The University of Michigan Graduate Employees’ Organization (GEO) “Strike for a Safe and Just Campus” in September 2020 garnered the most engagement the union had seen since its inception in the mid-1970s. “We had to start setting up, effectively, burner accounts to let enough people into the [general membership meeting] rooms, which was wild,” says Isaac Blythe, a GEO departmental steward from the chemistry department. “I didn't even know that Zoom had a capacity limit.”

The University of Michigan strike is the most acute manifestation of graduate student frustration from the COVID-19 pandemic turning into action. As universities are attempting to adapt to the many challenges COVID has introduced, graduate students’ non-Newtonian-fluid status as sometimes-employees and sometimes-students often leaves them caught in the cracks. COVID policies crafted for undergrads or for staff and faculty don’t account for graduate students’ unique place in the university system, even though they play an integral role in universities’ intellectual and research enterprises.

Though some issues like testing, quarantining, and in-person teaching are unique to the pandemic, many of the current challenges are pre-existing issues that the pandemic has merely magnified. Students from institutions across the country have previously brought up similar problems again and again and offered simple solutions: make transparent, clearly communicated policies; be understanding; offer support; ask students for input and truly listen.

Here is an overview of some of the controversies and changes that have been brought to the forefront at many higher education institutions as a result of the pandemic and the GEO’s strike in response to the University of Michigan’s handling of it.

University Decentralization

Many universities left COVID safety decisions to individual schools, departments, or even professors. Although this flexible approach allows each department or professor to set policies that work best for specific research, it heavily depends on individuals making thoughtful decisions at the same time as it makes transparent communication much more difficult.

Ashay Patel, a third-year graduate student in Caltech’s Physics, Math, and Astronomy division, says his division is on the more cautious side, but it’s hard to tell whether that was a systemic decision or based on the reasoning of the division chair. “As far as I know, there [isn’t] an institute-wide policy for what level of caution is required,” Patel says.

This individual-level decision-making becomes particularly confusing when different divisions share buildings or when buildings have open floor plans. Without centralized planning and communications, understanding the policies for shared spaces becomes a complicated game of Telephone.

“I couldn’t tell you what the plans of my neighboring labs are,” says Fayth Tan, a third-year grad student in Caltech’s Biology and Bioengineering program. “From the amount of signs that they've put up, they had a whole thing of making sure the walkways were one-way, but without reaching out to them and being like, ‘Hey, what did you do to control traffic on the floor?’ I would have no way of knowing that, so it depends on how much individuals are talking.”

At the University of Michigan, in-person graduate student instructors had to rely on the chemistry department for personal protective equipment (PPE) and sanitization supplies because they were not provided by the university. One of the GEO strike demands included university-provided PPE for in-person instructors across the institution. Another demand the university agreed to was creating a mechanism for graduate student instructors to request to switch out of in-person teaching, which had been department-dependent up to that point.

Policies That Exclude Categories of Graduate Students

As institutions rolled out strict new COVID-19 policies, students quickly realized that the rules were based on the common assumptions that graduate students are young, single, living alone, and healthy.

Because of the high cost of living in California, graduate students at Stanford and Caltech were particularly vulnerable to campus restrictions that affected housing. At Caltech, Graduate Student Council (GSC) representatives Tan and Patel pointed out that the institute’s plans and restrictions didn’t account for situations where students were living with others, especially non-Caltech roommates, which was an oversight considering the cost of housing in the LA/Pasadena area and the graduate stipend.

Additionally, at Stanford, graduate students learned in mid-August 2020 that they would not be able to receive their stipends, retain their visa status, or work or live on campus if they did not immediately sign Stanford’s “Campus Compact.” More than 1,500 people signed a petition requesting revisions to the compact, which did not come with plans for COVID-19 testing or reporting, or for isolation or quarantine housing, but which did warn that compact violations could result in removal from the on-campus housing where many grad students live.

The first iteration of the compact also restricted guests and travel, closing off students’ access to significant others and people they might care for or rely on for childcare. The university eventually revised the contract to allow for exemptions and an appeals process.

