Dear President Napolitano,
We share with you a commitment to the mission of the University of California. Your February 14 letter to the UC Santa Cruz community, however, raises concerns among faculty across the UC system about how best to address the crisis under which many of our graduate students live. This is a crisis born of rapid increases in housing costs with which graduate student incomes have long not kept pace. A thriving graduate student body is essential to our research and teaching, both at the undergraduate and graduate levels. The graduate student demand for cost of living increases, begun in actions at UC Santa Cruz and now spreading across the system, is an acute response to unsustainable conditions. A punitive response to these actions, resulting in the dismissal of hundreds of Academic Student Employees, will disrupt the education of thousands of undergraduates and will make the work of many UCSC faculty difficult or impossible. Therefore we urge you to work to achieve a speedy and satisfactory solution to the cost of living crisis that we all recognize. We all hope for a quick solution that will both address legitimate and pressing graduate student concerns and not interfere with faculty ability to do their jobs.
Sincerely yours,
The Executive Board of the Council of UC Faculty Associations
Well said! As the director of a grad program at UC Davis who is familiar with the housing, cost of living, and debt problems that impede our students’ teaching, research, and future career prospects I could not agree more!
—Seth Sanders, director, Graduate Group for the Study of Religion
Subsidized (and sustainable/carbon neutral) housing for both graduate and undergraduate students needs to be made a central part of UC planning. There simply isn’t enough affordable housing in most UC communities to accommodate our students. UC’s failure to provide this results in students living far away from campus and commuting, raising campus GHG footprints & requiring subsidized parking. At UC Davis, sizable amounts of older, affordable grad student housing were razed in 2013, and more is scheduled to come down in the future, to be replaced with more expensive new housing. That’s not a recipe for sustainability.
— Steve Wheeler, Prof and Chair, Community Development Grad Group, UC Davis