UCSD Muslim Student Association and Students for Justice in Palestine present…
Justice in Palestine Week: End the Humanitarian Crisis
The recent Israeli, 23-day invasion, of Gaza left 1,500 dead, many of which were innocent children, women, and men. Even after the ceasefire, Israel has continually refused to lift the humanitarian blockade, despite calls for the lifting of the blockade by the UN, European Union, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International. In light of the ongoing crisis in Palestine, and the continual occupation and partitioning of both the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the UCSD Muslim Student Association and UCSD Students for Justice in Palestine present the “Justice in Palestine Week: End the Humanitarian Crisis”. The main goal of this week long series of events is to bring attention to the devastating effects of Israel’s occupation of Palestine.
End the Silence, End the Ignorance, End the Racism, End the Blockade, End the Occupation!
Sponsored by:
-UCSD Department of Ethnic Studies Faculty NOTE Correction: The Department of Ethnic Studies Faculty is only endorsing the “Panel Discussion on the Humanitarian Crisis in Gaza” on Tuesday, May 12 from 6-9pm.
-Teachers Against Occupation
Endorsed by UCSD chapters of:
-Amnesty International
-Arab Student Union
-Collective Voice Newspaper
-Migrants Rights Awareness (MIRA)
-MEChA
-One Earth One Justice (OEOJ)
-Pakistani Student Association (PSA)
-Sangam
-South East Asian Collective (SEAC)
Tuesday, May 12 (6pm-9pm)
Panel Discussion on the Humanitarian Crisis in Gaza
UCSD Ethnic Studies Department Faculty
Professor Michael Provence, History of the Near East
Professor Gary Fields, Communications Department
The Forum, 4th floor of Price Center http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=76393649834
Wednesday, May 13 (6pm-8pm)
Teach-in and Live Report from Gaza
Radhika Sainath, National Lawyers Guild
Lecture with UC Berkeley Professor Dr. Hatem Bazian
TMC Room, Price Center http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=93254304807
In order to continue their fight against socialist education, the Billionaires converged once again at UCSD, this time protesting March 4th, a national day of action for education.
This documentary examines the turbulent life in California of political philosopher Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979), author of One-Dimensional Man, Reason and Revolution and Eros and Civilization, among other books, professor of philosophy at the University of California San Diego, and a visionary and influential force for the student movement worldwide during the Sixties and Seventies. Blending archival footage, interviews, re- created scenes and voice-over narration, the video profiles not only the life of Marcuse but also the history of student protest and social activism. The video features interviews with Marcuse’s student Angela Davis, former UCSD Chancellor William McGill, colleagues Fredric Jameson and Reinhard Lettau, and rare footage of Marcuse and former California Governor Ronald Reagan. Directed by Paul Alexander Juutilainen
Partnership! Well, labor and capital may be partners in theory, but they are enemies in fact.
JOHN L. LEWIS; President, United Mine Workers of America; 1936
If you contract out, union-bust, or otherwise make it impossible for workers and students to have an organized voice, you don’t shut them up, you just get collective bargaining by riot.
ELAINE BERNARD; Director, Harvard Law School Labor & Worklife Program; 2002
Pomona College is the site of active class struggle. The food service workers of Pomona College are now in open conflict with the corporate administration of Pomona College over their attempts to organize an independent union. They fight for dignity, justice and respect. Their employer, Pomona College, seeks only the ability to continue its exploitative practices. The College rejects even their basic demand for an agreement against intimidation. We, as Claremont Solidarity, stand with the workers, and against the interests of capital and the corporate university.
On Monday, March 1, 150 students and workers entered the office of David Oxtoby, President of Pomona College, to deliver their demands for a fair unionization process to him. Hundreds of signed petitions were stacked in Oxtoby’s hands, petitions signed by 90% of the food service workers at Pomona College, demanding that Pomona College agree to a card check neutrality agreement with the dining hall workers. If the College were to accept this card check neutrality agreement, they would pledge to not engage in any anti-union intimidation of workers and recognize the workers’ union as soon as a majority have signed union authorization cards. On Saturday, March 6, workers came forward to speak to students, addressing a rally of more than 400 students assembled in the rain, speaking to their situation and efforts at creating a union.
