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Information and Resources Re: Withholding Winter Grades

Dear fellow grads,

We are reaching out with additional information and guidance about withholding grades for Winter quarter. Though the procedures are basically the same as for Fall, we want to reiterate the power of withholding grades as leverage against the administration in our fight for better working conditions. 

In addition, we want to remind everyone of the powerful movements that have developed at other UC campuses in the few short months since fall quarter ended. These movements are advancing rapidly at all campuses, but especially at UC Santa Barbara, UC San Diego, UC Davis, and UC Berkeley, all of which are now engaged in wildcat strikes. It is crucial to remember that we are not alone in this fight. The wildcat grading and teaching strikes across the UC, along with the unfair labor practice (ULP) lawsuits filed by the union against the UC, are further building our power to bring the UC to the bargaining table. In this moment, it is essential that we maintain our position and withhold as many grades as possible for Winter quarter, along with our colleagues at UC Santa Barbara, UC San Diego, and UC Davis.

Please see the “How to Strike” document for detailed information about how to withhold grades. However, please note the following key pieces of information:

  1. Failing grades: We recommend posting failing grades immediately, as these will impact a student’s progress and may have a more negative impact if they show up unexpectedly later.
  2. Winter graduation: If a student is unsure about whether they need their official grades posted in order to graduate in Winter quarter, the most important question is whether they need an official transcript in the near future to prove their graduation (say, to an employer), or whether it can wait. If a student has applied to graduate in Winter quarter, the Registrar usually cannot clear them to graduate until all official grades are posted. However, it is important to remember that the Registrar can (and often does) backdate a student’s graduation to their transcript–if the student finished their degree requirements in winter 2020, that is what their transcript will reflect (even if, for example, that degree is not officially posted until sometime in spring quarter). 
  3. Admin emails asking for individual grades: Last week, several instructors received emails from the Registrar’s office indicating that grades were needed for specific students, either due to Winter 2020 graduation or for undisclosed reasons. In any case in which you/your instructor receives emails from the Registrar, the Financial Aid office, or similar entities, a good first step is to reach out to the specific student(s) mentioned in the emails. They have likely received communications from these offices as well; they can decide if they want their official grade posted. 

Again, the most effective way to support the movement right now is to withhold winter grades. Use the attached how-to document, the grade request flowchart, and the template for emailing undergraduates to guide you through the process. The administration is going to extreme lengths to punish strikers and to calculate/input fall grades without negotiating with TAs–they want these grades very badly, which underscores the power of this tactic.

In solidarity,

Striking graduate students

Template for Undergrads Download
Template for FacultyDownload
How to Do a Grading Strike (March 2020)Download

Response to “Operational changes in response to COVID-19 virus”

From gsa_pres in response to UCSC’s announcement to suspend in-person classes in response to coronavirus:

COVID-19 is being used by university administration to assume emergency powers that can profoundly impact the way that academic work is done. There have been years of resistance to the move to online education. We see the university’s turn to emergency measures as a rehearsal for a permanent shift to large scale online instruction, accelerating the creep of online teaching with little oversight, with no bargaining, and with little to no transparency. As UCSC looks for ways to operate in the Spring after losing around 80 graduate student employees, the turn to online learning would set an alarming precedent for how a university can function without its workers. 

At UC San Diego, administration has already made the cynical move of asking instructors to ensure that a gradebook on Canvas remains updated, on the pretext that course staff may become ill and be unable to process students’ grades. Graduate student-workers’ greatest power is to withhold our labor; actions like this undercut our ability to withhold our labor. Grads will continue to withhold Winter grades, and as such must resist pressure from above to put grading information online.

This has immediate consequences for faculty and undergraduates. This was a top-down decision made without input from instructional faculty, who must have autonomy over pedagogical decisions. In the immediate context, faculty face overwork in redesigning classes on the fly. For undergraduates, this is not the education that they paid for. Online teaching is a poor substitute for learning in a classroom, and has been shown to diminish the value of a university education. 

As both the strike and the threat of coronavirus spread across the other UC campuses, gatherings in large groups will become more difficult as our movement grows. On our campus, this will mean that rather than focusing on maintaining a physical picket, our attention will turn to the digital picket. 

The digital picket means:

  1. Don’t submit.
  2. Keep grades off Canvas.
  3. Don’t hold classes online.
  4. Undergraduates should submit their assignments directly to their TAs.

