From Joe Klein
March 6, 2020
Dear Colleagues,
I wanted to write again with some updates from the ongoing strike.
For the 19th day hundreds of graduate students, undergraduates, faculty, staff, lecturers rallied at the base of campus, and for the 19th day metro bus drivers refused to cross the picket line in solidarity with striking graduate students. Energy was high all morning, despite aggressive UCSC police intimidation of strikers peacefully picketing (including of yours truly). In one of the most powerful moments of the entire strike to date, late in the morning a group of latinx femme strikers and allies briefly took to the street of the main entrance to perform “El Violador En Tu Camino,” a performance piece born out of feminist struggle in Chile and across the world. Throughout the day strikers continued to rally, march, hold teach-ins, and organize, while celebrating their victories.
According to administration’s own estimates, as of today, UCSC has now spent at at least $5.7 million on the police presence at the picket line: about 1/4 of the funds needed for an annual COLA for all UCSC graduate students. Meanwhile university administration remains silent–and so the strike continues!
UCSC has sparked an unprecedented mass movement. UCLA and UC Berkeley are poised to join UCSC and UC Santa Barbara and begin a full teaching strike next week, while UC San Diego today voted to join UC Davis in a grading strike to withhold winter grades, while UC Irvine and UC Riverside continue to organize toward a full strike. Meanwhile over 3,000 academics around the world are preparing an academic boycott of the UC system in solidarity with striking graduate students. This strike fights for the future of higher education and this fight is going global.
Today strikers are celebrating the end of 4 weeks of sustained actions and strike, including the victory of spreading this movement to every campus in the UC system to demand that graduate students be paid enough to live where they work. Come Monday and our 1 month anniversary on full strike, strikers will be advancing even further into campus to continue to remind the administration who runs this campus. To prevent further actions, graduates continue to invite administration to the table to negotiate an end to the strike. Meanwhile, all members of our campus community are invited and encouraged to join the strike in any way they are able: students, workers, lecturers, and faculty united cannot be stopped. Together we are creating the university that we need.
Some of today’s action items:
- Join strikers on Monday morning. Please bring friends! You can also bring supplies: sunscreen, coffee, hand sanitizer, healthy food, and large containers of drinking water are always in demand.
- Donate to the strike fund to support striking grads and to provide material relief to our fired grads: gofundme.com/f/support-fund-for-striking-workers-at-ucsc Please share the strike fund with your networks!
- Faculty are encouraged to discuss moving to a full teaching strike.
- Cancel your classes and sections, and do not ask your students to cross the picket line, especially this coming Monday and Tuesday.
- Lecturers should consider holding their classes at the picket.
- Push back the dates of large assignments, or as some instructors have done, cancel them.
- Write to the administration asking them to come to the table to work with graduate students and to rescind the decision to fire nearly 100 graduate student workers.
- Call Gavin Newsom’s office to complain about the firing of graduate students, the extreme rent burden of graduate students, and to ask that $310 million be allocated for a UC wide COLA. Click here for contact information.
As always, thank you so so much for your support, and extra special thanks to our undergraduates and to the faculty who have been coming out to support strikers–we are so grateful.
See you Monday!