The Pomona dining hall workers are organizing to establish an independent union in order to collectively fight for a contract and better working conditions. In the Pomona College dining halls, where workers are denied year-round employment, where more than 80% report having been injured on the job, where workers are at-will employee and are routinely fired for being worked to the point where injuries prevent them working any more, where decades of employment provides only the opportunity for decades of poverty-level wages, where legally required breaks have been denied with uniform consistency for years, where the managers compel workers to perform unpaid labor off the clock, and above all, where workers have been robbed of their power, their voice, and their dignity. To the administration, they are merely part of the faceless human capital that greases the wheels of the educational institution, regardless of the fact that they contribute far more to the College than the comfortably positioned PR office bureaucrat who makes certain that every letter published by the College uses the approved font, or even the faculty member who teaches students how to continue reproducing our oppressive social relations
Pomona College is the second wealthiest liberal arts college in the country, with an endowment of $1.8 billion. An endowment of $1,160,000 per student, with a tuition of $50,000, and Pomona College pays its dining hall workers as little as $10 an hour. With the lack of reliable work that the College offers, many workers – who tend to be the primary breadwinners for their families – come out making between $10,000 and $15,000 per year. Pomona College’s endowment has grown by 240% over the past 10 years. What does that vast increase in wealth mean for the workers? It means absolutely nothing; wages have been stagnant for decades, just keeping up with inflation and lagging behind the cost of living. No matter how much money Pomona College has, it will pay its employees as little as it can get away with.
After years of paternalistic negotiations, after bureaucratic do-nothing committees, after proposals for an ombudsman, after a failed unionization campaign with an outside union, after years of proper channels and no improvement, the dining hall workers are certain that the only means to gain dignity and respect at their work is to organize and create their own union.
The workers have chosen to create their own independent, worker-controlled union and to not relinquish control to a self-interested outside union. They have been failed by the national unions in the past and now they have made complete autonomy and local control an absolute condition of any union organizing. It will be difficult for an independent union of a few dozen workers and scant resources to challenge the billion dollar corporation that is Pomona College, but with student solidarity it is possible, and it may be preferable to a few dozen workers challenging a union that either outright ignores workers who aren’t in thousand-person bargaining groups, or seeks ‘mutually beneficial partnerships’ with employers.
The response from the College administration to all of this? President Oxtoby declares his support of workers’ right to unionize! Simultaneously he rejects all of their demands and refuses to negotiate on the issue of card check neutrality. Oxtoby will allow only for talk of a unionization process that follows the model of National Labor Relations Board vote, a process that is the graveyard of democracy and unionization attempts. Oxtoby demands that the College reserve the right to intimidate its workers, to retaliate against organizing workers, to delay the unionization vote for years, and to appeal any unionization vote for yet more years. These are the points of difference between the process demanded by the workers and the process offered by the College. Unless the College was planning on utilizing some of these anti-union tactics allowed under the NLRB process then there would be no reason in rejecting the card check process.
Oxtoby has revealed the true anti-worker position of the College in statements that deny any need for workers to be concerned with the benevolent, protective employment of the College, even going so far as to call workers ‘naïve’ in an interview with the college newspaper:
“The assumption, often, with a union is that everything that you have now you will keep and you will get more — you will have all of the channels of communication and ways of working with the college which we’ve developed over the years, I think that’s not correct. I think it’s a little naive.”
The workers know the liberal bullshit of the administration when they see it, and have responded with a hardening commitment to the fair process that 90% of them had originally demanded, in direct rejection of the anti-worker NLRB process that Oxtoby holds to. The orange armbands are staying on in the kitchens of Pomona College.
Meanwhile, out of the public arena, the College has already forced the dining hall workers to attend anti-union meetings where they illegally promised concessions if the workers stop their organizing efforts (covering up their illegal activities with the blatant lie that they implemented these concessions months ago, without any of the workers noticing). The deans, so fond of the liberal college activist who poses no challenge to their own comfort and security, sat one student organizer down to threaten him with the loss of his job with the College if he continued devoting his efforts to the union.
