Documentation of UCSC Graduate Students’ Attempts to Engage Administration Through Official Channels
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Open in new tab December 12, 2019
The purpose of this document is to detail the recent history of graduate student attempts to engage both UC and UCSC administrators through official channels, in an effort to address graduate student costs of living amidst skyrocketing costs of housing and the unavailability of housing itself for UCSC graduate students. We maintain that responses by administrators have been utterly inadequate toward providing any meaningful remedy for these issues of graduate student precariousness. Even when events and reports have been initiated by administrators themselves (detailed in Sections V and VI) to hear the concerns of graduate students and undergrads, adequate support toward supporting graduate student overall well-being has not materialized. Thus, with growing feelings of collective anger, 385 graduate students voted yes in a straw poll on December 6, 2019 (80% of all graduate students who responded to the poll) to go on a wildcat strike in order to win a COLA (cost of living adjustment). Hundreds of graduate students decided to go on this wildcat strike, using the leverage that we have, to force administrators to act beyond paying facile lip-service to our concerns because we strongly believe that all other options, including advocating through official channels of communication, have been exhausted.