Grad Students Withheld Grades for Higher Pay. Now They’ve Been Fired.

The University of California at Santa Cruz followed through with its threat to fire striking graduate instructors, university officials said on Friday.

Teaching assistants, who were withholding grades until the university met their demands for higher pay to cover rising housing costs, had been warned to stop their strike by Thursday or face dismissal.

Obviously the University of California is hoping this will blow off and that they'll be able to replace the grad students. The grad students, on the other hand (well, you can read the continued article down below)...

The university insisted it was dismissing the striking graduate students to protect undergraduate education, but those on strike say the dismissals could have a devastating impact on the campus.

“It would involve pretty much destroying major departments in this university,” said Sohum Banerjea, a computer-science Ph.D. student at UCSC who is withholding grades, “because there are definitely departments of the university that have close to 100-percent participation.”

Obviously there is an impasse here. The university does not want to pay the graduate students' rent. Maybe the UC hopes that the grad students can live in their cars (amidst chronic harassment from city police and arrogant locals) or (illegally, and thus perpetually in fear of the UC Police) in the forested land behind the university, while at the same time being TAs and carrying full courseloads. Maybe replacement TAs can be found, but the publicity surrounding this little move is likely to discourage newbies from thinking their fantasy thoughts about Santa Cruz, once upon a time something better but now this.

Once upon a time, say back before the 1989 Aptos earthquake, the city of Santa Cruz, California was a paradise of sorts, with an under-enrolled University of California campus that had been structured as a reflective place where the students didn't have to take course grades if they didn't want to. Such an institution went explicitly contrary to the money-obsessed neoliberalism of the Eighties and Nineties. Meanwhile the State of California was facing increasing pressure to increase student enrollments (starting in the Eighties) because it built only one new UC while building a whole bunch of new prisons at taxpayer expense and filling them generally with nonwhite males and other victims of the War on Drugs.

Beginning in the 21st century, UCSC started requiring everyone to take course grades. UCSC gradually tripled its enrollment while increasing the size of the campus 30%, mostly for the convenience of lab researchers. Thus in the town you see 1) UCSC as a competition-crazy tech school creating traffic jams from Empire Grade to Mission Street, 2) astronomical rents in town (probably up tenfold from the Eighties) fueled by greedy landlords and the status of Santa Cruz as a bedroom community for Silicon Valley, and 3) the general overcrowding of the whole area with tourists and students and tech commuters and homeless people.

Something clearly has to give. So here is my modest proposal (hat-tip to Jonathan Swift); UCSC should go back to being the Cowell Ranch. (Historical footnote: before the University of California acquired property near Santa Cruz through eminent domain, it was the Cowell Ranch, owned by the Cowell family. Some of the old buildings of the Cowell Ranch are still on campus, preserved as museum-pieces). It would make more sense than the garbage which currently transpires. The University can keep the McHenry Library open for people who want to read its Ernst Bloch Collected Works. Maybe the Center for Agriculture and Sustainable Food Studies can stay open for its agroecology work. They can relieve the tax burden on the University of California by using the meadow at the base of campus to grow organic blueberries and strawberries. Demolish all the other buildings. Plant redwood saplings in their place.

The graduate students can find jobs on hippie communes in northern New Mexico and learn the fine art of growing drought-tolerant crops. The University of California can move the current crop of undergraduates to an affordable new UC campus or three, preferably up around Redding in the north part of the state where there's plenty of land or maybe in Lompoc or in Mendocino on the coast if students really have to have a beach. A stock-market crash will deal with much of Silicon Valley, perhaps precipitated by the end of Moore's Law. And maybe at some point the residents of Santa Cruz will stop being jerks and lower their rents to affordable levels. At any rate, the experiment has failed, not least because the Powers That Be abolished it and installed the current abomination in its place.

Oh and bring back the nongraded university, at least somewhere in America. Students can think about a better world more easily if they're not worried about getting a grade of A- for doing so. But since that's not happening any time soon, support the strikers.

(Disclosure: I am UCSC alumnus, BA literature, Crown College, class of 1984.)