Category: history 2019-2020

****Please Forward Widely****

Dear Colleagues,

We write to share our concern over the two recent communications (“An Open Letter to Faculty, Staff and Students at UC Santa Cruz” from President Napolitano and “Graduate Student Strike Update” from iCP/EVC Kletzer, both dated February 14th) that threaten to dismiss Teaching Assistants who have not submitted Fall grades by February 21st from their Spring 2020 appointments. These two letters raise serious questions about the future of our campus. We cannot deliver high-quality undergraduate education without the face-to-face learning and evaluation provided by the talented and committed graduate student teachers who are themselves vital to UCSC’s nationally and internationally recognized doctoral programs and to our status as a research university.  The proposed EVC response to fall grades and the wildcat strike runs directly counter to our values and purpose.  

The administration’s proposed action will cause deep and lasting harm to both undergraduate and graduate education at UCSC (well beyond the disruption currently caused by the Teaching Assistants’ strike). In this time of increasing enrollment pressure at the undergraduate level and the necessity for large classes (as well as small research-oriented seminars), faculty cannot mount a quality curriculum that serves undergraduates without the indispensable pedagogical support of graduate student labor. Over the last few years, TAs in nearly every graduate program on campus have received enhanced field-specific training founded in research on effective and inclusive teaching. As a result, TAs have made immeasurable contributions toward  closing the equity gaps and ensuring success for an increasingly diverse undergraduate student body.

In addition to damaging undergraduate education, the proposed punitive actions will also severely erode, if not permanently damage, the doctoral mission of the University of California.  UCSC has been on a strong trajectory of doctoral growth and it boasts a diverse and robust set of programs. All of them stand to suffer as a result of the proposed actions.  Striking graduate students have already been negatively impacted by their rent burden and low wages; to dismiss them from their Spring 2020 positions only compounds the financial reasons that led to the wildcat strike in the first place. We fear that many graduate students will simply be unable to continue their education as a result. This year’s cohort of prospective graduate students may also be reluctant to accept offers, causing further damage to individual departments, undergraduate curricula, and UCSC’s strong and growing reputation as a major research university.  

As faculty, we are further concerned that the proposed measures constitute an infringement of the principle of shared governance, which grants Senate faculty the right to oversee curriculum and courses of study. Regents Standing Order 105.2 states: “The Academic Senate shall authorize and supervise all courses and curricula.”  The action threatened by the administration would have profound effects on our courses and curricula, constituting a change in the delivery of instruction. As such, it is not a step that should be taken without thoughtful and extensive Senate consultation and consent.

Graduate students, with the support of undergraduates, lecturers, staff, and faculty, have drawn attention to a long-standing problem. The current crisis offers us an extraordinary opportunity to come together as a community to reimagine the future of UCSC and, through honest and frank dialogue, construct the paths that will return UCSC to its place as an institution dedicated to knowledge in the service of social transformation.

It is our belief that even faculty who do not support the strikers and their tactics ought to be deeply concerned about the implications of these letters for the quality of education on this campus. We hope you will join us in insisting on faculty consultation and shared governance in this matter. We also invite you to affirm the critical importance of graduate Teaching Assistants to the educational mission of the University of California and to urge systemwide and local campus accountability, compassion, and creative problem-solving.

We hope you will attend the Academic Senate Meeting on Wednesday, February 19, to raise some of these concerns with campus leadership.

Sincerely,

The Faculty Organizing Group (FOG)

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)

Dear COLA community, 

TL;DR: 

By any assessment, we are winning this struggle. Graduate students will meet on Tuesday evening, after the sixth day of picketing, for a General Assembly to discuss our response to the latest threats from UCOP (details forthcoming). If you are a graduate student worker withholding grades from Fall 2019, do not submit before this meeting. More than ever, we need to move collectively. First step: organize within your department. See you at the picket on Tuesday, from 7:30am onwards. 

Yesterday evening, our General Assembly concluded with a unanimous decision by strikers and picketers: the strike continues on Tuesday. 

Later that same evening, we received our first communication from UC President Janet Napolitano, with threats to our current and future employment if fall grades are not submitted by next Friday, February 21.

This is a decisive moment in our struggle. As long as graduate students continue to move together, we will undermine these threats, revealing them as a last-ditch scare tactic, a desperate bluff. These threats are credible only if the UC leadership is prepared to sink UCSC and risk indelible consequences to the university at a statewide level. It does not take much to imagine how a mass firing of rent-burdened graduate students on this campus would ignite protest and boycott across the UC system. 

