Grad Students Hold Cross-School Rally Against GOP Tax Bill
Graduate students from NYU, Columbia, CUNY, and The New School converged on Union Square on Wednesday to rally against the Republican tax plan that passed through the House last week. The plan would categorize tuition waivers as taxable income, causing graduate students to face much higher tax rates.
“I have a stipend from NYU that is about $26,000 a year, plus I make money by teaching,” Joshua Sooter, a PhD student in the NYU History Department, explained. “But the tuition waiver is much more expensive — about $50,000 a year. I never see that money because it’s a tuition waiver…but [under this bill] I would be taxed as though I have an income of $70,000 to $85,000 a year, as opposed to my actual income of $26,000. This is while taxes for the wealthy and corporations are being cut in the same bill.”
For Collette Perold, a PhD student in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communications and representative of NYU’s Graduate Student Organizing Committee, taxing students’ tuition waivers is unprecedented. “The tuition that grad students pay is a mere accounting fiction,” she said.
Although NYU President Andrew Hamilton wrote in a statement to graduate students that “combatting these elements of the bill — on our own, with peer institutions, and through higher education associations — is receiving our highest attention and effort,” Perold urged students to “keep up the fight” against the University.
“Instead of just focusing on our congresspeople, we must absolutely keep up the fight against our employers,” Perold said. “This is absolutely class war and we must not let our administration distract us from that. Our administration has been completely complicit in the political climate that has gotten us to this point…We have to make sure that we do not let them convince us that we are too privileged as graduate workers to fight.”
To most, the importance of graduate students as teaching assistants and researchers is self-evident. “The work of a TA is indispensable,” said undergraduate student Jorge Maldonado, of the NYU Democratic Socialists of America. “And although I would like to say that the enormous amount of labor and time required to [be a TA] goes without saying, the decisions of our current administration have proven otherwise.”
Many students fear that this bill could affect the accessibility of higher education and diversity within universities.
“It’s not that positions [in higher education] will be unfilled, but obviously, it’ll be people with more independent wealth that will be able to get into it,” said Ben Schluter, an NYU PhD student in German Studies. “It will be an entitled upper class filling in the truly highest education positions and it will deter those who don’t have independent wealth, it will deter people coming from abroad.”
“This is not just about us,” Perold said. “This is about the future of higher education, this is about the future of higher ed racial and socioeconomic diversity.”
