On my way home from the Canadian Mathematical Society (CMS) winter meeting, which was held at the University of Waterloo last Friday-Monday.  Going to Canada for math is not new for me—I LOVE going to Canada for math and do it pretty often—but this was the first time I’d gone to something organized by the AMS’s Canadian counterpart. I came to this meeting because I was invited to give a talk in a really nice session called “Explicit Finiteness of Integral Points on Hyperbolic Curves,” organized by David McKinnon and Jerry Wang.  Some of my work is very relevant to this topic, though I admit I had to look up what exactly made a curve hyperbolic before I said yes.  In any case, while I was at the meeting I started thinking about how much I have enjoyed my connections with Canadian mathematicians and institutions, as well as how little I know now/knew when I started going to Canada about the mathematical world there.  Which is a bit silly—there are so many excellent Canadian mathematicians and math departments, and so many connections within the mathematical profession between the countries, how could I know so little?

Okay, so here is a short digression on math in Canada: I was introduced to Canada’s math community will through the Banff International Research Station (BIRS), which I first visited in 2008 for the first Women in Numbers conference.  BIRS is on the grounds of the Banff Center for the arts, and I was thrilled to find this institution that placed mathematics among other creative practices. Obviously, Canada has many great universities, some of them world-famous and definitely USA-famous.  There are other great universities that people in the US may not know much about, though.  University of Waterloo, for example, is a really excellent place with an ENTIRE COLLEGE of Mathematics (with their own dean) consisting of the departments of Pure Mathematics, Applied Mathematics, Computer Science, Combinatorics and Optimization, and Statistics and Actuarial Science.  There are around 240 full-time faculty in this college and something like 8000 students.  The College bills this as “the largest concentration of mathematical and computer science talent in the world.” Of course, Canadians know about University of Waterloo, but I had no idea it existed before I started coming here for conferences a few years ago, and when I told people in at home that I was going to Waterloo for a conference, they mostly assumed I meant Iowa. One person asked if I meant Belgium.

The mathematical community of Canada is smaller than that in the US—the CMS has “1,100+” members (best estimate I could find on the website), whereas the AMS has around 28,000.  Many CMS members may also be AMS members. The CMS winter meeting felt similar to a large-ish AMS sectional meeting, a great size—you see a lot of people from different areas, but can still walk through the main common area without fear of losing your friends forever.  Given the number of members, relative to the AMS, the CMS does a startling amount of stuff, including sponsoring high school math competitions and Math Camps, publishing research and teaching journals, and granting several prestigious prizes. And also, in case anyone forgot, the Fields Institute is in Canada.

Anyway, my CMS winter meeting experience was excellent.  Here is a photo tour:

Sabin Cautis, winner of the Coxeter-James Prize, giving his plenary lecture entitled “N choose k = N choose N-k”.

Mike Bennett, President of the CMS, shows Joseph Gunther, recent PhD and non-Canadian, how to eat some delicious Middle Eastern poutine, supervised by Nils Bruin and Patrick Ingram. (Counterclockwise from top left.)

The hotel bar was math themed.

Richard Hoshino won the Adrien Pouliot Award and gave a lecture entitled “Four Problem-Solving Strategies for Mathematics and for Life”. Richard is also the author of a novel entitled “The Math Olympian”, about a Nova Scotia girl named Bethany that trains to participate in the International Math Olympiad.

Richard Hoshino teaches at Quest University in British Columbia–one of a few schools on the block plan like Colorado College. So we were the block plan delegation to the CMS winter meeting.

In graduate school, my stipend was $17,000 a year. I picked up an extra class a year on top of the three I taught for my stipend to make a little more. This turned out to not be such a ridiculous thing in the long term, as I gained enough teaching experience to make myself stand out a little on the job market. Though my research suffered.

My health insurance was designed for healthy 20-year-olds, and I was neither. We got a tuition waiver, but that didn’t cover fees, which came to a couple grand a year. In a right-to-work state, we had no hope of unionizing, and though we tried, we could never even get an advocacy organization off the ground.

We watched our friends who’d left academia buy houses and have kids and make retirement plans while we cooked rice and beans and scrounged furniture off the curb when undergrads moved out.

Then my husband and I graduated and got postdocs and I got a tenure track position. And now, adjusted for inflation, I make less than I did when I was a first-year teacher with Teach for America, fresh out of college. We knew what we were getting into, and we have no regrets about the decisions we made. But especially considering the time value of money, we made significant financial sacrifices for the careers we chose.

All this is to say that if our financial situation had been even a little more dire, we could never have gone to graduate school at all. And we were lucky: we had no kids or sick parents to support, in fields with tuition support and decent numbers of jobs available, and we came from white, middle-class families with parents who never once asked why we still didn’t have a “real” job.

I’m sure you all know that the current GOP tax plan will tax tuition waivers as income, increasing student tax bills by thousands to tens of thousands of dollars. There is no way we could have managed to pay for school under this scheme. There’s no way most of my friends and colleagues could have, either. The pipeline already favors students from wealthier backgrounds; raising the financial bar higher will choke off the supply of graduate students that the modern university system lives on.

Regardless of how the upcoming Senate vote comes out, there is a relatively easy way to solve this problem. Sarah Arveson, Ph.D. candidate in geology and geophysics at Yale, lays out an excellent argument in her editorial in the Washington Post for simply removing the accounting sleight-of-hand of waivers and stop charging tuition for graduate students. Not only would this solve the tax issue, I believe it would help reframe the position of graduate student entirely: recognizing that they generate more resources than they consume, and that they’re a vital part of the university ecosystem. Graduate students are more employee than student, it’s a real job with real work, and it’s long past time we recognize that in tangible ways.

I think a lot of us believe that being a professor is somewhat of a calling, and that it’s reasonable to expect to make sacrifices to become one. But there must be a line between making sacrifices to get to do what you love, and martyring yourself for your job. The current academic system already falls on the wrong side of that line more often than not. Depending on what happens tomorrow, it may get a swift kick even further. I can’t imagine how worried these students must be tonight, and I hope those of us on the other side will continue to advocate for them. For all our sakes.