If hundreds of graduate student workers are terminated from employment, whole departments will be unable to offer courses next quarter, dozens of international graduate students will effectively face deportation, UCSC rankings will nosedive, huge sources of funding will be jeopardized, political organizing at other campuses will intensify, and UCSC may become subject to academic boycott (over 1,000 non-UCSC scholars and educators have already committed to a pledge of solidarity and non-cooperation with UCSC). In short, such a move would profoundly impoverish graduate and undergraduate education and research at UCSC, as well as its collaborations and partnerships with other research institutions.

So far, over 200 graduate students have received warning letters from the university for continuing to withhold at least 71% of their Fall 2019 grades beyond February 2nd. Since the start of our full teaching strike, our five-day picket at the base of campus has drawn several hundred graduate students, undergraduates, faculty, lecturers, and staff. The sheer size of the crowd repeatedly filled the university lawn and spilled into the Bay and High intersection, effectively shutting down the major entrance to campus every single day this week. The midweek police presence — excessive in their arms and in their brutality — was visibly scaled down after the masses at the intersection showed that they would not be arrested and beaten into submission. 

Let’s assess the concrete effects of these actions. Collective direct action forced the first round of concessions from the UCSC administration, even if these early concessions (as any student of labor history could have predicted) were grossly inadequate to our demands. Collective direct action has sent administrators scrambling as the university reels from the effects of 12,000 withheld grades: The mobile and arbitrary deadlines for grades—December 18th, February 2nd, and now February 21st—bears witness to the fact that the UCSC administration is unable to compensate for or offset our actions. Collective direct action has revealed the administration’s alleged inability to meet with strikers was in fact and remains a politically motivated refusal. Collective direct action has forced the university to show its hand by unveiling the biggest stick it has at its disposal: Janet Napolitano herself stepping forward from behind the curtain to threaten mass firings. Every move made by UC administrators up to this point has been one failed attempt after another to dilute and diminish the collective power we continue to build.

If we set ourselves the unpleasant task of thinking from the perspective of the UC President, we can conceive of two reasons why the highest level of administration has made a calculated, strategic decision to unveil its biggest threat. The hyperbole of the administration’s current threat of retaliation teaches us not only that ‘they mean business’ but also, and more crucially, that business is their highest priority. While they may be indifferent to our rent burdens, they cannot remain indifferent to the disruptive effects of our withheld labor (and especially of the withheld grades) on the university’s operations. If our mid-January strike poll was any indication, the number of graduate students in favor of withholding Winter 2020 grades (715) holds promise for a disruption on an even greater order of magnitude. Our readiness to escalate is profoundly unsettling for UC leadership. 

But perhaps for them what is even more disconcerting is the writing that’s now undeniably on the wall: the strike is spreading. Kletzer, Larive, Napolitano—the string-pullers behind the riot helmets, batons, and their indiscriminate use—may have been unwilling to administer beatings themselves, but at the drop of a hat they blew an estimated $1.5 million this week on cops from across the state, so that strikers found themselves facing off against police from UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UC San Francisco, UC Santa Barbara, and even UC Irvine, not to mention the notorious Alameda County Sheriff’s Office. While the UC system mobilizes its statewide penal resources in the hopes of overwhelming what they see as a local problem, we are strengthened by the proliferation of COLA movements organized by rank and file graduate student workers on at least five other UC campuses. UC Santa Barbara graduate workers will circulate their own strike poll in a matter of days. UC Davis organizers have come to our picket line day after day this week to express solidarity and share reports of the rapid growth of their own COLA campaign. Storms are brewing in mass meetings and rallies at UC San Diego, UCLA, and UC Berkeley. Campus and statewide administrators cannot afford to wait us out, because neither we nor any other COLA movement in the UC show signs of slowing down. The threat of mass firings represents a last, desperate hope that they can crush this movement once and for all. 

In short, the appearance of the university’s most forceful threat of retaliation reveals its position of weakness, while nonetheless pushing the COLA movement to a critical and decisive juncture. In this next week more than any other, graduate students need to organize and act collectively. 

This is a call to organize within your department and with comrades in departments across the academic divisions over the next seven days. 

This is a call to show up at the picket line from 7:30am on Tuesday morning, to make our collective presence felt at the base of campus. 

This is a call to a General Assembly on Tuesday evening, where graduate students will meet to discuss Napolitano’s threats of mass termination, and to decide how to proceed. Many of us are feeling the real weight of these threats, and will each assess considerations of our own as the February 21st grade submission deadline approaches. As we’ve done all along, and as today’s mass email threads have shown, our militant struggle is anchored by a fierce spirit of mutual aid. Our collectivity is our most precious resource and moving together will give us the best chance we have at keeping each other safe. Watch your inbox for more details on the General Assembly. 

