day 31 (part 2 of 2)

(Read part One here.)

“THE ONLY POSSIBLE RELATIONSHIP TO THE UNIVERSITY TODAY IS A CRIMINAL ONE.”

The 8th house in astrology also rules what the old astrologers called “the occult,” as in, what’s hidden. The subconscious is sometimes put in this category; the shadow, darkness, witchcraft, what’s ‘beyond’ the visible all fall here. It’s stereotypically feared, like the 12th, the final and most esoteric house (incidentally the location of my chart’s other stellium).

Any planets in the eighth house move in silence, are covert operations. In my personal case, that’s my “personal planets,” as they’re called because of their stronger influence on personality: Mercury, Venus, and Mars. The planets of, respectively, communication, flow of desire, and method of action. Crudely, all I want is to be left alone, and the means to be so.

I don’t know how to square this (ha) with the strike generally, except to say that it seems appropriate for a person of my nature to be involved in bringing an abuse of power to light (Saturn in Aquarius, Pluto in Scorpio) in order to benefit financially and spread that life-giving wealth (Jupiter in Leo). What matters to me most is that there is a livable baseline for student researchers. It’s when we’re just starting out that we need the most support, not the least.

The spiritual goal, the ‘greatest good,’ in this context, to me, is parity. I am afraid that the better-paid union reps (from the STEM fields and from Berkeley, the elite and highest-paid campus of the nine UCs) will think that a few extra weeks of maternity leave and some discount bus passes (two of our latest bargaining “wins”) are enough to justify folding to the university’s pressure.

I have a Berkeley advisor who told me that his department competes with Princeton. I know what Princeton Comparative Literature students net, and I make less than half what they do. Because I cannot afford to live in or even near Santa Cruz, I am expected to commute for four to six hours per workday (Silicon Valley traffic is a bitch) to make less than half of what my coworker makes at Cal. Something like a third or more of my Santa Cruz colleagues live in the East Bay and do the same. It is obvious why the Santa Cruz union reps are the hardliners, determined not to cave and to accept the petty concessions that the university tried, just this last weekend, to force through (without giving reps time to confer with the rest of the union). They claimed it was their “final offer.” It did not include anything near parity, and despite half a dozen or more little treats (like bus passes),  it did not promise anything substantial in the way of wage increase.

Bitterness can be my signature. I’m working on it. It’s easy to feel like you’re ‘explaining yourself’ hoarse in a situation like this. The union is gigantic. We’re not 3,000 workers like Columbia, and we’re not private. We’re 48,000, currently represented by nineteen.

I wonder a lot lately about the breakdowns of paygrades based on campus, field, and department. Does a physicist at Irvine make less than an art historian at UCLA? Does a philosopher at Berkeley outearn a biomechanical engineer at Merced? Does a politics student at Davis break even with a linguist at Santa Barbara?

The mind reels. The tummy hurts (it’s day 27). Fred Moten (of UC Riverside) and Stefano Harney begin The Undercommons with the following, and so I will leave this at this (cf. the 8th house in astrology):

It cannot be denied that the university is a place of refuge, and it cannot be accepted that the university is a place of enlightenment. In the face of these conditions one can only sneak into the university and steal what one can. To abuse its hospitality, to spite its mission, to join its refugee colony, its gypsy encampment, to be in but not of—this is the path of the subversive intellectual in the modern university. (p26)

image: monks’ quarters at the Self-Realization Fellowship, viewed from the other side of their garden walls (Encinitas, CA)