A recent decision to make Chicago Transit Authority U-Passes mandatory for Northwestern graduate students has left some grad students ecstatic and others infuriated.
Priced at a $60-per-quarter mandatory fee, the CTA University Transit Pass, or “U-Pass,” allows full-time students unlimited rides on any CTA bus or train. The policy to make them mandatory was officially implemented by the administration at the beginning of Winter Quarter. The decision was largely based off of a survey conducted in October by NU’s Graduate Leadership Council (GLC), in which nearly 62 percent of grad student respondents supported U-Passes.
After the proposal was passed, however, many grad students complained that the survey merely asked for their opinion on the U-Pass; nowhere did it state that students would be obligated to pay for them, much less at such a high cost. Siddharth Madhav, a fourth-year graduate student in economics, said he didn’t appreciate the surprise.
“We were completely blind-sighted from the fact that [the U-Pass] would be mandatory and what it was going to cost,” Madhav said. “It was really a surprise to all of us, so the fact that it was unannounced [in the survey] was disconcerting.”
Madhav, like many other grad students, lives in Evanston and said he would not use the U-Pass on a regular basis. The U-Pass is only valid for the El and CTA buses; it does not cover the Chicago Metra, which excludes students who reside in other suburbs from using the U-Pass for a downtown commute.
More than 100 grad students who opposed the rule attended a meeting conducted by the GLC on Jan. 24 to voice their complaints and suggest alternatives to a mandatory U-Pass. Many in favor of the U-Pass also attended, creating a sometimes hostile atmosphere where students from differing financial backgrounds debated the implications of a $60 quarterly fee.
However, the backlash did not come as a surprise to Ashi Savara, president of the Graduate Students Association.
“We expected there to be probably at least 100 people or more who would be against it and vocally against it,” Savara said.
The fourth-year chemistry student/Ph.D candidate said the GLC received between 100 and 200 opposition emails, “but of course there are 2,700 students who are affected by this,” he said.
In response to several student petitions protesting the mandatory U-Pass rule, Savara said other students wrote petitions to leave the rule in effect. He also said that the ultimate decision was made by the administration, and the GLC only acted as a means of communication between the grad students and the administration.
But not all students are directing their anger toward the GLC. Marianne Wanamaker, a fourth-year economics student/Ph.D candidate, said she blames the administration for exhibiting “a blatant redistribution of wealth from one group of graduate students to another with no justification.”
Wanamaker said she mainly uses her car to get around, and the U-Pass isn’t useful to her. She also said she took the policy’s timing as a sign that the administration does not care for the financial concerns of its students.
“[They could have said] we’re not going to institute it until September, and that way you guys can get a different lease and live somewhere near the El,” Wanamaker said. “[That they didn’t] sends a huge signal to me that they don’t really care about the people who are interested in using it.”
Wanamaker said she drafted a letter of protest and collected over 100 signatures from students across various graduate departments, but heard nothing from the administration.
Those in favor of the U-Pass agree that an opt-out, an option for students who will not benefit from the U-Pass to decline it and not incur its extra cost, would be the best possible solution. Even though Andrew Schoch, a third-year student in McCormick’s Graduate Program, strongly supports the U-Pass, he sees an opt-out as the only feasible solution.
Those in favor of the U-Pass agree that this is the best possible solution. “[An opt-out] may raise the cost a little for people that use the U-Pass, but it would be able to reduce the cost for those people who don’t use it at all,” he said.
Schoch said he supports the U-Pass for “entirely environmental” purposes and hopes that its implementation would prevent students from driving their cars to campus. He also said the survey should have been taken more seriously.
“When filling out a survey, you probably have to take into account that they’re doing it for a reason,” he said.
Savara did acknowledge that the initial problem lied in the wording of the survey.
“It’s fair to say that the GLC would probably have better worded the email that went out with the survey to make it crystal clear that policy might be decided based on the survey itself,” he said.
However, Savara was quick to add that the U-Pass has been a topic of discussion for years, and despite students’ forming committees to fight the U-Pass policy, the GLC has “no regrets in relying on the survey.”