As UAW-2865 prepares to go into mediation of grievances for the unjust firings of dozens of graduate Teaching Assistants engaged in the 2019-2020 UCSC grading strike, we, members of the campus and wider community, urge that the UC reinstate all fired strikers for Fall 2020.

41 graduate workers remain fired and permanently banned from teaching for the duration of their graduate careers. Graduate students who rely on teaching assistantships for funding, particularly in the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, are being effectively pushed out of their programs, all in the midst of a global pandemic. These graduate students face not only losing their employment, their ability to remain in their degree programs, and the careers they’ve spent years working toward, but also losing their health insurance during the COVID-19 crisis, which literally puts their lives at risk. Additionally, many of these grads are international students, who, rather than celebrating the rescission of the recent ICE directive, remain in fear of de facto deportation; should they be unable to work, they lose tuition remissions, without which they cannot remain enrolled full-time and their visas become forfeit.

The continued blocking of these graduate students’ employment flies in the face of numerous calls from UC faculty, grads, and undergrads, and the wider community, for the administration to cease disciplinary actions and reinstate its student workers. As far back as February 20th, the UCSC Academic Senate passed a resolution that calls for “the withdrawal of sanctions against striking and arrested students”. The day before, the UC-wide Academic Council concluded a statement on the UCSC grad student strike with a resolution that “the University should refrain from punitive action against graduate students during the strike and from retaliation against them once the strike has been concluded.” The San Francisco Chapter of the National Lawyers’ Guild deemed the punishment illegal and urged the university to reinstate the fired students. Furthermore, these firings were the grounds for an ongoing boycott of the UC, signed by hundreds of academics across the world. To continue to block reinstatement, as these resolutions and statements point out, raises serious concerns not only for values of shared governance and academic freedom, but also students’ constitutionally protected rights.

We fear the increasingly authoritarian nature of the UC administration, demonstrated in their response to a just demand for a living wage, made by some of the university’s lowest-paid workers. The administration’s response has made clear that it prioritizes the silencing of dissent above actually meeting students’ needs. The university spent millions of dollars on a militarized police force and surveillance system that left graduates and undergraduates beaten, bloodied and traumatized. The estimated cost of just one day of police presence at the picket – $300,000 – was almost exactly the amount that was raised by the graduate students’ strike fund, which supported almost 80 fired students through spring and summer, and fed hundreds of people at the picket line for a month. Student conduct charges, doled out to both graduate and undergraduate students, have led to multi-year suspensions, with the most egregious punishments inflicted on  militant students of color. In addition, at least one tenured faculty member has had their communications with students surveilled and has been charged with violating the Faculty Code of Conduct for acting in solidarity with strikers, in a move which has frightening repercussions for academic freedom.

As members of the UC community, we remain acutely aware of the effects that the university’s authoritarian discipline has had on our campus. We object to the firing of these student workers from their spring appointments and are dismayed to learn that these 41 students have been rendered ineligible for teaching appointments in the upcoming academic year. To impose further punishment on students after the cessation of the labor strike is an exorbitant and unnecessary step that serves only to eliminate valued colleagues and students from our respective departments. We call on Chancellor Larive and the UC administration to swiftly reinstate these students so that they may return to work and continue progress towards their PhDs.


You can view the list of signatories here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17gapsZtLY4ulERNJuLW-FCqnV-0yiMORDmTqCJSDDuw/edit?usp=sharing