BY PATRICIA NAVARRA

“Employers threatening to cut off benefits is not uncommon, but actually doing it is,” offered Bethany Kosmicki, Temple University Graduate Students Association (TUGSA) past president and member of the negotiating committee, as she discussed the TUGSA strike with National Public Radio. Yet health care benefits were deactivated for graduate teaching assistants this week only to be restored—and again deactivated—in a move TUGSA office organizer Evan Kassof (also a past president) describes as “acutely cruel.” The average graduate student’s base salary at Temple is $19,500.

The Temple website lists many still unfilled openings for “adjunct” faculty for spring 2023. Potential instructors will be required to cross the TUGSA picket line in Philadelphia, unless they duck out by teaching online. To scab is a verb though. We see you.

Temple’s first strike on academic freedom: The administration is hiring people on an emergency basis to teach myriad academic disciplines. These instructors have not been vetted through acceptable academic channels and faculty shared governance. One is a realtor. One dean offered scabs $23,000 to teach strikers’ classes—more than some TAs make in an entire year. Meanwhile, management has notified undergraduate students that their courses are “reassigned” for the remainder of the term “as we work through this situation.” Dating apps have more accountability.

Temple’s second strike on academic freedom: The administration has stripped all tuition remission benefits from TUGSA strikers. Graduate student workers who do not pay in full by March 9 will have a hold placed on their accounts, preventing future registration. The average cost of graduate tuition at Temple is $20,000. If graduate students are not allowed to register for fall courses, there likely won’t be enough enrollments for entire graduate programs, such as sociology, to run. Temple is holding entire academic programs hostage rather than come to the table.

Temple’s third strike on academic freedom: After a year of drawn-out contract negotiations, TUGSA workers are in a legal strike. They are asking for an annual base salary of $32,800. Temple wants to raise their salary to $22,500 by 2026. These 750 TAs and RAs want a living wage and expansion of health care, family, and bereavement leave. Yet the Temple administration has not only chosen to go to war with its graduate student union, it has decided to wage a war on academic freedom by expelling striking TAs from the academic community without notice or due process. Administrators have decreed a revenge which is also the end of the road for many graduate students.

As the strikers have said, the world is watching.

Patricia Navarra is adjunct associate professor of English at Hofstra University and a member of the AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure.

Visit https://www.tugsa.org/strike if you are looking for information about how you can support the TUGSA strike, including information on donating to their strike fund.

Photo courtesy of the American Federation of Teachers.