Details of the UC Boycott. See also: the call for the boycott, and the case for the boycott.
What falls within the purview of the UC academic boycott and how can academic laborers show further solidarity with the COLA 4 All movement?
The goal of the UC academic boycott is to show support to COLA4all students and faculty and to publicly declare that the administration’s firing of graduate student-workers deserves to be rebuked and must be reversed. However, the boycott actively avoids interrupting the educational process. In other words, this boycott is aimed specifically at the administration, not students and faculty. To these ends, we suggest the following:
Boycotters should feel free to participate in, and help co-organize, events off-campus that would benefit UC students and faculty. However, given that university-sanctioned talks will likely be held via Zoom or Skype, we encourage people to think creatively about a digital picket. For example, avoid lecturing digitally in UC courses or as a part of UC-sponsored lecture series on non-UC platforms. Whenever possible, boycotters should clearly state that they are canceling their participation due to the boycott rather than COVID-19, for example. This could be done with the hashtag #boycott4COLA and by tagging @colasolidarity on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to allow for your message’s amplification.
Job talks or other lectures/visits related to departmental hiring practices do not fall under the purview of the academic boycott. Similarly, we do not consider the individual scholarship produced by UC academics to belong to the boycott sphere. Therefore, those engaging in the boycott are welcome to buy, read, peer-review, and cite the work of UC scholars.
We suggest that boycotters avoid donating to the university administration, and instead reallocate those funds to the COLA strike fund. This will be an especially powerful message on April 22, the university’s Giving Day. Please make a statement about your decision to reallocate these funds to strikers on social media whenever possible.
We encourage boycotters to speak to your students about the strike, the history of strikes, and other concomitant labor actions if it fits in the curriculum, especially addressing questions of higher education and the history of the wildcat strikes.
We encourage boycotters to use other public platforms to speak out about UC’s retaliation against students demanding a Cost of Living Adjustment, such as opinion pieces in local or national media.