Reopening policies have also left chronically ill and disabled students with a disproportionate burden. Most reopening plans assume a certain amount of risk—going to campus increases the chance of contracting COVID-19 compared to working from home. However, students with preexisting conditions are particularly concerned about lowering their risk of infection, especially when communities are experiencing high case counts that result in triaged healthcare.

Graduate student Ben Stovall was grateful that the department was receptive to his request to teach virtually in the fall semester at Virginia Tech because of his preexisting condition. “I made it clear to my department head and the people who are making TA positions that I’m not teaching in person. I can’t; I’m not going to risk it,” he says. “They really did a good job to accommodate.”

Student–Faculty Power Dynamics

Even before the pandemic, graduate students were often concerned about advisers pressuring them to work long hours. In a pandemic, unsafe conditions can easily replace or augment those long hours, especially when institutions leave lab reopening plans up to individual faculty members anxious to make up for two or three months of lab time lost in spring lockdowns. But how can departments and universities address students’ concerns about adviser pressure?

“That goes back to this age-old problem of the power dynamics between professors and students. If you have an issue with your professor, who are you going to talk to?” says Anni Zhang, a fourth-year graduate student in Stanford’s Chemical Engineering program. “Okay, you've talked to this assigned faculty member who is a friend of your professor’s, and as much as you want it to be anonymous, and as much as you want it to be a focus on the problem and not the person, [you] still don't want to bring these [issues] up to specific individuals that you might feel uncomfortable with.”

Creating ombuds positions where students can talk to a neutral party might be a way to address these problems while decreasing the power differential between adviser and student. However, relieving the imbalance in the power dynamic can’t completely eliminate the pressure to return to work, even if returning to research is voluntary.

Based on a survey from the student-led safety team at the University of Iowa’s chemistry department, fourth-year grad student Jessica DeYoung says that students felt a weird dynamic with their labmates, feeling pressured to return to the lab when they realized others in their group were doing so. She notes that, “If anything, the peers were setting the precedent, not the PIs.”

Negatively Affected Communities Bear the Onus To Correct Systemic Problems

Caltech was in the middle of a contentious healthcare plan change when the pandemic started. In 2019, more than one-third of grad student respondents to a survey (n=655) from Caltech’s GSC said that they had avoided medical treatment because of its cost while at Caltech, yet the proposed changes to the healthcare plan included a 15% premium increase, doubled the in-network deductible, and decreased benefits.

Then the pandemic struck. Chronically ill and disabled students (more than 35% of 2020 survey respondents identified as chronically ill, and 6% identified as disabled) were left to lobby for a healthcare plan they heavily and increasingly depended on while they were also trying to avoid contracting the virus. (In May 2020, Caltech For Affordable Healthcare learned that students’ premiums, out-of-pocket maximums, and deductibles would increase, but student advocacy resulted in crucial covered benefits being retained.)

In another example, although programs and schools have been open to pushing back Ph.D. graduation milestones the way they have pushed back tenure clocks for junior faculty, not many have committed to funding students for the extra time they will need to make up for a lost season of field work, disrupted live subject research, or a backlogged academic system full of hiring freezes. Without institutional support for the plethora of different situations that might result in a need for additional funding, it falls to individual students to figure out how they should find financial support.

At Virginia Tech, Ben Stovall was pursuing a master’s degree after having switched labs, but his new adviser moved to a different university—along with Stovall’s funding. When the pandemic pushed his fall defense date to the spring, he suddenly found himself without funding.

“I'm very lucky to have…advocated for myself in a way that impressed the department chair and the graduate program director to allow me to stay on,” says Stovall. “But in order to do that, I presented them with almost a plan of attack…‘This is what I’m doing; this is my plan. I need to stay for the spring. Can you help me?’”

Reactive Rather Than Proactive Approaches

The conditions that prompted the University of Michigan graduate workers to strike arose from many poorly handled decisions, as detailed in publications ranging from The Michigan Daily to The New York Times. Even the UM faculty senate voted “no confidence” in the university’s president after a difficult fall reopening.

“Fortunately, the university's winter opening plan was a lot better and, incidentally, incorporated almost all of the initial suggestions and demands that the union had made,” says UM GEO chemistry departmental steward Isaac Blythe. Even though the university did not implement the changes as a direct result of the strike, students now have mandatory weekly testing, and asymptomatic testing is available to faculty and staff working on campus, among other changes that fulfill more of the strike’s demands.

