WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. (WLFI) – Purdue graduate students have been unsatisfied with their wages for several years. Earlier this month, the university increased their wages by 2,000 dollars a year, but the students are still unsatisfied.
Graduate Research Assistant, Rob Weiner says they planned to make their voices heard at the Board of Trustees meeting this month. “People were really excited to kind of make these stories more visible to the board of trustees to make their case for a living wage,” Weiner said.
Purdue's Graduate Rights and Our Wellbeing program (GROW) is a labor group for grad students. GROW organized a sign making event to bring with them to drop off a petition at the board of trustees meeting. “We have chosen to be off campus, to hold a very low key event, not to do a protest. Instead to have a respectful petition drop off,” Weiner said.
Purdue Police showed up to the event to tell the grad students they were not allowed to bring signs into the meeting and it was not perceived well. “Whether or not it was intended as intimidation it really felt like intimidation,” Weiner said. Weiner believes they found out what was going on from a social media post informing people about the sign making event.
Fourth year PhD. student, Olivia Gearner, says they received more push back from police at the meeting as well. “It felt like like they were trying to intimidate us into not organizing this event,” she said. According to Purdue's website, handheld signs are in fact allowed at the meeting. “So we still showed up, we still delivered our petition, we brought signs into the meeting room. We brought banners. They initially tried to prevent us from bringing them in, but we showed them the explicit rules that say we can bring that stuff in. And they finally let us into the meeting,” Gearner said.
Purdue Police Chief responded to this with a statement saying: “For registered student organizations, ODOS is equipped to help the student organizations prepare and plan for safe events on campus. Since this group is not a registered student organization, it is PUPDs practice with campus events to reach out and let them know standard procedures and applicable rules so they may deliver their message in a safe way. The prep for that specific event that our officers attended was widely publicized on social media and they had a constructive and pleasant talk with the grad students. The meeting on Friday went smoothly for all.”
The petition GROW passed along to the Board of Trustees has about 975 signatures.
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