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I'm an undergrad at UCSC right now and have found the entire strike to be more detrimental to their cause. They've lost so much undergrad support after disrupting a STEM midterm and shutting down campus causing us to miss the classes we have paid for. I even lost my grades last quarter as my TA was fired ( of the 54 ) and he has refused to hand them over post firing. What it has done to the undergraduates is a little ridiculous and I felt for them in the beginning, but the strike has made me be a supporter against them unfortunately.

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There seems to be a history of strikes at UCSC alienating the rank and file.

Strikes are supposed to squeeze the employer, e.g. because their factory isn't producing and the employer is losing face & sales to competitors.

All the strikes at UCSC seem to wind up squeezing the student body, which 1) doesn't call the shots and 2) is paying fixed costs.

Last one I remember was a transit strike where the strikers closed all entrances & exits to the campus. That did not win them many supporters.

Congratulations, you have both fallen into the position that the University wants you to.

UCSC can easily marshal the resources to get your grades, get you graduated, etc. The fact that UCSC chooses not to in order to divide you from the strikers is intentional.

People don't go on strike because it's fun or popular. And strikes are not meant to be convenient.

> UCSC can easily marshal the resources to get your grades

Unless UCSC is hiring water boarding specialists, no they can’t. The TA refused to give them up.

What would the college have done if the TA had decided to quit?

What would the college have done if 54 TAs had quit... It's much easier to fix one missing TA, be redoing the grading work if necessary, than for 54. And if a TA quits, I would expect the TA to release the grades as far as they have been determined at the point of quitting.

1) A TA can get hit by a bus tomorrow. What do you do in that case? You can just do that here.

2) Waterboarding and torture have been demonstrated over and over to be ineffective. That mere idea that they might ever be a useful tool is pernicious and needs to be denounced even when said in jest.

So the only workers at a university who have any capacity to effectively strike are the employees in the admissions department?

And now you've just figured out why in labor disputes it's so important/valuable for everyone to be in the union.

(Also, don't forget about the employees in billing, grant handling, the professors bringing in big grants, etc)

Back in the day of unions, strikes were not about making a statement, they were literally bending the employer to the will of the workers with brute force. The workers- collectively- held the power. Unresolved strikes literally sunk companies. It feels like that's been forgotten somewhat.

At the risk of getting banned for this comment, fuck this. I was an undergrad as UCSC and I supported the strikes then, and I support the strike now. Yes the strike interferes with undergrad education, but that is the entire point. I never went to class when a strike was on, just like I would never cross a picket line. Professors deserve to be paid well, and grad students in teaching or TA positions deserve to be paid well too. With the absurd tuition the UC system charges, that is the least they can do.

Good for you?

But consider that GP is also paying "absurd tuition." Returning grades is the least UC can do.

Not everyone goes to school to become an activist. No one should begrudge you of your means and desire to skip class in solidarity with the oppressed grad students at probably the top public university system in the world, but not everyone has such privileges.

Seriously, fuck this. Disrupting the revenue stream IS THE POINT.

A good strike hits the employer in the pocketbook. How much revenue did UC lose? Zero. Student fees are fixed.

It's the undergrads getting bent over the barrel, not UC, which is IMO why these strikes don't seem to have much public support.

You paid a bunch of money, then the school provided you with instructors that have to worry about where their next meal is going to come from.

Hyperbole is not really helpful for this discussion.

“I’m struggling for basic needs such as toilet paper, buying my son milk,” said Arjona, who pays about $1,700 a month in rent out of the $2,200 she receives

A cursory examination of Craigslist shows that you can easily rent a nice 4 bedroom house for $4000/month in Santa Cruz. Get a couple of roommates to split the rent and you're only paying $1000/month.

Perhaps Arjona should consider that she could have more money for living expenses if she was more economical with her housing choices. After all, she was the one who chose to sign a lease for $1700/month on a $2200/month salary, when cheaper options exist.

Are you seriously telling this graduate student (with a child!) that she should find more roommates when she apparently has some already?

Nobody forced her to make these living arrangements that consume such a large percentage of her monthly salary. While it is regrettable, it's not the responsibility of the university to make sure that its students make good life choices.

We don’t know her life to say this wasn’t her best choice.

Besides that, people with different backgrounds and life experiences bring different things to the table which is great for a research environment.

If everyone came from the same background and experiences it wouldn’t be great for research.

Where did I say anything like that? I was just saying that $1700/month for rent is clearly above both the market rate for living with roommates, and above what she can reasonably afford given her salary.

Children living with unrelated adult roommates, or without their own bedroom (shared with siblings until age 10), is considered a strong indicator of poverty.

I expect a graduate student parent to be making significant material sacrifices to support a child (no big parties, no trip to Thailand in the summer) but they shouldn't be in poverty.

