Graduate Students are on strike at UC Santa Cruz, demanding a cost-of-living adjustment to meet cost-of-living increases in a city that has outstripped wage increases by a factor of 5. The Santa Cruz Faculty Association and Berkeley Faculty Association support the student’s demand for a COLA, and the Davis Faculty Association wishes to add our support as well.
Graduate students play a crucial role in the economy of the public university. As a source of cheap instructional labor, they allow UC to offer undergraduates face-to-face teaching on a mass scale and their devotion is essential to maintaining a high-quality undergraduate education. Their labor similarly subsidizes the research that attracts federal funds and corporate sponsorship, while their academic excellence makes the university attractive to faculty. Their own scholarly achievements, of course, contribute to the reputation of the university, and the diversity of UC’s graduate students plays a vital role in increasing the diversity of faculty nationally.
Thus, we support the graduate students at UC Santa Cruz, who are striking in order to bring attention to the crisis they face. They are threatening to withhold grades – their only power in a lopsided struggle. If the University of California wants to retain its standing as an outstanding public university, it ought to treasure its graduate students, and pay them a living wage.