Recent pledges will be listed here soon.
The following pledge is designed to be signed by UC faculty as a means of supporting students in their classes and graduate students in their departments who will be participating in the student strike from Wednesday, November 18–Friday, November 20th. We encourage all faculty to also sign the strike call and to cancel classes and other activities, but whatever your position on the strike, signing this letter sends a message to your students that you respect their participation in this political movement and that you support their efforts to protest the fee increases which threaten the future of their education. Take a moment to read the pledge and to add your name to it, and pass on the word to your colleagues.
Faculty Solidarity Pledge
Download PDF flierDear fellow members of the UC faculty:
We, the undersigned, have signed this document to affirm our support for those participating in the upcoming UC-wide strike on November 18th, 19th, and 20th. We understand that this strike has been called for and is being organized by students in protest against the 32% fee increase on which the UC Regents will be voting on November 19th. As the student strike call notes, students will be "paying more for fewer classes, and for classes with larger enrollments—more for fewer instructors, for closed libraries, for closed department offices, for cancelled programs". We wish to state our solidarity with students and other sectors of the campus who will once again be forced to bear the burden of fee increases and cuts to salaries and resources. Whether or not each of us will be participating in the strike by canceling our classes, all of us as faculty have a unique opportunity to support undergraduate and graduate students who will be taking part in the strike.
We the undersigned thus pledge to not penalize undergraduate or graduate students who will not be attending class during the strikes. If we have midterms scheduled or papers due during the strike, we will do our best to reschedule exams, to extend deadlines, to create alternate assignments so that students can respond to events on campus as part of their classwork, or to accommodate students in other ways. We also pledge to protect the rights of graduate students working as TAs and GSIs in the event that they face retaliation from the administration as a result of their participation in a work stoppage. We will call on our departmental managers to refuse to report graduate students who will not be teaching classes or performing other work, and on the campus leadership to likewise protect graduate students.
Throughout the history of student movements in the UC system—from the Free Speech Movement of the 1960s, to the fights to create and to defend Ethnic Studies, to the struggle of GSIs to unionize in the 1990s—the willingness of sympathetic faculty to protect those who are more vulnerable has been vital. Although there is no consensus amongst us on the system-wide actions which will take place in November, we believe that as faculty members our commitment to this solidarity pledge is consonant with a statement made by the Coordinating Council of the UC Berkeley faculty group SAVE, who have stated that they "recognize the right to the action called by the staff and students, because their situations are imminent and there is no other time to act" and who call on faculty to "avoid penalizing students who choose to participate in an action that affects so many of them in life-changing ways." We call on our colleagues across the campus and the UC system to join us in affirming the rights of students to protest the fee increases and cuts in classes and services by signing above.