They are a student. As much as it sucks they have to support a child, this was a decision that they consciously made. We shouldn't have to throw around money to every grad student just because some small fraction of them are parents.

If you want to talk about programs specifically for supporting parents working towards their education, I'm all ears. But that is orthogonal to the current discussion.

They are adults working.

Most grad 'students' work and should be paid as employees. They're not 'studying'. I really believe a grad student should be an employee and treated as such. They're doing the research which is directly tied to the university's ranking. The ranking and name of a university is tied to the applications they receive. They're the ones doing the grading and proctoring. They're not simply taking classes and graduating. They're writing papers and grants, meeting their deadlines for papers by not sleeping and then going to teach a session or grading all day. All while getting paid to work 'part time'.

Regarding being a parent, the alternative is singling them out, make the ones with children pass through hoops in order to receive extra financial support.

On a university, the funding will probably be limited. So now it's not only grad students that are parents but the grad students that are parents that did it early/qualified.

There's already a big discrepancy, even inside a single university, between how much each student earns based on their department/advisor/research.

Do some spot pricing of apartments on the Southern California coast and get back to us, m'kay?

What does that have to do with any of this? Are you confused about where Santa Cruz is located?

> when she apparently has some already?

Where are you seeing that she has roommates? It's not mentioned in the article I read, and I don't see any evidence that the units are shared at https://housing.ucsc.edu/family/. In fact, it says the rent for a 2br is $1700 a month, the same as what she says she's paying.

In any case, the mistake seems to be earlier in the decision-making process, when she decided to become a anthropology graduate student while having a child to care for and without the financial resources to complete the program.

Ok, so now we have a complaint that she shouldn’t have tried to join the program with a child? I think we’re done here.

I only mentioned it as a major contributing factor to her having insufficient financial resources to complete the program. Plainly, she would be able to accept a cheaper housing situation if she did not have a child, and housing is her dominant expense. You yourself called that out, so I don't think it's out of bounds for me to mention it.

What I'd really say is that a single, low-income parent-or-other-person-who-won't-have-roommates should probably not move to Santa Cruz (or Beverly Hills, Monaco, Chelsea, Dumbo, the Chicago Loop, etc.). I get that this is a controversial viewpoint for some folks, but it just seems like fundamental personal finance to me.

I always find it interesting that people reject the idea that one should have to consider their children or their future children over certain decisions. Why shouldn't we insist that a parent or parent-to-be makes the best possible choices over their employment while considering the child they have or will have?

If for, an admittedly highly contrived, example if this individual had the option of making $50K/yr in a low cost of living area OR the graduate program that would result in subsistence wages in a high COL area, why would we not insist that it is at least in part their own doing? Why would we not consider this to be both a bad decision to opt for subsistence wages as well potentially morally reprehensible for the lifestyle she willingly imposes upon her child?

In an alternate question, what if a similar individual with a child making $50K/yr had the option to purchase a reliable car for $700/mo but instead purchased a luxury vehicle for $2K/mo, forcing her into a situation where she was living on subsistence wages with her child? Would we not criticize the choice?

It seems that today it is becoming a popular opinion that any choice for any additional education (unless its from outside traditional academia and then it's bad) should be viewed as ultimately holy and that criticizing those choices is beyond the pale. I suggest that this may come from the Gen Xers and Millenials of the world who were essentially dictated to that they _had to go to college_ to live a good life. The net result of this has been people attending college and then ending up so-called "underemployed" by the masses. However, perhaps many of these people never should have attended college. Perhaps we sold them a raw deal that we have glorified and encoded in bull shit credentialism that requires college degrees for jobs that I could have easily done as a graduated high school student. For many, especially our youth, this alternative view seems verboten and we are now insisting on making college EVEN MORE prevalent by making it free for all. However, the deal will still be a bad deal. We will then be sending even more individuals into a system that will give them no advantage, take 4yrs of their lives and spit them out just as useful to society as they were going in at great cost.

Genuinely, yes! If you have a child, you need to consider your child's needs and best interests ahead of your own hopes and dreams and desires.

And if that child's needs are better met by taking a decent job in a lower COL area than by working for poverty wages at UCSC, then you should take that job. Your child is more important than your selfish dreams!

As somebody in Santa Cruz, good ducking luck actually getting that house.

Finding a place off Craig's list is nearly impossible.

Last time I tried to use that (5years ago), the only call-backs I got from about 20 calls were landlords that recognized my name and I had known from other contexts (I've lived here a while). I ended up getting a place through other personal connections. Most local rentals operate on a network of personal connections here, with locals offering friends or other locals a deal to get by in an expensive town. Students never get this treatment, and often don't even get shown rooms.

For a grad student arriving without an extensive network, a room for $1700 isn't too bad.

The university has abandoned these students, and so has the town.

