29. Nov ‘22, crisp morning. //
J comes back flush from biking thru Oakland yesterday afternoon to say he inadvertently found himself in a throng of over a thousand UAW picketers down by the lake. They were workers from Berkeley, Davis, and SF campuses marching on the UC Office of the President (which, it turns out, is at 1111 Franklin Street in Oakland). He biked along for a while and took some great pictures. The mayor-elect of Oakland (Sheng Thao!) stood in the bed of a pickup with a megaphone and gave a speech.
There is also good video footage of picketers stopping traffic along La Jolla Shores Drive down in San Diego, the route I used to take to high school every morning, at a main entrance of UCSD. It’s a fun game to check out all the images coming out on social media of pickets across the state and try to guess in which part of California they are happening: Santa Barbara, Irvine, Riverside. Winter anywhere in California looks like pale blue skies, faded low-level foliage, and purple- and sand-colored hills. The gist of each background is curves of asphalt and horizon.
Since the strike began two weeks ago, the UC has only agreed to discuss items pertaining to Post-doctoral scholars, who make up a minor portion of the graduate population. The most significant items are of course the pay increases for ASEs, “academic student employees,” including Teaching Assistants and Graduate Student Instructors, and SRs (Student Researchers). Of our 48,000 union members, roughly 36K are ASEs, and a smaller number than the remainder are Post-docs. A tentative agreement was made between Post-docs and the UC over the weekend; they gave a good amount of ground. Presumably, as the end of quarter looms and the threat of withheld grades grows, this week’s bargaining is going to have to attend to the demands of the ASEs.
Back in October, after I passed the Qualifying Exams, I promised my advisor a draft of my dissertation prospectus by December 1. The strike seemed relatively distant. Since then I have produced a short document the reception of which by my committee, as usual, I find it all but impossible to predict. There is never the encouragement a younger version of myself would have craved. There is never the outright derision a fearful version of myself believes must be coming. Often there is just less response than seems appropriate, given the time and energy put into such writing. But (I have learned over the past three.5 years) this is the way this work works. If you are not living for it, give it up. I don’t mean this in a discouraging sense, but in a be-reasonable sense: not unlike your poetry, the lack of which will never cause the spinning world to cease to spin, there is no machinery that needs your thinking. It’s just you that needs it; that is, if you do, indeed, need it. Each piece of writing therefore asks: so, do you?
image: sign on West Cliff, Santa Cruz
Last thing: link to the long, live list of UC faculty who are honoring the picket line by (continuing to cancel all classes and) promising to withhold final grades alongside us if we’re still striking at the end of term (16 days from now…). How many names do you know? ;) https://sites.google.com/view/ucfacultypledgeofsolidarity/home?pli=1