I wonder how many of the responses here are from folks who went through CS/STEM graduate programs and who have no idea what their current/former colleagues in the humanities go through. One person alluded to how privileged a grad student is to have their tuition paid while being afforded the opportunity to become a "domain expert" in their field. Tell that to the average history Ph.D. in the US who takes 7-9 years to complete her degree, spending the prime of her youth to end up working 4/4 course loads as an adjunct in some godforsaken community college with no health insurance. And yet that individual carries with her the collective knowledge of thousands of years of human intellectual endeavor.

As for the news from UChicago, I congratulate my former colleagues, and yet I also know that it's not enough. I started a Ph.D. in the humanities at Illinois and left after 2.5 years. Our union was great, but no union is enough. We were fighting to prevent the administration from docking our meager $17k/year pay for frivolous BS reasons, and while I'm grateful for what the union did for us, in another way it was so shortsighted. Why were the stewards of civilization making $17k/year in the first place? Why couldn't we make far, far more, worthy of the years of specialized knowledge that we had developed at great cost?

The union could never answer these questions. Actually, most people thought I was crazy for even asking them. We spent all day denouncing capitalism, and yet we were enthralled to the myth of the Protestant work ethic, that compensation is somehow tied to our self-worth. And that misguided albeit well-meaning hypocrisy why I left academia and joined Silicon Valley.