Damian Dovarganes/AP Photo
People participate in a protest outside the University of California, Los Angeles, campus on November 14, 2022. On Tuesday, postdoctoral scholars and academic researchers reached a tentative labor agreement with the University of California but will remain on strike.
In 1971, 23-year-old chemist Youkang Hsieh Liu flew from semi-tropical Taipei to anti-tropical Massachusetts, where she staffed Clark University’s state-of-the-art nuclear magnetic resonance machine in exchange for getting her master’s in chemistry. My not-yet-mom deftly budgeted her $300 monthly graduate student researcher stipend: a room’s rent; a diet of Campbell’s soup; loan repayments to her mother. Several years later, reunited in Seattle, my mom and dad pooled their respective University of Washington Ph.D. stipends to buy a home with views of Mount Rainier.
But life remained challenging for young Youkang Hsieh Liu. Prenatal leave? None. Youkang continued her experiments with carcinogens until days before my birth. Parental leave? None. Waipwoa (my mom’s mom) flew to Seattle to care for newborn me. After solo parenting her seven children, Waipwoa had vowed not to do any more infant care but relented with Youkang’s Ph.D. in sight. Child care benefits? None. A team of Chinese grandmas cared for me while my parents hustled to finish their degrees. Post-Ph.D. job? As an uber-educated now mother of three, Dr. Youkang Hsieh Liu pivoted to the semiconductor industry and endured ten years of the misogyny, racism, and bullying for which the tech industry is justly famous before leaving it altogether.
My work life, and those of my peers, is no better than my mother’s was half a century ago.
Two and a half weeks ago, 51 years after my mother embarked on the life of an American grad student, my parents met me on a strike line in Berkeley, to which they brought their appropriately conflicted feelings. They’re proud that their Ph.D.-educated firstborn has a respectable research agenda (color and race disparities in cognitive aging) at a world-class university, where she works with an amazing team of mentees and colleagues.
But they’re dismayed that my work life, and those of my peers, is no better than my mother’s was half a century ago. As a Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development postdoc at Brown University, I was not accorded a single day of sick leave or maternity leave or vacation. Today, as a fully funded National Institutes of Health academic researcher at UC Berkeley, employed both to do research and train future scientists, I don’t have a dedicated office and have to beg senior colleagues to borrow theirs when they don’t need them.
Every academic researcher, postdoc, and grad student has their own unique challenges, but we all endure the same underinvestment in and lack of respect for our work. My fellow academic researchers, and our postdoc and grad student colleagues, do nearly all the research, teaching, and grading work at the University of California but lack decent pay and respectful working conditions. The average UC graduate student stipend is $24,000 gross, even as decent housing near almost any UC campus costs at least that much (UC Merced may be the sole exception). My colleagues and I survive by relying on help from our families, and in many cases, also taking on second jobs and debt, relying on food stamps, living with housing insecurity, or even being unhoused.
As an academic researcher, I am better off than my grad student and postdoc colleagues, but my NIH-funded Ph.D. researcher salary in 2022 comes to just 75 percent (inflation-adjusted) of my 2003 salary as an organizer for SEIU Local 790. On Monday night, the university administration agreed to give the 12,000 postdocs and academic researchers a raise—a sizable one to the postdocs—but only because we’d been striking for 15 days. The administration still hasn’t offered a suitable settlement to the 36,000 grad student instructors and researchers, and so we—the postdocs and academic researchers—will continue to walk the picket lines with our comrades.
It’s the strike, now well into its third week, that differentiates my experience from my mother’s, and the experiences of this generation of exploited academic workers from those who have come before. As the first known Hsieh Liu family member to strike from their job, I am making family history. As the participants in the largest strike of academic workers in U.S. history, my comrades and I are making labor history, too. But there’s nothing in our exploitation that’s unique to the UC system. Our struggles are shared by hundreds of thousands of graduate students, postdocs, and academic researchers throughout the United States and beyond.
Must knowledge advance through exploitation? Sadly, this is how teaching, research, and science proceed and progress in American universities. This is how innovation is made. It does not have to be this way. We can collectively find and wield our power. We have worked isolated from one another for far too long, in academic silos, in the shadows, invisible not just to administrators but to ourselves. Today, we have become a multitude, and our peers across academic America can become multitudes, too.
The motto of UC Berkeley is Fiat Lux—Let there be light.
Indeed.
