Black Graduate Student Association: A graduate student union is in our best interests
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Dear campus community,
The Black Graduate Student Association is a cohesive and responsive organization dedicated to making Syracuse University aware of and responsive to Black graduate students’ needs and concerns. As a professional and social support assemblage, BGSA is vitally concerned with the recruitment and retention of Black graduate students within the university.
As the BGSA, we recognize that SU has made progress in bettering its experience for students of color. These efforts include the opening of 119 Euclid, a building dedicated to representing and protecting Blackness on campus, the appointment of Jeffrey M. Scruggs as the next chair of the board of trustees and the continued community-building initiatives hosted by the Graduate School BIPOC Alliance for Excellence.
Our concern is that while steps are being made in the right direction, a dangerous power imbalance remains. Many academic programs across campus could not operate without the labor of their graduate employees. These same employees are often faced with an immeasurable amount of financial, physical and mental stress.
SU does not currently pay its graduate workers a living wage nor provide substantial relocation services for international students. We find this situation to be readily apparent and very telling within the department of African American Studies.
Until now, graduate employees in the AAS department found themselves near the bottom of the pay scale — $17,500 per year without summer pay — dealing with several unfilled faculty and staff positions. These vacancies increased the workload for international student workers especially, forcing them to quickly adjust to life in the United States without adequate support.
This situation is probably familiar to your own academic program. It should be acknowledged that each of us, including undergraduates, have a role to play in bettering our situation. Forming a union would be an effort to increase protection, resources and funding to departments across SU.
This is why organizing a graduate employee union is paramount to BGSA, as it represents our attempts to ensure our university’s vulnerable populations are protected. Working at SU, an institution boasting an endowment of over 1 billion dollars, should not mean scraping by paycheck to paycheck, being unable to afford doctor’s visits or having to rely on a community food bank for your next meal.
BGSA recognizes that Black graduate employees are less likely to have the social safety nets associated with access to generational wealth. For many minority graduate employees, financial hardship brings on declining classroom performance, the need for a second source of income or ultimately a withdrawal from their academic program. Joining the union effort means working to gain control of our working conditions, leading to a shift in the demographics of higher education as a whole.
For these reasons, we strongly encourage you, regardless of position, to join Syracuse Graduate Employees United in fighting for a more equitable future at SU.
Signed by BGSA Leadership
