Vick Chung Fights for Student Workers

Trustee Vick Chung took a courageous stand at the board of trustees meeting on Sept. 24 on behalf of student workers wrongly stripped of their jobs. Chung, who uses they/them pronouns, didn’t get the support they deserved from some of their fellow board members. 

While the chancellor acknowledged that a mistake was made by the administration in leading department chairs to think that nearly twice as much money had been allocated for the student aide budget than the chancellor had approved, it was the student aides who took the hit when the positions they had been promised were suddenly taken away without warning. Well, not just the student workers. 

It turns out that departments depend on those workers to do essential jobs. A case in point is the student aide who works in the Cinema Department’s issue room, where expensive cameras and lighting equipment are checked out to students working on film projects. After the faculty member assigned to supervise the issue room went out on extended leave, another faculty member moved in to take up the slack. But with one faculty member down, the department is shorthanded, and the student worker paid to work in the issue room became essential.

By most accounts, the chancellor has done a good job enforcing fiscal discipline where it has been sadly lacking for many years. But that discipline has not come without costs. If enrollment can be increased sufficiently in the next three years, the college may be able to free itself from the hold harmless provision it is now laboring under, and begin receiving cost of living adjustments again. Initially, the chancellor proposed to increase enrollment at a rate of 3% per year, but that proposed rate has now dropped to 2%, and there is concern that with low morale among faculty, stagnant wages, no new hiring, and few incentives to retain existing faculty, enrollment may not recover. 

Therefore, it seems particularly tone-deaf to deny departments the assistance of student workers willing to work at minimum wage, and to strip away the jobs of student workers without warning, just to save the equivalent of one administrator’s salary. It is especially harsh when the college’s reserve fund is brimming with $75 million, supplemented most recently by a $6 million surplus from last fiscal year. 

So when Chung went to the rescue of those student workerjobs, insisting that the board reallocate the money taken back from the lab aide budget, the chancellor was put on the spot. She unconvincingly said that she was prepared to move $100,000 from other budgeted items but had not been provided with the information about the positions that had been cancelled so didn’t know how many students were entitled to be reinstated. 

The board caved. No timeline was set, no promises were made. The chancellor now has two more weeks before she reports back to the board. Let’s hope it all leads to a good student outcome.