Dear Colleagues,

The University of California is currently experiencing two major upheavals: the COVID-19 health crisis and the ongoing strikes by graduate students who seek a Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA). These events intersect: the threat to these students is amplified during this time, and portends broader threats to us all within the university system.

We write both to illustrate these links and to solicit your thoughts on how best to act as a faculty.

THE CURRENT CRISES
The issues raised by the graduate student workers’ strike, and the challenges to the entire university community – in particular, funding cuts, layoffs, furloughs, and general austerity measures – are amplified by administrative responses to the pandemic.

UC Santa Cruz graduate students began the COLA strike in fall 2019; 82 graduate student workers were terminated in early 2020 and at least 8 more received notices of dismissal in April. Graduate students are now striking on several additional UC campuses to express solidarity with their fired counterparts and bring attention to the need for a COLA across the UC. Over 835 UC faculty so far have signed pledges of non-retaliation against graduate students engaging in activities related to the strike.

WE WOULD LIKE YOUR THOUGHTS ON THE APPROPRIATE ACTIONS
Below, please find a survey we drafted as the Inter-Campus Faculty Solidarity Network, a group of about 40 tenured, untenured, and adjunct faculty from across the UCs who have been communicating weekly throughout the COLA campaign and into the COVID-19 crisis. This network is in turn generated by Faculty Organizing Groups and other bodies of long-standing faculty activism that emerged from previous moments of austerity and that, more recently, have been in support of COLA actions and demands. Our aim in this survey is to better understand faculty concerns during this time and organize potential future collective action to respond to those concerns – from support for the COLA demands to our own uncertain futures at a time of looming economic recession.

THE SURVEY IS DIVIDED INTO THREE PARTS
-  In the first, we assess faculty concerns about the impacts of COVID-19 on quality of education and students’ wellbeing.
-  In the second, we gauge faculty willingness to participate in a variety of potential actions to reinstate fired Santa Cruz graduate student workers and achieve a UC-wide COLA.
-  In the third, we assess faculty concerns about, and willingness to organize in opposition to, coming austerity measures. Our aim as organizers is to ensure a more just and equitable economic recovery for all members of our universities and to insist upon sustained public investment in higher education.

Thank you for your time and participation.

Sincerely,
The Inter-Campus Faculty Solidarity Network