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Graduate students occupy a unique role within the university system, co-existing as students and employees who teach a large portion of the undergraduate courses. We have a substantial stake in the reputation and future of SUNY-ESF as an institution because we are building a network of colleagues that we will collaborate with for the rest of our careers. Our financial security, health and safety are deeply interwoven with the decisions made by the SUNY-ESF administration.

Unfortunately, the turmoil within SUNY-ESF leadership over the last five years, now capped with a pandemic, has left many graduate students with little trust in the SUNY-ESF administration. Graduate students are left out of the room during crucial conversations; when we express our strong concerns at the few public opportunities we have, we are frequently met with a defensive or condescending response that suggests we are being difficult or demanding, rather than our true mission: advocating for ourselves and others because we care deeply about SUNY-ESF as an institution. We are asked to blindly trust that administrative decisions will protect us, despite not having a seat at the table during important decision-making conversations and having our concerns rebuffed time and again.

Additionally, graduate teaching assistants were not given any substantive opportunity to influence decisions about modes of instruction, semester schedules or health and safety procedures for the fall 2020 or spring 2021 semesters, despite being on the front lines as instructors.

The SUNY-ESF Living Wage Campaign was formed to advocate for improvements in financial security, health and stability for graduate students at SUNY-ESF. Our group and Graduate Student Employees Union Representative Rose Osborne made repeated efforts to reach out to administrators over the summer during restart planning, but we were never included in key discussions. To our knowledge, plans for returning to campus were rolled out without a single undergraduate or graduate student being included in any conversation about how to return to campus safely.

The only opportunity for graduates or undergraduates to voice our concerns was during a short series of town halls held after restart plans had already been finalized. Only one of these meetings was used to discuss health and safety concerns, and a meeting was held to address graduate student concerns only after we demanded it. During these town halls, the transfer of information was largely top-down, and minimal efforts were made to meaningfully address students’ concerns.

Follow-up communications about testing, safety policies and schedules have come from diffuse sources and are often given at short notice. Because of our ties to Syracuse University, we sometimes hear news from SU and then wait days or even weeks to hear a reactionary response or clarification from our own administration. Sometimes, vital information is posted on SUNY-ESF social media accounts before it is officially emailed to students, causing confusion.

The SUNY-ESF Living Wage Campaign has attempted to improve the financial security of graduate students at SUNY-ESF by asking for a modest delay in graduate student bill timing. Currently, tuition and fees are due at the start of the semester, frequently timed before graduate student workers have even received their first paycheck for the semester. We asked for a permanent delay of just one month from the current deadline, which would not impact the college’s bottom line and could be easily granted at the college’s discretion. Despite repeated conversations, inquiries and meetings, we have had no substantive response from administrators. One administrator even went so far as to call our efforts “unprofessional.”

In an even more troubling case, the anonymous Instagram accounts @ShareYourStoryESF and @BlackatESF have detailed multiple testimonials of SUNY-ESF administration failing some of the most vulnerable people on campus. The only public response to these disturbing stories has been a single open forum (initiated and organized by undergraduate students) in November, where administrators claimed they had no prior knowledge of any of the issues detailed in public posts with official SUNY-ESF accounts tagged. In a rather disheartening moment, after three hours of students sharing deeply personal and traumatic experiences, as well as countless specific and actionable suggestions from students about how to improve circumstances for students, an administrator’s closing thought was, “We can’t do anything about this unless we know about it.”

We ask administrators to work with us to build a healthy campus climate by including graduate students when making decisions likely to impact our livelihoods, research and coursework. We ask them the following:

 1) Solicit broad-based feedback from all students through town halls and surveys prior to planning important changes

2) Directly reach out to the leadership of graduate and undergraduate student groups during any planning that impacts students, 

3) Issue open calls for graduate and undergraduate student representatives on decision-making committees, rather than hand-selecting students who have favored relationships with administrators. 

Our hope for spring 2021 and beyond is that the SUNY-ESF administration makes significant efforts to include a broad sample of graduate students in their planning — early, often and with genuine concern for us as valued members of the SUNY-ESF community.

Members of the SUNY-ESF Living Wage Campaign

Published on January 14, 2021 at 11:57 pm