Grad Students and UC-Santa Cruz Chancellor Say Strike Will Have Lasting Impact on Higher Ed. They Disagree on What That Will Be.

What the wildcat strike at the University of California at Santa Cruz means for higher education depends on where you sit.

Late last week the university notified 54 graduate teaching assistants that they would be fired from their spring appointments because of their refusal to submit undergraduate grades and end their unauthorized strike. An additional 30 or so grad students don’t yet have an assistantship lined up but have been told they will be prevented from teaching in the spring. The students are seeking a $1,412 monthly cost-of-living raise, an amount they say is necessary to live in Santa Cruz.

On Thursday the activists and their allies shut down the campus by blocking the two main entrances, causing classes to be canceled. A giant banner that read “Eat the Regents” hung on a bridge over one of the picket sites. The activists say other such shutdowns are not out of the question.

On Monday night, after their first full business day staring dismissal in the face, a small group of Ph.D. students here gathered at a local bar to speak with a Chronicle reporter about their impending firings and their futures.

Three were the kinds of students colleges say they want to serve: Nathan Xavier Osorio, the son of a Mexican grocer and Nicaraguan nurse. Brenda Arjona, a single mother who dropped out of community college but eventually graduated from the University of California at Berkeley with a 3.95 GPA. Priscilla Martinez, who said she knows the value of education because her parents were migrant farmworkers before they went to college. Joining them was Tony Boardman, who is from England and might need to leave the country.

For the students, their strike is not just about personal economic survival but also about who gets access to higher education. Martinez is one of only four Latina/o Ph.D. students in the history department. Three of them face dismissal. To Martinez, it’s telling that people who look like her and come from marginalized backgrounds have felt compelled to strike. Underrepresented minority students earn doctorates at dismal rates, and the financial stresses of graduate education are often an insurmountable barrier. Colleges, she said, must pay more attention to basic needs if they are truly committed to diversity.

“I’m in my seventh year. I’m on my way out. I’m ready to go on the job market,” said Martinez, who wants an academic job. “But I couldn’t stand by and let this happen to future generations of people of color who are going into my department. There’s no way they’re going to be able to live here.”

In an interview in her office the next day, the Santa Cruz chancellor, Cynthia K. Larive, said she sympathized with the graduate students’ concerns. But to her the strike is about whether graduate students have the right to go rogue and hold undergraduate education hostage. The strikers, she said, are violating the existing collective-bargaining agreement with the United Auto Workers, which represents graduate teaching and research assistants across the University of California system.

Larive rejected the characterization in a tweet by Sen. Bernie Sanders, who wrote on February 28 that the dismissal notice was “disgraceful” and demanded that Santa Cruz stop union busting and negotiate in good faith.

“It was an unfortunate and inaccurate framing of the situation,” Larive said. “The students are in the middle of a four-year contract with two years left to go. The contract has a no-strike clause. As a person and as a campus that supports labor and supports collective bargaining, negotiating with students in a wildcat strike is not a course of action that we can take.”

Digging In Their Heels

It’s unclear how all this will end. Both sides seem ready to die on this hill.

It’s easy to see the high stakes for the University of California. A cost-of-living increase of the size the Santa Cruz students want isn’t cheap. And calls for cost-of-living raises are now pouring in from other University of California campuses. The entire system has more than 28,000 Ph.D. students. Administrators on those campuses are no more eager than Larive is to be seen as acquiescing to the demands of unauthorized student strikers.

For the graduate students, it’s an all-or-nothing bet, a conviction to press forward in spite of the consequences. Desperation-fueled courage, perhaps. None of the four students The Chronicle spoke with indicated being deterred by the firings. A spokesman said he wasn’t sure if any of the strikers had turned in grades and stopped striking since the university sent the dismissal notices.

Boardman, the international student, sees the strike as partly symbolic. “The grade is not the end product of the university,” he said. “The end product is the process of teaching and learning, which the grade can actually detract from.”

A Ph.D. student in literature, Boardman doesn’t expect to become a professor at the end of his doctoral journey. With a rough academic job market, especially in the humanities and social sciences, a tenure-track job is increasingly out of reach. That makes the need to shore up support in doctoral programs more urgent, he said.

“We’re fighting for going through graduate school to be a valid and well-supported thing in itself,” he said.

Arjona, a third-year Ph.D. student in anthropology, doesn’t regret striking. But she does regret going to graduate school in the first place. After dropping out of Long Beach City College, and escaping an abusive relationship, she went back to college and thrived at Berkeley. But now she often thinks she and her son, who’s in fifth grade, would have been better off if she had continued to work in retail jobs.

“My son has watched me have panic and anxiety attacks,” Arjona said. “It’s not just the stresses of graduate school. It’s this underlying financial burden you can’t escape. I would never recommend any single parent put themselves through this. It’s not a way to live.”

Loans to Pay the Bills

The stipend many graduate teaching assistants receive comes out to about $2,100 a month after taxes. An on-campus room costs about $1,200, with shared areas like a kitchen. Student family housing costs about $1,800 a month.

Larive, the chancellor, said the campus is working to build more affordable student housing, and is already providing more support for graduate students. She noted the housing stipend, and a recent decision to guarantee five years of financial packages to doctoral students. The strikers say those efforts fall far short.

The chancellor’s primary focus appears to be ending the strike. Departments are scrambling to figure out how to adapt to the reduced work force. At least one department, sociology, may reduce the number of undergraduate seats.

“I just hate to think about the students’ being held up from timely graduation either because their grades haven’t been submitted or perhaps because they’re going to have difficulty getting into the courses they need for spring,” Larive said. “Ethically, the grades, the papers, those belong to the undergraduate students who did the work.”

Not all graduate students have stories about struggling to pay their way through their doctoral programs. One way to avoid precarious living conditions is to take on student debt. That’s what many are doing. Nationwide, federal student-loan debt has exploded an astonishing sixfold over the last 15 years, to more than $1.5 trillion, surpassing all other forms of debt except for mortgages. Education now is considered more a private benefit than a public good.

Osorio knows that firsthand. Now a second-year Ph.D. student in literature, he previously studied at Columbia University, where he earned a master’s degree and met his partner. She’s an adjunct at California State University-Monterey Bay. They’re both in the humanities, with bleak prospects for paying off their roughly $250,000 in student-loan debt.

The value of an education was drilled into him as a child. Education, he said, was like religion. It was a ticket to financial security — but now it might stand in his way. He’s striking partly because he doesn’t want to add to his mountain of debt. “To feel those doors closing in on me,” he said, his voice trailing off.

“We might lose public education as I had grown up imagining it,” he said. “If we don’t reimagine the university, then it will no longer be for people like me, people who use education as a pathway out of poverty.”