Dear Stephen, UCSC Students,
All the best today on your sick day!
You are standing up for all of us – COLA won’t stay only in SC or SB.
THANK YOU for the courage and determination.
Your UC San Diego fellow graduate students wish you a speedy recovery. When you secure a COLA, we invite those of you still recovering to a sanatorium in San Diego where the weather is slightly more favorable. We can try to arrange that you stay at the ocean-view villa of our Chancellor – the Audrey Geisel University House – for a holistic mind, body, and soul experience.
I write as a UC graduate student, and on behalf of the UC/UCSD Student Housing Association founded last year. Your campaign and our campaign for affordable housing share some similarities. Although right now solely focused on UCSD due to the logistics of trying to graduate, the goal of our site is to serve as a housing trends and analysisresource for all UCs students. (Info/feedback/help is welcome.) Last May the idea struck me that we could turn UC/UCSD grad student housing into HUD Section 8 housing… We’d certainly qualify for it.
Amidst consistent and constant student outcry, school UCSD admins have been raising campus rent at a pace to catch up with the UC Santa Cruz discrepancy. And it has succeeded! A 2-bd apt in the brand new Nuevo West campus grad housing is $1929/month. To live there with my family I would be paying 77% of my UCSD income to rent. HDH is coming up with a number of creative tricks to make this luxuriously-priced tiny-box university housing appealing. Rent itself is also raised in quite creative and unprecedented ways down here – read Background 1 below.
I am sure top admin is itself not bashful to negotiate for a COLA supplement to their already appealing packages worth 10, 20, 30 grad student salaries each. Ah yes, of course – our work is not as important as the top admins’ work… until courageous students like you decide to not grade. Then our work becomes the top admins’ work. Thus although a COLA may be a reasonable request per our top admins’ experience, its consequences may be something absolutely scary, potentially defying the laws of physics and chemistry:=> UC schools will have to slow down the pace at which they are creating and promoting VCs and AVCs in the future. In this sense some of us know they will create a disruption in the very periodic table of elements. Quite frightening indeed.Here is a NY Times article about a potential real reason why college costs so much, and why there is such an opposition to the COLA movement.
Sincerely,
Petia Y. M.-J.
PhD candidate in Physics
Student Housing Association founder
UC San Diego
Background 1: I served on the UCSD grad housing committee ARCHAC last year. As at UCSC, what used to be the ‘refuge’ of UCSD grad housing is no more and campus rent has been outpacing the growth of our salaries quite steadily. For a unique flavor, the UCSD Housing Dept. – HDH – was quite actively engaged in misleading budgeting practices with us as a committee, and called in the UCSD CFO (!) to negotiate with us – on student rent. For these reasons, which at the time were becoming evident one by one through events resembling a surreal movie, in March 2019 we recommended a campus housing Rent Freeze to UCSD/HDH for the upcoming year. HDH did not go for it. But the effective rent which they implemented for all of grad housing in ’19-’20 was ~ $360,000 lower than the original proposal. We negotiated a deal without even trying while standing up for the more simplistic ideals of “truth” and “transparency”. Soon thereafter, idealistic/unrealistic UCSD students such as myself continued to “demand administration integrity and accountability”. We eventually came back down to planet “UC Reality”, which apparently resembled that of our Housing Department’s, as this CA State Auditor report finds. (No student knows what the HDH reserves actually are.)
Background 2: Here in San Diego it was not pretty for some of us, the more outspoken ones. Surprisingly, our own GSA removed me from the ARCHAC committee for making too much noise with the admin and for bringing the committee to unprecedented cohesion around the rent freeze idea. They’re now onboard though, with housing resolutions, MOUs, and I am glad to see that the UCSD GSA execs support the COLA move. Here in San Diego grad student reps on committees are supposed to go for the admin ideas, and not oppose them. Not sure how you do things in SC. Then our Associate Vice Chancellor of Student Life called my academic advisor out of the blue this past fall to tell her she was “concerned about me”, meaning she was concerned I was spending quite a bit of my own mind-my-own-business time to do this analysis and advocate for affordable housing. When admin is “concerned” and warns you, as the UCOP Labor Relations office has done with you, then at least you know there is a heartbeat! All the best out there helping that admin heartbeat align a little better with your own, and subsequently with all of our own as UC grads.
Background 3: Our UCSD admin has recently asked us to approve another fee on ourselves – a CAPS (counseling and psychological services) fee. That’s because, you know, as salaries lag rent increases, and there are more financial and mental burdens, we tend to not feel as well and have to go see CAPS. The school doesn’t want a bunch of students who don’t feel well walking on campus without proper care, so in effect they are asking us to take care of ourselves, by taxing ourselves. It is plain to see how the vicious circle completes itself, but admin prefers to think of it as a never-ending line they call “the mental health crisis” (since they are not proposing that there is an end to this newly-propose fee to cover the crisis…). Interestingly, the CAPS fee proposal includes a COLA clause, for CAPS employees.