#cola4all

[exigencelost]

Strikers at UC Santa Cruz and UC Santa Barbara keep taking over dining halls and opening them to the public so that food insecure folks can eat for free and the universities keep...calling the cops and throwing away all the food...hey UC Regents this is a bad look

[anonymous-robot]

[fightmeyeats]

Rethinking “Inclusive Excellence”: A Critical University Studies Approach to COVID-19, the UC COLA movement, and Inequality in the University

If there’s one thing we know about power, it’s that it is most effective when it is obscured; we do not question what we cannot see, what we take for natural. This is something which the UC system depends on, positioning itself as a space of accessible education and “inclusive excellence” while refusing to engage with the way that the very infrastructure maintaining the UC is inherently antithetical to these goals. Wildcat strikers and organizers for the COLA4ALL movement currently sweeping through the UC system have done much to excavate these oppressive systems and contradictions foundational to the UC through the fight for a COLA (Cost of Living Adjustment) and the simultaneous refusal to disconnect this specific goal from the need to address the broader violence of the institution.

For those unfamiliar, the movement initially started at UC Santa Cruz. UCSC graduate students, like nearly all UC graduate students, are rent burdened. During the Fall 2019 quarter, graduate student instructors began a wildcat grade strike, calling attention to the contradiction between the university’s dependence on graduate student labor to function and the university’s refusal to provide graduate students with a reasonable standard of living through a refusal to submit grades. The movement quickly spread, and now spans all 10 UC campuses (many of which are on a full or partial strike). COLA4ALL’s overall vision, taken from the inter-campus website StrikeUniversity.org, centers free and accessible public education for everyone (without student debt), critical thinking and skills that are not bound to the imperatives of the market, replacing competitive models with communities of care and shared struggle, brilliance that refuses hierarchical models of “experts,” and the decolonization, democratization, queering, and abolishing of the university.

The UC has responded to COLA organizers with violence which is deeply revealing of the anti-black, carceral power foundational to the entire system. Militarized police presence has been prevalent at COLA picket lines, walk outs, and other organizing events. During a COLA rally on February 20, 2020 at UC Irvine campus police officer Trish Harding tackled and arrested a Black alumna who was not even involved with COLA and simply on campus trying to pick up her transcripts (please sign the UCI Black Student Union’s petition demanding accountability). UC-wide, many students have been harassed, assaulted, and arrested for daring to tell administration that they cannot survive under “business as usual”.

Recently a student in one of my classes asked the professor about their stance on UC graduate students organizing for a COLA; the professor said that it was up to us as their students, asking if we would be willing to have our grades withheld. Framing the issue as one of undergraduate willingness to go without grades fundamentally misrepresents what is going on. None of us want our grades withheld. Many of us cannot afford to have our grades withheld. But the consequences of having our grades withheld only exist within the context of institutional intransigence, not graduate students going on a wildcat strike.

It is imperative that graduate students be paid fairly and the university reevaluates the oppressive model it is currently operating under.

One of the things that stands out to me in the way that COLA4ALL is discussed is the emphasis put on the fact that the strike is illegal because UAW 2865, the graduate student union, has not voted to strike. As those of us who have critically engaged with criminality and the construction of “illegal”, part of the discourse surrounding illegality is an undermining of the value and contributions of those who are positioned as “illegal.” This is something which is, of course, multiply impactful to those who are already criminalized, as we can see clearly in police response to Black alumni existence on campus. The law is so often unjust and frequently sides with those who hold power and money. Why is it illegal for workers to organize outside of a singular union? Why is it legal for the UC system to put union busting measures into their contracts? Why do we talk about the wildcat strikes in terms of legality instead of engaging critically with the University as an institution?

The extraction of wealth from students is central to the current operation of the UC. This is evident in the high cost of tuition and the rate of student debt, and further heightened through the multitude of ways in which the UC system profits off of its students; while we can think about this in the insane cost of parking, the use of work-study to maintain a labor force of minimum wage workers, the denial of sick pay to undergraduate student workers, the tokenization and marketing of students, and the obviously inflated prices at on-campus stores like The Hill or Zot-n-Go, no where is it more apparent than in housing. Focusing on graduate students, since COLA4ALL is currently focused on improving pay and labor conditions for graduate students, not only are the majority of students extremely rent burdened, but many are living in “subsidized” campus housing, paying large portions of their paychecks back to the very institution already underpaying them and exploiting their labor. It very much feels like company scrip.