Alongside the administration, numerous supposedly leftist faculty at Pomona College have belittled the workers’ attempts at forming an independent union, apparently unable to believe that workers are capable of organizing themselves without the leadership of decayed professors or bureaucratic outside unions. To them, we repeat the words one worker spoke to the faculty: “We’re not asking for your advice, we’re asking for your support.” At the very least, 90% of the workers have decided that this the course of action they want to take, and the only justifiable action for us to take is to respect their decisions and lend them our solidarity, not our paternalism.
It is no surprise that an elite liberal arts college supposedly committed to social responsibility responds to the organization of its workers in the same fashion as any profit-driven corporation, because that is exactly what the modern college has become through a long process of corporatization. The only structural difference remaining between college and corporation is that as ‘non-profits’ colleges need make only enough revenue to break even, a difference in scale only. The condition of the workers at Pomona College is a result of this corporatization of the college; a result of transformation of Pomona College into Pomona College, Inc.
As students at a corporate college we are now mere consumers of the education commodity. So workers are mere human capital, rather than dignified and respected members of our community. They are expected to have the same relationship with the College community as McDonalds’ fry cooks have with their customers. What should be a community of equals who are valued for their contributions to the collective education of everyone in our community is instead debased to a rude system of commodities, consumers, producers and exploitation.
Our friends from Direct Action Claremont have participated in occupations at the public universities, and we see this struggle at Pomona College as an extension of that struggle. Both the battle for public education and the unionization efforts at Pomona College are manifestations of resistance to the neo-liberal corporate model of higher education that simultaneously dispossesses students of an education, and workers of dignified labor.
Claremont Solidarity exists to escalate the class struggle at Pomona College. The interests of the workers and the interests of the corporate College are directly opposed to each other; one seeks justice and fairness, the other seeks profit through exploitation. The College will not choose through its own enlightenment to act against its economic interest and allow the workers to organize. It can only be forced to do such. In order to realize progress, we must create a situation of conflict, where the power of the administration is challenged by the power of the workers. And we must make certain at the same time that students understand this conflict, and choose to cast their lots on the side of the workers. We cannot wait for this situation of open class conflict to emerge; time is the College’s most potent weapon, and they intend to delay justice until it is terminally denied. Pomona College will attempt to batten down the hatches and wait for the storm to blow over; we pledge that this storm shall only strengthen until the workers at Pomona College have justice.
We pledge an escalating campaign of confrontational action, as this is the only way to force the College to recognize the workers’ demands. Pomona College cannot run as though everything is normal when the College is refusing to consider the demands of 90% of its food service workers. There is an active labor conflict in Claremont, and we will not let the College forget it. No business as usual!
The UC does not face a budget crisis, but a crisis of priorities. In one of the richest places in the world, public education is being destoryed. Join the struggle, and fight for the right to a quality education!
by Bob Samuels, President of the University Council – AFT and lecturer at UCLA
UC faculty and students are still being manipulated by the administration to blame all of the university’s problems on state funding, but as I have previously shown, most of the UC’s budget issues are internal. While I have argued that we still need to fight to increase the state allocation for higher education, we have to pressure UC administrators to provide truthful information regarding the university’s finances. Moreover, the solution to our current inability to provide access, affordability, and quality higher education in the California is to increase enrollments and make sure that the enhanced revenue finds its way into the classroom. While many people will argue that we cannot afford to have more students, I will show below why we cannot afford not to have increased enrollments. To make this argument, I will refute several of the standard myths that the UC circulates about its own finances.
Myth 1. UC does not get enough money from the state and student fees to cover the total cost of instruction.
Fact #1: I have calculated that while the University of California receives $15,000 from the state for each student, and student fees and tuition brings in another $10,000 per student, it only costs about $3,000 to educate each student. This means that most of the money that students and the state pay goes to fund external research, administration, and extracurricular activities. Furthermore, the main reason why the cost for instruction is so low is that research universities rely on large classes and inexpensive non-tenured faculty and graduate students to teach most of their undergraduate courses.
