UC Santa Cruz Reinstates 41 Graduate Students After Months-Long Strike | Hacker News Reader

UC Santa Cruz Reinstates 41 Graduate Students After Months-Long Strike

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65 pointssneeze-slayer20 comments

I attended UCSC on and off over a period of 10 years. The level of blatant corruption in the administration, both at the school and among the broader UC system and regents, is something you would have to experience to believe. For years the administration has been squeezing the life out of UCSC’s academic programs (both grad students and instructors) while simultaneously awarding administrative staff with new positions, titles, huge raises and lavish lifestyles.

This is an incremental win for a very hard-working and talented group of staffers, but hardly even a chip in the armor of the bloat and waste that is the UC administrative complex. I’m actually low key ashamed to have a degree from them.

> This is an incremental win for a very hard-working and talented group of staffers

There is a large, high paying labor market for very hard-working and talented staffers, about 40 minutes north on CA-17. I went directly from a UC campus to a private Silicon Valley company, and learned more there, more broadly and more quickly. I'd recommend it to those that feel the sacrifice to work in academia is too high.

There are some kinds of careers and questions that can only be pursued in academia, so advising that grad students abandon ship really isn't a satisfactory answer in general. Academia needs to be reformed.

"Academia progresses one funeral at a time"? Not sure how apt a rephrasing that might be, never progressed past community college.

It just seems like there's an old guard of administrators that have grabbed onto this huge source of money and are lining their pockets, and nothing substantial will change until enough bodies swap out that the people who actually want to provide a good affordable education are in the right seats.

Not suggesting the administrations get culled.

I’m happy for these students, and the housing stipend they managed to get will help them, but I don’t think it’s a net positive overall. It just adds more demand to the local housing market, so a different set of people on the margins end up homeless. The only way to improve the situation is to build more housing.

UCSC is sitting on a lot of land while offloading housing onto Santa Cruz

And as a state entity they can develop their land without approval from local governments, one of the largest obstacles to new construction. UCSF has used this to great effect in San Francisco.

That's interesting. UC employees aren't classified as state employees, they are employed by the regents. CSU employees are state employees.

While I am somewhat (and really, only somewhat) in support of the grad students lobbying for better benefits, I am discouraged by UCSC essentially walking back any penalties for violating their no-strike clause. They agreed to terms, and actively chose to violate them.

All this does is incentivize other similar groups to do the same, and learn that the longer and harder you go, the more likely you are to get what you want. And that public institutions can be held hostage.

Add to that a frustration with a definite viewpoint-based forgiveness of the approach. If students had been violating their contract for other kinds of less popular speech, I highly doubt they would be forgiven like this. I'm not glad to have public universities making those kinds of tacit judgement calls.

The university makes it clear in their statement that they don't consider it a walk-back. They still think the firings were justified, but now that the grad students have turned in the grades they withheld and agreed to do their jobs going forwards, they're willing to offer an olive branch in the interests of a harmonious community.

Civil disobedience does get results. That's why it can be a good tactic.

Does striking count as civil disobedience? This is essentially an employment dispute.

Most uses of martial law in the United States were against striking workers, including in California, so at least the government sees it as civil disobedience.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martial_law_in_the_United_Stat...

Meh, you can quibble over terms, but I'd be inclined to count it. Yes, they committed a civil tort instead of a criminal offense, but they did so against an agent of the state.

> I am discouraged by UCSC essentially walking back any penalties for violating their no-strike clause. They agreed to terms, and actively chose to violate them.

Their contract is with the university, which is within its rights to decide not to enforce those terms. The university is under no obligation to hold the line and be an example for other institutions.

At a more pragmatic level, since the weight of public and political opinion appeared to be against the university, enforcing that clause was likely to be seen as excessively punitive, and cause further damage to the university's reputation.

What is this no-strike clause? I am not familiar with the story.

Was it something that each students individually decided whether to sign or not and if they signed, they received a benefit for it? Or was it a non-negotiable part of every contact that was forced on everyone if they wanted to go to or stay in UCSC? If it is the latter, I don't see anything morally or ethically wrong with violating it. Legal matters are of course another issue.

Here is a link to the union, their collective bargaining agreement, and the specific subsection.

https://ucnet.universityofcalifornia.edu/labor/bargaining-un...

