Email from graduate student to UCSC Chancellor and Executive Vice Chancellor on the day Winter quarter grades are due.
To the administration,
Despite the world-sized cloud of severe uncertainty the Covid-19 global pandemic has thrown us into, I am certain nevertheless that I will not be submitting grades today. The conditions of precarity that many the world over are newly experiencing – fear of falling ill, fear of job loss and financial ruination, feelings of isolation and powerlessness – these were already more than familiar to us, driving us to begin our movement for a COLA in the first place. We needed one before, and now we need one more than ever.
I am speaking for myself. The 80+ graduate student teachers you sacrificed were striking for the same cause I am striking for, so I withhold grades in solidarity. As a movement we have always made decisions collectively, but acted autonomously. And so I speak autonomously. But in this time of imposed isolation, it has become starkly clear that we have never been autonomous; that we think and we act on each other’s behalf; that in all our particular acts we nurture and further a co-allegiant goal. We striking graduate students, ourselves, gathered the funds to lift out of total penury the 80+ students you terminated. In keeping, I sincerely hope you are staying safe and enjoying the company of your loved ones in this precarious time of isolation and apprehensiveness. In keeping, while you may thank this pandemic for having shut down campus in lieu of us shutting down campus, and while you may thank this pandemic for virally overtaking the news cycle in lieu of stories of your brutality and our victories, do not for one moment think or thank Covid-19 for shutting down the strike. It has only more keenly affirmed us of our foundational resolve, and more firmly reminded us of our need to organize.
So I repeat, I myself am withholding grades today. I’m uncertain what sort of retaliation you are planning towards myself and others like me; your recent action against 80+ graduate student workers was unconscionable then, whereas a similar retaliatory action now would likely place you in a circle of…well, I’ve been reading a lot of Dante. I would ask instead that you respond to us with a COLA, that you use your administrative power to act as an exemplary model of what community leaders can do for their members in times of crisis. I don’t care if that’s naive. We are a community in crisis, and you can do something about it. Do something about it.
This is not a plea, this is a suggestion; generosity looks better than Randian intransigence. Either way we’ll get our COLA.
Sincerely,
Jared Harvey
PhD Candidate in Literature