BY HANK REICHMAN
The situation at the University of California at Santa Cruz has escalated. On Friday the university administration announced that 54 graduate students who are withholding fall grades were fired from their spring appointments. This number may in fact be as high as 80, as some students did not get dismissal letters but instead received notice that they are no longer eligible for Spring positions. In response a faculty group endorsed a call by the dismissed strikers to cancel classes and instead attend a press conference. The group issued a powerful statement of their own. The group also solicited statements of support from individuals and organizations outside the UC. I was proud to submit the following statement on my own behalf and on behalf of the AAUP.
Support Statement from Hank Reichman, Second Vice-President, AAUP and Chair, AAUP Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure
Fellow teachers, I regret that I am not able at this time to convey to you in person the support of the American Association of University Professors for the courageous effort initiated by UCSC graduate student instructors to gain more equitable and fair cost-of-living compensation. But let me assure you that I and other leaders and members of the AAUP are here with you in spirit.
Last week the national Council of the AAUP released a statement expressing support for your struggle and for the various efforts now being undertaken by graduate student employees at other UC campuses. Our statement also deplored the use of riot police against peaceful picketers and condemned UC President Napolitano’s threat to fire those on strike. Now the university has followed through on her threat. This cannot stand.
Since at least 1998 the AAUP has affirmed the right of graduate student workers to organize and bargain collectively in both public and private institutions. We have long recognized that today’s graduate students are tomorrow’s professors. We have therefore welcomed graduate students as members and have defended — and will continue to defend — their academic freedom and other professional rights, including their right to reasonable compensation for their instructional and research employment.
Here in California graduate students and professors alike are stuck between, on one side, the long-term decline of state support for higher education and, on the other, the escalating cost of studying, working, and living in this state. Some have worried that the cost of meeting the graduate students’ demands will be too high and hence place yet another burden on UC’s already inadequate funding, with costs perhaps passed on to already indebted undergraduates. But it is time for those of us in higher education to unite and to demand what previous generations benefited from — genuine public funding of higher education so that, not only will it be available to all who are eligible, but that those instructors who provide it will have both the academic freedom and the essential economic security appropriate to productive professional life.
I therefore today call upon President Napolitano and the UC administration to cease efforts to fire striking employees and accept the offer of UAW Local 2865 to negotiate over cost of living issues, including efforts to ameliorate the cost of housing. And I call on both parties to seek a settlement that meaningfully addresses the great burden placed on graduate student workers and all low-wage employees by extraordinarily high housing costs. Should additional funding be essential to such a fair settlement, I call on the UC Regents and President Napolitano to join with faculty, students, labor unions, alumni and all interested citizens in demanding that the Legislature take action to dramatically and swiftly reverse the decline in public funding of higher education in California and begin a return to the now-all-but-abandoned promise of California’s Master Plan.
The presence of unions, or efforts to organize them, in my experience, is almost always a direct result of the presence of incapable administration or management (the university and private sector are utterly alike in this aspect). The UC System unfortunately installed a political operative as its effective chief executive (she even pressed her former federal assets including the FBI, to lobby for her appointment as a professor). She not only has no relevant experience in either capacity, but more critically, no daring stake in the ground concerning the System’s future. Concerning strike action, and related acts of defiance, that is probably not among the most effective means of pursuing or advancing special interests, or even simple economic ones. The AAUP in my view is otherwise fighting a losing battle, although I agree with Mr. Reichman that state funding is inexcusably absent or deficient in university working and other capital sources (although they are provided with a panoply of taxpayer subsidies). Readers may appreciate my viewpoint, below, in the press concerning the GSU strike and other activities, at the University of Chicago, also a particularly good example of under-performing administration (except in their own economics) and deficient leadership, resulting in labor industrial action. Thank you and Regards.
https://www.chicagomaroon.com/article/2019/6/7/university-goes-corporate/
https://www.chicagomaroon.com/article/2020/2/7/chicago-principles-dissent/
Spot on.
Once again, deplorable university executives acting like the turn-of-the century carpetbaggers they are. Workers (instructors) are not humans to them. They would step over your starved body and be angry you got in their way. Slave masters remain with us.
