In Solidarity

In more updates from the Berkeley English department listserv, the fact that one of the department’s more activist Marxists signs her emails with “In Solidarity” has produced a counter-reaction, the sign off “In liquid” and “In fluidity.” I didn’t even understand it as a sneer the first time I read it; only after the second such sign-off did it suddenly made sense that they found something worth mocking or critiquing in the idea of celebrating solidarity. I haven’t signed any emails that way, but it made me think a little about what “solidarity” is.

What solidarity is not is blind, unthinking obedience, and though not a few Stalinists have used it this way, my fellow English department people’s rejection of the idea sings to me much more like a kind of unthinking liberal phobia against any form of collectivity, the feeling that anyone saying any variation on “We’re all in this together” is not to be trusted. But I think there’s a useful concept in there to be salvaged, and much as we Americans despise the idea of having anything in common with people we’re different from, I think that it means exactly that: the sense of unity across difference. The good version of the word, if I may, is something like “pamoja” in swahili, which I was reminded a moment ago (by Louder than Swahili) has a locative meaning (indicating location). In other words, while “umoja” means “unity,” “pamoja” means something significantly different; since it’s formed by the “pa-” prefix added to the word for “one” (“mmoja”), it adds up to a very specific form of the word “together,” the idea that we are not necessarily one, but are together in the sense of being in the same place. And that seems like the right way to define solidarity: we are not the same, nor should we be. But, since we share the same location, we should think with each other in mind.

And for bonus ZZ content on the subject of solidarity, it seems that the University of Vienna protested against police brutality in Berkeley, the very day that said police brutality was ocurring. They were already into day 32 of their own occupation of university buildings, of course, but courtesy of the great Paul K I give you Der Standard, reporting on “day 32″ of the Vienna:

In Kalifornien hatte die Besetzung der University of California in Berkeley negative Folgen: Hunderte Studenten hatten am Freitag ein Gebäude der Uni besetzt, weil die Studiengebühren ab Jänner um ein Drittel erhöht werden sollen. Die Polizei schritt ein und nahm drei Demonstranten fest. Aus Solidarität gingen die Wiener demonstireren. Vor der Amerikanischen Botschaft in Wien hielten sie Samstagabend eine Spontandemo ab.

[In California the occupation of the University of California-Berkeley had negative consequences: on Friday hundreds of students occupied a university building because student fees are to be raised by a third this January. The police intervened and arrested the demonstrators. Out of solidarity the Viennese went to demonstrate; Saturday evening they held a "Spontandemo" (which I suppose is a spontaneous demonstration) in front of the American embassy in Vienna.  (And there's crappy webcam video here of some of it, the action ocurring around 45:00 in; the slogan is "Occupy the universities, clear out the Nazis.")]

I’m also informed by zunguzungu’s germany desk that our ambassador (William E. Eacho, III, surely a real prince) had questioned the Austrian protests a few weeks ago, and that the protesters are all about transnational solidarity, apparently, with sites at our university and free education with this kind of platform:

Make a change now! Unbearable conditions in the educational system have forced us students to mobilize! The Bologna Process in Europe has lead a economization of education and universities are turned into educational institutions for private corporations. We have squatted the main building and are resisting! We call for following movements, solidarity campaigns and resistance by all European universities!

We claim:

-enough money for each university place

-free access to education

-all real democratization of the universities

-self-determined learning and living instead of pressure to perform

-no restrictions to master degrees

-independent teaching and research

-stop precarious working conditions

-no restricted extra curricula

-stop neoliberalism!

And now you know as much as I know about that. Thanks Paul!

“The Police didn’t beat us with batons; the administration beat us with police”

That was one of the chants at Monday’s rally against police brutality. The UC administration, on the other hand, has been trying to deflect attention from themselves by saying stuff like this:

“It’s not all about me, and it’s not all about Yudof. It’s about the university, and people have to decide whether they support the university in a very difficult time.”

Beyond the “with us or against us” crap, what gives Birgeneau the right to be the sole voice of authority speaking for the entire campus community? And what legitimizes Mark Yudof to speak for the university when he seems to open every conversation with the announcement that he’s just a lawyer from Philadelphia? Who are these people that act as chief executive officers in the UC system? (for those of you who aren’t familiar, the UC is a single university with ten campuses; it has a single President (Mark Yudof) and each campus has a Chancellor).

