Dear admin,
Visiting day is approaching. This means that faculty and graduate students will need to paint a picture of life at UCSC that might convince prospective students to accept offers of admission. In this picture, funding is ample enough and affordable housing can be found, if you’re patient. Here, we will be asked to frame UCSC as a radical, forward-thinking institution—the original authority on questioning authority. More of us than would care to admit have been lured here by this fiction.
We cannot participate in the painting of that picture. We are pushed to make an ethical intervention into visiting day. Without a guaranteed COLA, the working and research conditions at UCSC are untenable for graduate students. It is our duty, as the community of current graduate students at UCSC, to share this with our prospective colleagues.
Graduate students provide the labor necessary to uphold the university’s commitments to undergraduate education and innovative research and scholarship. We also play a crucial role in recruitment. We are walking examples of the lives and conditions that prospective students are here to evaluate. We therefore feel obliged, as conscientious members of this academic community, to do right by those who would be our peers.
We cannot suggest that the compensation that comes with studying and working at UC Santa Cruz is anywhere near adequate to the requirements of living here. We feel we must make the conditions here extremely transparent. So long as the administration refuses to meet our demand for adequate compensation, we will do everything in our power to ensure that prospective students leave Santa Cruz with no illusions. UCSC cannot survive if we, the graduate students, cannot survive.
It has been said that UCSC advertises everything it has killed. Without a COLA, we will be forced to kill this advertisement.
Sincerely,
Striking Graduate Students