To determine the basic educational cost at any university, you simply need to take the average salary of the people who teach the courses and then divide that salary by the average number of courses to get the per course cost. In the case of the University of California, the average salary for a professor teaching undergraduate courses is $100,000, and the average course load is 5, which means the per course cost is $20,000. However, half of the undergraduate courses in the UC system are taught by non-tenurable lecturers and grad students, and their average per course cost is $6,000. If we average these two costs together, the combined average cost per class is $13,000. The next thing to do is to determine the average class size, and the best way to do this is to look at the size of the classes that the average student takes in an average year. In the UC campuses using the quarter system, students average 8 large classes and 2 small classes per year, and the large classes average 200 students, and the small classes average 20 students. This means that the average per student cost for a large class is $65, and the average per student cost for a small class is $650. Now, we can add up the cost of the ten courses a student takes in a year, and we get $1,820 ($1,300 for 2 small classes + $520 for 8 large classes).
One thing that I have left out of this calculation is the cost for small sections taught by graduate students that often accompany large lecture classes. In the UC system, this additional cost adds another $1,000 to each undergraduate’s yearly bill, and if we now multiply the whole total by the cost of providing healthcare for all of the instructors (15%), our new total is $3,243. We are still a long way from the $25,000 that the UC claims it costs to educate each undergraduate student per year. More importantly, it is clear that if the UC increased enrollments, it would have more money for all of its other activities.
Myth 2: The state now only pays half as much per student as compared to 1990.
Fact #2: If you actually crunch the numbers, as I have done, the UC got $13,000 per student in 1990, and in 2008-09, they got over $15,000. UC argues that if you use a special inflation index, a calculation that they have never revealed, you see that in terms of “real dollars,” state support has been cut in half; however, the truth is that state support has gone up, and the UC cannot account for how state funds are spent. Moreover, the UC does not tell students or parents that the UC Office of the President redistributes state funds and student fees to the campuses according to some secret formula. By claiming that the state has cut its funding in half, the UC is able to blame the state for all of the university’s problems, and then after attacking the state, the administration expects lawmakers to turn around and increase their funding for the UC system.
Myth #3: The UC had its budget cut by $800 million during the 2008-09 fiscal year.
Fact #3: According to its own audited financial statements, the UC’s funding from the state went up $300 million in 2008-09. It turns out that when President Yudof and other UC officials sought to justify the raising of student fees and the furloughing of employees, they constantly hid the fact that the state’s funding reductions for 2008-09 were erased by the federal recovery money and additional state funding. While, it is true that for 2009-10, state funding was actually cut, the problem is that we do not know by how much and if any federal recovery money has been used to reduce the total loss of state funding.
Myth #4: Most of the UC’s funding is restricted, so you cannot use money from a grant to study laser technology to pay the salary of an English professor.
Fact #4: According to its own audited statements, only about a third of UC’s budget of over $20 billion is restricted by law. The UC likes to pretend that it cannot move money around, but that is what it always does. For instance, when a professor gets a grant to study laser technology, he uses part of the grant to buy himself out of his teaching duties. His department then takes this buyout money from the external grant to hire a grad student or lecturer to teach the professor’s course. The strict line between the restricted external grant funds and the state-supported unrestricted instructional funds has now been broken.
Another proof that restricted and unrestricted funds are combined is by the fact that many administrators have their salaries paid out of a combination of state funds, student fees, endowment funds, and external grant indirect costs. Moreover, even when an outside donor gives money to the university to support an endowed chair in History, this means that the university does not have to use its own unrestricted funds to pay for the position. In short, the strict border between restricted and unrestricted funds is constantly being crossed in the UC system.
Myth #5: UC has a budget crisis.
Fact #5: In 2008-09, the UC had a record year of revenue, and it looks like revenue in 2009-10 will be even higher. In almost every category of the UC budget, we see that the UC has been able to bring in more money as it raises student fees and furloughs and layoffs employees. Last year, due to the federal stimulus, the university received a large increase of research money, and the one-year augmentation of student fees by over 23% helped the system to recoup any losses caused by the 2009-10 state reductions. Also, while the UC claims that it will bring in an additional $195 million from the furloughs, it is possible that the salary reductions saved at least twice that amount.
Myth #6: UC has to spend more money on administrators.
Fact #6: While the UC has tried to justify its constant expansion of the administration, we have shown that not only are these increases unneeded, but they take away funding and power from the faculty. Twenty years ago, there were more faculty than staff, and now the faculty only represent a quarter of all employees. Moreover, administrators and bureaucrats have some of the highest salaries in the system.
