To: EVC Galloway and Chancellor Blumenthal
Justice for UCSC Labor Activists
The UCSC Lecturers and Librarians join our voices with our concerned colleagues of the Academic Senate in regards to administrative and police response to the labor action and student protest on April 2 and 3.
We are alarmed by the shift in the campus climate, and hope that you might at this point still be able to exercise positive leadership that helps to build a common discourse based on the principles of healthy and transparent debate, negotiation, and compromise. While recent positive budget news has sparked new optimism and a sense of purposeful coming together to envision how we might rebuild ourselves, it also opens a new sense of deep unmet need. As the events April 2 and 3 clearly revealed, there remain pressing problems on this campus that, if not honestly and openly addressed, can only produce larger ripple effects of ill will, mistrust, and frustration, deteriorating the relationships we so strongly wish to fortify.
First and foremost, we ask that you act swiftly on behalf of the students who were arrested on the days in question, to get their legal and campus judicial charges dropped, and ensure their university standing is not adversely affected. It is clear from the video footage from April 2, and from numerous first-hand accounts on both days, that protesters were attempting to abide by police orders to maintain an orderly picket, and that police acted arbitrarily and provocatively, thereby escalating the conflict and resulting in 22 arrests. The majority of these arrests were of undergraduate students acting in solidarity as they perceived injustice unfold; they were not a planned element of a labor action, nor were these arrested persons directly or individually responsible for the labor action that resulted in campus slow-down.
Secondly, now and moving forward, we ask that you recognize that graduate student employees, like other low-paid workers at UCSC, are living unsustainably. UCSC, like our sister campuses in the UC system—and universities across the nation—remains caught in an unfeasible economic and educational bind, and this situation is stretching the lowest-paid workers and the highest-paying students the most. Graduate student TA’s find themselves at the intersection of all the contradictions, and are being asked to make all the sacrifices at once. Moreover, UCSC is distinctive in that it is located in one of the most unaffordable locations in the country. It is simply illogical to imagine that these issues would not emerge as urgent demands, and it is visibly unreasonable to react with force to a legal strike called by a union that has gone more than six months without a contract. It appears from the type of extreme reaction and accompanying discourse we witnessed this month that you may be under considerable pressure to suppress student protest and organized labor actions at UCSC. Such pressure, expressed almost as an overwhelming mantle of fear, suggests there is no margin at all for debate, for solving our shared problems, or for thought.
Yet apart from the precise bargaining points or history involved in the UAW’s struggle for a contract, everyone on campus knows that the student:faculty (and student:TA) ratio has spun out of control, and that class sizes are too big; it affects all of us, and hinders what we all work so hard for on a daily basis. As Lecturers and Librarians, we work closely with students affected by impacted majors, large lecture classes and large sections, and inadequate faculty mentoring; our students are propelled forward with insufficient opportunities for skill-building in research, writing, communication, close analysis, and applied problem-solving, due to minimal feedback and minimal opportunities to participate critically in small groups. From our vantage point, although—as per our contracts—we worked extra hard throughout the strike to meet our first-week teaching responsibilities, we understand the graduate TAs’ work stoppage as a substantive contribution to a campus discussion we all need to engage in. If we fail to pursue this conversational opening, and choose instead to cast it as somehow in opposition to our common goals, we are not only missing an opportunity, but disingenuously attempting to maintain a daily and weekly status quo that is unsustainable, a brutal speed-up of our work lives, our research, and our educational projects, which can only result in diminished returns.
Ultimately, we write to ask you to consider carefully your actions and your narrative. We understand that you, too, find yourselves enmeshed in this same moment of economic and educational compression, and that this scenario is not the one you would have wished for UC Santa Cruz when you began your careers here. Thus far, you have distinguished yourselves as leaders capable of building optimism and programming, and of approaching the future with a problem-solving attitude. We know this could be done differently, and we ask that you do so.
