CUCFA Letter to President Napolitano on the Crisis at UCSC

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