Strike Updates Day 20

From Joe Klein
March 9, 2020

Dear Colleagues, 

I wanted to write again with some updates from the ongoing strike. 

For the 20th day graduate students, undergraduates, faculty, staff, lecturers, and others rallied in support of a COLA. Today marks the 1 month anniversary of the full teaching strike that began in February. This week the picket line is coming to campus, moving each day to a new location as we continue to organize, build community, and build power. For the first day of week 10, in solidarity with the UCSC Undocu Collective, strikers took over the Academic Resource Center (ARC). Energy was high all day as strikers continued to organize and plan for the ongoing strike. As of today administration continues to ignore our demands–and so the strike continues! Tomorrow the picket will move to a sit-in at the Earth and Marine Sciences Building, beginning at 9am. 

One month ago, in response to months of UCSC administration ignoring Undocumented students’ demands for greater support, including for a dedicated space to serve the undocumented community, members of the Undocu Collective occupied and took over an office in the ARC to demand that the space become a new headquarters for Undocumented Student Services. Rather than respond to the demands and concerns of the collective, UCSC administration retaliated against these students by issuing code of conduct violation summons for some of those who participated in the protest, and banned these students from the ARC–which should be a community space open to all students. These students who are working tirelessly to support themselves and their community are threatened with suspension or expulsion by a university that brags about its diversity while doing nothing to support its struggling student body. We know this pattern well: students exercise their right to make a claim on the university for the resources they need, and are met with retaliation. Their fight is our fight. 

In stunning news from our statewide union UAW 2865, leadership today announced that graduate students across the UC system have voted overwhelmingly (97% of respondents) to ratify union demands to reopen contract negotiations and to fight for COLA across the state. Today leadership began circulating a pledge to gauge support for moving to an Unfair Labor Practice (ULP Strike); this would mean that all graduate students across the state would be legally protected to go on a full strike. You can fill out the pledge here, and encourage your colleagues to do so as soon as possible. If enough students sign the pledge this week, a vote to authorize the strike could come as soon as next week. 

It should go without saying that this move by our statewide union would not have been possible were it not for the courage of UCSC strikers and grade with holders to risk their own livelihoods to fight for all of us graduate students, and for the months of organizing work by our comrades and colleagues, both graduate and undergraduate, who helped this movement build power to fight for a better university that actually works for its students and workers. UCSC organizers today issued a statement on the relationship between this movement and the ULP strike, noting that only the wildcats on each campus will decide when to end the strike once the demand for a COLA has been met. To avoid this strike, university administration is once again asked to come to the negotiating table, including by California Assemblymember Mark Stone and 11 other representatives from across the state in an open letter.

Meanwhile, across the state the wildcat strike is spreading faster than ever. UC Berkeley today announced that it will join UCSC and UC Santa Barbara on full teaching strike effective next Monday. UC Davis and UC San Diego continue their own grading strike, while UCLA is expected to announce its own strike soon. Following similar actions at UC Santa Cruz led by COLA4ALL and The People’s Coalition, today organizers at UC Santa Barbara liberated a dining hall on their campus to provide free meals to all students. These actions not only feed hungry students, but help us to imagine what might be possible in a university that works for its most vulnerable. 

Some of today’s action items: 

  • Join strikers at Earth and Marine Sciences, beginning tomorrow at 7:30am. Please bring friends! You can also bring supplies: coffee, hand sanitizer, and healthy food are always in demand.
  • Teach the strike: Guide available here  
  • Donate to the strike fund to support striking grads and to provide material relief to our fired grads: gofundme.com/f/support-fund-for-striking-workers-at-ucsc Please share the strike fund with your networks!
  • Faculty are encouraged to discuss moving to a full teaching strike.
  • Cancel your classes and sections, and do not ask your students to cross the picket line, especially this coming Monday and Tuesday.
  • Lecturers should consider holding their classes at the picket. 
  • Push back the dates of large assignments, or as some instructors have done, cancel them. 
  • Write to the administration demanding that they come to the table to work with graduate students and to rescind the decision to fire nearly 100 graduate student workers. Guides and samples available here.
  • Call Gavin Newsom’s office to complain about the firing of graduate students, the extreme rent burden of graduate students, and to ask that $310 million be allocated for a UC wide COLA. Click here for contact information. For reference see the Faculty Organizing Group letter to Gavin Newsom. 

