While UK president makes millions, graduate workers earn poverty wages

As the COVID-19 pandemic surpasses the two-year mark, many workers across Kentucky are struggling. We are struggling financially to pay rent, to pay medical bills, and to buy food as prices rise. We are struggling to support our children and maintain a level of financial stability that allows us to rest easy at night. We are overworked, and we are struggling emotionally and mentally with the ongoing precarity of our situations. While we continue to struggle, the pay gap between the wealthiest Kentuckians and those at the bottom widens — especially at our public institutions of higher education, despite their mission to improve the lives of all Kentuckians.

In the midst of our ongoing struggles, it was announced in December 2021 that the University of Kentucky’s president, Eli Capilouto, would be receiving a 24 percent raise to his base salary. Without including hundreds of thousands of dollars in extra compensation, this raise increased his base salary for 2022 to $1,035,646. Herald-Leader columnist Linda Blackford’s opinion piece at the time articulated well the shock and frustration that many UK employees and students felt upon receiving this news.

As graduate workers at the University of Kentucky who make poverty wages and who the institution relies heavily on to teach the students and do research, we have a unique perspective on how our university operates. We know just how unethical and how catastrophic a mistake it is to concentrate public resources at the executive level. Graduate student workers are essential to the success of the university, but the university has neglected investing properly in the graduate student community for years and years.

The vast majority of us make well under $20,000 a year. A good number of us make under $12,500. Some of us even make as low as $8,000 a year. It was only after our organizing as a union (United Campus Workers of Kentucky) that graduate assistants in the College of Arts & Sciences and the College of Education received a 10 percent raise this past year, which has still left most graduate assistants living in poverty. We are the cheap labor which makes UK run.

We teach and design courses which undergraduates must take. We manage labs and support research that brings in millions of dollars of grant money. All of this labor is fulfilled on top of our own scholarship and research despite our poverty wages and our heavy workload.

Recently, President Eli Capilouto announced increases in the salary pool for workers at the University, but it’s unclear how this will affect us and other low-wage and marginalized workers on campus. In the past, for instance, upper administrators have left out graduate workers altogether when making salary improvements. Beyond just graduate assistants, we believe that any increases in pay go to the employees who are struggling here on campus. In particular, we believe that any raises should prioritize the most marginalized faculty and staff. This means experience pay increases for facilities staff who have been here for twenty years and make $15.50 an hour, only 50 cents more than the starting rate. This means increases for lecturers and adjunct faculty who are wildly underpaid to do the same work as their tenure-track colleagues and more support for female and non-binary faculty, international faculty, Black faculty, Latinx faculty, and Asian faculty who are under supported, overworked, and often disrespected.

Fundamentally, we believe that public education should not be run as a big business motivated by profits and built on the exploitation of workers at the bottom while a small group of administrators draw exorbitant salaries. We care too much about the university to let it be run like a corporation. UK workers deserve fair pay and a say on how our institution is run. It’s time we got it.

To highlight our concerns and demands and deliver our petition to President Capilouto, we are organizing a rally starting from the Student Centre (on the Avenue of Champions) at UK campus on Wednesday, April 20 at noon. We welcome community members.

Jess Van Gilder is a Graduate Teaching Assistant in English. Annie McGraw is a former Graduate Research Assistant in Soil Science and Sanjana Krishnan is a Graduate Teaching Assistant in Geography.