I googled, and this is what I found. I don’t offer the following as an argument, exactly, but it was sort of eye-opening to note how the UC chancellors who actually came from the campus they now serve as CEO of are the rare exceptions; only one chancellor (of ten) was from his own campus, and only one other came from the UC system. And I’m not saying that it’s a bad thing, necessarily, for the CEO’s of universities to come from outside; certainly it is part of academic culture to embrace a kind of cross pollination of thoughts and ideas. But I wonder if Birgeneau would have called the police (and outside police) out on his students so quickly if he had deeper roots in this campus. I wonder if Yudof’s loyalties are influenced by being hired by a group of political appointees who themselves have very little in the way of UC roots. I wonder what the effect is of a state of affairs where the entire class college presidents seem to be as rootless as Methodist ministers, and if (as it was for Wesley and the Methodists) switching jobs before they can build a personal attachment to a place and a community isn’t exactly the point.

Here’s the breakdown:

• Before he became Chancellor of UC Berkeley, Birgeneau was the president of the University of Toronto.
• Chancellor of UC Davis, Linda Katehi was provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
• Before Chancellor Drake went to UCI, he was vice president for health affairs at the University of California’s Office of the President.
• UC Santa Barbara Chancellor Henry T. Yang had been the dean of engineering at Purdue.
• UCLA’s Gene D. Block had been the provost of the University of Virginia.
• Timothy P. White became chancellor at the UC Riverside after being president at the University of Idaho, and had previously been provost and executive vice president at Oregon State University.
• Marye Anne Fox became chancellor of the UC San Diego after serving as North Carolina State University’s chancellor.
• Susan Desmond-Hellmann became chancellor of the UC San Francisco, after being president of product development at Genentech, where she “was responsible for Genentech’s pre-clinical and clinical development, process research and development, business development and product portfolio management.”
• UC Santa Cruz’s George R. Blumenthal, on the other hand, is an actual product of UCSC, though it will perhaps not be surprising that he became Chancellor in an unusual way, stepping in as acting chancellor when the previous chancellor (who had come from the University of Washington) unexpectedly passed away.
• And Steve Kang became the Chancellor at UC Merced after serving as dean of Engineering at UC Santa Cruz, which is at least a sister campus within the UC system.

“UC Regents, I see tyrants”

During my class, one of my students was fiddling with his phone, which I had thought was odd, because he’s usually one of the most attentive (if quiet) studentsin the class. Then it turned out that he was getting word that the UC office of the president building, in Oakland, has been occupied by about a 150 students.

You can read their entire account here:

“Once we were in, the floodgates opened and about 60 or 70 people rushed through.  We shoved past the building  security and in to the lobby. Students were calling for Yudoff and there were many other chants. It was so exciting I cannot remember what they were. The group made our way to the front desk where one of the student leaders pointed out that the sign up sheets didn’t have a column for “students”

The Daily Cal also has the details. After a meeting with some flunkies, the protesters left peacefully.

On teaching a writing class in a classroom whose door was recently knocked off its hinges by the police

At 3 o’clock today, I will teach my first “normal” class since the strike of last week and since the confrontation between UC Berkeley students and the BPD, the SFPD, and riot cops from the Alameda county Sheriff’s office. This happened (and the occupation was of my classroom!), so I need to take account of it somehow:

So I wrote the following email to the English graduate student listserv, and I reproduce it here because, well, why not. And while I began the email with the fear that “controversial topics…are met with instant and personalized reactions,” I didn’t realize that I would receive an email from someone I consider a friend within minutes, calling what I had written “garbage” without having read it. This is dispiriting and makes me sad. But I still think it was the right decision to send it.