I was a TA at UCLA for the entire time I was a doctoral candidate; while there, I led a victorious TA revolt that led to a doubling of the TAs assigned to my department. Then, years later, I taught at UC, Santa Cruz, and supervised TAs.
Although I am almost always supportive of faculty labor actions, I still reserve the right to investigate and comment on each individual stoppage or strike on a case-by-case basis. For instance, the general (and mealy-mouthed) AAUP pledge to “affirm the right of graduate student workers to organize and bargain collectively in both public and private institutions” and their recognition that “today’s graduate students are tomorrow’s professors” do not address the specificity of the UC, Santa Cruz situation, or the allied campus work stoppages. No one is denying the TAs’ rights to organize and bargain; indeed, they are represented by a union, UAW, which negotiated an extant contract, which is being observed by UC.
Some facts that have not been emphasized in most media reports:
1. TAs are not allowed to work for more than 20 hours/week BY CALIFORNIA LAW AND REGENTS POLICY. (That was the basis of our victory at UCLA in 1980; we documented our work schedules with extensive time-motion studies and found that most were toiling 40-60 hours/week!.) It is half-time work and so grad students may find it difficult to manage a full-time life on half-time pay. But that’s what they signed up for: half-time pay.
2. That half-time salary comes to an AVERAGE of $2,434/month on a 9-month basis. (Some are paid more than others if they are Teaching ASSOCIATES or Teaching FELLOWS, as I was). That’s about $22,000 per year (assuming there’s no summer school teaching available) for half-time work, about $44,000 if it was a full-time gig. Many F/T college instructors and assistant professors do not make that much, even if they are fully credentialed.
3. According to CBS News, two UC, San Diego TAs, for instance, make $31,000 a year for that P/T job, AFTER TAXES.
4. TAs receive automatic tuition remission, which could be considered a boost to their salaries.
5. They are entitled to low-cost grad housing, even if they have families, usually on or near campus. In fact, there is a $2500 annual housing stipend, if you did not go on strike.
6. There are numerous other perks and privileges such as parking permits, free textbooks, numerous discounts, and the chance to practice at and ply one’s trade without a terminal degree.
7. They now want to supersede a lawfully negotiated labor contract, endorsed and signed by the UAW, which was probably not a great choice to represent TAs. (By the way, my prior union at CUNY went without a contract for 5-6 years and was completely ineffectual on a mass scale or on individual grievances.)
8. The extra salary requested, $1412/month, would represent a monthly raise of 58% over the current average.
9. One of the main rationales used is that no one should have to spend 50% of their income on rent; the most one should pay is 30%. That is an interesting GUIDELINE, but why should California taxpayers single out TAs for such largesse BUT NOT OTHER WORKERS, who may not have working spouses, trust funds, other sources of income, summer employment, etc.? (BTW, I spend about 50% of my income on rent in pricey New York City and receive no special aid for that.)
10. UC professors are not paid their own salaries if their TAs do not turn in grades, a fact I learned when one of my Santa Cruz TAs refused to do so because she was too busy preparing for her own comprehensive exams and a celebratory trip to Europe!
I sincerely hope that this matter gets resolved and that the TAs get SOMETHING out of this. However, wildcat strikes are anathema to the labor movement and are rarely justified, except in the case of corrupt or ineffectual unions.
i welcome the usual boos but instead of AUTOMATICALLY exercising your “knee-jerk” opinions, why not start by addressing the factual points made above?
Let me address some of your points that can actually be construed as “factual:”
“5. They are entitled to low-cost grad housing, even if they have families, usually on or near campus.”
Fact: at UCSC grad housing serves a mere 82 students (of more than 800 graduate students; you don’t even need to be a TA to qualify). And the rent for a 10-month lease is $1,211/month, which is a tad short of 50% of the $2,434/month average salary (https://housing.ucsc.edu/gradhousing/index.html)
“In fact, there is a $2500 annual housing stipend, if you did not go on strike.”
Fact: there is no such stipend. it was offered as an incentive to end the walkout, which amounted to an unfair labor practice, since any change in compensation needs to be bargained with the union. I’m surprised to see the self-proclaimed “Marxist” endorsing paying people to scab.
