Dear Chancellor Larive, EVC Kletzer, VPDGS Williams, and Assistant Dean Moore,
As graduate directors of the six departments in the Division of Humanities at UCSC, we collectively write to request further details on the resources that will be available to departments in support of the Chancellor’s January 27 email regarding graduate student financial matters. Because we are in the midst of admissions season for 2020-21 and are actively making decisions about funding, it is critical that we be in dialogue right away.
The Chancellor’s letter announces, first, that graduate students, including continuing students, will receive five-year funding guarantees. This program also mandates that the Teaching Assistant salary provide the baseline minimum for all funding packages.
The graduate division had, prior to the recent graduate student actions concerning the cost of living in Santa Cruz, given us initial warning that the university planned to move to a five-year standard offer model, based on the experience at UC Irvine. However, those earlier communications did not explain (1) that such a mandate would apply to continuing students and (2) that the TA salary would become the baseline. Nor were programs forewarned that this mandate would roll out in the middle of admissions season.
Although some Humanities departments have switched to five-year funding guarantees, no department currently has the resources (in terms of block allocations or Teaching Assistantships) to implement such a policy by fall quarter 2020. We have looked at the numbers, and five of our six departments are short on available TAships to make such a commitment to current students, without even considering the potential needs of a new 2020-2021 cohort.
The mandate to fund continuing students will also have an impact on the admissions cycle. Financial decisions surrounding offers to newly admitted students are on a very short timeline and must be completed by early February. So many variables and unforeseeable circumstances (such as enrollment-generated TAships) arise from the new mandates, both (1) and (2), that we are hampered in our ability to conduct admissions in a responsible way.
We request that the Chancellor, in consultation with the graduate and humanities divisions, revisit block allocation and teaching assistantship allocations and immediately make additional funding available to individual departments to support the required amount of resources to ensure that we can viably make five-year offers to all continuing students.
Finally, we ask that the upper administration guarantee for the next five years that you will fund students directly in the event that our resources fall short of this funding guarantee.
We wish to underline the struggles that graduate students face in order to meet basic needs in Santa Cruz. We also feel that resources need to be forthcoming from the upper administration in order to move toward a more livable wage and stable funding structure for all graduate students. If such guarantees are not made, we may face a situation where we will not be able to continue admissions. This will harm current students and the intellectual life of the university.
Sincerely,
Noriko Aso (History)
Banu Bargu (History of Consciousness)
John Bowin (Philosophy)
Neel Ahuja (Feminist Studies)
Kirsten Silva Gruesz (Literature)
Maziar Toosarvandani (Linguistics)
and
Tyler Stovall (Dean of Humanities)
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