Under the social distancing/remote learning model being deployed in response to COVID-19 many of these already untenable circumstances are only being heightened. Housing insecurity, a major problem for many undergraduate and graduate students alike, is significantly increased through the rise in un-and-under-employment resulting from shelter-in-place closures; meanwhile, the UC system is encouraging students to leave campus while doing nothing to assist those who live in off-campus housing who are now not only rent burdened and frequently living in highly crowded living quarters during a pandemic, but given no option to break their lease without penalty and are still required to somehow continue paying rent despite changes in their ability to work.

Similarly, while some campus employees are now able to telecommute to work the administration obviously has no intention of allowing those working in food services, maintenance, custodial services, etc to “conference in”, leaving them at continued risk while prioritizing the safety of those in higher wage positions. Additionally, graduate students and professors without access to the technology needed to teach from their homes are being encouraged to continue to come to campus and teach from classroom spaces. What this means is that those with the resources (stable housing, internet access, a computer with a webcam and mic) can work safely from home, while the most marginalized (those most in need of a COLA) will have to risk exposure.

Furthermore, many telecommuting workers are being told they must sign a contract which includes the provision that employees are “responsible for establishing and maintaining a safe, ergonomically sound, and secure work environment. The employee will establish a functional workspace, including appropriate computer and communications equipment within their telecommuting worksite.” Forcing workers to sign this contract creates a situation where the UC is not obligated to ensure students/workers have access to either the tools they need to work remotely or paid leave, and further establishes that the UC is not responsible for work-related damage to the health and personal equipment of workers. It also makes it possible for the UC to fire those who are not able to independently establish and maintain said work environment.

The level of exploitation and discriminatory violence on this campus and in the UC system is unethical and untenable. The fact that a billion dollar institution would rather negatively impact graduate and undergraduate students, would rather pay for a militarized police presence at the picket line, would rather heighten the risk to their most marginalized students and employees, would rather arrest a Black alumna than pay graduate student workers a living wage speaks for itself. This is not about whether undergraduate students can afford to go without grades, it is about refusing a system where the interests of graduate student workers and the interests of undergraduate students are falsely constructed as oppositional.

The stakes are too high not to speak candidly. I hope you will consider openly standing in solidarity with COLA4ALL. 

[exigencelost]

Today is the start of UC Berkeley's big spring fundraising push. If you ore anyone you know is considering donating to UCB Berkeley, please donate to this instead! Your impact on students’ access to quality education will be exponentially greater!

 (copied from Cal COLA: Pay Us More UCB's twitter): Comrades! We ask you for your contributions to the Berkeley COLA Strike Fund. As we begin our strike on Monday, it's essential that we build as robust a strike fund as possible; as a wildcat we don't have any other strike fund but our own! THANK YOU

https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-fund-for-striking-workers-at-ucb

[exigencelost]

Fuckin hell. UC Berkeley did their 24-hour fundraising push for their annual “Big Give” yesterday and they made. Ten million dollars. $10,130,341 in 24 hours. Pay your fucking workers, UCB.

To donate to support the UCB grad student strikers click here! A wildcat strike has no strike fund except what people donate.

[exigencelost]

From the @payusmoreucb on twitter:  Fight back against UC Berkeley's "Big Give". Donate instead to the Cal COLA Wildcat Strike fund! http://tinyurl.com/UCBStrikeFund Read our full statement on The Big Give: https://payusmoreucb.com/support/statement-on-the-big-give… Image text available under read-more and at second link above. 

[Image text:

CalCOLA Statement on UC Berkeley “Big Give”, Launch of Strike Fund

Each year, UC Berkeley celebrates its increasing privatization and commodification of education by soliciting private donations for a 24-hour period they call the “Big Give”. During this time, University administration uses student advocacy as a marketing tool while they rake in millions of dollars contingent upon the demands of wealthy donors. This year, instead of resigning ourselves to this twisted, undemocratic, and neoliberalized vision of “public” education, we are asking you to fight back against this system and contribute to the CalCOLA strike fund. These funds will be allocated for legal fees, docked pay for strikers, food and organizing supplies for actions, to promote equity, and ensure accessibility at our events, assemblies, and meetings.