Fact: According to the strikers’ “Rent Burden Calculator” (https://payusmoreucsc.com/rent-burden-calculator/), median rent for a one-bedroom place in Santa Cruz is $2,242, which for a 12-month lease amounts to 123% of an average TA’s 9-month salary. A room in a two-bedroom place is $1,385 (76% of salary) and a room in a three-bedroom place is $1,154 (63% of salary).
For some background pieces on the California housing crisis go to https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/series/broken-dreams-inside-californias-housing-crisis
“7. They now want to supersede a lawfully negotiated labor contract, endorsed and signed by the UAW, which was probably not a great choice to represent TAs.”
I won’t argue that it was a good choice — and the Santa Cruz TAs voted overwhelmingly to reject the current contract — but the UAW has repeatedly called on the UC administration to reopen negotiations, which they have refused to do, attempting instead to violate the contract by “negotiating” with entities of their choice. That is the essence of the UAW’s unfair labor practice filing of last week. Read about it here: http://uaw2865.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/2865_ULP.pdf
“9. One of the main rationales used is that no one should have to spend 50% of their income on rent; the most one should pay is 30%. That is an interesting GUIDELINE, but why should California taxpayers single out TAs for such largesse BUT NOT OTHER WORKERS . . .”
This is not a factual assertion, but merits a response. Good question; indeed, all low-wage employees should receive assistance. Both last week’s AAUP statement and my own remarks today acknowledge that. However, the old “why should you be special?” question can be applied to any effort by a group to improve its situation. Why should I still have a pension (I do, and live on it) when most others don’t? Why should anyone have a union, when most workers don’t? By this logic the only job action worthy of support would be a general strike by all workers.
“10. UC professors are not paid their own salaries if their TAs do not turn in grades . . .”
Fact: If that was once the policy it is not true today. No professor at UCSC has had a single salary payment withheld since the TA’s began withholding grades. By contrast, UC faculty members have expressed considerable support for the strikers. For examples, see
Two resolutions by the Academic Council of the UC system Academic Senate:
https://senate.universityofcalifornia.edu/_files/reports/kkb-jn-council-statements-ucsc-graduate-student-strike-and-police-presence.pdf
A statement by the Council of UC Faculty Associations (CUCFA), an AAUP partner organization:
https://cucfa.org/2020/02/uc-cost-of-living-crisis/
Or see this petition, currently signed by 250 UCSC faculty members:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1XbWhae2OX7cJz25HOUXfWZgkOnuYowYviVLHMyuurwY/edit
And lastly there is the “open letter” from longstanding UCSC faculty member Ronny Lipschutz, retiring at the end of this year, which poignantly describes the current situation as the product of a long series of misguided administration initiatives:
http://utotherescue.blogspot.com/2020/02/an-open-letter-to-ucsc-administration.html
Sincere THANKS to Hank for adding to my post and filling in some of the blanks I was not privy to.
However, the MAIN point of my rant was that these assistantships are HALF-TIME positions (with perks). In my day, those unable to afford steep rents in UC cities found roommates, cut corners, clipped discount coupons, begged their parents for money, went on food stamps or even welfare, tapped into their trust fund (I’m only HALF joking here; I knew of 5-6 grad students who had such funds available), married well, and/or used all the other survival strategies that poor people throughout the centuries have always used to get by under capitalism (and even feudalism).
Even given some of Hank’s valuable updates, I still do not believe that ALL these TAs deserve a 58% salary increase. And, BTW, I do not care WHO has endorsed their cause or signed a petition. This Marxist makes his own independent judgments, based on the individual circumstances and issues, not on a knee-jerk reaction that automatically supports wildcat strikes and that, in this case, endangers undergraduate students, who may be even poorer than the TAs..
