Last November, U of T announced that base funding guaranteed for all PhD and SJD students would increase to $40,000 in the funded cohort. Given that Ontario still provides the lowest amount of funding per student in Canada, graduate student leaders have approached this shift with reservations. 

The Base Funding Committee 

In July, a coalition led by the Base Funding Committee (BFC) released an open letter calling on U of T to ensure the base funding increase did not come at the “cost of clawbacks of other funding sources at the university, faculty, or department level.”

Signatories noted that while this was the first significant increase to graduate program funding in a decade, the letter called on the university to increase base funding to a minimum of $40,000 per year and to provide annual increases to match inflation going forward.  

The letter also highlighted how departments have responded to previous funding models: increasing workload and research responsibilities, reducing or cancelling additional funding, shortening program timelines, and shifting funding responsibilities onto supervisors.

BFC Chair Julian Nickel and member Dorothy Apedaile wrote to The Varsity to discuss the committee’s evolving work in response to funding concerns and austerity. They emphasized their efforts to support departmental-level organizing, push back against changes, and collect survey data on funding policies. 

As part of their research, the BFC has identified specific impacts: arts and science students faced cuts to travel grants, engineering students saw increased TA work requirements, and public health students’ funding timelines have decreased from five to four years, with additional non-thesis work required to secure their funding. 

To address these issues, the BFC has put forward a motion for the December 4 Annual General Meeting (AGM) of the University of Toronto Graduate Students Union (UTGSU) to take a larger role in advocacy. This is one of three AGM motions concerning base funding. 

 

“What this experience has really taught us is that without a negotiation process between graduate students and the university, we’re not going to see future stipend increases and reasonable workloads,” Nickel and Apedaile wrote. “Graduate students deserve a living wage for the work they do at the university.” 

Departmental and upper-year graduate student funding 

Apedaile is now a fifth-year epidemiology PhD candidate and, earlier this summer, was among the graduate students notified that funding would be cut for their upcoming fifth year. After organizing with her department, public health science students successfully secured partial transitional funding for the fifth year, rather than the full cut. 

“It’s grad student research a lot of the time that gets held up as groundbreaking stuff. It’s grad students doing a lot of that… And the university, historically, has gotten that for pretty cheap, and unless we are able to negotiate with them and able to sort of show the collective solidarity we have as students, they’re going to keep paying us as little as possible,” Apedaile told The Varsity.

“Regardless of the program, the overall impact is consistent,” UTGSU Vice-President Academics Nicholas Silver wrote to The Varsity. “Students are working more or just as much as before, while effectively receiving less for their labour.”

Silver noted that the Funding Letter Collection survey in one way that the UTGSU has highlighted base funding issues. The UTGSU also meets regularly with the Dean of the School of Graduate Studies, Joshua Barker. 

Marwa Hussein, a history PhD student and Graduate History Society president, explained in an interview with The Varsity that the Department of History had implemented measures before the base funding increase in response to ongoing discussions about precarity in the historical profession. 

She noted that labour and funding concerns were more evenly distributed in a larger department than in smaller, less-funded programs. Hussein questioned why the funded cohort of five years does not match the typical time to completion when most PhD students finish their degree in seven years.

“What types of scholars are we producing? Are we just trying to get them out of here? Are we just trying to get people to get diplomas?” Hussein asked.

At the same time, Hussein highlighted the immense labour that upper-year graduate students perform with less guaranteed funding. She also pointed to the equity concerns that the funding increase has exposed across cohorts and academia.

“[Upper-years] are more seasoned, they’re more knowledgeable. They course instruct, they support emerging research. Our professors rely on graduate student labour,” Hussein said, “And so this is a weird kind of academic thing where […] greater experience results in greater devaluation.”

In response to an inquiry from The Varsity, U of T Media Relations stated that “the university addresses matters raised by student societies and employee unions directly with them.”