I write this email with a certain amount of trepidation, since we seem to have reached a point where controversial topics on the listserv are met with instant and personalized reactions, and that’s not what I’m hoping for. But I think we’re all in the same boat now, and we can best address that by talking to each other about how we’re dealing with it (especially since it seems unlikely that this will be the last of it). And I’d like to know how other people are addressing the issue. For me, it is unavoidable because at least a half dozen of my current students were out there last Friday, and at least one of them was beaten by police batons. I’m not going to urge people what to say about what happened (or even to say anything at all), but when we go into our classrooms this week to teach, please, please, please be aware of the senseless severity of what happened on Friday as well as the size of the confrontation. If you haven’t seen the youtube videos (though you should), you should know that the confrontation between students and police wasn’t just ugly and protracted, it was intermittently violent to an extent that still shocks me. And while I’m sure the police will believe that they were fully justified in the amount of force they used, I’m also quite sure that most of the students who were out there on Friday will be of the opinion (which I share) that the administration showed itself to be callously indifferent to the welfare of its students when its first response to non-violent student protest was to call out the riot police who used riot shotguns, tear gas, and batons to control a crowd that formed in response to their presence.

I’m not going to say anything about the occupation itself (though the fact that it happened in the very classroom I’ll teach in makes it hard to avoid), but it seems to me important to remember that the vast, vast majority of the students who were beaten and shoved by police and were staring down the barrels of riot shotguns were not the people who occupied Wheeler Hall. They were simply students who were standing there watching, and since they were treated as criminals, almost from the very start, I will be introducing the concept of “interpellation” to my students today (by reference, conveniently, to an event that happens in today’s reading of the novel Cities of Salt, where a bedouin who is treated as a rebel when he seeks redress (but before he becomes a rebel), then becomes a rebel as a result of having been interpellated as such.)

I am going to do this in my classroom, because it seems to me to be the best way I can meet my responsibility to my students, as I define it. And we will each define that responsibility differently. But however we choose to address what happened, I think we would do well to remember that while only about forty of our students were actually occupying classrooms (and only a handful were pulling fire alarms or whatever) several thousand of our students had the experience of riot police pointing shotguns at them, for no apparent reason. And while they may have become increasingly hostile to the police as the day went on (though, to their credit, non-violent), this was a situation created by the police themselves. I can’t reiterate enough how shocking and infuriating it was to watch students who were literally doing nothing, standing with their hands at their sides or in their pockets, be pushed and beaten by riot cops in full riot gear. Students threatening to do what, mill around? were beaten with batons. I am absolutely furious that passive non-violent student protest was so quickly met with inarticulate violence, and since the administration bears the bulk of the responsibility for having created that situation, I hope you can understand how infuriating and disingenuous I find Birgeneau’s last email on Friday to have been. To quote 41 Geography grad students who wrote an open letter to Birgeneau:

“we are insulted by the euphemistic claim that “a few members of our campus community may have found themselves in conflict with law enforcement officers.” What we observed, and what is well-documented, was the police indiscriminately striking, shoving, and knocking over unarmed and non-aggressive students who were fully within their constitutionally guaranteed rights. Further, to argue that the protests “necessitated significant police presence to maintain safety” makes a mockery of the fact that the only threat to safety on Friday was the police presence itself. The broken fingers sustained by two protesters and the bruises and welts sustained by many were not inflicted by their fellow peaceful demonstrators, but by the police themselves.”

Whatever one thinks of the original occupiers themselves, the issue for me (and for my students who were there, I imagine) is now what happened outside Wheeler Hall, not inside it. And I want to say again that I think our students behaved with admirable restraint; the police have claimed that one of them was sent to the hospital for injuries, but in all frankness, I cannot imagine how that could have possibly occurred, how unarmed protesters could have managed to injure a cop in riot gear, and I saw no attempts by the protesters to harm the police at any time (and I was there most of the day). On the other hand, the report that a student requires reconstructive surgery for her broken hand seems eminently plausible to me, given the stupid and indiscriminate deployment of force I saw on the part of the police. But it’s ultimately Birgeneau who has the responsibility for what happened; instead of negotiating with the occupiers (and members of our department faculty were rebuffed when they offered to mediate from the beginning), he called in Berkeley city police and San Francisco city police in the morning, and the Alameda county sheriff’s office at least by one. It was only after he had introduced several hundred cops in riot gear into the situation, and only after it had become completely volatile, that Birgeneau became willing to negotiate (3 o’clock, by his own account, at least nine hours after the police first broke down the front doors of Wheeler Hall). And it was in spite of, not because of, the police use of force that the situation was resolved peacefully.

