Baby Steps

Students at Harvard’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences who are planning a family saw a bump in their benefits this week when the GSAS administration announced that it will expand its Parental Accommodation and Financial Support Program. With the newly augmented program, students will now receive $6,200 and 12 weeks of time off after giving birth to or adopting a child.

This change is clearly a positive one for students of both GSAS and the College. Since graduate student teaching fellows play such an important role in Harvard's undergraduate experience, dedicating more resources to them is beneficial to the entire academic community. The new policy will also bring parental benefits for Harvard’s graduate students in line with their peers at Columbia, Princeton, and Dartmouth, where 12 weeks of leave are available to new parents. In addition, under Harvard's policy, graduate students will now be able to spread their twelve weeks over the course of an entire year, rather than take it in a single block as required under the old program. This flexibility, combined with the program’s financial subsidy, is a sign that GSAS is pursuing policies with its students’ best interests in mind.

According to Allen Aloise, GSAS’s dean for administration and finance, the Parental Accommodation program was started in 2013 following a collaborative effort between GSAS, the Graduate Student Council, and Harvard Graduate Women in Science and Engineering. Upon revisiting the program two years later, the GSAS administration concluded that students could benefit from more resources. “In hearing and talking to students, we heard that they would appreciate some additional support in this regard, and the Graduate School agreed,” said Aloise. Last year, GSAS spent $155,000 on the program, a figure that is expected to rise both because of the expanded financial benefit and from a larger number of interested students.

More broadly, the process of consultation that led to the revamping of the parental leave policy reflects administrators’ ability to continue improving conditions for graduate students. Despite this commendable advance, graduate students face remaining difficulties that the administration would do well to address. In addition to smaller sections, teaching fellows should receive greater security in funding and teaching assignments, and better training before they take the front of the classroom. These very concerns, among others, precipitated last year's demands for unionization.

It is important to note that the increase in parental benefits happened without the involvement of any sort of union. Still, one administrative success cannot undo the dissatisfaction among students that gave impetus to this movement. Last fall, we argued that unionization was a potential solution to a situation in which Harvard did not have strong enough incentives to respond to graduate students’ concerns. A continued effort on the behalf of administrators to cooperate with students, however, may provide compelling evidence against the proposition that unionization is the most effective means by which graduate students can effect change.

While we are not ready to suggest that such evidence exists at this point, Harvard now has the opportunity to show that it can respond to its graduate students without the presence of a union. To do so, administrators must pursue further reforms in other areas of concern. Until then, graduate students will be justified in their continued efforts to organize.