Dear Chancellor Larive and Campus Provost/EVC Kletzer,
Throughout this campaign, graduate students have given testimony of their experiences trying to survive in Santa Cruz on the inadequate wages and funding we receive from this institution.
These stories aren’t novel or surprising to most of us. And they shouldn’t be surprising to administration, who have completed multiple assessments of graduate student wellbeing. Administrators have ignored and dismissed their own findings, which demonstrate that it is impossible to survive on our stipends in Santa Cruz. We will not be ignored. We will not be dismissed. We will not wait. We will not submit.
We want to give voice to these anonymous accounts to illustrate to administration and faculty how dire our situation really is. We also hope that by sharing these unedited stories, graduate students will realize that they are not alone in these experiences:
“I was unhoused for a year. A FULL YEAR. During that year, I lived in an office on campus, slept on the floor, showered at the gym, and cooked everything I ate in a microwave. To be honest, it was better condition-wise than the apartment where I had a threatening landlord/slumlord where the appliances leaked and broke and the plumbing backed up on the regular, or the place where the ceiling caved in and I had to vacate for 3 months of the year so boardwalk workers could sleep in my apartment on bunk-beds. During that year, around 8 grad students in my department slept in offices for different reasons: living too far to drive home so late at night after teaching; needing to move out because one’s roommate was engaged in illegal activity that possibly endangered the student’s ability to remain in the country; eviction; being “between places;” generally being too exhausted to go home and lacking the funds to call a car so late at night after a rigorous schedule or to afford a car or parking permit, and finding oneself stranded on campus… This is abjection, pure and simple.
So many employers understand that pumping resources into people helps them to produce better work while also living a better quality of life. I will likely never fully recover from the trauma of going to sleep scared I would be found out every night for a year. Gone are the days when we can rely upon the receipt of a cushy professorship replete with a comprehensive retirement package. Our “salad days” are not a temporary state of bohemian bliss that will give way to the promised American Dream that you can fetishize. This boils down to basic human rights and justice, and the UC should be not only ashamed but also afraid of what it has created.”