Security Doors

Wheeler Hall is sort of surreal right now. The building is open, and although there’s a police car out front and there were a couple policemen standing in the stairwell of the second floor when I walked by, other parts of the building are as they normally are on a Sunday. The classrooms that the students occupied look normal, though one of them obviously has had the hinges removed and the other is completely empty, of everything, and mopped clean. I suppose I’ll be teaching in the room two doors down from it on Monday as usual. I’m sitting and typing in the English department lounge, on the third floor, and that’s the view from the window (the barricades are still piled all around the building).

Wheeler houses the English department on the third floor and faculty offices on the fourth floor, but the first and second floors (and the big auditorium) are regularly rented out to a variety of clubs and organizations. When I walked by the west-facing classrooms where the occupiers were holed up, in fact, there were several nicely-dressed undergraduates sitting outside, and I’ve seen more coming up the stairs onto the second floor since then. And then a few minutes later, as I was walking back down the third floor hallway, I started hearing a guitar and hymn music coming up the stairs from below. No doubt a church group is using the space for a Sunday morning service, and the cops came by to check up.

They don’t normally. I’ve “broken and entered” Wheeler hall a dozen times or more since I’ve been here at Berkeley; most grad students have their own trick for getting in when the building is closed, and since the building is so old, it really isn’t hard for a reasonably athletic person to do. We do this because we, the grad students, use the building regularly, as a study space, storage space for books, computer access, etc,^[1] and because the building is sometimes (but unpredictably) locked up. The reason it is sometimes — but not always — closed, is that the University leaves it open for the clubs and organizations that pay to use it. If that church group wasn’t using it this morning, it would probably be locked up, for example. As a graduate student, this can be frustrating: if you’re working late, there’s a chance you’ll step out for a cup of coffee and discover when you get back that the building has been locked behind you, or you’ll show up on a Sunday and discover that the entire building is locked up. It happens rarely enough that you count on being able to use the building, but often enough that you get screwed and have to shimmy through the East side windows. And, for early risers like me, the building is usually open by eight in the morning, but if it isn’t (because it sometimes isn’t, a problem when you teach in the morning), it helps to know that one particular door (the northwest basement entrance) is often left open even when the building is officially locked, and there are certain of the front entrance doors that will sometimes open if you push them really hard.

The long and short of it is this: Wheeler Hall is an extremely insecure building. I imagine the protesters chose to occupy it for this reason, though as far as I know there were no actual English department folks involved. But the particular way that the building is insecure tells you a lot about the university and its priorities. Most buildings on campus are locked at night and on weekends, with the exceptions being the buildings that have staff in them. The logic of that is clear: if no one official is in the building, it should be locked up. Wheeler Hall, on the other hand, is never staffed on the weekends or at night. Instead, when the university can rent the building out to groups that are willing to pay to use it, they simply leave it open. This means that graduate students who want to use the building are usually able to do so.

In fact, as Natalia reminds me, the issue of graduate student access came up at a department meeting some years ago. Graduate students were getting tired of having to jimmy a window open every third weekend and complained to faculty, who agreed that it made sense for grad students to have keys. However, when faculty members inquired with campus police, they were told that, as Natalia paraphrases:

“1. It was a security risk to give out that many keys (we have approximately 150 grads at any given time).

2. The windows in Wheeler Hall stick, so if grads really needed to get into the building they always could.”

Why, do you ask, do the windows “stick” (by which they apparently mean, you can shove them open if you try)? Well, the building is old, and while the university has enough construction funds to be building gleaming new libraries and laboratories, they apparently lack the money to buy twenty locks for the first floor windows. Perhaps I’m oversimplifying the issue in putting it this way, but I really don’t think I am; if the university wanted to secure the building, they could. They haven’t.  