...
We are alarmed by the shift in the campus climate, and hope that you might at this point still be able to exercise positive leadership that helps to build a common discourse based on the principles of healthy and transparent debate, negotiation, and compromise. While recent positive budget news has sparked new optimism and a sense of purposeful coming together to envision how we might rebuild ourselves, it also opens a new sense of deep unmet need. As the events April 2 and 3 clearly revealed, there remain pressing problems on this campus that, if not honestly and openly addressed, can only produce larger ripple effects of ill will, mistrust, and frustration, deteriorating the relationships we so strongly wish to fortify.
First and foremost, we ask that you act swiftly on behalf of the students who were arrested on the days in question, to get their legal and campus judicial charges dropped, and ensure their university standing is not adversely affected. It is clear from the video footage from April 2, and from numerous first-hand accounts on both days, that protesters were attempting to abide by police orders to maintain an orderly picket, and that police acted arbitrarily and provocatively, thereby escalating the conflict and resulting in 22 arrests. The majority of these arrests were of undergraduate students acting in solidarity as they perceived injustice unfold; they were not a planned element of a labor action, nor were these arrested persons directly or individually responsible for the labor action that resulted in campus slow-down.
Secondly, now and moving forward, we ask that you recognize that graduate student employees, like other low-paid workers at UCSC, are living unsustainably. UCSC, like our sister campuses in the UC system—and universities across the nation—remains caught in an unfeasible economic and educational bind, and this situation is stretching the lowest-paid workers and the highest-paying students the most. Graduate student TA’s find themselves at the intersection of all the contradictions, and are being asked to make all the sacrifices at once. Moreover, UCSC is distinctive in that it is located in one of the most unaffordable locations in the country. It is simply illogical to imagine that these issues would not emerge as urgent demands, and it is visibly unreasonable to react with force to a legal strike called by a union that has gone more than six months without a contract. It appears from the type of extreme reaction and accompanying discourse we witnessed this month that you may be under considerable pressure to suppress student protest and organized labor actions at UCSC. Such pressure, expressed almost as an overwhelming mantle of fear, suggests there is no margin at all for debate, for solving our shared problems, or for thought.
Yet apart from the precise bargaining points or history involved in the UAW’s struggle for a contract, everyone on campus knows that the student:faculty (and student:TA) ratio has spun out of control, and that class sizes are too big; it affects all of us, and hinders what we all work so hard for on a daily basis. As Lecturers and Librarians, we work closely with students affected by impacted majors, large lecture classes and large sections, and inadequate faculty mentoring; our students are propelled forward with insufficient opportunities for skill-building in research, writing, communication, close analysis, and applied problem-solving, due to minimal feedback and minimal opportunities to participate critically in small groups. From our vantage point, although—as per our contracts—we worked extra hard throughout the strike to meet our first-week teaching responsibilities, we understand the graduate TAs’ work stoppage as a substantive contribution to a campus discussion we all need to engage in. If we fail to pursue this conversational opening, and choose instead to cast it as somehow in opposition to our common goals, we are not only missing an opportunity, but disingenuously attempting to maintain a daily and weekly status quo that is unsustainable, a brutal speed-up of our work lives, our research, and our educational projects, which can only result in diminished returns.
Ultimately, we write to ask you to consider carefully your actions and your narrative. We understand that you, too, find yourselves enmeshed in this same moment of economic and educational compression, and that this scenario is not the one you would have wished for UC Santa Cruz when you began your careers here. Thus far, you have distinguished yourselves as leaders capable of building optimism and programming, and of approaching the future with a problem-solving attitude. We know this could be done differently, and we ask that you do so.
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Why is this important?
Twenty-two UCSC students were arrested and are facing civil and University judicial charges for peacefully demonstrating in solidarity with the UAW Teaching Assistant strike on April 2nd and 3rd. The University administration must stop this crackdown on labor activism and drop these charges.