Graduate Student Unions Are Growing- and Fighting for Social Justice

Truthout
By Eleanor J. Bader
January 26, 2018

Not surprisingly, when graduate students heard that the Republican tax bill included a provision to tax tuition waivers, most became both upset and angry.  But rather than despair, they organized.  On campus after campus, in city after city, they mobilized to protest the 2017 bill.  Their concerns extended beyond the injustice of taxing in-kind financial aid incentives as income, to include a broader progressive agenda: opposing racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia; denouncing corporate tax giveaways; fighting the growth of anti-intellectualism; and countering attacks on publicly funded education.

Austin A. Baker, a Ph.D.-level philosophy student at New Jersey's Rutgers University, joined students from Drexel University, the University of Pennsylvania and elsewhere to oppose the proposed measure.  "If the tuition waiver portion of the tax bill had gone through -- thankfully, it did not end up in the final draft -- it would have made Ph.D. programs completely out of reach for working-class students and students from low-income communities," Baker said.  "We could not let this happen.  Those of us who are required to teach undergraduates as part of our training understood that our students deserve to have mentors who are racially, sexually and class diverse.  This is something we're committed to."

Read the full article at the Truthout website here.