Recent decades have seen a shift in the funding and operation of our “public” universities. The State of California has decreased its contributions to the UC from $23,000 per student to $8,000 over the last four decades. The UC is now funded more by student tuition and private donors than by public funds. We see the University prioritize its relationship to private interests over listening to its students, its workers, and the public. This system perpetuates the racial and economic injustices of the past and present into the future as it gives those in privileged groups the ability to determine who is included and excluded from our public institutions.

We cannot accept this. We recognize these structural problems are protected and reinforced by a toxic culture in the UC administration. We cite the California State Auditor’s assessment of the Office of the President:

“Our report concludes that the Office of the President has amassed substantial reserve funds, used misleading budgeting practices, provided its employees with generous salaries and atypical benefits, and failed to satisfactorily justify its spending on systemwide initiatives. [...] Correspondence between the Office of the President and the campuses shows that the Office of the President inappropriately reviewed campuses’ survey responses, which resulted in campuses making changes to those responses prior to submitting them to us...”

...the Office of the President’s actions during this audit have caused us to question whether it will make a genuine effort to change.”

(auditor.ca.gov/pdfs/reports/2016-130.pdf)

The poisonous combination of these structural failures and the administration’s mismanagement and lack of ethics have left graduate students in the UC system no choice but to act. On Monday, March 16, graduate students at UC Berkeley will go on strike to demand the University provide a Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA) that will bring graduate students out of rent burden. Beyond the well-being of current graduate students, this demand is required to ensure higher education is accessible and equitable, and truly serves as a public good. Graduate students across the UC are putting their bodies upon the gears and the wheels of the administration in order to stop this dishonorable higher education system. We are asking you to support us in our collective struggle.

Please donate to COLA organizer strike funds listed below, and from Wednesday March 11 at 9pm to Thursday March 12 at 9pm, and promote the hashtags #CalBigGive, #cola4all, and #colastrike on social media to show the administration and the public that you stand with our COLA strikers. We have immediate need for funding to ensure universal access at COLA events and meetings, and to provide security for our most vulnerable strikers.

Current Strike Funds for Wildcat Strikers:

UC Berkeley: https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-fund-for-striking-workers-at-ucb UC Santa Cruz: https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-fund-for-striking-workers-at-ucsc UC Santa Barbara: https://www.gofundme.com/f/ucsb-cola-campaign

In solidarity, CalCOLA

“There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part. You can't even passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it — that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!”

-Mario Savio, 2 Dec 1964, Sproul Plaza

/end Image text]

[voicesfromthepicket]

Abhimanyu, Political Science PhD Student, UC Irvine

Abhimanyu (Center) pictured with colleagues.

"Non-Resident Supplementary Tuition Fees are a discriminatory mechanism. They suppress the equitable recruitment and retention of international students who are seeking admission to and currently enrolled in grad programs within the UC system. In this powerful moment of collective organizing, I hope my colleagues remain in solidarity with us by voting no [on the current contract, which does not include provisions for NSRT fee remission] and continue to strike to secure a fair contract that secures protections for everyone; international students, disabled students, parents, and BIPOC students."

[voicesfromthepicket]

Brett, PhD Student in Neuroscience, UC Berkeley

"It has been a neverending struggle to balance having children while working at the UC. Not only are my children viewed as a liability by my department, PI, and the university, but there is no assistance programs or healthcare coverage under the current contract. My wife and daughter have needed critical medical and dental care multiple times during my time at the UC. Not only has the university been uncaring in its response but they have actively shifted, at least in my experience, to avoid admitting parents at flagship campuses like Berkeley. My family has suffered greatly due to the university's focus on cutting labor costs and when presented with a chance to reverse their wrongs, they have doubled down. I have had to pay large sums out of pocket for childcare and having to watch our children has limited the employment opportunities of my wife and I due to the UC's heartless policies. I will be forced to leave my graduate program if I cannot get health insurance for my family."