Dear Sara Wadia-Fascetti and David Luzzi,

We want to thank you for your efforts so far to keep graduate students informed and supported during this COVID-19 pandemic.

We urge you to demonstrate further initiative and leadership by extending the funding timelines of current PhD students and candidates. Specifically, we ask for a one-year extension on degree timelines and funded graduate assistantships, including NUSHP health insurance and tuition remission. In these unprecedented times, such an extension is essential to ensuring graduate students’ ability to recover from this global crisis.

Several universities have announced they are extending the tenure clocks of junior faculty by at least one semester in response to the disruptions, both personal and professional, caused by the pandemic. The same disruptions are affecting graduate students’ time to degree, and Northeastern can assume leadership in supporting graduate student welfare by announcing similar support for its PhD students and candidates. We urge the university to set a national example in this regard, one befitting the university’s growing stature among R1 institutions. Such leadership will help to set our graduate students up for success and serve as a model for other universities to follow.

As a result of the pandemic, many graduate students are facing significant setbacks in their courses of study. Graduate students are unable to travel to campus when adhering to state and federal self-isolating guidelines, most recently Governor Charlie Baker’s Stay at Home order, lest they pose risks to their personal and public health.

Graduate students who perform research in Northeastern’s laboratory facilities, where they are working to maintain critical in-progress experiments and help close down labs, are unable to enact new projects and experiments to make dissertation progress. Graduate students whose research depends on physical books and resources in Snell Library, materials from interlibrary loan, archival materials (either at Northeastern or elsewhere), or Northeastern-owned resources held off-site are unable to access these materials. Because academic travel has been cancelled, research trajectories that depend on archival research, fieldwork, or feedback from conference papers and workshops have been delayed.

Because faculty are themselves taxed at this moment, graduate students are also facing delays on committee feedback and the postponement of milestone approvals.

Graduate students serving as lecturers and teaching assistants for their graduate assistantships have played a critical role in the effort to adapt Spring and Summer I coursework for online instruction. This has imposed, and will continue to impose, on time previously allotted for individual research and study.

Additionally, graduate students join Northeastern faculty and staff in bearing the many precarities associated with this crisis. These include increased self- and family-care responsibilities, daily routine interruption, depressive effects of social isolation, food and cleaning product scarcity, and rent burden from partners’ and roommates’ situations. These stressors are further distracting and detracting from dissertation and other research work.

The importance of a statement from Northeastern on extending graduate funding timelines is amplified by recent news that the pandemic response will last through at least the Spring and Summer I semesters. Such a statement would provide PhD students and candidates with reassurance, knowledge and support, which would help them immeasurably in meeting their personal, scholarly, and professional aims.

Signed,

List of signatures: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1bFQ_IkGYr7bX_p__d2hkroPi2h_MPl2oe4-LWAt7XyE/