As always, thank you so so much for your support, and extra special thanks to our undergraduates and to the faculty who have been coming out to support strikers–we are so grateful. 

See you tomorrow!

We Are Moving the Picket Line

For one month, UCSC wildcat strikers have maintained a full picket at the base of campus. Over this period, Metro buses have refused to cross our picket line, alongside thousands of grads, undergrads, faculty, lecturers, staff, technical workers, and UPS drivers. Our strike has spread across the UC system and has gathered major press coverage, donations, and support from around the world. It has invigorated collective imagination about the future of the university and graduate education in the UC system. This would have no doubt have been less effective had we not been out on the picket line every day for four weeks. 

The picket line has been a central site of organizing the strike thus far, and has served as a meeting place for so many of us who did not know each other before. It has served as a space for debate, deliberation, and mutual aid. As a result, it has also been subject to intimidation and attacks from police, reckless or belligerent drivers, and further threats by the administration—all of which have, of course, failed to stop this movement. 

After much discussion, however, it has become clear that our strategy must change. Much of our vitality as a movement lies in our adaptability. For the final week of the quarter, we are advancing our picket line up the hill and into the heart of campus. Our picket line will roll through different locations across the week, beginning at 9am in McHenry on Monday. We encourage the entire campus community to join us. 

Our work stoppage continues.

More information on the week’s events will follow. See you on the rolling picket.

Solidarity forever,

Striking Graduate Students

COLA: Dear President Napolitano, We Shut It Down

Dear President Napolitano, Chancellor Larive, EVC Kletzer, Dean Williams, and UC Regents:


In response to the mass firing and barring of roughly 80 UCSC graduate workers from spring quarter appointments, on Thursday, March 5th, striking grads and their allies seized both entrances to campus and held them for 10+ hours. We know you know this, because we know it had a huge impact on the daily operations of the university. 


Classes were cancelled, building projects were halted, the flow of goods onto campus was cut off, food was not prepared, bathrooms were not cleaned, trashcans were not emptied. We did not want to resort to this. We never wanted to resort to this. But when you fire international, POC, undocumented, pregnant, broke, indebted, hungry, rent-burdened, angry, and principled people, you should expect an uprising. 


And it is an uprising you are getting. Grads at Santa Barbara have gone on full strike. Grads at Davis and San Diego are on grading strike. Dozens of departments at Berkeley and Los Angeles are strike-ready, and more are following their lead. Four other campuses are organizing and starting to catch up. 


We know you never expected this. You thought you could keep this from spreading. You thought firing us would scare others away. You were wrong. What you’ve never seemed to understand is that we are committed not just because we want better material conditions but because we are true believers in education and equal access to it. It is this that makes us unstoppable.


If you haven’t yet understood this, I direct you to this video in which a number of us are interviewed. You should see the faces of those you fired, and listen to what they have to say. These are people whose risk and sacrifice are rescuing this university from its neoliberal demise. You owe them your respect, because they are doing the job that you repeatedly fail to do. 


Yours very truly,

Stephen David Engel

Strike Updates Day 19: We are winning.

From Joe Klein
March 6, 2020

Dear Colleagues, 

I wanted to write again with some updates from the ongoing strike. 
For the 19th day hundreds of graduate students, undergraduates, faculty, staff, lecturers rallied at the base of campus, and for the 19th day metro bus drivers refused to cross the picket line in solidarity with striking graduate students. Energy was high all morning, despite aggressive UCSC police intimidation of strikers peacefully picketing (including of yours truly). In one of the most powerful moments of the entire strike to date, late in the morning a group of latinx femme strikers and allies briefly took to the street of the main entrance to perform “El Violador En Tu Camino,” a performance piece born out of feminist struggle in Chile and across the world. Throughout the day strikers continued to rally, march, hold teach-ins, and organize, while celebrating their victories. 

According to administration’s own estimates, as of today, UCSC has now spent at at least $5.7 million on the police presence at the picket line: about 1/4 of the funds needed for an annual COLA for all UCSC graduate students. Meanwhile university administration remains silent–and so the strike continues!

UCSC has sparked an unprecedented mass movement. UCLA and UC Berkeley are poised to join UCSC and UC Santa Barbara and begin a full teaching strike next week, while UC San Diego today voted to join UC Davis in a grading strike to withhold winter grades, while UC Irvine and UC Riverside continue to organize toward a full strike. Meanwhile over 3,000 academics around the world are preparing an academic boycott of the UC system in solidarity with striking graduate students. This strike fights for the future of higher education and this fight is going global. 

