UC Santa Cruz Shutdown: Why Classes Are Cancelled

Nearly 100 of our colleagues have been fired. 18 of our friends and supporters have been arrested, many brutalized by police. The same precarious workers that were driven to demand a COLA have been rendered even more precarious—facing further food and housing insecurity, potential loss of legal status, healthcare, and childcare subsidies. The student conduct process has been mobilized to suppress dissent and monitor political activity in relation to employment decisions. Administration has tried to drive wedges between everyone—undergrads and grads, workers and student workers, faculty and advisees, divisions and departments.

The administration’s response has been to minimize the significance of the crisis from the beginning, to bemoan the interruptions caused by the strike, and to deflect blame for these consequences onto the strikers. Their repeated calls for returning back to business as usual at all costs (modified slightly with new advisory councils, studies, “short and long term solutions”) is also their justification for refusing to acknowledge the strike directly. UCOP states unequivocally that the wildcat strike undermines the basis on which they manage the university’s labor. And they are set on stamping it out and reducing it to an aberration. The firing 10% of the TA workforce cannot pass for normal; neither should it be normalized. It is an outrageous and cruel overreach by a profit-hungry administration.

This is why business cannot carry on as usual, and why students, faculty, and workers across University of California campuses statewide are taking action today. The strike began because there was a crisis that demanded to be acknowledged, that had been swept under the rug for too long. Every administrative response since, from indifference to tear gas to termination letters, has only further illustrated the depth and breadth of the crisis perpetuated every day by this university system. Classes are cancelled today because things must change if anything is to carry on at all.

In solidarity with students, workers, faculty, and staff,

Striking Graduate Students