Dear Lori Kletzer, Cynthia Larive, and Quentin Williams:
I am an eighth-year PhD candidate in the Department of History and I write to you just weeks away from filing my dissertation and completing my degree. As someone who researches the history of the Black Panther Party, the labor mobilizations over the past two months have given me even more of an opportunity to critically reflect on our university’s fifty-five year history and its relationship to the Bay Area’s legacy of social and political activism.
I’m sure you all are aware that given our school’s geographic proximity to Oakland and its establishment just months prior to the emergence of the Black Power Movement, UC Santa Cruz is an important part of this rich local and national history. The connections between our school and the movement’s calls for racial and class equity go beyond these spatial and temporal parallels, however. In fact, one of the co-founders of the BPP, Huey Newton, received his PhD from our world-renowned History of Consciousness program. Not long after Newton completed his degree, Dr. Angela Davis—not a Panther herself but an active and visible ally of the Party—joined our school’s faculty contingent, marking the beginning of her 17-year career in the History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies programs. While Dr. Davis no longer teaches full-time, as a distinguished professor emerita she maintains an active presence in our campus community, producing scholarship and building coalitions around the issues of wealth disparity, racial violence, and mass incarceration in the United States- the same issues that she and Newton fought against fifty years ago.
In 2016 our very own McHenry Library hosted a photograph exhibition in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Black Panther Party. For the exhibit’s opening and closing receptions former Black Panthers spoke to our undergraduate and graduate students as well as UCSC faculty and staff about their community organizing work during the Black Power Movement. They further encouraged our students to stay engaged in community issues, emphasizing the urgent need for young people’s participation in grassroots measures geared toward mitigating food and housing insecurity in Santa Cruz. Your administrative colleagues in the Division of Graduate Studies provided necessary and much appreciated funding for both events.
As I conclude my second year on the academic job market, one of the most common pieces of advice I’ve come across from tenure-track faculty is the importance and necessity of gearing your application to the values, interests, and expressed needs of the campus to which you’re applying. This, I have heard, holds especially true for your interview with campus administrators, if you make it that far along in the application process. When UCSC’s faculty, students, and staff asked you why you wanted to work at UCSC, how did you respond? What answers did you offer our campus community, especially considering that over the past few decades UCSC administrators have been deeply complicit in perpetuating the housing and food insecurity experienced by an exponentially increasing proportion of our student body?
I ask you this with genuine curiosity because as I sit at my desk reviewing the images in my dissertation from the BPP’s newspaper, I see chronicles of 1970s Oakland. I see the Party’s documentation of the city’s lack of affordable housing and the effects of profiteering and negligent landlords on local families. I see a visual record of the Panthers’ self-organized response to the federal government’s broken social welfare system and the dereliction of local officials. Juxtaposed with these photos are others documenting the weekly casualties of black men, women, and youth involved in the Panthers’ community programs, all at the hands of a highly militarized local police force. During my work breaks I turn to local and national coverage of our current labor movement only to see photographs of swarms of police, many of whom were recruited by you from the same Bay Area police departments that worked hand in hand with J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI to violently repress the Panthers and their free food programs. On multiple days of the graduate student strike these police arrived in full riot gear and confronted our undergraduate and graduate students, and our faculty with hostility and brutal violence. I’ve seen the videos of officers using excessive force to the point of crushing the bones and ripping open the skin of non-violent protestors, all against the backdrop of Martin Luther King Jr.’s image advertising our school’s annual convocation in his honor and in celebration of Black History Month.
How can you hold pride in your work at UCSC when your behavior so blatantly contradicts your expressed concern for the well-being of the school’s employees and educators? Without our daily labor UCSC would not exist. Spending over $1 million to line our campus streets with armed police while telling us that you and your colleagues are working with an inadequate and rigid budget is a clear contradiction in discourse and practice. In addition to providing our chancellors with housing stipends the UC also provided at least one of them with an on-campus house, which currently remains unoccupied, all while more and more graduate students are forced to find shelter in their cars. While we take it upon ourselves to ensure that we have roofs over our heads and enough money in our bank accounts to eat, you meet our actions without one iota of concern for our humanity. When your colleagues graciously welcomed the former leaders of the Black Panther Party to speak with our students about the necessity and stakes of their community work in the 1970s, did any of these administrators mention UCSC’s pattern of hiring police squads to surveil and repress student and employee organizers? From what I recall they were conspicuously silent about this history.
The rising tide of concerns expressed to you by student employees over the past two months is not a product of hyperbolic complaints. Rather, our testimonies point to the reality that our school is in the midst of a crisis. Your celebration of UCSC as an inclusive site of learning when the vast majority of our student population exists in massive debt and lives paycheck to paycheck is dishonest and self-serving. UCSC has become an educational institution for the wealthy. As UC administrators you have an obligation to take care of your students and employees and a responsibility to respect our central roles in maintaining our school as an institution of knowledge production. Over the past few decades UCSC’s institutional priorities have increasingly departed from the school’s early connection to the Bay Area’s civil rights movement and the progressive ideas and projects that came out of it.
My research explores questions of intergenerational relations in social movements, political legacy, and historical memory, and while I read through my chapters I’m reminded that history is chock-full of moments of contradiction, irony, and hypocrisy. Over the past two months you have demonstrated all three phenomena, and to me, that is at once depressing and infuriating.
As I near the end of my graduate career, I prepare to leave our university unemployed, with few full-time academic job prospects, and thousands of dollars in debt. I checked my bank account this morning and at the moment I have a whopping 54 cents to my name. Do you have any creative ideas that would help me stretch this out enough to cover the cost of printing my chapters for their final round of committee feedback?
As historians we are encouraged to avoid hypotheticals, but it may be worth noting that if I had the chance to pursue a graduate degree at UCSC all over again, I probably would decide against it. Earning an education at this school is no longer financially tenable.
I sincerely hope that the living and working conditions of future UCSC student workers are drastically better than what my fellow students and I have had to deal with, and what those who came before us experienced. Student poverty at UCSC has reached its breaking point and at this critical juncture it bears repeating that you have both the ability and opportunity to do the right thing.
Lastly, if nothing I’ve expressed in the above paragraphs resonates with you, I will end by reiterating what many have already conveyed to you: the country is watching you right now and waiting to see how you will respond to the needs that our campus community has vocalized to you, loudly and for too long. National media coverage of the current strike by outlets including the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, has been overwhelmingly sympathetic to the plight of UCSC students and our growing movement. How will you add to UCSC’s legacy?
Sincerely,
Kiran Garcha
(PhD Candidate, Department of History, UCSC)