Today strikers are celebrating the end of 4 weeks of sustained actions and strike, including the victory of spreading this movement to every campus in the UC system to demand that graduate students be paid enough to live where they work. Come Monday and our 1 month anniversary on full strike, strikers will be advancing even further into campus to continue to remind the administration who runs this campus. To prevent further actions, graduates continue to invite administration to the table to negotiate an end to the strike. Meanwhile, all members of our campus community are invited and encouraged to join the strike in any way they are able: students, workers, lecturers, and faculty united cannot be stopped. Together we are creating the university that we need. 

Some of today’s action items: 

  • Join strikers on Monday morning. Please bring friends! You can also bring supplies: sunscreen, coffee, hand sanitizer, healthy food, and large containers of drinking water are always in demand.   
  • Donate to the strike fund to support striking grads and to provide material relief to our fired grads: gofundme.com/f/support-fund-for-striking-workers-at-ucsc  Please share the strike fund with your networks!
  • Faculty are encouraged to discuss moving to a full teaching strike.
  • Cancel your classes and sections, and do not ask your students to cross the picket line, especially this coming Monday and Tuesday.
  • Lecturers should consider holding their classes at the picket. 
  • Push back the dates of large assignments, or as some instructors have done, cancel them. 
  • Write to the administration asking them to come to the table to work with graduate students and to rescind the decision to fire nearly 100 graduate student workers. 
  • Call Gavin Newsom’s office to complain about the firing of graduate students, the extreme rent burden of graduate students, and to ask that $310 million be allocated for a UC wide COLA. Click here for contact information. 

As always, thank you so so much for your support, and extra special thanks to our undergraduates and to the faculty who have been coming out to support strikers–we are so grateful. 

See you Monday!

Strike Updates Day 18: Whose University?

From Joe Klein
March 5, 2020

Dear Colleagues, 

I wanted to write again with some updates from the ongoing strike. 

Today was another historic day in labor history at UCSC and across the UC system. For the 18th day of the strike, hundreds of graduate students, undergraduates, faculty, staff, lecturers, and others successfully closed down UCSC’s main campus for the entire working day. Two hard picket lines were created just beyond Family Student Housing on the west side, and just beyond Faculty Housing on the east side, to ensure that our colleagues and friends would be able to get easily in and out of their homes, while other traffic easily passed out from campus at both entrances. Students hung a banner from the FSH bridge reading “EAT THE REGENTS” while east picketers were joined by a giant goose puppet (#honkforcola) on the barricade. All classes were cancelled; instead, students fed each other, held teach-ins, jumped rope, learned new dances, organized their own transportation, and made new friends, while outside of Family Student Housing, families and children came out to play in the streets. Standing together–building power and building community–strikers reminded administration who runs this campus.

Meanwhile, the entire UC system took to the streets today in solidarity with UCSC. Thousands rallied at UC Santa Barbara while UCLA and UC Berkeley are both organizing toward a full teaching strike (e.g., the Anthropology Department at UC Berkeley voted 70 to 2 to authorize a full teaching strike in support of fired UCSC anthropologists and for their own COLA campaign–UCB Anthropology’s statement here). UC Davis remains on a full grading strike, while major actions were held at UC San Diego, UC Riverside, and UC Irvine, and organizing continues at UCSF and UC Merced. In addition, the Council of UC Faculty Associations representing faculty senates across the UC system issued a statement earlier this week demanding that the university negotiate with striking graduate workers. Faculty, students, staff, and our communities have made ourselves effusively and abundantly clear: administration must negotiate. 

Strikers and allies across the UC system reject an institution that would dispose of them rather than negotiate; when you fire 10% of your graduate workers, nothing can be normal. But beyond this, strikers are fighting against the cruelty that has become normalized on this campus. The COLA movement was sparked because many hundreds of graduate students and many thousands of undergraduates experience daily precarity, hunger, trauma, homelessness, and marginalization, and because this institution has consistently failed to meet its student’s basic needs. Strikers reject an institution where students skip meals and sleep in cars to make ends meet, and reject an administration that would fire them for not wanting to live that way. Together we fight for ourselves, for our friends, for the future of higher education, and for the university that we need. 

