Dear all,
It is worth noting, firstly, that more than 54 graduate student workers were fired or barred from spring appointments on Friday, including at least ten international students. The number is certainly higher than 70 and may be around or above 80.
I wanted to state the obvious point that these firings are not yet final. They can be reversed at any moment. That is, they are now a site of struggle for our community.
Many have written and will continue to write about the stakes of this moment: for the jobs, livelihoods, and careers of those fired; for the future of public graduate research and education; for the quality of public undergraduate education; for the future of labour movements and living-wage and affordability struggles; for the future of robust humanities, arts, and social science divisions; etc.
But I wanted to share my simple conviction that no community deserving of the name would permit 70-80 of its members to be fired for a peaceful struggle for the ability to pay rent. In the words of our STEM colleagues, this is a deplorable action.
The support outside of UCSC since the firings has been swift and enormous. Since the news broke, the strike fund has received nearly $100,000. People across the UC system are organizing weeks of action and graduate student workers move closer to striking every day, both for our reinstatement and for their own COLA. Before the firings, thousands of faculty across the country committed to effectively boycott UCSC in the event of mass firings.
But once again, and even after grueling months of struggle with administrative threats and police violence, the response that matters most is the one within the UCSC community. It is a moment that demands nothing less than the most meaningful forms of solidarity: more grading strikes, mutual aid, class cancellation, protest, picketing, collective job refusals, boycotts, work stoppages, etc.
This starts on Monday at a press conference on the picket at 9:30am and does not stop until we are reinstated, safe, and making genuine progress towards the implementation of a COLA.
I’ll see you on the picket.
Your fired international colleague and friend,
Jack.