Describing graduate students who are rent-burdened to the point where they can't afford basic necessities is not hyperbole.

If they are so rent-burdened, they should consider living with a roommate, or perhaps 2 or 3 roommates. Then they would be more easily able to afford basic necessities.

At my university, graduate student housing is already like this. Graduate students are doing this already.

Great, that's as it should be. At your university, are graduate students able to afford such a living situation on their stipends?

I can’t speak to GP’s situation, but TFA makes clear that the university grad student housing available at UCSC in this specific real-world case is in fact not sufficient for the graduate students to afford such a living situation on their stipends.

Then live off-campus? Or live in a 3 or 4 bedroom unit on-campus?

And what do you know, the rents are still high. At what point do we realize that an administrator making 600k a year off the backs of people toiling long hours in labs to bring in grant money for the school and coming home to live in tenement conditions isn't the fault of the students, but the administrators making half a million dollars a year? Quite a hill to die on.

An administrator is paid that much because that is how much value they provide to the university system. A graduate student provides minimal value, in fact barely above replacement level. That’s why they are a student.

Are you a grad student? And you never took an economics course? This is pretty basic material.

That's a truism. It depends on the administrator, and in general executives and administrators aren't paid on the value they bring, but based on a sort of signalling game with the oversight board that determines their compensation. If pay was really based on value to the system, Chancellors that are fired or denoted under scandal wouldn't keep their pay.

https://www.sacbee.com/news/investigations/the-public-eye/ar...

I've seen graduate students bring in millions of dollars of federal grant money from the NIH, NSF, and the DOE that would have been awarded to other institutions had that grant student not written their proposal. I've seen schools take half of this grant money for overhead and use it to pay for administrative bloat under the pretext of 'keeping the lights on.'

Students at my university started striking four days ago.

I would be completely on the grad students' side if they weren't withholding materials necessary to produce the grades. That, though, sounds a lot like extortion, and it's hard to have any sympathy whatsoever with someone doing that.

It'd be one thing for me to walk off my job. It'd be another thing entirely for me to run off with the only copy of business-critical data.

IANAL, but I wonder if there might not end up being criminal charges in some cases.

As a grad student myself, lets just say that many graduate students and faculty are suggesting that grad students never apply to your school.

I wouldn't call that very detrimental to there cause.

What happened with your grades in those classes? I read the university systems release and this article and couldn’t glean the details. Is that course’s grades still just up in the air?

For many classes, grades were withheld and then released as the TAs did not want to lose their jobs. My TA was not one of them. For a class that needs tests graded, this isn't as much of an issue, but in my case, the class is a Distributed Systems course and the projects we built are quite extensive. My professor reached out to me and other high scorers in the course requesting us to recreate the grading infrastructure as he believes our true grades will never be received from our fired TA. I took the course as a letter grade class, but currently it is marked as a Pass/No Pass which conveniently is not allowed for major courses. It will be a fun time talking to the advising people on campus.

> My professor reached out to me and other high scorers in the course requesting us to recreate the grading infrastructure as he believes our true grades will never be received from our fired TA.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but he's asking you to work on grading infrastructure?

Me along with other students who did well on exams + assignments that were graded and given out before the strikes really gained traction.

I hope you kindly email the professor and ask him or her to to their job and grade their course.

I did turn the offer down because I didn't feel comfortable with it. I may not be 100% for this strike, but I would not want to be apart of that. I really appreciate your responses here as it is illuminating many things I hadn't originally considered. The TA's clearly have way too many responsibilities for the pay they receive. I just feel like undergraduates are really getting screwed when there has to be other methods... Of course, I have never considered them so what good is it for me to say that lol.

now is not the time to back down. teaching is hard. teaching and doing research is even harder. this whole problem would be solved by everyone grad and undergrads walking out for a few weeks. Throw in a hunger strike in there too. Only a big disruption at this point will get things done. Now is not the time to back down. The School admins will not understand any other language unfortunately.

Teaching needs a large pay-bump. If you only hire the lowest common denominators you're going to get the lowest result. I've seen so many teachers move on to other jobs just because it doesn't have the pay needed for basic living.

Stop calling things like this socialism, futures depend on good education.

Wow, your university treated their staff like shit and you're mad that the associated materials are gone. Open up your brain a bit.

I don't think it is that simple. Associated materials that I am paying for? Additionally, as another commenter mentioned there is an administration aspect no doubt about how crazy it is TAs even have this power in the first place.

_Mad_ is not the word I'd use in this situation. Ive been here long enough to just roll with the punches through every strike. I am just trying to talk about it, but it seems its easy to assume how others are acting.

The aggressive rhetoric this topic brings out like "open up your brain a bit" really is helping no one, including the strike and its cause.