Happy Valentine’s Day. Spread the strike. DO NOT SUBMIT.

Love,

Graduate Students Association 

UAW 2865 Santa Cruz

Graduate Students Wildcat Strikers

Letter sent to many individual TAs as an email attachment on the evening of Friday, Feb 14, 2020 (around 8pm) from the Office of CPEVC <officeof@ucsc.edu> following Janet Napolitano’s email to the UCSC community and Lori Kletzer’s email to faculty.

It reads:

February 14, 2020

I am writing because you have not submitted grades for the Fall Quarter and those grades remain outstanding. You received a written warning in early February 2020 for failing to submit Fall Quarter grades as of that date.

The submission of grades is a required duty of your position. Your continued refusal to submit Fall Quarter grades even after receiving a written warning is causing continuing and ongoing harm to the students who earned them and to the operations of the University. You are directed to submit all outstanding grades from the Fall Quarter by no later than February 21, 2020. Your failure to follow this directive will lead to disciplinary action, up to and including dismissal from your current and/or Spring Quarter appointment.

I also want to emphasize that you are expected to perform your required job duties for the duration of your appointment. Participation in the wildcat strike not only violates the no strikes clause in the collective bargaining agreement between the UAW and the University but also reflects a failure to meet your employment responsibilities and will result in disciplinary action, up to and including dismissal.

If you believe that you have been identified in error as a person who has not submitted Fall Quarter grades, please let me know as soon as possible. Otherwise, we look forward to your expected cooperation in submitting Fall Quarter grades by no later than February 21, 2020.

Sincerely,
Lori G. Kletzer
Interim Campus Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor

cc: Jennifer Schiffner, Director of Employee & Labor Relations Quentin Williams, Acting Vice Provost & Dean of Graduate Studies

Email from UC President Janet Napolitano, sent Friday, Feb 14, 2020 at 6:01 pm via UCSC Public Affairs. Soon after, Executive Vice Chancellor Lori Kletzer emailed faculty and then began sending letters to TAs warning them to release grades or face disciplinary action and/or dismissal from current and/or Spring appointments.

TL;DR

“Participation in the wildcat strike will have consequences, up to and including the termination of existing employment at the University.”

Janet Napolitano

---

Full Email

February 14, 2020

To: UC Santa Cruz Community
From: Janet Napolitano, President, University of California
Subject: An Open Letter to Faculty, Staff and Students at UC Santa Cruz

Dear Faculty, Staff and Students:

The University of California respects its labor unions and its unionized workers. They provide valuable services throughout the University, from gardening and food service on our campuses to patient care in our hospitals to lecturers in our classrooms. The obligations between the University and its unions are negotiated and memorialized systemwide in collective bargaining agreements, which must be voted on and ratified by the union membership. With respect to the collective bargaining agreement between the University and Academic Student Employee-Teaching Assistants (TAs) and their union, the United Auto Workers (UAW), the TAs received the following benefits:

• A waiver of tuition, plus a $300 campus fee remission
• 3% annual wage increases (in line with other University employees)
• A child care subsidy of $3,300 per year (unique to TAs)
• A one-time signing bonus
• A complete remission of any health care premiums

In exchange for these guaranteed benefits, the University received a contractual promise that the TAs would not strike while the collective bargaining agreement was in effect through June 30, 2022.

Consequently, the wildcat strike by UC Santa Cruz TAs, where a number of TAs have withheld or deleted fall grades and are refusing to teach classes, is unauthorized and in direct violation of the existing collective bargaining agreement. The striking TAs have asked whether the University would either re-open the agreement or negotiate a separate side letter with them to provide a Cost-of-Living Adjustment (COLA) over and above the wage increase already in the agreement to account for the high cost of housing in Santa Cruz.

The University will not re-open the agreement or negotiate a separate side-letter. To accede to the demands of a group of employees engaged in an unauthorized wildcat strike would undercut the very foundation of an agreement negotiated in good faith by the UAW and ratified by thousands of members across the system.

We are sympathetic to the high cost of housing in Santa Cruz and the pressure this puts on TAs, but a wildcat strike is not the way to get relief. Chancellor Larive has already proposed two measures to help graduate students: a $2,500 need-based housing fellowship; and for doctoral students a 5-year, funding program at the minimum support level of a 50 percent teaching assistantship. We can work together to persuade our legislators in Sacramento to support the University’s request for more graduate student support. We could also work together to develop other legislative proposals to speed the construction of student housing.  

