January 30th – Freezing CM Graduate Program Funds in Response to “Offer”

Sent by Computational Media department chair, Sri Kurniawan, to graduate students, Jan 30, 2020.

Dear CM graduate students,

I am sorry for the bringer of bad news, which hopefully is only temporary.
As you might recall, the Chancellor sent an email announcing some programs to support graduate student. One of the programs is: “beginning in fall 2020, we will offer new and continuing doctoral students support packages for five years (two years for MFA students). These packages will have a minimum level of support equivalent to that of a 50 percent teaching assistantship.”

As a result of this announcement, departments will need to immediately consider how they will provide 5-years offers to existing and incoming students. BSOE is also working hard to do the most accurate projection of this new development financially, and until we have a better projection, unfortunately I have been told to freeze expenses from a certain funding source.

This will immediately impact the CM travel grant requests, expenses for social events (including refreshments grad salons), cruise for incoming and existing students, and several other expenses.
I will keep you updated as I hear more.

Best regards,
Sri Kurniawan
Professor and Chair, Department of Computational Media
Baskin School of Engineering
UC Santa Cruz, 1156 High Street, SOE-3
Santa Cruz CA 95064, USA

Mission

We are TAs, GSIs, Tutors, Readers, Student Researchers, Fellows, Postdocs, and Academic Researchers at UCSC. We are represented by our union, UAW 4811 (Formerly UAW 2865 and UAW 5810). In 2019/2020, workers at UCSC withheld labor for a Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA), and in 2022, our statewide union struck for 6 weeks over a COLA, arguing for a 54k base wage for all academic workers with the goal of raising the living conditions of academic workers across the state. Now, we are on strike for Divestment, Disclosure, Transitional funding for researchers, & Amnesty for all protestors.