On Tuesday evening, the Stanford Alumni Union announced that it had canceled an expected strike since its negotiating committee had reached an agreement in principle with the University. The union was scheduled to strike Wednesday morning.

The letters below were sent in response to Jonathan Berk’s request Ed. of opinion. Berk is the AP Giannini Professor of Finance at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

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At first, I was simply irritated by Professor Berk’s editorial. His language overflows with disdain and contempt for the educated workers who rely on him. But upon reflection, I now find his argument outdated.

It is the artifact of a conservative, classist sensibility. Conservative with a lowercase “c”: The status quo has probably served Professor Berk quite well, after all. It’s charming in its simplicity. He argues his point of view in an acerbic manner but without really engaging the reasoning of his opponents. He lives in a world where most students, like many of his MBA graduates, will easily make up for lost tuition and wages after graduating. He doesn’t live in a world where tenure-track jobs are shrinking by the day; where complements earn less than $30,000; and where underemployment is rife among doctoral students. It is a world where economic relations have nothing to do with power. For him, the right price is the price demanded by the market. I envy him. It seems like a much nicer world to live in. It’s a world in which I – a soon-to-be graduate of a prestigious law school with a well-paying summer job lined up – am highly valued. This is a world that many of my colleagues at the Stanford Graduate Workers Union do not live in.

Professor Berk should seriously consider rewriting his article, applying the methods of research and argumentation that he probably teaches his students. If he would like help in making these arguments, I would recommend that he enroll in one of the many wonderful seminars taught by his colleagues in the humanities, social sciences, or here at the law school. At Stanford Law School, we are often reminded that respectful disagreement is possible, even on controversial issues. But respectful disagreement requires truly respecting those with whom you disagree. In a new version, I hope that Professor Berk will consider treating his interlocutors with respect – after all, they are his employees and colleagues. I look forward to reading a better written essay from him on this topic in the future.

Bryce Tuttle BA ’20, JD ’26

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Dear editor,

As Professor BerkI left a well-paying job (I was an engineer) to start a Ph.D. My colleagues also looked at me in disbelief. In my case, it was because I wanted to study education, a field in which I would essentially leave any hope of future well-paying work behind me.

It is only through my engineering career that, now in my third year of my PhD, I have been somewhat protected from the stress of food insecurity. I work about 60 hours a week on academic or research topics. After paying my rent at Stanford, I typically receive between $0 and $377 every two weeks in my paycheck from the university. before tax. I pay about 44% of that in federal and state taxes. That leaves at best $105 per week, or $15 per day, for all expenses.

I try to avoid getting into debt or living in unsafe housing by dipping into my savings. Other peers, from wealthy backgrounds or married to STEM professionals, have also managed to avoid this stress. But are these the only qualified workers do we want Stanford to educate? Independently wealthy people or those going into high-paying fields, like finance?

What is the goal of Stanford? Be a support for the reproduction of social inequalities? Or train academics capable of helping to solve society’s biggest challenges? If we only serve the rich or those studying in well-paying fields, then we are such a medium. I suggest we hold Stanford to a higher standard.

Haley Lepp holds a Ph.D. candidate at the Stanford Graduate School of Education.

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TomorrowStanford graduate students will strike for the first time as an affiliated union. This work stoppage is not something anyone sought. Rather, it is the intransigence of the administration that has brought us to this point. Whether the University’s refusal to meet the reasonable economic demands of the Stanford Graduate Workers’ Union (SGWU) is based on faulty reasoning and a lack of understanding illustrated by Professor Jonathan Berk recent opinion articleit is no wonder that graduate students have taken the drastic step of suspending their work to demonstrate the importance they place on maintaining University operations.

It is worth recapitulating some of these economic claims before deconstructing the poor arguments against them. Although Stanford announced a five-year financing guarantee with great fanfare a few years ago, the administration refuses to devote this promise in a legally enforceable contract. After years of historical inflationwith no proportional salary increase For graduate workers, the SGWU is calling for an increase in wages to bring graduate workers back to a level of pay equivalent to what they earned just a few years ago. Graduate workers also want assurance that their salary increases will not be immediately eaten away by rent increases in Stanford-controlled housing – transfer money from workers’ pockets to university coffers. SGWU also seeks protection against abuse of power, as well as an enforceable grievance procedure, which the University has refused to accept.

All these demands amount to a demand for a decent wage. Despite Professor Berk’s derision at the idea of ​​a living wagethe demand to earn “enough money to buy the necessaries of life, such as food and clothing” must be met so that graduate workers can continue to bring value to Stanford. Only someone truly disconnected from the lived reality of working for oneself would scoff at the demand for a salary capable of covering basic needs. This betrays the attitude that higher education is supposed to only for the rich: those who can afford to take jobs that do not pay enough to live on.

The University says current graduate student pay rates are competitive with peer institutions. Looking at the raw numbers, you might believe so if you ignore the differences in cost of living. A dollar in Silicon Valley doesn’t go as far as a dollar in New Haven, Princeton, or other comparable institutions. In the same way that we normalize our experimental data for analysis, normalizing salary to local cost of living is essential to making a valid comparison. Perhaps Stanford Law School and the Graduate School of Business are not instilling the need to properly handle data, as evidenced by the attitudes of our dean and president. When half or more of your paycheck goes toward rent, the full dollar amount is cold comfort at best.

The worst argument Professor Berk makes is his attempt to muddy the waters by claiming that tuition stipends are actually part of the compensation that graduate workers receive. No, they can’t eat tuition money – and besides, it’s a huge amount of money that graduate students never have any control over. This is why the University fought fiercely against the proposed provision in Trump’s tax bill that would have imposed a tuition tax on graduate students as if it were compensation. If tuition is really meant to be considered compensation for graduate students, bringing their total to more than six figures, then, by contrast, the thousands of postdoctoral researchers employed by Stanford for a minimum of around 70,000 dollars are severely exploited and underpaid. In what world does this make sense to someone who earned a PhD? suddenly, after pursuing postgraduate research, get a salary cut of over $40,000 from the same employer? The University cannot have it both ways.

The truth about tuition money is that it is a transfer of funds from grants obtained by professors to the central funds of the University. I would expect a finance professor understand how to keep track of your money how it flows during university accountingbut apparently this is too great a demand on the intellect. Professor Berk prefers to devote his mental efforts justify the existence of charlatans in highly qualified professions. Graduate workers never see tuition money, which is a significant cost for professors.

That’s why SGWU proposed covering salary increases by simply waiving graduate tuition fees. as did Princeton Universitya suggestion rejected out of hand by Stanford. This approach would increase graduate salaries and ease the subsidy burden on faculty, but administrators refuse to even consider this option. SGWU proposed several other ways in which the proposed salary increases could be implemented without harming other university stakeholders. The ball is in the University’s court.

Tim MacKenzie received his Ph.D. in the Department of Chemistry at Stanford. During this period, he became associated with the Stanford Solidarity Network, the precursor to the Stanford Graduate Worker Union. He also worked as a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Genetics.