Covid-19 Relief

Letter to Stanford admins

Dear President Tessier-Lavigne, Provost Persis Drell, and the Faculty Senate:

We write to you today to give voice to the needs of the graduate student community in these difficult times during the COVID-19 pandemic.

We admire the speed with which Stanford has moved to implement online teaching and learning, as well as the measures taken to quickly and safely help undergraduate and graduate students move out of their campus residences. However, we do not feel that these measures have sufficiently addressed the very real impact this crisis has and will continue to have on graduate students’ work, health, family life, and employment prospects.

The pandemic is affecting all areas of graduate research for students in every PhD program. We cannot access labs, secure data, archives, or libraries. We have been forced to halt all fieldwork and travel with no indication of when normal work will resume. We are all facing a decimated employment market both within and outside of academia. Many of us are now responsible for full-time care of children or other relatives with no chance of respite; many of us are stranded in environments not at all conducive to work. Our timelines to milestones and graduation are thus significantly delayed, throwing our professional and financial futures into question. These delays put us at increased risk of losing access to a steady source of income, health insurance, and affordable housing. International students are at risk of losing our legal status in the U.S. and, by extension, our ability to continue with our scholarship. Both domestic and international students are more vulnerable than ever to instances of abuse of power in our research settings. We are all suffering through the anxiety of isolation, of falling ill, of watching loved ones fall ill: regardless of geographic location, our need for mental health support has never been greater.

We are calling on the University to mitigate the potentially disastrous consequences of the pandemic on our scholarship and basic quality of life, and thus submit this list of measures not as demands but as recommendations, with the hope that Stanford will honor its commitment to the success and well-being of its graduate students. With this petition, we express our support for such measures as disclosed below and offer testimony as to their necessity, directing these requests to all relevant decision making bodies at Stanford: administrators, departments, the faculty senate, and the Academic Continuity Group.

We also wish to state that we stand in solidarity with masters and professional degree students in their demands for a discount in tuition, as well as with contracted workers, including custodians and childcare workers, as they and their allies demand that Stanford extend the pay continuity policy to all workers.