The reason this matters is that — as a faculty member was telling me last night (and I‘ve heard about before) — that the entire building used to be regularly vandalized, and at its worst, janitorial staff working late at were assaulted; in some cases, quite seriously. Once upon a time, I am told, the faculty would semi-regularly have their offices burglarized, their windows smashed, even come in to find graffiti in the hallways. I don’t know details, so I can’t confirm anything more than the plausibility of such things happening. But I’ve seen enough strange people wandering the halls of this place at strange hours, and the first floor bathroom is the most disgusting facility I’ve ever seen in my life, consistently, a regular stop for homeless people that want to take a sink shower or whatever.

There has been a long-running fight between the faculty and staff that regularly use the building and the administration over the issue of security, the faculty demand being that, since the university makes money renting the building out to various organizations and campus groups, they should spend some of that money on making the building secure. And the university yielded to faculty and staff pressure and elected (instead of hiring a security guard or night porter), to install heavy security doors outside of each stairwell, that would automatically close at night but be accessible to people with the right Berkeley ID.^[2] This is what they look like, closed and open, from the third floor stairwell:

The irony of irony, it seems, is that it was these very security doors which kept the police from breaking into the second floor where the occupiers were bunkered down on Friday. I was told that this was the case, but I was also able to see that these doors on the second floor certainly do look like they’ve been smashed open. From left, you have a third floor fire door (so you can see how they normally look) and the two second floor fire doors that show signs of having been forced open (the middle one is super bent, while the right one is more slightly bent):

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^[1] I have a study carrel in the building that I share with another grad student (who I heard — but haven’t confirmed — was beaten by the police on Friday).

 

^[2] I’m told that, in point of fact, these doors will open if any magnetic strip is wiped in front of them. That may be true; I’ve tried and not managed to do it myself.

Wheeler Hall Occupied by the Police

“The SWAT team is coming in. They are hammering the hinges off as I type.”

The students who occupied the classroom next to the room I teach in have been arrested, apparently. No one outside seems to know much, but no one has poked their head out the window in a while. I’m still processing. I know I saw police hitting students with billy clubs. And while no one is going to say that the students didn’t provoke a conflict, that things didn’t get dicey, at no point were any of these police in fear for anything more than a frustrating afternoon. The violence on the part of the police was in response to the violence of being. I’m in solidarity with the protesters, don’t get me wrong. But even if you’re not, even if you think they’re a bunch of whiny Berkeley kids or whatever, the fact is that every time a Berkeley city cop struck a student with his billy club, he was hitting a non-violent student protester whose protest was the demand to occupy a classroom. That makes me sick. If you stand in the wrong place on campus, it seems, the chancellor of the university will call the city police who will use billy clubs (and tear gas and rubber bullets, according to what I heard) to remove you. They do not negotiate, it seems. The administrators of a campus which pretends to take pride in the Free Speech Movement will call the police, who will knock the doors of a classroom off its hinges so it can charge students with Burglary. I am sick.

The police allowed the protesters to occupy the building for almost twelve whole hours today, they stormed in and arrested students almost immediately, this morning. They arrested three students then and the others barricaded themselves in a tiny little room like the one I teach in, the one next to it, I think. I don’t know if there were fifty students who occupied that room, but I do know that when I was turning students away at the beginning of the semester — because the University doesn’t offer nearly enough sections of that class for all the students who are required to take it to graduate — I told them that the room was too small for more than twenty to sit comfortably. I think those students today must have been mighty crowded (UPDATE: for a picture of the cops coming in, click here or scroll down). It does occur to me that when the police occupied the building this morning, the students in that tiny room were hardly a threat.

I saw the officers from the Alameda County Sheriff department arrive around 2, in a line, looking neither to the left nor to the right, with visors over their eyes, in full riot gear. I was too intimidated to take a picture of them.

The Chancellor sent out an email today saying that “Since 3:00 p.m. today a group of senior administrators, faculty, and student leaders have been reaching out to the protestors inside Wheeler Hall. Attempts to engage in a conversation with the 15 to 30 protestors estimated to be in the building have been refused.” I could be wrong. But I call bullshit.

(2nd and 4th photos via Millicent, thanks to my dead camera battery)

 

Update. The police coming in, from the OccupyCA site:

And this photo, from the inside looking out:

Incoherance

This is what it was like. Don’t know what’s happening now.