Some of today’s action items: 

  • Join strikers on the picket line, beginning tomorrow at 7:30am. Please bring friends! You can also bring supplies: sunscreen, coffee, hand sanitizer, healthy food, and large containers of drinking water are always in demand.   
  • Teach the strike: Guide attached below!  
  • Donate to the strike fund to support striking grads and to provide material relief to our fired grads: gofundme.com/f/support-fund-for-striking-workers-at-ucsc  Please share the strike fund with your networks!
  • Faculty are encouraged to discuss moving to a full teaching strike.
  • Cancel your classes and sections, and do not ask your students to cross the picket line, especially this coming Monday and Tuesday.
  • Lecturers should consider holding their classes at the picket. 
  • Push back the dates of large assignments, or as some instructors have done, cancel them. 
  • Write to the administration demanding that they come to the table to work with graduate students and to rescind the decision to fire nearly 100 graduate student workers. Guides and samples available here.
  • Call Gavin Newsom’s office to complain about the firing of graduate students, the extreme rent burden of graduate students, and to ask that $310 million be allocated for a UC wide COLA. Click here for contact information. For reference see the Faculty Organizing Group letter to Gavin Newsom. 

Teach the Strike Guide:

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CAMPUS SHUT DOWN – Why Classes Are Cancelled

Why Classes Are Cancelled

Nearly 100 of our colleagues have been fired. 18 of our friends and supporters have been arrested, many brutalized by police. The same precarious workers that were driven to demand a COLA have been rendered even more precarious—facing further food and housing insecurity, potential loss of legal status, healthcare, and childcare subsidies. The student conduct process has been mobilized to suppress dissent and monitor political activity in relation to employment decisions. Administration has tried to drive wedges between everyone—undergrads and grads, workers and student workers, faculty and advisees, divisions and departments.

The administration’s response has been to minimize the significance of the crisis from the beginning, to bemoan the interruptions caused by the strike, and to deflect blame for these consequences onto the strikers. Their repeated calls for returning back to business as usual at all costs (modified slightly with new advisory councils, studies, “short and long term solutions”) is also their justification for refusing to acknowledge the strike directly. UCOP states unequivocally that the wildcat strike undermines the basis on which they manage the university’s labor. And they are set on stamping it out and reducing it to an aberration. The firing 10% of the TA workforce cannot pass for normal; neither should it be normalized. It is an outrageous and cruel overreach by a profit-hungry administration.

This is why business cannot carry on as usual, and why students, faculty, and workers across University of California campuses statewide are taking action today. The strike began because there was a crisis that demanded to be acknowledged, that had been swept under the rug for too long. Every administrative response since, from indifference to tear gas to termination letters, has only further illustrated the depth and breadth of the crisis perpetuated every day by this university system. Classes are cancelled today because things must change if anything is to carry on at all.

In solidarity with students, workers, faculty, and staff,

Striking Graduate Students

Strike Updates Day 17

From Joe Klein
March 4, 2020

Dear Colleagues, 

I wanted to write again with some updates from the ongoing strike.

For the 17th day, hundreds of graduate students, faculty, undergraduates, staff, lecturers and others rallied at the base of campus and for the 17th consecutive working day metro bus drivers refused to cross the picket line. Strikers marched and listened to local musical artists as part of “COLA-CHELLA” and were visited by Fred Moten who led a group discussion at the picket line, along with other teach ins and actions. So far UCSC has spent $5.1 million dollars on police rather than meet with striking graduate students; this is nearly 25% of the cost of an annual COLA for all graduate students. Administration continues to be silent after the firing of its graduate students–and so tomorrow the strike continues! 

Tomorrow, Thursday March 5th, will be a special UC system wide day of action in solidarity with our colleagues and friends who were fired by university administration. When the university would rather fire its own students–students fighting for a living wage– than have a simple conversation, business as usual cannot continue. Organizers are calling for a day of no classes and no work across the system. Please ask yourself: Do you want a system of education in which a PhD is accessible to only to the wealthy and privileged? If the answer is no, we need your support and we need it now. 

Join us at the picket; together we are fighting not only for the future of graduate education, but for the university that we want and the university that we need. Please wear black.

Poster that reads: "UC Wide Blackout / In support of fired UCSC workers / Thursday March 5 all day / No class / No work / Wear black