WFHB Bloomington Community Radio
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Over the past decade, academic labor has become increasingly precarious, with tenure track positions diminishing rapidly and the pool of adjunct lecturers growing intensely. Compensation for graduate students who double as Teaching Assistants (or TAs) has dropped significantly or stagnated while tuition and additional fees, as well as general class sizes and teaching responsibilities, have climbed steadily.
The graduate students at the Santa Cruz campus of the University of California are keenly aware of this predicament: A crisis in housing has driven them into an extreme rent burden, demanding upwards of 70% of their already meager paychecks to cover monthly rent. With Santa Cruz being one of the most expensive cities in the United States to live in and with wages for graduate workers at the university falling well below the average cost of living in the city, UCSC students are often foregoing basic necessities just to get by. To remedy this and to fight for a life of fairness and basic dignity, UCSC graduate students went on strike, demanding a cost of living adjustment (COLA) for all students at the university.
Beginning in December of last year as a small-scale grading strike, where graduate students and TAs refused to submit grades for the fall quarter, the UC Santa Cruz Wildcat Strike has since developed into a state-wide initiative to demand a cost of living adjustment for all students and workers across the UC system. On February 10, graduate students at UCSC voted to extend the strike from a grading strike to a full-scale teaching strike, refusing their work as TAs and grading assistants until the UC administration, headed by Janet Napolitano (former Secretary of Homeland Security), makes good on their demands. The administration thus far has been silent and, instead, has made active attempts to break the strike, employing methods of intimidation, arresting several nonviolent strikers, and most recently firing at least 80 graduate students from their teaching positions, throwing them further into financial burden.
But look closer…which graduate students are struggling the most? It’s not those who study war, or chemistry, or politics, or business, or biology…rather it’s the students who investigate and critique those other methods of structuring our society.
Part One
Guest Yulia Gilichinskaya is a PhD candidate in the Film and Digital Media Department at UC Santa Cruz. She’s one of the nearly 80 students who were fired from their teaching positions on February 22 by the UC administration simply for seeking a path for negotiation. Gilichinskay is deeply involved in the wildcat strike and has been an effective organizer with the grad strikers.
Part Two
Guest Michael Burawoy is a professor of sociology at the University of California Berkeley and Secretary of the Berkeley Faculty Association, the so-called “conscience of the faculty senate” which is involved in joint governance with the college administration. Burawoy has appeared on Interchange in the past to discuss the business ideology at large in the Public University.
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Become Unreasonable: For wildcat strikers at the University of California in Santa Cruz, there’s no turning back. (Commune Magazine)
The UCSC Strike Is Working
These Hollowed Halls (Interchange interview with Michael Burawoy)
MUSIC – The New Pornographers
“Stacked Crooked”
“Testament to Youth in Verse”
“Mutiny, I Promise You”
“Breakin’ the Law”
“To Wild Homes”
CREDITS
Producer & Host: Doug Storm
Part One producer: Cole Nelson
Part Two producer: Doug Storm
Executive Producer: Kade Young
