Dear President Napolitano: I Am a Wildcat Striker and We Will Win.

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In late December 2019, graduate workers at UC Santa Cruz began a wildcat strike to secure a Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA). In one of the most expensive housing markets in the US, graduate workers at UCSC are paid poverty wages, leaving many unable to afford basic necessities. The UC administration has responded brutally to the student action. The campus has called in riot police to break strike action, at the cost of $300,000 per day, resulting in 17 arrests and several student injuries. International students are being threatened with deportation. In a hardline move to intimidate the workers, UC President Janet Napolitano issued a “Doomsday” deadline of February 21: turn in the grades or face termination and deportation. 

On the morning of February 22, graduate worker Stephen David Engel sent this letter to Napolitano and the UCSC administration:

Dear President Napolitano, Chancellor Larive, EVC Kletzer, Dean Williams, and UC Regents:

I am a graduate student worker at UC Santa Cruz, and I am also a wildcat striker. It is past 12:00 AM on February 22nd, 2020, and I have not submitted grades from fall quarter. Since receiving President Napolitano’s threat a week ago, I have had no doubt that her threat was real. So, I expect to be fired from my spring quarter appointment.

However, I know that I have made the right decision. The COLA movement is about improving the material conditions of people in my community and enabling them to do what they came here to do: teach and research. It is also, and perhaps most importantly, about equal access to the vocation of teaching and researching. The current funding structure of this university is racist, classist, ableist, and all sorts of other awful. It discriminates against humanists, social scientists, and artists. Our COLA movement is aimed at forcing a concrete change in this discriminatory, exclusionary, and exploitative structure. 

 
You as administrators defend and perpetuate this structure, but we say “enough!” And we are no longer alone in saying this. As you well know, our movement has now spread to UC campuses in Santa Barbara, San Diego, Los Angeles, Irvine, Davis, Merced, and Berkeley. It’s after midnight, and wildcats are roaring. 
 
My appointment next quarter was to teach a class I designed myself, one that I have dreamed of teaching for the last ten years. But I refuse to give this university my pedagogical light. I refuse to give my pedagogical light to a university that would respond to our demand for a cost of living adjustment with an army of police that costs $300,000 per day. I refuse to give my pedagogical light to a university that arrested and brutalized 17 students—graduate and undergraduate—to avoid a traffic detour (the west entrance, I’ll remind you, was open). I refuse to give my pedagogical light to a university that, instead of announcing adequate support programs, would fire us en masse, rendering the most precarious among us more precarious than before. 
 
Right now, after midnight, knowing I’ve been fired, my determination has only increased, because earlier tonight, at our general assembly, looking at a packed house, I knew that we will win. 
 
Yours very truly,
Stephen David Engel

You can learn more about the COLA movement at http://payusmoreucsc.com/. You can follow the campaign on Instagram and Twitter. Donate to them here.

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