Dear Chancellor Larive, Campus Provost/EVC Kletzer, and President Napolitano,
Throughout this campaign, graduate students have given testimony of their experiences trying to survive in Santa Cruz on the inadequate wages and funding we receive from this institution.
We want to give voice to these anonymous accounts to illustrate to administration and faculty how dire our situation really is. We also hope that by sharing these unedited stories, graduate students will realize that they are not alone in these experiences:
“Since coming to Santa Cruz four and a half years ago, I have moved six times due to rent burden and housing insecurity. This excludes the summer I relocated to stay with generous friends and the month I spent paying to sleep on a stranger’s living room floor. I have taken on second jobs that have made progressing through the PhD program more challenging. I stopped going to therapy because I couldn’t afford it, and I want to stress the connection between mental health issues and precarity. Living paycheck to paycheck also makes unforeseen expenses (in my case, medical bills and car repairs) impossible to navigate without taking on severe debt.
I feel a great deal of undergraduate solidarity with the strike and demand for a COLA. In my tenure TAing and instructing here at UCSC, numerous students have shared with me that they are houseless, or balance full-time jobs with full enrollment, or fear that the unsustainability of living in Santa Cruz will force them to drop out.
I’m for COLA and against a university system that hurts my quality of life, that of my colleagues and friends, that of my students.”
These stories aren’t novel or surprising to most of us. And they shouldn’t be surprising to administration, who have completed multiple assessments of graduate student wellbeing. Administrators have ignored and dismissed their own findings, which demonstrate that it is impossible to survive on our stipends in Santa Cruz. We will not be ignored. We will not be dismissed. We will not wait. We will not submit.