May I provide a brief comment: it is interesting to look at the cost of living index in and around universities, as at least partly caused by the university itself. The University of Chicago is an example. Its outstanding debt is now at around $4bn (and its credit rating recently downgraded, and therefore its cost of capital, increased) in large measure from real estate construction projects, including residential housing, some graduate. These new expensive “state-of-the-art” residential project finance costs and amortizations are passed on to students (some actually forced to live in them), and they also encourage surrounding real estate speculators, aggressive debt financing and price inflation. The University has also aggressively purchased other real estate including land, apartment buildings and even grocery stores, and in some ways create a monopoly pricing environment. So those increases in wages sought by the GSU, for example, simply go back into the pockets of the university, and reflect cost-of-living spirals that they were central in creating in the first place, in part by accessing commercial (versus public) finance and acting, actually, more like a for-profit commercial business, than a university. Given the makeup of most of today’s Trustees, Regents, Fellows and Chancellors, that should not be surprising. The students, and grad students, are effectively the forced, enslaved customers of the university administration’s private sector speculation and commercialism. This may go back to Mr. Reichman’s argument for more public financial support, but there are distortions like the ones I describe, that need to be tackled as well, on the cost side first. Price inflation is simply being passed on to students, and they have to seek more tuition finance, or in the case of graduate assistants, more disposable income. A wage-price freeze as an alternative (including for administration)?
Matt raises a good point re U. of Chicago, which might also apply at other institutions, most notably NYU (a real estate company with a side business in education, some say) and my own alma mater, Columbia, although the overall high cost of housing in Manhattan is, I suspect, a bigger factor there than in Hyde Park. But I don’t think this is the problem in Santa Cruz, which as one of the most poorly funded UC campuses has quite limited resources to even get into this shady real estate game. Here in Berkeley, however, it’s another matter. One source of the housing crisis here is that the university has significantly increased the number of students, including graduate students, without a comparable increase in housing stock, university-provided or private. To be sure, UCB is now building more housing–including, it is proposed, at the hitherto off-limits People’s Park site (about time, in my view)–but because of state rules it’s overwhelmingly being done through public-private partnerships, which, as UCB professor James Vernon pointed out, “may allow the campus to build without going in to further debt, but they do so at the expense of students.” Added Vernon, “All the evidence I have seen – and this is true of the new housing built locally for undergrads and grad students – is that they increase rents and thus the total cost of attendance, which in turn is a further deterrent to students from low-income households” (see https://ucbfa.org/2019/09/weekly-commentary-9-2-19-122-the-costs-of-public-private-partnerships/).
A brief follow up from previous: In addition to a university’s own impact on internal and local real estate market costs, there are ancillary effects that profoundly transform neighborhoods into investment speculation zones, and radically escalate prices. An example is the former president’s “Obama Presidential Center” in the UChicago boundary, which is acting, on the one hand as a magnet for development, but on the other, and to a larger extent, as a beacon for real estate speculators (see the article below in the UChicago paper).
These kinds of vanity projects–in this case also absorbing significant public park land–have little if anything to do with education, while also establishing an unfortunate ideological bias symbolism in what is already a heavily infiltrated university political culture.
https://www.chicagomaroon.com/article/2020/1/14/stop-displacement-woodlawn-neighbors/
Another very interesting development that is escalating costs, is the foreign student–especially Chinese–and an almost systematic responsive commercial clustering that surrounds the modern university, from Oxford, England, to Oxford, Mississippi, seeking student patrons who in relative terms have unprecedented disposable income (and family and corporate wealth effects). The area surrounding the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign for example, rivals high-end luxury, including Chinese students sporting full-length leather, Rolex watches and Lamborghinis (or Austin, Texas, Cambridge, Massachusetts, UAlabama, or of course Berkeley) who have invaded rural American campuses with a spending vengeance.
https://www.mlive.com/lansing-news/2014/04/michigan_state_chinese_student.html
https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20160607-a-lust-for-speed-young-rich-and-chinese-in-rural-america
In some respects, the modern university is no place for the poor, and has become almost a luxury good itself (e.g. UChicago’s #1-ranked $80K per year undergraduate price tag that, according to UChicago president Robert Zimmer, is perfectly aligned with the “upper middle class” who can “pay full-freight.”
Zimmer sounds more like a salesman for Gucci shoes, or Park Hyatt hotels perhaps? Is this the model of higher education advanced by Trustees from the modern corporation and Wall Street? The final corruption and perversion of the university?
https://www.chicagomaroon.com/article/2019/8/11/light-tuition-hike-university-needs-financial-tran/
Regards.