What 'is' isn't what's fair

Regarding the staff editorial "School of Hard Knocks" (Oct. 17):\n"It is what it is" -- the Indiana Daily Student used this phrase to describe graduate students' difficult financial experience. According to the editorial staff of the IDS, graduate students shouldn't complain about their poor living and working conditions because we should know what we're in for when we arrive. Even if we did know in advance that the administration of the University would reduce health care benefits without warning or would dangle dental care in front of us and then remove it, awareness doesn't mean that we shouldn't fight for change. Exploitation isn't fair just because it's common.\nAlthough the IDS claims that we have high-paying jobs in store for us in the future, it fails to recognize that, when the University hires graduate student labor under cheap labor conditions, it deprives us of those future "high-paying jobs" (if you browse the public listings of IU faculty salaries, you will see that many of those wages, especially in the humanities and social sciences, are not particularly high). Today, adjunct and temporary faculty positions (which often pay even worse, in wages and benefits, than graduate assistant positions) are rapidly replacing tenure-track faculty jobs. Just last year, IU decided to leave 23 vacant faculty positions unfilled to save money. Those extra classes will likely be taught by AIs, adjuncts and temporary instructors -- and that means 23 "high-paying" jobs that we won't have access to when we receive our Ph.Ds. The bottom line is, if we don't demand fair treatment now, universities around the country won't feel the need to pay reasonable wages to hire full-time, permanent faculty. As a result, my "high-paying" job as an English Ph.D. may very well be an adjunct position that pays under $20,000 a year.\nThe Graduate Employees Organization has appreciated support from the IDS in the past, and we hope that this last editorial was an error in judgment. Instead of lamenting that grad school "is what it is," we think that students should act to change what "is" into what's fair.