Columbia Responds: Striking Ph.D. Students Are Treated Fairly
Benefits, stipends and other compensation can reach $100,000 a year.
Regarding your editorial on Columbia University’s labor dispute with its doctoral students (“United Auto Workers of the Ivy League,” Dec. 18): Earlier this month, we offered a package of compensation and benefits to Ph.D. students that is one of the most generous available at any U.S. university. It would provide $100 million in additional support to union members over the next five years, reflecting our determination to reach an agreement as soon as feasible.
Student loans do not play a role in Ph.D. packages. Columbia Ph.D. students pay no tuition and typically live in affordable, university-owned housing. In addition to stipends and compensation, we pay 100% of health-insurance premiums, including for dependents, and contribute to child care. All told, benefits, stipends and other compensation can reach $100,000 a year.
Comparing Columbia to private companies, as you do, misunderstands the role of Ph.D. students, the support they receive at Columbia and their work responsibilities. These student workers are not full-time employees. Ph.D. students in the humanities, for example, will teach during only three of their five years of study. To enable time for study and research, their teaching workload does not exceed 20 hours a week. During the years they work, there is no summer teaching requirement. Yet Columbia supports these humanities Ph.D.s, and all our 3,000 Ph.D. students, with this multiyear compensation and benefits package regardless of their teaching assignments or research work.
Why, unlike workers in private companies, are these student employees compensated when not at work? We make this financial commitment, and make it enthusiastically, because developing new generations of scholars is central to our mission as a university. Fulfilling that objective requires supporting Ph.D. students fully even in years when they are focused solely on their own research and scholarship.
We are dedicated to seeing students thrive at Columbia, and we are eager to reach a reasonable agreement.
Mary C. Boyce
Provost, Columbia University
New York
