Published May 2, 2024 by Carter DeJong

Graduate student workers have reached a tentative contract agreement with the University of Alaska after only three months of negotiations.

The tentative contract includes several items the graduate workers have been advocating for since the Alaskan Graduate Workers Association (AGWA) formed last year. Major parts of the contract include a $24.50 minimum hourly pay rate for master’s students, a $29 pay rate for Ph.D. students, three weeks of unpaid family leave per semester and fee waivers for AGWA members.

The UA Board of Regents, which is made up of governor appointees, will likely hold a special meeting in the coming days to vote on the contract, UA Spokesperson Jonathon Taylor said.

On Wednesday, AGWA members were actively voting to approve the contract throughout the day, but the results of that vote were not available by press time.

Published May 2, 2024 by Matt Acuña Buxton

The University of Alaska announced on Tuesday night that it had reached a tentative agreement on its first contract with the newly formed union representing the university system’s graduate students, who voted overwhelmingly to unionize last fall.

The contract between the University of Alaska and the Alaska Graduate Workers Association includes an increase in the minimum pay for graduate students, setting minimum time off, continued health coverage, improved reporting for grievances and improved access to university facilities. Both the union and the university hope to ratify the contract and forward the funding request to the Alaska Legislature.

“We’re super proud of this contract on both sides. We’re especially proud of the timeline in which we were able to come to an agreement,” Nóra McIntyre, graduate teaching assistant and member of the AGWA/UAW bargaining committee. “To get that done, both sides worked really long hours here at the end.”

The timing is critical because the most straightforward way to fund the contract’s terms — which includes raising the minimum pay for master’s degree students to $24.50 an hour and Ph.D. students to $29 an hour — is to get it approved in the state budget, which the Legislature is in the process of finalizing before the end of the legislative session on May 15.

In the university’s announcement, UA President Pat Pitney committed to submitting the request to the Legislature for inclusion in this year’s budget, though it’s possible that it could be retroactively funded if it’s not included in the budget.

“Our bargaining team has worked tirelessly — particularly over the last week — to reach an agreement,” she said in a prepared statement. “I want to sincerely thank and recognize them for their willingness to go the extra mile on behalf of our graduate student employees and the University. Throughout these negotiations, our goal has been to support graduate students through fair compensation increases while ensuring the contract is financially sustainable.”

Published May 2, 2024

Fisheries biologists at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks meanwhile have collaborated with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, NOAA Fisheries and the University of Washington in ongoing studies of the divergent responses of western Alaska salmon to the changing climate.

“The main point is looking at how these climate changes impact downturns in Chinook and chum salmon,” said Erik Schoen of the International Arctic Research Center at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. He collaborated with five other researchers, including UAF colleague Peter Westley and Schindler on this study.

Their report, released in the late summer 2023 in Fisheries Magazine, focuses on four major points:

Western Alaska salmon abundance reached historic extremes during 2021-22, with record lows for Chinook and chum salmon and record highs for sockeye salmon.

Salmon are maturing at smaller sizes. Since the 1970s, Yukon River Chinook salmon have decreased an estimated 6% in mean adult body length and 15% in fecundity, likely exacerbating population declines.

Salmon population declines have led to fishery closures, worsened user conflicts and had profound cultural and food security impacts in Indigenous communities that have been tied to salmon for millennia.

Changes in abundance and size are associated with climate changes in freshwater and marine ecosystems and competition in the ocean. Changes in predators, food supply and disease are also likely important drivers.

The study notes that waters in Western and Interior Alaska are warming nearly four times faster than the global average and twice as fast as waters in the continental U.S., with the impact of the Pacific Marine Heatwave of 2014–2016, the Pacific Marine Heatwave of 2019 and an air temperature heatwave and drought in 2019.

This warming is believed to have negatively impacted Chinook salmon, which would represent a fundamental departure from previous decades of salmon ecology research, which consistently found that warmer conditions improved salmon production in northern regions.

Changes in growth and age of maturity of western Alaska Chinook salmon have been linked to changes in ocean climate, and selective predation of larger individuals also may be contributing to accelerated maturation, the study said.

Chinook populations in the area are influenced by changes in demographics and food webs and are susceptible to bycatch and interception in other fisheries, researchers said, including the Arctic-Yukon Kuskokwim (AYK).

Published May 1, 2024 by Claire Stremple

Before Monday evening’s advanced Tlingít language class, Raven Svenson and her classmate discussed how to conjugate the verb “boil” in the context of cooking. The University of Alaska Southeast class in Juneau is headed into finals week and students are preparing for dialogues that will test their conversational skills.

Professor X̱’unei Lance Twitchell walked in and suggested the specific verb for cooking meat by boiling. He answered a few questions in English, then switched to Tlingít as he started class. All his students switched languages, too. For the next hour, conversation was almost exclusively in the original language spoken primarily from the mouth of the Copper River to the southern edge of the Alexander Archipelago and the foundation for Tlingít cultural identity.

The classroom is a microcosm of the change Twitchell and other members of the Alaska Native Language Preservation and Advisory Council called for statewide: An Alaska committed to increasing the number of Alaska Native language speakers and promoting common use of the languages.

“Tlingít, the thing that it has in common with most of the other languages in Alaska is that there’s fewer than 50 speakers remaining,” he said. “The majority of Alaska’s languages are severely endangered.”

The group has issued biannual reports to advise a dozen years of Alaska governors and lawmakers, but this January it issued a call to action instead. The document is titled Ayaruq, the Yup’ik word for walking stick, to reflect that it is a guide on the path forward. It asks Alaskans and lawmakers to affirm the right to Indigenous education, acknowledge oppression and intergenerational trauma, commit to language equity and normalize the use of Alaska Native languages.