After the petition for a revised Stanford campus compact, the administration created a Graduate Student Advisory Committee of representatives from various student organizations. The committee now meets biweekly with the Stanford administration regarding the university’s COVID-19 response.

“Why didn’t they have this before?” asks fourth-year chemical engineering grad student Anni Zhang. She says the university credited this student council with the idea of using positive reinforcement for a recent testing ramp-up. Instead of handing out punishment for not complying with testing and contact-tracing guidelines, the university is “waving the carrot instead of the stick” by entering compliant students into raffles. Zhang says she has heard far fewer complaints since the university began consulting students about COVID-19–related decisions.

Stay Positive, Test Negative

Despite the massive amount of advocacy work students have had to do since the beginning of the pandemic, some people and institutions are definitely doing things right. Many students were quick to enter a caveat that their own advisers have been extremely supportive throughout the pandemic. Some advisers have encouraged students to take lab N95 masks for personal use, and when on-campus testing was not available, many department chairs and faculty members sent information about local testing centers.

At Cornell University, weekly testing for all members of the Cornell community has been in place since the academic year started in August, in contrast to other institutions like Caltech, where pilot surveillance testing did not begin until November 30.

Fifth-year Cornell chemistry grad student Renee Sifri says that TCAT, the Ithaca-area bus system, has been great about notifying riders about fellow commuters who have tested positive and specifying which days and routes the infected person was riding. Sifri says the university president also sends an e-mail every time a spike in cases is discovered at Cornell, making sure everyone is up-to-date. Things have been going so well at Cornell that labs have been able to transition away from shift work to relatively normal schedules and capacities, depending on each lab’s preferences and size.

What Can Universities Do?

The ultimate goal for most academics is to return to something resembling “normal,” eliminating lab capacity caps and shift work and returning to in-person meetings, colloquia, and conferences. Although large gatherings may not be feasible until most of us are vaccinated, the aggressive testing, tracing, and transparency at Cornell University seems like a promising model for a new normal.

While many students are struggling financially because of changes in finances due to the pandemic, institutions should avoid creating situations that force students to pay for their safety and the safety of the campus community. Examples include enforcing parking fees in areas where many people previously took public transit or failing to supply PPE to in-person TAs.

Institutions can also help by expanding financial support for students by increasing or supplementing graduate stipends as Cornell and UPenn have done, expanding access to student child care grants, and creating or broadening programs to alleviate financial strain, such as Stanford’s Emergency Grant-In-Aid Funds and other financial grant programs.

“When universities think about, and communicate openly with, impacted communities before making decisions, the results are better. To create their pandemic response plan, Cornell’s Graduate School relied upon many sources: the Graduate and Professional Student Assembly; individual student feedback; questions and concerns voiced in the Graduate School’s Ask a Dean column, and in individual one-on-one meetings with the Graduate School Leadership team as well as graduate faculty,” says Janna Lamey, Cornell’s Assistant Dean for Graduate Student Life. From this feedback, the Graduate School Leadership team realized that “the pandemic’s impact on student academic progress was unique to each student” and required plans that were thoughtful, customizable, and flexible.

Research suggests that in response to the pandemic, advisers should also have more conversations with their students about their plans. To assess the pandemic’s effects on early-stage chemists, Cornell’s Sifri conducted a chemical education research survey of other graduate students and postdocs across the country.

Overall, Sifri says, people—particularly women—are more stressed than before the pandemic, especially about research progress, career goals, and graduation timelines. She says that respondents seemed to want more conversations with advisers and support from departments in those areas.

Sifri also noted that one thing that surprised her from the survey comments was realizing that “everyone is feeling the same way” about COVID-19. “It’s really hard for the individual person to realize that; at least that’s how I felt. Is everybody as lonely as I am?” she said. In the same way that it is a relief to realize everyone is experiencing stress in individual ways, it is also affirming to realize that students at universities across the country are dealing with the same issues caused by the pandemic and that sometimes—and we can all hope, increasingly—faculty and administrators are listening.