Yale Graduate Student Childcare Petition

As graduate student teachers and researchers building careers in higher education, we applaud the recent steps taken by the Yale administration towards improving the quality and accessibility of child care at Yale. For too long, financial constraints have forced promising young scholars, particularly women and international students, to choose between a family and a career. The expansion of child care services will go a long way towards removing those constraints.

To ensure fair representation for the diversity of needs on this issue, and because certain of the above principles will require emendations to graduate school policy, we call for an open meeting before the end of the fall 2006 semester between concerned graduate student teachers, interested faculty, the administrators from the Yale University WorkLife sub-committee on Child Care, and Dean Jon Butler to discuss the full range of options for improving child care. This meeting will afford an opportunity for the work-life committee to give a progress report on their extensive work of the past year, while ensuring direct input of all affected communities.

Yale has the resources to become far and away the most welcoming and nurturing research university for young scholars who have or plan to have children. In order to achieve this goal, Yale should set its sights above the standard recently set by peer institutions such as Stanford, Dartmouth, and the University of Michigan. The following principles should be understood as indispensable components of any effective new policy:

Affordability: All graduate student families require need-based, financial subsidies for adequate child care, whether in the form of additional fellowship money tied to dependents, or direct child care service vouchers.

Flexibility: Yales policy must not preclude financial assistance to those parents who use alternative child care services, whether that means kith and kin care or child care centers of the parents choice. The scarcity of child care for parents at all economic levels makes this provision vital to ensure that everyone benefits from the new policy, not just a lucky few.

Workability: New child care policies will not have the desired effect unless Yale takes certain concrete steps to make the university a more family-friendly environment generally. These steps include establishing a basic, non-discrimination policy towards graduate student parents, policy provisions like parental and sick leave, pauses in the registration clock, and options for graduate students to switch teaching years, as well as literal provisions like accessible changing tables and lactation rooms on campus.