On Tuesday night, the Stanford Graduate Workers Union announced that it had canceled an expected strike because its bargaining committee had reached a tentative agreement with the University. The union was due to strike on Wednesday morning.

The letters below were sent in response to Jonathan Berk’s Op-Ed. 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 op-ed. His language oozes contempt and disdain for graduate workers who rely on him. But upon further reflection, I now find his argument odd.

It is the artifact of a conservative, classist sensibility. Conservative with a Lowercase ‘c’ : The status quo probably served Professor Berk quite well after all. It is charming in its simplicity. He makes his point fiercely, but without actually engaging the reasoning of his opponents. He lives in a world where most students, like many of his MBAs, will easily recoup their lost tuition and wages after they graduate. He doesn’t live in a world where tenured jobs are shrinking by the day; where deputies earn less than $30,000; and where underemployment is rife among Ph.D. It is a world where economic relations have nothing to do with power. Right, for him, is the asking price of the market. I envy him. It seems like a much nicer world to live in. It’s a world where I—a soon-to-be graduate of a prestigious law school with a high-paying summer job—am highly valued. It’s a world many of my colleagues in the Stanford Graduate Workers Union are not in.

Professor Berk should strongly consider rewriting his piece, applying the research and argumentative methods he probably teaches his students. If he would like help forming 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 contentious matters. But respectful disagreement involves actually 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,

That Professor BerkI quit a well-paying job (I was an engineer) to start a Ph.D. And my colleagues looked at me in disbelief. In my case, it was because I wanted to study education, a field where I would essentially be leaving behind any hope of future well-paid work.

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

I try to avoid going into debt or living in unsafe housing by dipping into my savings. Other peers, who come from wealth or are married to STEM professionals, have similarly managed to avoid these stresses. But there are those graduate workers only do we want stanford to educate? Independently wealthy people or those who go into high-paying fields like finance?

What is the purpose of Stanford? To be a means of reproducing social inequality? Or to train scholars who can help solve society’s biggest challenges? If we only serve the rich or those studying in high-paying fields, then we are such an environment. I suggest we hold Stanford to a higher standard.

Haley Lepp is a PhD student. 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 that anyone sought. Rather, the administration’s intransigence has led us to this point. If the University’s refusal to respond to the reasonable economic demands of the Stanford Graduate Workers Union (SGWU) is based on the faulty reasoning and lack of understanding exemplified in the work of Professor Jonathan Berk. recent editionit is no wonder that graduate students have taken the drastic step of retaining the workforce to demonstrate the importance they have in maintaining the University’s operations.

It is worth recapitulating some of these economic demands before deconstructing the bad arguments against them. Although Stanford announced a five-year financing guarantee with great fanfare a few years ago, the administration refuses to consecrate this promise in a legally enforceable contract. After years of historical inflationwith without commensurate salary increases for graduate workers, the SGWU is calling for a pay rise to bring graduate workers back to a pay level equivalent to what they were earning just a few years ago. Graduate workers are also looking for assurances that their salary increases will not be immediately eaten up by rent increases at Stanford-controlled housing – moving money from workers’ pockets to the University’s coffers. SGWU too seek protection from abuses of power, as well as an enforceable complaint procedure, which the University has he refused to accept.

All these requests amount to a request for a living wage. Despite Professor Berk’s derision of the idea of ​​a living wagethe demand to earn “enough money to buy the necessities of life, such as food and clothing” is one that must be met in order for graduate workers to continue to provide value to Stanford. Only someone truly detached from the lived reality of working for one’s fortification would scoff at the demand for a salary that could cover basic needs. It betrays the attitude that it refers to postgraduate studies only for the rich: those who can afford to take jobs that don’t pay enough to live on.

The university maintains that current pay rates for graduate students are competitive with similar institutions. Looking at the raw numbers, one can believe this if one ignores the cost of living differences. A dollar from Silicon Valley doesn’t go as far as a dollar from New Haven, Princeton, or similar institutions. In the same way that we normalize our experimental data for analysis, normalizing the wage to the local cost of living is essential to make a valid comparison. Perhaps Stanford Law School and the Graduate School of Business are not instilling the need to manage data properly, as exemplified by our president’s attitudes. When half or more of your paycheck is in rent, the total dollar amount is cold comfort at best.

The worst argument Professor Berk makes is in trying to muddy the waters by claiming that tuition benefits are an actual part of the compensation graduate workers receive. No, they can’t eat tuition money—and besides, that’s a huge sum over which graduate students have no control. That’s why the University fought hard against the proposed provision in the Trump bill that would have charged graduate students a tuition tax as if it were compensation. If tuition is really meant to count as compensation for graduate students, bringing their total to over six figures, then on the contrary, the thousands of postdoctoral researchers employed by Stanford on a minimum of about $70,000 are severely exploited and underpaid. In what world does that make sense to someone who received a Ph.D. to suddenly take a $40,000+ pay cut from the same employer after doing postgraduate research? The university cannot have both meanings.

The truth about the tuition money is that it is a transfer of funds from the grants obtained by the teachers to the central funds of the University. I would expect a finance teacher to understand how to keep track of money as it flows during university accountingbut it seems that this is too great a demand on the intellect. Professor Berk would rather spend his mental efforts justifying the existence of quacks in highly skilled trades. Graduate workers never see the tuition money, and this is a major cost that teachers face.

This is why the SGWU proposed to cover the wage increases by scrapping only graduate tuition as did Princeton Universitya suggestion rejected by Stanford. That approach would increase wages for graduate workers and ease the burden on faculty grants, but administrators refuse to even consider the option. The SGWU offered several other ways in which the proposed pay rises could be implemented without harming other university stakeholders. The ball is in the University’s court.

Tim MacKenzie earned his Ph.D. in the Department of Chemistry at Stanford. During that time, he organized with the Stanford Solidarity Network, the forerunner of the Stanford Graduate Worker Union. He also worked as a post-doc in the Department of Genetics.