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As members of our community continue to send Letters to the Editor, we will continue to update this page.

Dear Chancellor Syverud and Provost Ritter,

In some ways, I am loath to write this letter as I’m ignorant of how running a university works. It can’t be easy. I also know you both as kind human beings, and your support of our creative writing program has made it possible for our students to excel here.

Yet my late daddy was a labor organizer who put his body on the line in the 1950s to help working people secure benefits that in some ways saved my own family economically. During strikes when I was small, we often ate what union members shared from their gardens and what could be shot in the woods.

Also, for some years when my son was a baby, I worked as an underpaid adjunct professor, teaching five sections of comprehensive examinations at two universities for aggregate fees smaller than what Harvard University University paid me for a single poetry class.

So when I was contacted by workers I know are personally devoted to our students, and those workers asked whether I could support their efforts in forming a union by writing this letter, I had to say yes. And I urge you, from the compassion I know you both have, to say yes with me.

Not many years ago, a devoted staff member reached out to faculty for financial help, and I also know hard-working people on staff at Syracuse University University taking second jobs to put food on family tables. So I write to urge you to support their efforts to form a union and address their hardships.

I write with gratitude for their service to our students and for how both of you show your care for said students every day as well. Thanks for considering.

With hope and deep respect,

Mary Karr
Peck Professor of Literature, Trustee Professor

To Chancellor Syverud and the Syracuse University administration,

The members of Syracuse Graduate Employees United understand that we are not the only groups on campus that have had to deal with precarious working conditions, lack of support and protections and sub-standard pay. Our colleagues who feed us, run our libraries and make our departments run should not have to work in these kinds of conditions and we believe that all workers on campus should thrive as members of this community.

SGEU is a union of over 1,100 graduate student workers who perform various kinds of labor at Syracuse University. We conduct research, teach undergraduate students, support campus initiatives and perform other essential jobs to make this a prestigious university. As workers on campus, we believe that SU works because we do.

This is why we, the members of SGEU, proudly support the unionization campaigns of the clerical staff, student library workers and student food service workers at Syracuse University. It was only a year ago when we were in the same position as the clerical and food service worker campaigns are in. We believe unionization will increase accountability in university labor relations and improve the labor conditions for all workers on campus, benefitting the university community and the larger central New York community.

SGEU recognizes all the work that the clerical staff, hourly food service workers and hourly librarians do to maintain the status of the university. We call for........

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