There are many reasons why a majority of graduate employees support unionization, both here at Columbia and at Yale. Some are basic to the needs of any university employee: TAs and RAs want living wages, better health care, childcare, and respect. Yet many, like myself, see the possibility of long-term gains beyond our immediate financial concerns. By improving wages and benefits, unionization helps to make institutions like Columbia more accessible to more people.

Columbia administrators have said that they are committed to diversifying its faculty along race and gender lines for a long time now. Whether or not Columbia will succeed in (or is really committed to) diversifying its tenured and tenure-track faculty, it must also try to make success in graduate school a more realistic possibility for a greater number of women and students of color.

Deciding to go to graduate school, especially in the humanities and social sciences, requires more than an unusual devotion to one’s subject matter; it requires the material means to get through five to eight years of below subsistence-level pay—with no reasonable expectation of a permanent full-time job upon completion. People who already carry large student loan debt from college or non-deferrable credit card debt accrued during tough times on the job market need not apply. Having financial responsibility for a child or other family member makes gambling half a decade away on the passions of the intellect almost unthinkable.

Still, some determined folks incur debt, suffer the stress of constant financial insecurity, and make it through. In addition to working as TAs, RAs, and preceptors, nearly half of the graduate employees here at Columbia take on second and third jobs to supplement their incomes. This takes a disproportionate toll on the academic success of those who enter graduate school without a reliable financial cushion.

Given such insecurity, how can we be surprised that the attrition rates of women and students of color are appallingly high?

Underrepresented minorities make up only 2.9 percent of GSAS doctoral candidates—almost eight percent lower than the national average. The prohibitive cost of graduate school may not be the central reason we in the Ivy League cannot seem to find a way to walk the walk on affirmative action. But then again, a complete lack of childcare and a bare-bones health plan that costs a family over $400 a month certainly doesn’t help the situation, either.

A pay rate that keeps graduate teaching assistants some $3000 below the New York living wage does little but keep the academy elite both financially privileged and overwhelmingly male and white. A union contract for TAs and RAs will not rid the Ivy League of racial and gender inequality, but guaranteed raises, childcare, and better health care—all things that NYU grads won in their contract—would be a start.

University officials need to put their money where their mouth is and do everything they can to ensure that Columbia employs one criterion for admission and success in graduate school: academic excellence, regardless of class or racial background. It’s time for Columbia to respect the repeatedly expressed will of its graduate student employees and recognize GSEU/UAW.