Striking when it's convenient is worthless. Perhaps if the students weren't so entitled, they'd understand that solidarity is important and that grades should be handled. Furthermore, you have to realize the university is punishing you to turn you against the grad students... and it appears they have succeeded. If I were an ugrad there, I'd be right there with the grad students.

I was an ugrad at another UC where 2/3 of my classes were cancelled because lecturers got jobs at startups in the dotcom times, and they made a habit of not scheduling upper-div major classes frequently enough to stay full-time for the year. haha.

Eh, sounds like the grad students are doing the punishing. Their cause is noble, I'm sure, right up until it interferes with my education (and thus my career path).

They need to find a way to exert leverage on the people who can satisfy their demands -- meaning the University -- and not on people who are basically innocent customers.

I agree that striking when its convenient is worthless, but at the same time, I have various emails from my direct TAs and the COLA organization as a whole mentioning the intent is to not harm undergrads, but here we are... Additionally, I'm not sure where youre getting the students are "entitled". I work and take loans out in order to go to this school, takes classes, and receive my grades. Am I entitled for wanting what I pay for?

The administration is not withholding grades, the graduates are. I understand that they're doing it as a result of the administration, but why are we (undergraduates) sitting in the middle taking heat from both sides?

I'm happy you would be out there striking as thats your right, but to call me entitled is a tad bit much no? The response on the UCSC subreddit is similar - youre either entitled or a bootlicker if you don't join the cause. I am unsure how that is supposed to make me support the cause?

> The administration is not withholding grades

It clearly has the resources to provide you with your grades, it's not like the specific grad students are the only ones being able to grade random undergrad work. It appears it's failing to provide the service you pay it for.

You're absolutely right in that they have the resources to get these graded. Another comment I posted down below describes my grade situation and how I've been asked to help grade (for pay). I imagine in six months time I'll have my grades, but the wait is absolutely wrong. Other students are attempting to graduate, but their requirements are not met because of withheld grades by their TAs. Can they afford another quarter or two while the UC gathers new graders? Who knows.

The university is preventing people from graduating, not the TAs. The university could have professors grade their own exams. The university could hire undergraduates like you to grade exams. The university could also let anyone graduate that they want, the university is the body that enforces these requirements, not the TAs. They could send a memo tomorrow saying they would aggregate your other grades, or let you graduate provisionally, or waive whatever requirement the university itself has put in place, but they aren't because by not doing so they turn undergraduates like you against graduates. And from the looks of your comments they have succeeded.

And this is exactly what my professor has done in response to the graduate student strikes: she is some grading assignments herself and has dropped ones that she no longer has time for. I will probably receive my grades on time, and if I don’t I’m going to be a lot more annoyed at the university for not working something out than I will be at my TA (who has already submitted grades for assignments due before the strike).

I really hope you pay close attention to the comments by assdf replying to this. The graduate students clearly got desperate because of how crazy the financial situation got. It's sad to see how few people really recognize that. I hope you're lucky in life and never end up trapped the way they were!

This situation is also a consequence of poor management at UCSC. Every other university I'm familiar with makes faculty responsible for submitting grades. It's inconceivable to me, as someone in the UC system, why TAs would be responsible for grades. TAs should be teaching assistants, not adjunct faculty.

Is it Ok to strike when that will hurt innocents? I think we can all agree that having nurses strike and abandon care of their patients is unfair to those patients. This fight should be between UCSC and the graduates, not holding innocent undergrads hostage in the middle.

The only reason why undergraduates are 'held hostage' is due the policies of the university. The reason why grades are not posted is due to the university. The reason why people aren't able to graduate is due to policies stipulated by the university.

In most other universities, professors submit grades and are free to grade their own exams. TAs are there to just get through the stack of exams a little faster than the professor working on that same stack themselves. The TAs don't hold any sacred power in this scenario, they aren't needed at all actually, they just add an extra sets of hands to check or cross out answers on a piece of paper. That's it. There is no bylaw stating your grades must be submitted by a graduate student and no other, but if there were, it is the university that is enforcing the bylaw.

This narrative that grades can only be submitted by the TAs does not seem right, it seems like a narrative designed to put a wedge in the student body by spreading around a fundamental misunderstanding on how grading and graduation occurs at a university.

You wrote a lot but I am struggling to see your point. The TAs tried holding student grades hostage as leverage in their strike. Now some are withholding those grades for work they reviewed out of spite after being fired. They are hurting innocent students and potentially wrecking/derailing careers and lives. This latter part is a fact. The difference is that sone people here think this is an acceptable price to pay for the TAs to make more money. The rest of us think that’s a BS position.

Systematically it sounds insane that the TAs are wholly responsible for grading but they don't get to teach the class, and they don't get paid enough to live. How can you expect a TA to grade appropriately if they are starving? I would blame management for shitty TAs resulting in shitty work, than the TAs for breaking under unlivable conditions.

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