As a counseling psychology graduate student, Lorena* felt frustrated by her graduate psychology program. She and some of her fellow students felt alienated from faculty, overloaded with unnecessary coursework and concerned that practicum placements favored some students over others.
The students decided to survey others in the program about their experiences. For six months, they gathered data, compiled the information and then submitted a report to faculty. Much to the students' gratification, the faculty listened. The department held retreats to hash out the students' concerns and developed action steps to address them.
Lorena graduated too soon to see what happened next, but current students in the program say the movement bore fruit. The training director became more open with students about the way she made practicum and other decisions. Faculty began to host regular social gatherings for all grad students. And the department dropped an elementary statistics class from the course load, to name a few changes.
"I have more hope and optimism, and I look forward to seeing what happens with the program in the future," says Susan,* a third-year student in the program.
Lorena's and colleagues' efforts are just one example of the ways psychology graduate students are banding together to make a positive difference for themselves and fellow graduate students — sometimes just within their own departments, but in other cases, with students from other departments and even university-wide. Consider the situation at the University of Missouri in November, where student protests over the school's poor racial climate forced its president and chancellor to resign.
This new wave of student activism reflects a trend of student dissatisfaction that has been increasing over the last couple of decades, says APAGS Chair-elect Ian Gutierrez, a fourth-year clinical psychology doctoral candidate at the University of Connecticut. Factors including the inflated cost of higher education, pessimism about the future and the corporatization of higher education have left students "feeling marginalized, commodified and defeated," he says.
In this sense, the scenario is very different from the student protest movement of the 1960s, which joined with many outside movements to address larger social injustices, Gutierrez adds. Today, "grievances are more specifically about the structure of the university system and the policies enacted by its administrators," he says. "Simply put, frustration among students of our generation [related to such issues] has reached a breaking point."
Organizing — whether for pragmatic issues or more lofty ones — can result in many positive effects, adds APAGS Assistant Director Eddy Ameen, PhD, who was part of an active psychology grad student group at the University of Miami while a student there. These benefits include the opportunity to explore common concerns and to create the critical mass to do something about them, he says.
"When you make an official request [to faculty, administration or both] with your whole department of grad students standing behind that request, it's a lot harder to ignore," he says. "Even in places where faculty and students have great relationships, I still think there are things faculty have a hard time leveraging for students."
The bottom line? "Even when things are good, there is still a need to organize," he says.
Addressing the practical
While Lorena's grad student cohort dealt largely with school climate, other graduate students are working to address pay and health insurance. At the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, for example, students, faculty and administrators came together to hammer out uniform graduate student policies on maternity leave benefits, sick leave and maximum weekly hours that graduate students should work.
One of the grad students behind the movement was Jessy Warner-Cohen, PhD, now a health psychologist at the Long Island Jewish Medical Center. She and other grad students met for a year and a half with administration and faculty to discuss options, directions and solutions. The back and forth led to a handbook (PDF, 273KB) approved by faculty, grad students and administrators and ratified in 2006.
Even more important, the work "set the stage for a relationship with the administration and faculty that was very productive and very collegial," Warner-Cohen says. "Basically we said, ‘We're your next set of peers. How can we work with you in a way that you would treat a peer?' And they responded wonderfully to it."
Of course, not all problems between students and universities are resolved as seamlessly. In such cases, grad students see the need to take their concerns beyond the university to address perceived problems.
That was the case in 2013, when Gutierrez and about 20 fellow graduate students at UConn decided to unionize — a growing nationwide movement that's a more formal, hard-hitting response by university-employed graduate students to the low pay, lack of respect and poor benefits issues plaguing their peers. At UConn, grad students were dissatisfied by changes to their health insurance and an increase in student fees, Gutierrez says.
The students opted to join the United Auto Workers union, which helped them gather 2,135 graduate assistant signatures — more than the number required by the state to allow them to negotiate wages, hours and working conditions.
The group achieved a number of victories, including two major legal ones. The first was the state's legal recognition that graduate assistants at all UConn campuses were to be treated as bona fide university employees. That's significant, Gutierrez says, because a central line of dissension among students, administration and sometimes faculty is whether grad students who work for the school should be given the same benefits as other university employees, or not.
