According to family lore, my grandfather paid for his education at Ohio University in the 1940s with the profits from one particularly exceptional pig. He raised the pig, loved the pig, took the pig from fair to fair winning prizes, and, eventually, took the pig to slaughter. That was enough to fund his Bachelor’s degree.
He was the son of Hungarian immigrants living on a farm outside of Cleveland. It’s unlikely, all things being equal, that he would have been able to attend college today, given the corporatization of the university and its effects. Like today, many families existed on a razor thin margin back then. He still had to travel back to Painesville every weekend to help make ends meet. He drove his dad’s truck into the city and made egg deliveries to Hungarian families there. If college tuition hadn’t been so cheap, he wouldn’t have made it.
I feel grateful to Ohio University. It is the institution that educated my grandfather, my father, my sister and me—three generations of my family. Three of my grandpa’s four sons went to college, and two of his grandchildren will have Ph.Ds. None of that would be true, mostly likely, without OU’s initial investment in him.
Maybe this is why, when I came here to get my Ph.D, I felt so confused and betrayed by the institution’s callousness, by the way it felt, more than any other school I’d attended, like a system designed to steal my labor and the fruits of it. Unlike at Arizona State, where I’d earned my MFA, my $15,000 stipend from Ohio University turned into a $13,000 stipend after insurance, and then to an $11,800 stipend after the general fee. Of course, no one announced that the general fee would come out of my paycheck when I committed to come to O.U.—and insurance was seven hundred dollars cheaper per year when I enrolled in 2012. It went up every year I attended.
This bait-and-switch left me feeling like I was paying everything I got back to the company store. Graduate students who can’t afford health insurance, or who are overburdened by the cost of it, are less likely to effectively serve the university in their roles as teachers, researchers or graduate assistants.
In just my own classes, my students generated around $72,000 per year in tuition — while I was being paid, after what I paid back to the university, just under $12,000. From this perspective, it’s hard to believe that covering the $2,000 healthcare costs of my graduate student peers will break the university, even in this budget crisis. If the graduate students here refused to work for so little, it would cost Ohio University much, much more.
If graduate students want to change this dynamic, they have more power than they believe they do. We are a huge income generator for this university. The university is beholden to us, not the other way around. If you want to take action, please consider joining the O.U. Graduate Employee Organization — or joining us as we picket the Board of Trustees meeting to call attention to the need for increased health insurance subsidies on March 23rd, at the north entrance to Walter Hall 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. By working together, we can create a more humane Ohio University — one which has humanity that benefits us all.
Katie Berta is a postdoctoral fellow in English at Ohio University.