So, it is a specific clause with its own sub-section in the contract that the union made. From what I understand on how collective bargaining agreements work in the US, this means that all UC grad students, including non-members, are bound by the terms of the agreement as the union represents the entire UC grad student unit (except UCSF) and thus is the sole, exclusive, legal representative of all individuals in the unit regardless of whether they are union members or not. As far as I know, there is no legal way for any individual in the unit to be bound by a different agreement (except maybe if the union and employer allows it?) as it is illegal for organizations to make agreements with individuals in the unit without union approval.

They did not really agree to the terms, or at least justly agreed to the terms. The vast majority of students at UCSC and other UC schools were opposed to the terms since the cost of living is absurd in places like Santa Cruz on a grad student stipend, but the terms were agreed upon anyway by the graduate students' representative in negotiations.

> While I am somewhat (and really, only somewhat) in support of the grad students lobbying for better benefits

Honestly, the rest of your comment bears no weight if this is your position, but I'll go through it anyway.

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Grad students are exploited everywhere. They're underpaid while expected to do the brunt of the work that actually makes the money for faculty salaries (through grants, etc.). Saying you don't support grad students lobbying for better benefits tells me that you believe this exploitation is justified. Why is that? Why should the students not be fairly compensated for their work — the work that lets the school run?

UCSC is especially problematic, too. Some 11% of grad students are considered homeless, which is more twice the number at the next UC school at around 4% (and, honestly, anything above 0% should be considered unacceptable).

Claiming the school is in the right here based on a contractual technicality is absurd. Grad students at UCSC are not paid a living wage. Santa Cruz is disproportionately expensive compared to the cities surrounding the other UC schools; it makes no sense that UCSC can pay as little as they do.

> They agreed to terms, and actively chose to violate them.

Yes, the grad student union of the UC system had worked out new salaries a couple years ago — but they overwhelmingly ignored the outcries from the Santa Cruz population, which is what led to the current situation. Students at other UC schools are better compensated relative to their local cost of living, unlike the Santa Cruz students. (Note that the students at other schools are still horrifically underpaid, in my eyes, but that's a different matter.)

Things simply got too bad for the UCSC grad students. So, what, they should just wait until the next negotiation, patiently sleeping in cars and at friends' houses as they struggle to afford food and other basic amenities?

> All this does is incentivize other similar groups to do the same, and learn that the longer and harder you go, the more likely you are to get what you want. And that public institutions can be held hostage.

I mean, really. This is an awful position to hold so firmly. The logical conclusion of a consistent application of this line of thinking is that you also think the Supreme Court made the wrong ruling in Browder v. Gayle, when they decided that segregation was unconstitutional? After all, that only came about because a group of Black women chose to "actively violate" the laws that they believed to be unfair.

If that isn't the case (which I sincerely hope), then you make allowances that sometime exceptions to contract violation are reasonable. In which case, I would have to ask: what more should the students need to suffer through to justify striking as they did? At what point does it become "enough" for you? Or do you think contracts are the end-all, be-all of life?

> If students had been violating their contract for other kinds of less popular speech, I highly doubt they would be forgiven like this.

Why on earth would generalization be appropriate here? The students have specific demands, brought about by a specific combination of events. "If they had been fighting for other things the university might not have agreed" — what a terrible point in your argument. What are you even trying to say?

The point here is entirely around the cost of living in Santa Cruz versus the students' ability to actually afford that cost. Nothing else is on the table, so I don't know why you bother bringing it up. It's a lazy argumentative tactic, I think. This is an exceptional circumstance. It was right to handle it in as an exception.

> I'm not glad to have public universities making those kinds of tacit judgement calls.

I'm honestly not sure I could roll my eyes any harder. I mean... who else would be making these calls? Why would they not be tacit? What does the universities being public have anything to do with this? Do you mean that it would be okay for a private university to capitulate to reasonable demands from its grad students, but not okay for a public university? Honestly, this line of yours reads as very condescending, but I genuinely don't know what you're trying to say other than "I don't like this because Reasons(™)."

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Look, the crux of it is that UCSC is taking advantage of its grad students. The students should have the right to fight to amend that, and we as onlookers should support their fight for just compensation. But, more crucially, the school should give in to the students' demands when those demands are found to be reasonable! This isn't "holding a public institution hostage" (what utter bullshit, frankly); it's "demanding a fair standard of living while the students do the majority of the work to make the university's name mean anything at all."

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