The second legal win was students' right to a grievance procedure that can include legally binding arbitration by a neutral third party if necessary.
On a more concrete front, the UConn team also secured a 3 percent pay increase every year for three years for all working graduate students at a time when the university was planning either to freeze salaries or raise them a token amount. Students were also given a better health insurance plan, reductions in student fees, and six weeks of paid maternity leave for all female grad students, Gutierrez says.
"There is an unquantifiable sense of dignity, pride and empowerment you get from taking this kind of action," Gutierrez says.
Organizing for justice
Other graduate students are forming groups aimed at fostering social justice and multicultural awareness (see November gradPSYCH). One example is an independent psychology graduate student group formed by leaders of student organizations including APAGS and the student affiliates of APA Div. 17 (Society of Counseling Psychology) in response to the recent rash of police killings of unarmed black men, such as 18-year-old Michael Brown of Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner, of Staten Island, New York, both killed in 2014 by white police officers who were not indicted by grand juries.
The students' group, Grad Students Talk, organizes periodic conference calls that provide a safe space for students to discuss current events related to social justice. (To get involved, visit their website or email.)
The group's most visible effort to date came in the wake of the 2015 independent review of APA's ethics actions regarding military interrogations. To voice their dismay over the report findings and their commitment to the first guiding principle of the APA Ethics Code, the students created a "First, do no harm" campaign, which they advertised through division listservs, their personal Facebook pages and Grad Students Talk.
A key element was creating T-shirts with the campaign slogan on them, which the group started selling through the online retailer CafePress.com before APA's 2015 Annual Convention in Toronto. The students asked those who bought the T-shirts to wear them at convention, and dozens of members complied. Among those wearing them were members of APA's Council of Representatives and APA President-elect Susan H. McDaniel, PhD.
The students raised $747 for the Center for Victims of Torture, a nonprofit organization based in St. Paul, Minnesota, though donations of $1 per each shirt sale and a last-minute contribution from CafePress. (The shirts are still available at CafePress.)
This display of solidarity was important to Leighna Harrison, a member of Grad Students Talk who helped design the shirts with former APAGS Chair Jennifer Doran.
"At a time when I was feeling so disillusioned with APA following the release of the report, seeing all of those specks of red throughout convention was important to me," Harrison says. "It helped renew my faith in what a small group of dedicated people can do." (To read about the Hoffman Report, go to the September Monitor.)
Another successful grassroots effort is in process at the American School of Professional Psychology at Argosy University's San Francisco campus, where students have formed the first group for the school's lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) grad students. Clinical psychology student Khashayar Farhadi-Langroudi launched the group in 2012 when he came out and realized there was no formal support for LGBT grad students on the campus.
He recalls asking himself, "Am I going to isolate, or am I going to form this group that is needed?"
The group now hosts a variety of activities, including a seminar on how therapists can work on issues of shame with sexual minority clients, now an APA webinar.
An added mission of the group is to help LGBT grad students feel empowered to be more visible not only in their own circles, but in society in general, Farhadi-Langroudi adds.
"I am hoping to help grad students feel comfortable expressing a [social] identity that has not been accepted and has not been well cultivated," he says.
Unexpected benefits
Organizing also connects grad students in ways they hadn't imagined, many say. Some say they experience a thrill when they see what can happen when they tackle an issue with like-minded others.
"You realize you're not alone, that there are people struggling with the same things you're struggling with," as Harrison puts it. "And once the load gets lightened a bit, it creates a space to think about, ‘OK, what do we want to do about this? How do we want to fix this problem?'"
Sometimes the outcomes are unexpected. As a result of his involvement in Grad Students Talk, for instance, University of North Texas doctoral student James Garcia was surprised and gratified when members of his psychology department's grad student association asked him to lead a discussion on the Hoffman report.
"Here I am being requested by the students in my program to have a talk with them," he says. "To me in my development as a psychologist, that's awesome. It makes me feel like more of a professional."
*not their real names