Graduate students form union to tackle cuts

UNM graduate students are organizing to find another way of tackling budget cuts that have left many uncertain about their jobs.
Graduate Student Liza Minno-Bloom is forming Graduate Employees Together, a committee that advocates for graduate and teaching assistants. She said half of all UNM classes are taught by graduate students, and most estimates under-represent their impact.

“The budget issues in October kind of threw us into survival mode,” she said.

So GPSA President Lissa Knudsen said it was imperative that graduate students organize.
“This situation made it more obvious that graduate assistants need to have a collective unit where we can negotiate annual contracts,” Knudsen said. “If this foundation is taken away, everything comes tumbling down.”

At a Sep. 14 Board of Regents meeting, the College of Arts and Sciences suggested cutting 40 graduate teaching positions by the spring semester in an effort to deal with state budget cuts. The 3.2 percent cuts took $1.5 million away the College of Arts and Sciences, said Curtis Porter, the provost’s associate vice president for budget, planning and analysis. He said the University is expecting an additional 5 percent cut in the fall.

“It is looking grim,” he said.
But proposed graduate teaching cuts sparked student outcry and forced the University to revisit the issue and find alternative money sources, Porter said. He said the provost will give the college a one-time $300,000 payment from a backup fund, with $180,000 going toward spring student-teaching positions.

Janet Cramer, associate dean at the College of Arts and Sciences, said predicting how cuts will affect the graduate and student job landscape is difficult.

“All of us hope that budget cuts won’t be so deep as to cause loss of GA/TA lines,” she said. Knudsen said fewer positions increases class sizes and leads to less instructor-student interaction, and position cuts hurt graduate students because they need to pay for their education.

“It was a misstep of the administration to suggest these cuts at this time,” Knudsen said. “An inexpensive university like UNM depends in part on using graduates to do a tremendous amount of the work.”

Porter said he is optimistic that UNM financial committees can find ways to compensate for deficits.
“If we can get through the fiscal year 2012, at least we can get into a mode of not talking about cuts,” he said. “Hopefully, we’ll have some answers by early next semester.”