The University of California at Santa Cruz followed through with its threat to fire striking graduate instructors, university officials said on Friday.
Teaching assistants, who were withholding grades until the university met their demands for higher pay to cover rising housing costs, had been warned to stop their strike by Thursday or face dismissal.
“Unfortunately, despite our best efforts to find an amenable resolution, 54 teaching assistants have continued to withhold fall grade information,” Lori G. Kletzer, the interim UCSC campus provost and executive vice chancellor, said in a February 28 letter to the campus. “As a result, we have been left with no choice but to take an action that we had truly and deeply hoped to avoid. As I previously shared, students who fail to meet their contractual obligations by withholding fall grade information will not receive spring-quarter appointments, or if they have received them they will be dismissed from their spring-quarter appointments.”
The protesters’ Twitter account posted what appeared to be an individual letter from the administration to a grad student who had been dismissed.
The strike centers on the monthly stipends paid to graduate students, which they say isn’t enough to cover the cost of living in Santa Cruz. They’ve asked for that pay to be increased $1,412 to allow them to continue living in the coastal city about 75 miles south of San Francisco.
The university insisted it was dismissing the striking graduate students to protect undergraduate education, but those on strike say the dismissals could have a devastating impact on the campus.
“It would involve pretty much destroying major departments in this university,” said Sohum Banerjea, a computer-science Ph.D. student at UCSC who is withholding grades, “because there are definitely departments of the university that have close to 100-percent participation.”
Support for the strike spread in recent weeks to other campuses of the University of California system. In addition, more than 2,500 faculty members across the country signed a pledge of solidarity with the striking graduate students at Santa Cruz, vowing not to hold or attend events on the UC campuses where graduate-student instructors are striking.
The American Association of University Professors has also thrown its support behind the students, condemning the university’s response to protests and blasting the low pay for students.
“One-bedroom apartments in the Santa Cruz area rent for an average of $2,600 a month, but graduate students only earn about $2,400,” the letter reads. “The university needs to recognize that this is an unsustainable situation.”
The University of California system’s president, Janet Napolitano, previously criticized the wildcat strike. The strike violated the system’s collective-bargaining agreement, she said, 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 in a February 14 letter. “Therefore, participation in the wildcat strike will have consequences, up to and including the termination of existing employment at the university.”
Protests followed Napolitano to Washington, D.C., where she spoke on Thursday about the importance of democratic participation at a free-speech conference put on by the university system’s National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement. Student demonstrators walked back and forth in the front of the room at the system’s Washington Center, holding signs in front of the president.
The free-speech center’s executive director, Michelle N. Deutchman, stepped up to the lectern. She assured the students their protest was welcome, but asked them to move to the side so the audience could see the speakers. The students complied but later in the day began interrupting the speakers.
During a panel discussion about protest and disruption on campus, a member of the audience asked the students to be quiet. Some who had flown from across the country to hear experts on free speech and civic engagement said afterward that they had been bothered by the outbursts, even if they sympathized with the message. Others felt the students’ tactics had been justified, and where better than at a free-speech conference to push their points?
The students complained that they were being silenced in the last place they’d expect that. “People are shushing us at a free-speech conference,” Ashleigh Medina, a fourth-year student at Santa Cruz who is attending the system’s Washington Center, said during a break in the conference. “We just want answers.”
The center organizers, who had decided they wanted to avoid having to escort anyone out of the room or threaten anyone with disciplinary sanctions, called an unplanned coffee break to let tempers cool.
Although the disruptions clearly rattled some of the speakers, “We couldn’t have asked for a better, more realistic illustration of the challenges that are happening, day in and day out, on campuses across the country,” Deutchman said afterward. “We were grateful the protesters were willing to show the speakers respect, and we hope they appreciated the latitude we gave them” to make their points.
Banerjea, the striking computer-science student, said he’d encountered undergraduates on the strike’s picket lines, and added that he had offered to release grades for individual students who needed them.
UCSC issued an initial ultimatum to the instructors in mid-February: Submit grades from the fall quarter by February 21 or lose appointments for the coming spring quarter.
Banerjea, who is from Australia, said he had reacted to the ultimatums with “utter disbelief and disgust,” adding that he risks deportation if he loses his job.
“Those who do not submit full grade information by February 21 will not receive spring-quarter appointments or will be dismissed from their spring-quarter appointments,” Kletzer said in a letter two weeks ago.
After students held out, administrators extended the deadline to February 27, according to a message provided to The Chronicle. Officials also made some changes in their offered compromise to graduate students, such as removing a need-based requirement for a $2,500 housing stipend so that more students could qualify.
The striking group, “Pay Us More UCSC,” vowed to continue the strike in the wake of the dismissals.
