In response to hearing that position salaries would fall to only $3,000 per semester without any additional benefits, GET-UP organized a meeting last night to seek out answers.
Yet when graduate students from different departments gathered to talk about their experiences and vent their grievances with Associate Dean for Graduate Studies Walter Licht, they quickly found out that this rumor was not true.
Licht said that such a change was not in the administration's plans for the future.
"I have no idea where that figure came from -- we never discussed it," he said. "The graduate chair [of the Sociology Department] had no right to say it."
Nevertheless, the meeting was used to clarify lingering fears about funding.
"We want to join up our depressing, isolated experiences and see how they build up," GET-UP Mass Action Chairman Joe Drury said. "This is an exercise about sharing information and addressing the problems we've seen."
Licht also talked about the teaching assistant position.
"The TA-ships as we know them are coming to a rest," he said.
Up until now, graduate students picked up TA-ships as they went along according to their financial needs. With this new policy, TA positions will be given to second- and third-year students by the College, while remaining student TAs will have to be funded by the departments.
For fifth- and sixth-year students, the University is substituting TA-ships with Lecture B positions in the College of General Studies.
Another point of controversy was the establishment of five-year guaranteed funding packages, which leaves sixth- and seventh-year students without any form of University funding.
Graduate students also claimed that it is nearly impossible to finish their course load in five years.
"In order to get out in five years, you have to be done by your fourth year, before you go into the market," sixth-year English graduate student Celeste Dinucci said. "But many advisers suggest not to go on the market before the end of the fifth year because it would be premature."
To solve the problem that this gap poses, Licht suggested that departments cut their credit number from 20 to 12, and require all students entering their fourth year to come in with approved dissertation proposals.
Yet students countered that their admission letters had led them to believe otherwise.
"A lot of people who came in before the five-year package have no means now to renew their fundings because they don't exist anymore," Drury said.
Licht confirmed that advanced students are not currently receiving and in the future will not receive such "fellowship dollars."
"Can we support sixth-years? Absolutely not," he said, noting that he does not know of any institution that offers sixth-year funding. "The medical insurance is killing us as it is killing everybody else."
However, he refuted the idea that there are no means for these students to collect funds, suggesting research grants, dissertation fellowships or external scholarships as alternatives.
Also, Licht highlighted the advantages of the five-year package.
"All entering students in the humanities and social science departments are guaranteed named multiyear packages," he said, referring to the William Penn and the Benjamin Franklin awards.
Political Science graduate student Michael Janson also took advantage of the event to speak about the advantages that graduate students would be able to enjoy if the University granted them a union.
"When you have a union contract, all the members of the union are behind you -- you are not alone, you have an organization to back you up," he said.
With regards to the financial issues that many graduate students are now facing, Janson urged the stipulation of a contract as a means to legally bind the administration to the agreements and guarantees made to graduate students upon admission and beyond.
Finally, the panel presented Temple University graduate student April Logan, a member of Temple's graduate student union.
Logan talked about the advantages that a contract brings to graduate student employees -- 100 percent premium paid by the university and 2.75 percent cost of living adjustment guaranteed, among other benefits.
"The environment here at UPenn is one of fear and competition," she said. "This is simply about fairness."
