ICYMI / this is a really helpful interview on the UCSC wildcat strike and #cola4all sequence. here's a thread with some highlights. https://twitter.com/SpreadtheStrike/status/1265755048945975296

"grades serve as an integral accounting mechanism in the contemporary student debt-financed university where their allocation serves a peculiar evidentiary role, signaling nothing more than that education has indeed taken place. In this capacity, they are more akin to *receipts*"

"Withholding grades, then, while still continuing to teach…presents an interesting conundrum to an administration that must claim some form of injury, or dereliction of duty, in relation to an activity that it fundamentally has no insight into nor control over."

"Our administrators are always perfectly capable of acknowledging the dismal conditions of housing, work, study, and debt among the 'university community' – they study and lament these conditions, along with the lack of state funding and affordable housing."

"They recognize these 'realities,' with regret, and then regretfully hike tuition, increase enrollment, and propose capital investment projects like Student Housing West."

"notwithstanding the genuinely inspiring organizing and solidarity of certain exceptional members of faculty, the occurrence of militant labor actions in the university raises a fundamental question…about alliances between tenured faculty and those without such guarantees: …"

"is it possible for faculty to act collectively in ways that don’t ultimately amount to strikebreaking?"

"Initially, the concern was how to preserve this momentum over Winter break and into the next quarter…This was accomplished largely by the sheer weight and resonance of our demands… [W]e actually came back from that break with more energy and with the grades still in hand."

"In hindsight, however, there was a way that this strike action may have worked to undermine the underlying momentum of the labor stoppage. The decision to picket was reached in such a way that grad workers…had ultimately to decide what a 'full strike' meant for them."

"Although the Doomsday rally of February 21 was the peak of our physical demonstration, when around 1000 people comfortably closed campus, the threat of firing hurt the strike on another level: the number of grad workers withholding their labor decreased."

"Reflecting on the phases of the strike, it remains difficult to know whether we misrecognized our position, failing to address a dwindling number of strikers in spite of large-scale demonstrations at Santa Cruz and elsewhere."

"But it is equally possible that we were…robbed of an opportunity to regroup, or that the full teaching strike at UC Berkeley would have carried the COLA movement to new heights, had its first day not coincided with that campus’ first day of transition to online instruction."