{"id":23811,"date":"2020-07-02T16:50:27","date_gmt":"2020-07-02T20:50:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/wtbu\/?p=23811"},"modified":"2020-07-02T16:50:27","modified_gmt":"2020-07-02T20:50:27","slug":"phd-students-launch-bebetterbu-campaign","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/wtbu\/2020\/07\/02\/phd-students-launch-bebetterbu-campaign\/","title":{"rendered":"PhD Students Launch #BeBetterBU Campaign"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"100%\" height=\"300\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https:\/\/w.soundcloud.com\/player\/?url=https%3A\/\/api.soundcloud.com\/tracks\/851102281&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true&amp;visual=true\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<div style=\"font-size: 10px; color: #cccccc; line-break: anywhere; word-break: normal; overflow: hidden; white-space: nowrap; text-overflow: ellipsis; font-family: Interstate,Lucida Grande,Lucida Sans Unicode,Lucida Sans,Garuda,Verdana,Tahoma,sans-serif; font-weight: 100;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/soundcloud.com\/wtbu\" title=\"wtbu\" target=\"_blank\" style=\"color: #cccccc; text-decoration: none;\" rel=\"noopener\">wtbu<\/a> \u00b7 <a href=\"https:\/\/soundcloud.com\/wtbu\/aa-campus\" title=\"PhD Students Launch #BeBetterBU Campaign\" target=\"_blank\" style=\"color: #cccccc; text-decoration: none;\" rel=\"noopener\">PhD Students Launch #BeBetterBU Campaign<\/a><\/div>\n<p><b>PhD Students Launch #BeBetterBU Campaign<\/b><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">By Grace Ferguson<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">PhD students at Boston University launched a social media campaign on Wednesday called #BeBetterBU to protest the university\u2019s policies for faculty and teaching fellows.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Other tags associated with the campaign, which is mostly on Twitter, include #AshamedToBU and #StillAPandemic.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">As part of BU\u2019s Learn from Anywhere hybrid teaching model, instructors are expected to teach in-person this fall. Instructors can request to teach remotely, but only if they or someone they live with falls into a COVID-19 high risk category.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">PhD students who don\u2019t fall into a risk category and don\u2019t return to campus could lose their stipends. The university expects continuing PhD students to take a leave of absence if they don\u2019t return to campus, which means losing their stipend and health insurance.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Another option for PhD students is to take online classes, which lets them keep their health insurance, but not their stipend. Some students could get stipends if they can do their research remotely, but that does not include international students. BU says it cannot pay international students for tax reasons.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The #BeBetterBU campaign demands that BU let instructors decide where they teach. Other posts say BU should guarantee stipends and health insurance for all PhD students. Most posters under the hashtag are BU faculty or PhD students.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The two organizations behind the #BeBetterBU campaign are the BU Graduate Workers\u2019 Union and the BU PhD Student Coalition. They have distributed several images with large text outlining their demands and ideals. One image reads: \u201cDon\u2019t make us choose between our lives and our livelihoods.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The campaign organizers also posted some art meant to be used as profile pictures. The icons show men and women in front of a virus motif wearing masks with a BU logo.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Many of the posters under the hashtag have used the profile pictures, and most of the posts include one of the text images.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u201cBU is using policy to coerce PhD students into returning to campus in the midst of a pandemic instead of supporting their teaching and research wherever they are,\u201d one BU professor tweeted.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In a statement, the BU Graduate Workers\u2019 Union said the campaign is \u201call in the name of raising awareness to the BU administration (and Boston more broadly) that their plan for student workers to return to campus and put themselves at risk is unacceptable.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>wtbu \u00b7 PhD Students Launch #BeBetterBU Campaign PhD Students Launch #BeBetterBU Campaign By Grace Ferguson PhD students at Boston University launched a social media campaign on Wednesday called #BeBetterBU to protest the university\u2019s policies for faculty and teaching fellows. Other tags associated with the campaign, which is mostly on Twitter, include #AshamedToBU and #StillAPandemic. As [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17683,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1597,14],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/wtbu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23811"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/wtbu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/wtbu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/wtbu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17683"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/wtbu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23811"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/wtbu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23811\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23812,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/wtbu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23811\/revisions\/23812"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/wtbu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23811"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/wtbu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23811"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/wtbu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23811"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}