Wheeler Hall Occupation

Update. I left to get warmer clothes (and rain gear) and then took shelter at a friends’ house when it really turned into a downpour. By the time I got back to Wheeler, what had been an occupation and a protest outside turned into a confrontation. The police have the building and the students are barricaded in a room I used to teach in (known as the “hot dog room” for being long and thin), but the four corners around the building are each blocked by about a thousand to two thousand students. It’s hard to tell for sure. It’s been pretty rough; the police are all wearing riot gear and they keep bringing in reinforcements. Wendy Brown spoke to the crowd for a bit, urgin non-violence, but a lot of students were too angry to listen and shouted her down (“Who are you?”). Those were just the loud voices though; mostly it’s been peaceful. But the dynamic is now pure confrontation; the police are surrounding the occupiers, and the students are surrounding the police. For a brief period, the police tried to force a passage out with billy clubs (I’ll post pictures later) but after a period of shoving, the police gave way. There are barricades everywhere; they brought them in from the main library, which is now shut down (ironically, it’s the police who are occupying the library).

I would stay, but I have to teach a class off campus, ironically. We’ll see who shows up.

——-

Wheeler Hall is where the English department is located, and it has been occupied by forty or fifty students, demanding (apparently) that a dozen or so fired APSME workers be re-hired. And they have a twitter feed at @ucbprotest! Let’s hope they have an endgame planned for this. The cause is a good one, but I’ve already seen the cops get rough with protesters outside, and the rumor is that the Berkeley police were beating on people inside. The entire building is surrounded by police tape and there are cops everywhere. It’s a scene. I’d have pictures for you, except the battery on my camera died… but here’s a picture before the rain started pounding on us:

To Summarize

That last post made me uncomfortable after I wrote it, and as I lay in bed staring out at the pre-dawn morning, unable to go back to sleep, I realized why, that it was really a whole bunch of first person sound and fury to make a relatively simple (if vital) point: the irreconcilable difference between the social function of education and its economic function. What is so striking about being a teacher, in other words, is the way the two aren’t just incidentally separated, but programmatically so. I do what I do in the classroom based on what my sense is of what my students need, what they are unable to do, and what I can help show them how to do. And that task is practically endless, as endless as the social value of education itself. But the university’s increasingly economic account of itself is not of students with needs but of a set amount of capital to be invested: the state has given us a certain amount of money, they say, and this is what we’re going to do with it. Naturally, then, their consciences are unruffled when the time comes to throw kids out of school, to make it impossible for anyone who can’t afford it to get a decent public education. They don’t think about what needs to be done; they think about what can be done.

This is not, however, the difference between idealism and realism, even if that’s how the media has spun it. If you heard NPR’s account of the Chancellor’s meeting this morning, for example, you’ll note that they staged it as a conversation between students demanding money and Yudof saying the money was unavailable. One voice naively demands to be given more while the other voice regretfully and knowingly informs them that it just isn’t realistic. The reason this account is wrong is the same reason the UCSB Academic Senate officially called Yudof “a cynical opportunist with no commitment to education” and voted to censure him. As they put it, “UCOP has misrepresented the real nature of the University’s financial situation…The state cutbacks, though significant, are being used as an excuse to proceed aggressively with further steps toward transforming the University from a public resource, dedicated to the education of the people of California and the pursuit of knowledge, into a profit-making enterprise, a research facility of benefit primarily to industry and beholden primarily to commercial interests.” The university keeps spending money, on lots of things. And the situation is complicated; there are real fiscal limitations to what can be done, just as part of learning to be a teacher is figuring out how to limit what you can give, out of self-preservation. But it’s how those decisions get made, what principles you use to decide how the money gets spent, that determines the difference between an educator and a businessperson. Because you don’t want to go to, or send your kids to, a school that makes its decisions based on the bottom line.

