“A good teacher can teach regardless of how many students there are in the classroom: 10, 20, 30, etc., it shouldn’t matter.” -UC Administrator, September 16 bargaining session  

Our experience over the past few years has led us to recognize the damaging effects of increased classroom sizes.  For those of us taking classes, it has been increasingly difficult to receive the needed support and mentorship and support from both our faculty and teaching assistants.  For those of us teaching, it has been increasingly difficult to provide a quality education for our students, as last year’s maximum classroom size becomes this year’s minimum classroom size.  Our day-to-day experience, supported by a body of scholarly research, demonstrates that smaller class sizes are a crucial building block of a quality educational experience. Rising class sizes, combined with higher tuition for undergraduates and stagnating pay for Academic Student Employees (ASEs), threatens to degrade the UC’s primary academic mission. We demand that the UC Office of the President make a commitment to improve the ratio of students to Academic Student Employees.

We call on Janet Napolitano, the new President of the University of California system, along with the rest of the University of California administration to make a public statement of support for the demand of GSI’s, readers, and tutors to reduce student/ASE ratios across the board, and to give ASE’s a greater voice in setting those policies. Our goal is to maintain and improve the quality and accessibility of education that the public has come to associate with the University of California.