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CalCOLA Statement on UC Berkeley “Big Give”, Launch of Strike Fund

Each year, UC Berkeley celebrates its increasing privatization and commodification of education by soliciting private donations for a 24-hour period they call the “Big Give”. During this time, University administration uses student advocacy as a marketing tool while they rake in millions of dollars contingent upon the demands of wealthy donors. This year, instead of resigning ourselves to this twisted, undemocratic, and neoliberalized vision of “public” education, we are asking you to fight back against this system and contribute to the CalCOLA strike fund. These funds will be allocated for legal fees, docked pay for strikers, food and organizing supplies for actions, to promote equity, and ensure accessibility at our events, assemblies, and meetings.

Recent decades have seen a shift in the funding and operation of our “public” universities. The State of California has decreased its contributions to the UC from $23,000 per student to $8,000 over the last four decades. The UC is now funded more by student tuition and private donors than by public funds. We see the University prioritize its relationship to private interests over listening to its students, its workers, and the public. This system perpetuates the racial and economic injustices of the past and present into the future as it gives those in privileged groups the ability to determine who is included and excluded from our public institutions.

We cannot accept this. We recognize these structural problems are protected and reinforced by a toxic culture in the UC administration. We cite the California State Auditor’s assessment of the Office of the President:

“Our report concludes that the Office of the President has amassed substantial reserve funds, used misleading budgeting practices, provided its employees with generous salaries and atypical benefits, and failed to satisfactorily justify its spending on systemwide initiatives. [...] Correspondence between the Office of the President and the campuses shows that the Office of the President inappropriately reviewed campuses’ survey responses, which resulted in campuses making changes to those responses prior to submitting them to us...”

...the Office of the President’s actions during this audit have caused us to question whether it will make a genuine effort to change.”

(auditor.ca.gov/pdfs/reports/2016-130.pdf)

The poisonous combination of these structural failures and the administration’s mismanagement and lack of ethics have left graduate students in the UC system no choice but to act. On Monday, March 16, graduate students at UC Berkeley will go on strike to demand the University provide a Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA) that will bring graduate students out of rent burden. Beyond the well-being of current graduate students, this demand is required to ensure higher education is accessible and equitable, and truly serves as a public good. Graduate students across the UC are putting their bodies upon the gears and the wheels of the administration in order to stop this dishonorable higher education system. We are asking you to support us in our collective struggle.

Please donate to COLA organizer strike funds listed below, and from Wednesday March 11 at 9pm to Thursday March 12 at 9pm, and promote the hashtags #CalBigGive, #cola4all, and #colastrike on social media to show the administration and the public that you stand with our COLA strikers. We have immediate need for funding to ensure universal access at COLA events and meetings, and to provide security for our most vulnerable strikers.

Current Strike Funds for Wildcat Strikers:

UC Berkeley: https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-fund-for-striking-workers-at-ucb UC Santa Cruz: https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-fund-for-striking-workers-at-ucsc UC Santa Barbara: https://www.gofundme.com/f/ucsb-cola-campaign

In solidarity, CalCOLA

“There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part. You can't even passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it — that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!”

-Mario Savio, 2 Dec 1964, Sproul Plaza