Ohio University officials have drafted a plan to give teaching graduate students some benefits that are already offered at other public universities.
When graduate student Carl Edward Smith III had emergency gallbladder surgery last year, he was out for three weeks in the middle of a semester and couldn’t teach.
Even though the university doesn’t have concrete guidelines on how to handle these sorts of cases, the sociology department, in which Smith works, chose to pay him.
“For other students in other departments, if they have emergency surgery, they’re out of luck,” said Smith, the president of Graduate Student Senate. “They get fired.”
The university has a “leave of absence” policy which allows graduate students to request time off, but it doesn’t include how long the student is eligible to leave his or her program, how much the student will be paid and who will foot the bill.
A proposed new leave of absence policy would clarify those details that senate will discuss at its Monday night meeting.
The new policy would protect a graduate student’s stipend, tuition scholarships and assistant teaching positions if he or she had to take time off.
Other public universities, including Ohio State University, Smith said, already have such a program in place.
It would cost OU about $85,000 a year to implement. That estimates around 50 students will need to use the proposed leave of absence policy annually. Smith said he personally knows two students who have been affected by the current lack of policy.
“Graduate students have many of the duties and responsibilities of faculty, but they have only the rights and protections of students,” said Smith, president of OU’s Graduate Student Senate.
OU officials, including Interim Executive Director of the Office for Institutional Equity Dianne Bouvier and Director of the Women’s Center Susanne Dietzel, drafted a proposed leave policy for graduate students. It mirrors a pilot program already in place for other OU employees.
The departments would pay for the leave.
The draft parental leave policy for stipend-supported graduate students would:
Allow a birth-mother to have up to eight weeks of paid leave
Allow fathers or partners up to three weeks of paid leave
Still be enrolled in OU and receive their full level of stipend support and health benefits under the proposed policy
“Graduate students are in a really ill-defined space and what happens there is you’re salaried to do things that faculty would do, but say you have a child unexpectedly,” Smith said. “There is no protection that you get maternity or paternity leave. You could lose all of your funding and you could be kicked out of the program.”
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