Teachers teach, but not in order to get paid. Being paid enables you to do what needs to be done, and the ones who are motivated by money (or ego) either leave the profession or teach badly. Which is why the difference between a good educator and a bad one (who get paid the same, in practice) is a difference in priorities, the difference between putting your students needs above your sense of what it is that you do. A good teacher builds a curriculum out of the texts that will best help their students work on a particular skill set or open up a particular field of knowledge. A bad teacher is, for example, the tenured professor who designs a class as an excuse to work on their book project, a not uncommon sight at prestigious research institutions (though not a common one either, I’d hasten to add). But the best example of the bad educator is the administrator who, instead of thinking of what needs to be done for the students of the UC system, capitalizes on a crisis of funding to make those students into the cash cow for making the UC profitable. The difference is not between idealism and realism but between two very different sets of priorities, between the social function of education (educating students) and the economic function of being profitable. And that was why Yudof’s ridiculous “cemetery” line was so damningly telling: to make room for a corporation, you have to bury the school first.

On Being a Graduate Student (sort of) On Strike

The UC system is striking today, and after taking part (and taking pictures), I wanted to pause a minute and occupy the moment I’m occupying. For one thing, the idea of a university on strike is sort of a strange one. After all, a university is not a factory, where the idea of a strike was (sort of) first invented, and to which the idea still sort of mythically harks. And the real strike is a two-day work stoppage by the UPTE, a professional and technical workers union (their memo on the strike here), who can strike because they are workers in no uncertain sense and because they are charging that the university has engaged in unfair labor practices. As indeed it has. Since the grad student contract is not up for renewal, the most that we are supposed to do is sympathy strike. I’m not sure whether the difference matters. But this is also not really about labor practices, not entirely. Or rather, that “not entirely” is what makes figuring out what to do in this situation such a complicated thing.

After all, I am a worker in a very real sense: without the slightly-above-the-poverty-line money they pay me to teach, I would not be able to live this lavish lifestyle in one of the most expensive population centers in the country. Yet thinking of grad students as workers is not quite right. Part of it is that being a graduate student is, in practice, to work very hard for very little money. But I say that less as a complaint than as a way of expressing the fact that most of the work we do is essentially voluntary: what we are paid to do and the amount of work we actually do are not, in any direct way, connected. It would be incredibly easy to skimp on one’s classes, incredibly easy not to schedule those extra office hours, to spend that extra half hour on grading each paper, to spend half a day preparing a single hour’s class (not to speak of all the other stuff we don’t get paid to do, like the entire industry of producing scholarship). Sometimes we do just enough to get by, of course. Sometimes I am selfish, and I choose to do only as little as they actually pay me to do. But, then, I’m not talking about being a bad teacher; I’m talking about the difference between what you can get away with doing and what can be done. Because there is no endpoint to how much this job can take. If you were completely selfless, you could spend your entire life pouring energy and time into the black hole that is the “what could be done” to make your classes better. There is always more.

In practice, then, we learn to strike a balance. And one of the things that I find most striking about the graduate student teachers I’ve known is not so much where they strike that balance, but why. The teachers I admire work extremely hard for their students, taking a responsibility for their students’ education, less because they are paid to do so than because they have the opportunity to do something for students who come to become far more important in our lives than they probably realize (or we sometimes like to admit). It’s difficult to do this job well, and I’ll be blunt in saying it’s something I’m still struggling with, and something I’ve often fallen short in doing. But it’s because we take our professional responsibilities personally that the job becomes more than “merely” a business transaction.

Which is why there’s a striking contrast between an administration that wants to make the problem of education a purely economic one, to reduce everything to its cost and value, and this university’s teachers, who do more than they are paid to do as a matter of course, precisely because they think in terms of what they can do, and what needs to be done. And especially because they know what the UC administrators can avoid having to acknowledge, that when corners get cut, the students are the real human beings who end up falling through the cracks. This is only part of why I’m not at all comfortable thinking of my students as consumers of a product that I’m selling them, one of the baseline assumptions of the University’s increasing privatization. For one thing, if each class is a discrete unit of instruction that can be priced, then I’m getting royally screwed out of what they owe me. For another, the thirty percent tuition raise that the regents are voting on (update: voted on) will mean that the money my students paid last semester will now purchase roughly 76% of that much instruction next semester, or something like that. And if this is a simple transaction of dollars for instruction, then we have as much right to arbitrarily decide to withhold our instruction as the university does to arbitrarily raise tuition and withhold 10% of the salaries of faculty and staff. No one, in short, would have any obligations to anyone.

