Dear COLA community,
TL;DR:
By any assessment, we are winning this struggle. Graduate students will meet on Tuesday evening, after the sixth day of picketing, for a General Assembly to discuss our response to the latest threats from UCOP (details forthcoming). If you are a graduate student worker withholding grades from Fall 2019, do not submit before this meeting. More than ever, we need to move collectively. First step: organize within your department. See you at the picket on Tuesday, from 7:30am onwards.
Yesterday evening, our General Assembly concluded with a unanimous decision by strikers and picketers: the strike continues on Tuesday.
Later that same evening, we received our first communication from UC President Janet Napolitano, with threats to our current and future employment if fall grades are not submitted by next Friday, February 21.
This is a decisive moment in our struggle. As long as graduate students continue to move together, we will undermine these threats, revealing them as a last-ditch scare tactic, a desperate bluff. These threats are credible only if the UC leadership is prepared to sink UCSC and risk indelible consequences to the university at a statewide level. It does not take much to imagine how a mass firing of rent-burdened graduate students on this campus would ignite protest and boycott across the UC system.
If hundreds of graduate student workers are terminated from employment, whole departments will be unable to offer courses next quarter, dozens of international graduate students will effectively face deportation, UCSC rankings will nosedive, huge sources of funding will be jeopardized, political organizing at other campuses will intensify, and UCSC may become subject to academic boycott (over 1,000 non-UCSC scholars and educators have already committed to a pledge of solidarity and non-cooperation with UCSC). In short, such a move would profoundly impoverish graduate and undergraduate education and research at UCSC, as well as its collaborations and partnerships with other research institutions.
So far, over 200 graduate students have received warning letters from the university for continuing to withhold at least 71% of their Fall 2019 grades beyond February 2nd. Since the start of our full teaching strike, our five-day picket at the base of campus has drawn several hundred graduate students, undergraduates, faculty, lecturers, and staff. The sheer size of the crowd repeatedly filled the university lawn and spilled into the Bay and High intersection, effectively shutting down the major entrance to campus every single day this week. The midweek police presence — excessive in their arms and in their brutality — was visibly scaled down after the masses at the intersection showed that they would not be arrested and beaten into submission.
Let’s assess the concrete effects of these actions. Collective direct action forced the first round of concessions from the UCSC administration, even if these early concessions (as any student of labor history could have predicted) were grossly inadequate to our demands. Collective direct action has sent administrators scrambling as the university reels from the effects of 12,000 withheld grades: The mobile and arbitrary deadlines for grades—December 18th, February 2nd, and now February 21st—bears witness to the fact that the UCSC administration is unable to compensate for or offset our actions. Collective direct action has revealed the administration’s alleged inability to meet with strikers was in fact and remains a politically motivated refusal. Collective direct action has forced the university to show its hand by unveiling the biggest stick it has at its disposal: Janet Napolitano herself stepping forward from behind the curtain to threaten mass firings. Every move made by UC administrators up to this point has been one failed attempt after another to dilute and diminish the collective power we continue to build.
If we set ourselves the unpleasant task of thinking from the perspective of the UC President, we can conceive of two reasons why the highest level of administration has made a calculated, strategic decision to unveil its biggest threat. The hyperbole of the administration’s current threat of retaliation teaches us not only that ‘they mean business’ but also, and more crucially, that business is their highest priority. While they may be indifferent to our rent burdens, they cannot remain indifferent to the disruptive effects of our withheld labor (and especially of the withheld grades) on the university’s operations. If our mid-January strike poll was any indication, the number of graduate students in favor of withholding Winter 2020 grades (715) holds promise for a disruption on an even greater order of magnitude. Our readiness to escalate is profoundly unsettling for UC leadership.
But perhaps for them what is even more disconcerting is the writing that’s now undeniably on the wall: the strike is spreading. Kletzer, Larive, Napolitano—the string-pullers behind the riot helmets, batons, and their indiscriminate use—may have been unwilling to administer beatings themselves, but at the drop of a hat they blew an estimated $1.5 million this week on cops from across the state, so that strikers found themselves facing off against police from UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UC San Francisco, UC Santa Barbara, and even UC Irvine, not to mention the notorious Alameda County Sheriff’s Office. While the UC system mobilizes its statewide penal resources in the hopes of overwhelming what they see as a local problem, we are strengthened by the proliferation of COLA movements organized by rank and file graduate student workers on at least five other UC campuses. UC Santa Barbara graduate workers will circulate their own strike poll in a matter of days. UC Davis organizers have come to our picket line day after day this week to express solidarity and share reports of the rapid growth of their own COLA campaign. Storms are brewing in mass meetings and rallies at UC San Diego, UCLA, and UC Berkeley. Campus and statewide administrators cannot afford to wait us out, because neither we nor any other COLA movement in the UC show signs of slowing down. The threat of mass firings represents a last, desperate hope that they can crush this movement once and for all.
In short, the appearance of the university’s most forceful threat of retaliation reveals its position of weakness, while nonetheless pushing the COLA movement to a critical and decisive juncture. In this next week more than any other, graduate students need to organize and act collectively.
This is a call to organize within your department and with comrades in departments across the academic divisions over the next seven days.
This is a call to show up at the picket line from 7:30am on Tuesday morning, to make our collective presence felt at the base of campus.
This is a call to a General Assembly on Tuesday evening, where graduate students will meet to discuss Napolitano’s threats of mass termination, and to decide how to proceed. Many of us are feeling the real weight of these threats, and will each assess considerations of our own as the February 21st grade submission deadline approaches. As we’ve done all along, and as today’s mass email threads have shown, our militant struggle is anchored by a fierce spirit of mutual aid. Our collectivity is our most precious resource and moving together will give us the best chance we have at keeping each other safe. Watch your inbox for more details on the General Assembly.
Happy Valentine’s Day. Spread the strike. DO NOT SUBMIT.
Love,
Graduate Students Association
UAW 2865 Santa Cruz
Graduate Students Wildcat Strikers