Recent:
To Teaching Assistants and Associate Instructors at UC Davis,
As undergraduates at UC Davis, we attend your classes, your discussion sections, your labs and your office hours—we study beside you, learn along with you, and together, we make up the bulk of the university. We know that contract negotiations have broken down as the UC Office of the President has repeatedly thwarted your union’s efforts to ensure you a living wage, a respectable child-care subsidy, and adequate notification for the courses you are expected to teach. The UC administration is trying to crush your bargaining power and your spirit. They are toying with you by bargaining in bad faith, repeatedly coming to the table without the willingness to negotiate a new contract. Bargaining deadlines have been extended repeatedly and yet you still have no contract for the work you continue to do daily. We find it deplorable and unacceptable that UC students and educators are treated so poorly.
Like most undergraduates, grad students must work a job and attend to your responsibilities as students. But your working conditions are our learning conditions. Your fight for quality jobs is a part of our fight for a quality education. UCOP’s refusal to respect the UC graduate students is just one more assault against UC undergraduates, and public education in general. An attack against graduate students is an attack against all students!
On November 16th -18th , the Regents will vote on yet another undergraduate fee increase. On top of the 32% increase from last November, another 8% increase is expected. Many students don’t realize how these increases will affect our futures and our state in the long run. It is up to us to educate ourselves and each other about what it means to make public education inaccessible to the vast majority of our youth.On November 16th -18th , the Regents will vote on yet another undergraduate fee increase. On top of the 32% increase from last November, another 8% increase is expected. Many students don’t realize how these increases will affect our futures and our state in the long run. It is up to us to educate ourselves and each other about what it means to make public education inaccessible to the vast majority of our youth.
The UC Regents and administration vote themselves raises as they saddle us with impossible debt. They are NOT in favor of education—they are, in fact, banking on our lack of education, to keep us silent and passive. They are hoping we all remain isolated and separated in far corners of the university, in our respective departments, with our personal stresses, behind the closed doors of our labs, classrooms, and offices. But we are hoping for something else.
We propose that on the 16th of November, students—both grad and undergrad—come together in public to show the university how many of us are affected by the continued assault on public education in California. On these days, we want to attend our classes, lectures, office hours, and discussion sections in public on the quad, and we want you to hold them there.
During this all-day Teach-Out, our classes should be held as scheduled, but we won’t hide our numbers or our commitment to education and each other. Your class could attend a workshop or you could offer one. You could cover the assigned course material or you could devote your working hours to discussing the crisis of public education or your own working/learning conditions at UCD—just do it outside. No matter how you take part, we want to fill the quad, the lawns, and the sidewalks to make our work and our education visible, as one and the same public good, in solidarity with each other.
Please sign the petition above and ask your fellow undergrads and grad students to join us in the Teach-Out for Public Education!