But, of course, I think we do. And this is why every graduate student I know is deeply conflicted about canceling classes for the strike. Our obligations to our students are at odds. On the one hand, every class canceled is that much less time they’ll have to learn things that we don’t have nearly enough world or time to teach them anyway. But on the other hand, the UC system is screwing them by arbitrarily raising tuition 30% at the same time as they gut the quality of the education they receive^[1]. That the state is partially responsible is part of the story, of course, as is California’s incredibly stupid and dysfunctional fiscal process, but the UC regents and President have acted in bad faith throughout the entire process, have capitalized on a legitimate crisis to push forward a narrow partisan agenda against the stated objections of a whole range of stake-holders within the university. There’s a reason why 96% of the university community voted “no confidence” in UC president Mark Yudof, just as there is a reason why Time magazine named him one of the top ten university presidents for having done everything in his power to make this place a worse (but more profitable) university. Some people like the idea of a public university, while some people believe a university should simply be a corporation. Some people think public education is a worthy allocation of public funds. Some people do not.

Yet while you can have this disagreement in good faith, what makes me angriest is that the people in power have not done so. To take some language from the UCSB Academic Senate’s vote to censure Yudof:

1) UCOP has misrepresented the real nature of the University’s financial situation.  The options with which we were presented in June were not the only ones available, but were calculated to coerce us into accepting measures that UCOP and the Regents wanted to enact. The state cutbacks, though significant, are being used as an excuse to proceed aggressively with further steps toward transforming the University from a public resource, dedicated to the education of the people of California and the pursuit of knowledge, into a profit-making enterprise, a research facility of benefit primarily to industry and beholden primarily to commercial interests.

2) The “emergency powers” declaration, approved in July, was unnecessary, an effort to give the budget measures an air of urgency and inevitability that they do not in fact possess.  The specific purpose of the emergency powers is to free UCOP’s hand to undermine longstanding institutional structures, like faculty governance, and to circumvent financial obligations to faculty, staff, and students.

3) The decision of UCOP (as communicated in the memo of Provost Pitts) to override the expressed will of the Senate by demanding that faculty furloughs be taken on non-teaching days is a direct assault on the principle of faculty governance, a deliberate and offensive effort to undermine and degrade the institutional culture of the UC system.

4) President Yudof’s recent interview in the NY Times was an embarrassment. His statements showed him to be a cynical opportunist with no commitment to education.  He called his own entry into the field of education an “accident;” he claimed that the “shine” had gone off education, and he likened the UC system to a cemetery.  Such remarks are an insult to the UC community he is well paid to serve and lead; they are unbecoming to the president of the nation’s leading public University. They call his fitness for his position into question.

I have real reservations about the strike myself. I wish there were a clearer sense of what the goals were, and I wish I understood how some kind of negotiation is supposed to occur here. But then, that problem is, itself, a huge part of what we are protesting, the manner in which the administration has declared that no negotiation or discussion will occur. The Regents granted Yudof a range of “emergency” powers at the July 15th meeting precisely so that there could be as little input from the university community at large as possible (putting aside a university tradition of shared governance) and Yudof announced the specifics of the furloughs and salary reductions three days before the meeting (ignoring a broad range of alternative plans that were offered) precisely because the official line is that they don’t have to negotiate (The Council of UC Faculty Associations legal challenge to it is worth reading, by the way). But I go back over this not to rehearse all the reasons why Yudof is Teh Terrible but because having a coherent negotiating position presumes that they are listening to us. They’re not; which is why this strike can’t be about what results we want at the bargaining table. Everyone who is not a regent has already been excluded, en masse, from this discussion. This strike is, for me, about making Yudof and the regents admit that there is a bargaining table, that the university community at large has a legitimate stake in these decisions as well. They have an obligation to us, too.

 

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^[1] It’s hard to overstate how depressing this semester has been in terms of watching this university get dismantled. Berkeley is still a great place. But every part of the university’s mission that is not being degraded right now while simultaneously becoming more expensive. And while the change is gradual and slow, it has also been comprehensive, and the collective experience of watching it happen is incredibly frustrating.