic backgrounds as well as parent-students and students who financially support their families.

 

We are told by the administration that the prospect of a looming grade strike, prompted by further delay of negotiations by the administration, would negatively impact undergraduates reliant on final grades for their financial aid, professional prospects, or visa status. However, we strongly reject the administration’s spurious pitting of our graduate student community against the undergraduate students they serve and the implication that those faculty and students who support the strike are responsible for any potential harm to undergraduates brought about by withholding grades. Our graduate students are dedicated, essential members of our community who care deeply about their students, and we affirm their prerogative to engage in work stoppage as a strategy of employee grievance and collective bargaining consistent with the long history of union organizing, as well as the right of faculty and staff to act in solidarity. 

 

The university has the power to end all disruption caused to undergraduates by swiftly negotiating a fair contract with GEO. We thus understand any damage inflicted on our undergraduates due to grades being withheld to be a direct result of UM’s stonewalling of GEO’s good faith attempts to negotiate, vicious response to student protest, and continued attempt to pressure faculty into positions that impinge on our academic freedom and pedagogical integrity.  

 

In response to the strike, the administration has pressured faculty to act in ways that are unethical and antithetical to our mission as educators, including directing faculty to grade work taught by GSIs and to issue arbitrary grades for ungraded or incomplete work. We wholly concur with SACUAʻs assertion that the “assessment of student work is the prerogative of the instructor, and demands thoughtful and holistic evaluation of student performances.”  We maintain that the outsourcing of grading to persons who have not taught our students is a “violation of professional ethics” and are deeply troubled by reports that the administration intends to punish faculty and department chairs who refuse to implement this approach. Such reports have shaken our confidence in the university leadership at the highest ranks.  

 

These recent actions threaten to tarnish the University’s reputation as a leading public institution that prides itself on championing the principles of fairness, equity, and inclusion. With the highest possible urgency, we call on the administration to return to the bargaining table and make an equitable offer that aligns the values of our educational mission with the practices of a fair and just workplace.

 

 

Signed,