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Chronicle of Higher Education, FEBRUARY 18, 2020 PREMIUM
Grad Students Win Faculty Support as Strike Over Stipends Continues at
Santa Cruz
By Bennett Leckrone
Last week police officers dragged protesters, who were calling for
higher pay for graduate-student teaching assistants at the U. of
California at Santa Cruz, out of an intersection. Now faculty members
across the country have pledged support for striking TAs.
Nearly 2,000 faculty members at institutions across the United States
have signed a pledge of solidarity with graduate-student teaching
assistants at the University of California at Santa Cruz whose strike to
demand higher pay is entering its second week.
At the heart of the strike are complaints about the students’ monthly
stipends, which they say don’t cover or barely cover the cost of rent in
Santa Cruz, a coastal city about 75 miles south of San Francisco. The
protesters are calling for $1,412 to be added to the $2,200 stipends.
“In centering the cost of living, the strike has directly challenged and
brought renewed attention to the historical and ongoing exploitation of
grad-student instructors and researchers, as well as staff, service
workers, and undergraduate workers within higher education,” the pledge
reads.
The faculty signatories also pledged to not hold or attend events at
Santa Cruz, and vowed to extend that boycott to other University of
California campuses if their graduate-student instructors strike too.
Veronica Hamilton, a Ph.D. student in psychology and teaching assistant
at Santa Cruz, told The Chronicle that faculty support across the
country shows that housing affordability is a nationwide issue. She said
Santa Cruz is at its “breaking point.”
More than a dozen protesters were arrested last week for blocking an
intersection near the Santa Cruz campus, according to The Washington Post.
Some faculty members canceled events in solidarity with the striking
students. Margaret Price, an associate professor of English at Ohio
State University, tweeted that she would be dropping a series of invited
workshops this month at Santa Cruz.
The pledge of solidarity followed threats by the Santa Cruz
administration to fire graduate-student instructors and teaching
assistants who withheld grades as part of the strike. Roughly 12,000
grades were missing at the beginning of the university’s current term,
according to a news release from the striking students.
The University of California system’s president, Janet Napolitano,
blasted the wildcat strike — a strike conducted outside existing
collective-bargaining structures — in an open letter. She said the
strike violated the system’s collective-bargaining agreement, which
guarantees graduate-student TAs benefits like a waiver of tuition, a
$300 remission of campus fees, 3-percent annual wage increases, and a
child-care subsidy.
“Holding undergraduate grades hostage and refusing to carry out
contracted teaching responsibilities is the wrong way to go,” Napolitano
wrote. “Therefore, participation in the wildcat strike will have
consequences, up to and including the termination of existing employment
at the university.”
Firing teaching assistants, Hamilton noted, would also hurt
undergraduate education. She said the university’s threat to fire
teaching assistants was “problematic,” given that 230 TAs withheld grades.
As of Tuesday afternoon, the Santa Cruz campus’s website featured a
banner telling users to “stay informed during today’s unsanctioned labor
strike” and linking to a page of university updates on the walkout. The
most recent update was a February 14 message in which an administrator
noted that the university had made an “overture” to protesters that
included what it called new support packages and need-based housing
supplements for students.
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