To: Lori Kletzer and Quentin Williams
We believe, as you do, that statistics can give us an idea of the impact of TA labor on campus. Your communication begins with a triumphant figure: eighty percent of grades have been submitted. That looks like an awful lot. While we appreciate you running the numbers for us, we wonder if you could have drawn more heavily on your background as a social scientist in order to resist the urge to present misleading figures. We’d assume, for example, that your figure of 80% includes the substantial volume of classes for which there are no TAs at all, and which the grading strike obviously would not have affected.
Allow us to present a counter-figure. We’ve heard that 8,938 undergraduate students received a January 3 email from academic advising regarding missing grades. That’s a little over half of the entire undergraduate population at UCSC. This means that approximately 52% of undergraduate students are missing one or more of their Fall 2019 grades. We achieved this after only a week of organizing, and simply by withholding one hour of grade-submitting labor. We have no illusions about our collective power to disrupt the daily operations of the university and we will continue to use it, to expand it, and to escalate our action until our demand for a COLA is met.
Your email communication contains three tactical moves. The statement that it’s impossible to meet with us to resolve the strike is a deflection of your responsibility to pay us enough to live here. As we have reiterated in our previous correspondence, there is nothing within that the law that prevents you from meeting with us. Your appeal that undergraduate students with missing grades request them from their TAs is an attempt to divide and conquer by pitting undergraduate students against graduate students. And finally, your references to “potential misconduct” and “disciplinary action” is an intimidation via threat of retaliation for striking.
TL;DR We are not intimidated.
We repeat again our response to your threats of disciplinary action. Any offer of a Cost of Living Adjustment to graduate students must include “no retaliation” and “no student conduct charges” clauses. We will not be intimidated into passivity in the face of our intolerable living conditions.
We have seen overwhelming support for our cause from undergraduate students in the past month. Part of this support lies in a recognition of the tireless efforts by many graduate students to ensure minimal adverse impacts of the strike on the most vulnerable sections of the undergraduate population. These students know that their constantly rising tuition dollars are not flowing into the paychecks of the university’s workers. They know that their struggles and our struggles are the same.
There is one simple way for your apparent concern for undergraduate academic well-being to harmonize with your apparent concern for graduate student cost of living: give us a COLA. Until then, we’ll be saying to undergraduates that they should indeed be urgently demanding their grades — but from you, not from us.
In today’s email, you suggest that the strike action itself prevents the administration from sharing “plans developed over the past quarter to better support graduate students.” Given the administration’s record of total inaction in the face of demands for a graduate student COLA, we find this hard to believe. If you have proposals to alleviate problems of graduate student cost of living, let’s hear them. As we have stated in previous emails (click here to see just one of them), there are many options for resolving the strike.
Whatever we do next will be decided collectively at the upcoming graduate student General Assembly, this Thursday (1/9) at the Media Theater at 7:15 pm.
Graduate students will also discuss our next steps, and the success of our action, at the GSA/UAW meeting tomorrow (1/7) at the Graduate Student Commons at 5:00 pm.
As you know, and as the rest of the campus community knows, hundreds of graduate students collectively decided to go on strike, and graduate students will collectively decide what happens next. No COLA? No grades!
Signed,
GSA Executive Board
UAW 2865, Santa Cruz