The Most I Could Do

When I was in grad school, I was heavily involved in graduate student government. I spent a year as senator for the English graduate students, two years on the Graduate Student Senate Executive Committee as Parliamentarian, one year as a senator again, and then one final year as Vice President. The responsibilities of the VP were running meetings and chairing the Student Life Committee, which had a very vague remit of essentially dealing with all the stuff that the other standing committees did not.

I came in as Vice President at a pretty fraught time. The year prior, the administration had unilaterally changed the health insurance for graduate assistants. We had been on a great plan, basically identical to the state employees plan, but administrative factors caused the administration to get rid of our plan and put us on the student plan (mostly for undergraduates who didn't have insurance from their parents), but offered subsidies. This plan offered fewer benefits than the old plan, was more expensive for GAs, and was administered by an utterly incompetent corporation, Bailey Agencies. But when the new plan was presented to the outgoing Executive Committee, the presentation highlighted all of the benefits and none of the drawbacks, which only slowly emerged as GAs dug into the plan details and began using it.*

So this is what I came into, and what I spent most of my time as VP dealing with-- meeting with administrators, surveying GAs. Parallel to my efforts in the GSS, this is when the UConn graduate employee unionization effort exploded. It wasn't just this (we had seen a number of fee hikes over the past few years, including a substantive one to build a new gym that something like 98% of surveyed graduate students were against, but flat stipends), but it was one of the major contributing factors.

Things got worse as the school year rolled along. When the spring semester came, and GAs began filing taxes, it was discovered that the university subsidy counted as income, and therefore had to be reported on your taxes. This meant that if you were on the family plan, which the university subsidized at $10,000, you had to pay taxes on your $20,000 of actual income as if you made $30,000 of income.

To me what was particularly irritating was that UConn's administration seemed entirely uninterested in the actual effects that this policy change was having on the lives of actual people. Members of HR continued to smile and insist it was a better plan even when presented with evidence that this was demonstrably untrue; one particularly loathsome HR employee, Lori Vivian, kept rattling on about "total compensation packages," insisting GAs were just blinkered because they didn't appreciate how much money they got in the form of tuition wavers even as they struggled to make ends meet.

The new plan wasn't even achieving its goal of being cheaper for the university, so in January, the Dean of the Graduate School came to us to tell us it was getting even worse, and asking us to pick the way in which was getting even worse. To his credit, he had about as much power as we did in all this, and this visit was because he wanted to do us the courtesy of keeping us in the loop, unlike other administrators. The GSS rejected the choices as a false binary, a tactic of making it look like we consented to what was happening; the resolution ended with a statement that "that the Graduate Student Senate finds the recognition by the University administration of the right of graduate assistants to collectively bargain with the University as the only viable recourse for negotiating the terms of graduate assistants’ employment and for ensuring the well-being of graduate assistants, the Graduate School, and the University of Connecticut."

Nothing else was working, nor would it work. The thing that continually stymied me in my every effort to do something was that no one was obligated to do anything. No one had to listen to graduate students, because graduate students had no power.

The point where things really got bad was when the tax thing became apparent. Because UConn reported its subsidy of our health insurance as a scholarship, refunds were going down by about $650. But no one could tell me why. Eventually we managed to figure out it was because the new plan did not count as "employer-provided" even though it was provided by our employer... but no one could tell me what that meant. UConn's tax and compliance accountant didn't answer my e-mails, but thankfully the Dean of the Graduate School eventually got me into a meeting with him and a number of other relevant administrators.

That meeting was horrifying in how abstractly it treated the lives of real human beings. The guy from the Comptroller's office provided his explanation of why GAs were losing this money... and clearly considered it all good, and the meeting over.

I was like... "Wait... but what are we actually doing? Now that we know why this is happening, how are we using this information?" And the answer was basically that we were not. Lori Vivian from HR just apologized and said, "We didn't know." Which just infuriated me even more. It was her job to know! (It still baffles me that she has a job. Thanks to her poorly implemented health insurance change, GAs unionized, and UConn surely lost much more money due to that than it ever even could gained from downgrading our benefits.)

After that meeting, I went and spoke at the next Board of Trustees meeting, during the open comment session. This is how my speech ended:

I recently attended a meeting on this topic with the Dean of Graduate School, the Director of Student Health Services, the Controller, and representatives from Human Resources. The purpose of this meeting was not to fix the problem, but simply to explain it. It was explained to me that UConn was legally in the right, and everyone said they were very sorry and expressed surprise that this had happened. Legally, I am sure UConn is sound—ethically, I am not so sure. When a GA loses $600 or $1,500 or more for the privilege of having worse health insurance, UConn has done something wrong. When no one informs GAs in advance that they will lose this money, either because they didn’t know or because they forgot, UConn has done something wrong. When a roomful of administrators throw up their hands and says there’s nothing to be done about this, UConn has done something wrong.

I don't think this did any good but at that point it felt like all I could do.

I turned out to be a frustrating and unenjoyable year to be Vice President; I had just wanted to make jokes while chairing meetings.

#619: When have you spoken out about something you felt had to change?

* The new plan was so bad that the some GAs opted instead to go on the state-subsidized Medicaid plan for low-income families. The owner of Bailey Agencies, John Scott, was a state senator and corrupt as hell, so he introduced a bill in the state legislature to make it illegal for people to go on Medicaid if they were students!