It is time for the faculty and the students in the UC system to stop buying the administration’s line and to force the university to respect shared governance by providing accurate and transparent budget information.
Ward Connerly, the villian of Prop 209 and a staunch opponent of affirmative action, says, “There just aren’t enough black kids who are academically prepared to go to UCSD.”
Hrmmm….
1. That’s bullshit, considering that UCSD already sends acceptance letters to more African-Americans than UCLA or Berkeley–and this, while being unable to give special consideration to socioeconomic factors–but only 13% of them choose to come here because it’s known as a racist campus with a toxic climate.
2. Even if it were true, I wonder if it would be because California doesn’t offer the classes necessary to apply to the UC at many 4th and 5th quintile high schools? What an interesting coincidence!
Connerly displays his bizarre relationship with the facts, and his true motivation, when he makes this assumption. He then goes on to blame the victim, saying that, on top of doing the administration’s yield and retention work for them, black students should be working harder to convince individual black children to care about school. As if you will magically become a successful UC student if you care enough–it doesn’t matter if there are enough books, teachers or classes. Study harder!
I recently received a group email asking why they brought Ward Connerly to San Diego at a time like this. My response was, “So we could give him a welcome he’ll never forget. Let’s get to it!”
March 4th, 2010. From U.C. Strike on Facebook: At the 1:15 mark in this video, the roll is slowed to show a police officer kicking an already beat-up student in the head, after which she appears to go limp. appendix to Spring and All http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8bd-FwQaoc
You can bullshit about this on facebook all you want, but until you actually watch this video and see the cops beat up a peaceful protester, kick her in the head, and see her go limp, you have no fucking idea what you’re talking about.
ALL DAY: OPEN UNIVERSITY TEACH-OUT: We are asking professors and TAs to teach their classes/sections outside as a sign of solidarity with the March 4 protesters. If you have class on Thursdays, help us spread the word about this by asking your instructor to participate in this.
9:00am-12:00pm: Free breakfast at the Sustainability Resource Center (next to the Price Center Theater)
9:30am- Black Student Union Rally in front of the Chancellor’s Complex (3/4 is the deadline for the admin to respond to the BSU’s demands).
11:00am – Press Conference (w/ panel of Workers, Staff, Undergrad, Grads, and Faculty). Location: Cross Cultural Center Art Space (2nd Floor, Price Center East).
11:30am – Meet up in front of the Gilman Dr. Parking Structure (corner of Villa la Jolla Dr.) and march on over to Library Walk
12:00pm-2:00pm – Rally in front of Geisel Library (Silent Tree) on Library Walk (there will be lots of speakers and performers; more details to follow).
2:00pm – Mobilize people to go to the big march downtown to the governor’s office. Buses will be leaving from the front of Student Services center at 2:30pm (we’ve rented 4 student buses). You may also take the #150 buses and go downtown for March to the Governor’s office but be aware that it only passes through Gilman Dr. every hour (see below).
The events that the UCSD Coalition is planning are intended to be peaceful demonstrations intended to bring together as many people as possible to denounce attacks against public higher education in California. We do not envision any sort of problems with the police, but just in case, we are recommending that people read THIS “know your rights” pamphlet (courtesy of our friends at the San Diego ACLU).
Events in downtown San Diego on March 4:
As part of The March 4th National Call for a Day of Action, The Save Our Schools Coalition of California will be marching from Balboa Park to the Governor’s Office. We are asking all UCSD students, faculty, and staff to join this march. The schedule for that is:
2:30pm – 3:30pm - Gather at Park Blvd & Presidents Way (in Balboa Park, adjacent to the World Beat Center).
3:30pm – 4:15pm – March to Governors Office (in Front St.). The walk is about 1.2 long (approx 35 mins).
4:15pm – 5:30pm – Demonstration in front of Governors Office in San Diego
Public transportation from UCSD: We are asking that UCSD students and personnel take the 150 Express Bus to the 10th St. & C St. bus stop. From there, walk 2 blocks east to Park Blvd. (SD City College) and then walk about 1/2 mile north on Park Blvd (about 12 mins walking) until you reach the intersection of Park Blvd. and Presidents Way.