However, holding undergraduate grades hostage and refusing to carry out contracted teaching responsibilities is the wrong way to go. Therefore, participation in the wildcat strike will have consequences, up to and including the termination of existing employment at the University.

It should not come to this. We urge the striking TAs to turn in their grades and return to the classroom. The TAs must honor their side of the bargain, just as the University must honor its commitments. The wildcat strike must come to an end.

Yours very truly,

Janet Napolitano
President

If you’re talking about “having a critical role in ensuring safety and security to the people on campus”, the only people I know of who were physically hurt in the past week have been undergraduate and graduate students, by police. They have been beaten and bloodied. When we are fighting for housing security, fighting for wages that let us live and thrive here, and taking care of one another, and you are beating the shit out of us and our friends, I think we have the better claim to say that “the safety of everyone in our community is our highest priority”, and not yours.

We provide water and sunscreen to each other, childcare, and medical and legal support (including funds). The cops arrested someone bringing water through, and have consistently blocked supplies.

We also want to “study, … teach, and conduct research”. Grads have made clear that our lack of a COLA presents a significant obstacle to this.

Who do you protect? Who do you serve?

To: UC Santa Cruz Community

From: Public Affairs

Subject: Yesterday’s protest and arrests

Yesterday, on the third consecutive day of unsanctioned strike activity, officers arrested 17 participants who ignored dispersal orders that were repeated over approximately 20 minutes—requests to move out of the city intersection of Bay and High streets and onto the university field to continue their demonstration. Officers repeatedly tried to de-escalate the situation and made clear that blocking this major roadway had to stop or it would lead to arrest. Demonstrators locked arms, sat in the roadway, and refused to move back onto the university field.

During Monday’s unsanctioned strike activity, there were several dangerous incidents between vehicles and picketers when this major intersection was blocked. The safety of everyone in our community is our highest priority. Failing to comply with an order to disperse and obstructing a roadway is extremely dangerous, and it is also against the law. The participants in the unsanctioned strike were arrested for unlawful assembly, failure to disperse, and unlawful obstruction of the free movement of any person on any street, sidewalk, or other public place. While we understand the frustration about housing costs in Santa Cruz, we also have responsibilities to the vast majority of our faculty, staff and students who simply want to do what they came to UC Santa Cruz to do–to study, to teach, and conduct research. 

UCSC’s police officers have a critical role in ensuring safety and security to all on campus.  They protect everyone’s ability to exercise the constitutionally protected rights of free expression, speech, and assembly. These rights do not extend, however, to disrupting regular and essential operations of the university by occupying offices, blocking roads, or infringing on the rights of others.  

It is essential that emergency responders, the Santa Cruz community, and the campus community can freely travel through the city, and on and off the residential campus. Moreover, in addition to the 9,300 students who live on campus, UC Santa Cruz is home to families with young children and elderly residents.  We hope today’s protests remain peaceful and lawful.  

Dear Chancellor Larive, EVC Kletzer, Faculty, and Grads,

Today: We—undergraduates, graduates, and faculty—stood together in solidarity and stared down the latest police intimidation and brutality, acting under administrative orders to keep “business as usual.” Business is not usual when graduates and undergraduates are this heavily rent burdened and indebted. Business is not usual when hundreds of people close the base of campus demanding change. Business is not usual when the administration spends over $300,000 in one day to bring in out-of-county police and put them up in the Hyatt. Business is not usual when faculty are standing between students and police in riot gear. And business does not return to usual when those cops arrest 17 people, injuring many so badly that they ended up in urgent care at the hospital- hair ripped out, bleeding, concussed, and with broken fingers. See the linked video and photos below.

An administration bemoaning harm to undergraduates missing fall grades cannot burn money on cops that arrest and assault peacefully protesting students. The administration appalls us. It is a disgrace to our community. 

Refusing to be intimidated and struggling for just demands, undergraduates, graduates, and faculty stood firm until police backed off and agreed to release every person they had arrested. We held the Bay and High Street intersection for over four hours, only leaving when we decided it was time to dance together on the lawn. 

Tomorrow: We held a general assembly to close the day, and resolved to come back tomorrow morning. We will be set up from 7:30am and cannot wait to see your beautiful faces. 

Join us tomorrow on the picket! Become part of this movement. We grow and learn more every single day we are out here.Every day longer is a day stronger.

We particularly encourage every graduate student who reads this to come to the picket tomorrow. Students who cannot be arrested or handle confrontation with the police will be protected.

Sincerely,
Students and Workers