From gsa_pres in response to UCSC’s announcement to suspend in-person classes in response to coronavirus:
COVID-19 is being used by university administration to assume emergency powers that can profoundly impact the way that academic work is done. There have been years of resistance to the move to online education. We see the university’s turn to emergency measures as a rehearsal for a permanent shift to large scale online instruction, accelerating the creep of online teaching with little oversight, with no bargaining, and with little to no transparency. As UCSC looks for ways to operate in the Spring after losing around 80 graduate student employees, the turn to online learning would set an alarming precedent for how a university can function without its workers.
At UC San Diego, administration has already made the cynical move of asking instructors to ensure that a gradebook on Canvas remains updated, on the pretext that course staff may become ill and be unable to process students’ grades. Graduate student-workers’ greatest power is to withhold our labor; actions like this undercut our ability to withhold our labor. Grads will continue to withhold Winter grades, and as such must resist pressure from above to put grading information online.
This has immediate consequences for faculty and undergraduates. This was a top-down decision made without input from instructional faculty, who must have autonomy over pedagogical decisions. In the immediate context, faculty face overwork in redesigning classes on the fly. For undergraduates, this is not the education that they paid for. Online teaching is a poor substitute for learning in a classroom, and has been shown to diminish the value of a university education.
As both the strike and the threat of coronavirus spread across the other UC campuses, gatherings in large groups will become more difficult as our movement grows. On our campus, this will mean that rather than focusing on maintaining a physical picket, our attention will turn to the digital picket.
The digital picket means:
- Don’t submit.
- Keep grades off Canvas.
- Don’t hold classes online.
- Undergraduates should submit their assignments directly to their TAs.