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COLA & Corona
March 10, 2020
Hi everyone,
As you know, UCSC has just followed Berkeley in moving all of its classes online, starting tomorrow. I believe that this development of events fundamentally alters the strategic situation.
One problem that people sometimes have is that they get in the habit of thinking that the recent past is a good guide to the near future. Perhaps some of this is due to hardwired epistemic biases of the human creature, but much of it is social: we are under immense pressure to make investments of our time, money, and passion into the world under the assumption that things are more or less going to continue the way have been recently. This leave us vulnerable, both as individuals and as a society, to systemic risk.
What I would like to suggest to you is that the University system as we know it does not have the inertia of history on its side, despite whatever appearance our adversaries in the institution might wish to hold out to us. It is a very fragile institution, and it's an institution which has not existed very long, and therefore does not have the sheer historical momentum which we might be fooled into imagining that it does. The American University system was really created, in the form that we are familiar with it, in the wake of WW2. It went through an expansionary phase that lasted until, roughly speaking, the 80s, when the aftermath of the world monetary crisis of the 1970s, the Reagan revolution, and the end of the Cold War pushed the structure of US political economy -- and the University along with it -- into a new phase of what we could call "financialized contraction." That process has been going on up until the present moment. I think it brings some important perspective to realize that the second, contractionary era has lasted almost as long as the golden era of expansion that we remember, sort of foggily, as "how the university should be working if it weren't in crisis."
One salient feature of the contractionary phase, for our purposes, is the structural overproduction of PhDs alongside a shrinking market for "good jobs." This is part of what encourages grad students in general to be so vicious to one another: we know, even if we don't often like to talk about it, that we have been forced structurally to play a negative sum game with one another. And this situation is reflected in the affects that we bear towards one another, and it's the most powerful weapon the administration has to keep us in submission and to get us to allow ourselves to be slowly starved of resources. Why? Because if you believe that you stand a shot of winning the upside that you are here chasing (one of this dwindling supply of "good jobs") you might believe that your expected value for defecting from solidarity with your grad student colleagues is rather high: if you keep your head down, and don't strike for dignity and a living wage, and don't challenge anyone's orthodoxy, you will be the lucky one.
I, personally, have always thought this was a bad trade, and that the people making it were deluding themselves, but after Corona the value of this option is crashing. If you think that sucking up and playing nice with the bosses will get you a nice career in the University system, you are making a really, really bad bet.
Consider things, for a moment, from the perspective of admin. Why is a Corona shutdown so convenient for them? Well, first of all, it's the right thing to do on its own merits, purely from an epidemiological point of view, so they get to look prudent. Second, it allows them to break the picket, and deny us the chokepoint of the road, and prevent any new picket from being set up. Third, it allows them to intervene into the testing structure, to weaken our grasp on the chokepoint of grading.
But more than this, it gives them the chance to conduct a real, live-fire experiment in doing what they wanted to do anyway: move some vast chunk of all instruction online, permanently. The "state of exception" will stretch on into a new state of "the way things just are." And it won't look good for the wages or working conditions of the instructional staff. If you think things are grim now, just wait.
What I'm saying is that the value of your PhD just crashed. Hard. Along with the price of oil, the stock market, the yield curve, and possibly, soon, the global financial system. The economy has been on central bank life support for 12 years. This has made everything very fragile, and it has made everything very austere. The fallout of 2008 is why things are so bad for us, here now at Santa Cruz - there is a direct historical causation. And if it's happening again, and if the patient is already so, so weak...
Don't count on the possibility that what you think of as "the University" will survive the shock. I'm not saying I can predict the future, but I am urging you to think about this very seriously and price "real historical Events" into the model that guides your actions as we move forward to exam week and the Spring.
Love and Solidarity
Colin Drumm
From Joe Klein
March 9, 2020
Dear Colleagues,
I wanted to write again with some updates from the ongoing strike.
For the 20th day graduate students, undergraduates, faculty, staff, lecturers, and others rallied in support of a COLA. Today marks the 1 month anniversary of the full teaching strike that began in February. This week the picket line is coming to campus, moving each day to a new location as we continue to organize, build community, and build power. For the first day of week 10, in solidarity with the UCSC Undocu Collective, strikers took over the Academic Resource Center (ARC). Energy was high all day as strikers continued to organize and plan for the ongoing strike. As of today administration continues to ignore our demands–and so the strike continues! Tomorrow the picket will move to a sit-in at the Earth and Marine Sciences Building, beginning at 9am.
One month ago, in response to months of UCSC administration ignoring Undocumented students’ demands for greater support, including for a dedicated space to serve the undocumented community, members of the Undocu Collective occupied and took over an office in the ARC to demand that the space become a new headquarters for Undocumented Student Services. Rather than respond to the demands and concerns of the collective, UCSC administration retaliated against these students by issuing code of conduct violation summons for some of those who participated in the protest, and banned these students from the ARC–which should be a community space open to all students. These students who are working tirelessly to support themselves and their community are threatened with suspension or expulsion by a university that brags about its diversity while doing nothing to support its struggling student body. We know this pattern well: students exercise their right to make a claim on the university for the resources they need, and are met with retaliation. Their fight is our fight.
In stunning news from our statewide union UAW 2865, leadership today announced that graduate students across the UC system have voted overwhelmingly (97% of respondents) to ratify union demands to reopen contract negotiations and to fight for COLA across the state. Today leadership began circulating a pledge to gauge support for moving to an Unfair Labor Practice (ULP Strike); this would mean that all graduate students across the state would be legally protected to go on a full strike. You can fill out the pledge here, and encourage your colleagues to do so as soon as possible. If enough students sign the pledge this week, a vote to authorize the strike could come as soon as next week.
It should go without saying that this move by our statewide union would not have been possible were it not for the courage of UCSC strikers and grade with holders to risk their own livelihoods to fight for all of us graduate students, and for the months of organizing work by our comrades and colleagues, both graduate and undergraduate, who helped this movement build power to fight for a better university that actually works for its students and workers. UCSC organizers today issued a statement on the relationship between this movement and the ULP strike, noting that only the wildcats on each campus will decide when to end the strike once the demand for a COLA has been met. To avoid this strike, university administration is once again asked to come to the negotiating table, including by California Assemblymember Mark Stone and 11 other representatives from across the state in an open letter.
Meanwhile, across the state the wildcat strike is spreading faster than ever. UC Berkeley today announced that it will join UCSC and UC Santa Barbara on full teaching strike effective next Monday. UC Davis and UC San Diego continue their own grading strike, while UCLA is expected to announce its own strike soon. Following similar actions at UC Santa Cruz led by COLA4ALL and The People’s Coalition, today organizers at UC Santa Barbara liberated a dining hall on their campus to provide free meals to all students. These actions not only feed hungry students, but help us to imagine what might be possible in a university that works for its most vulnerable.
Some of today’s action items:
- Join strikers at Earth and Marine Sciences, beginning tomorrow at 7:30am. Please bring friends! You can also bring supplies: coffee, hand sanitizer, and healthy food are always in demand.
- Teach the strike: Guide available here
- 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 demanding that they come to the table to work with graduate students and to rescind the decision to fire nearly 100 graduate student workers. Guides and samples available here.
- 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. For reference see the Faculty Organizing Group letter to Gavin Newsom.
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 tomorrow!
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