Statement of Support for Academic Workers' Strike

The faculty of the English Department at UC Davis would like to express our support of the student workers represented by the UAW across the campuses of the University of California. We urge the UC Davis administration to pressure UCOP to bargain with the UAW in good faith and to take the bargaining position of the UC Graduate Student Associations seriously. This is necessary to bring UC’s graduate student employee salary scale into line with that of our comparison institutions, to account for the cost of living in California, and to keep pace with the rate of inflation especially in rents and cost of living. 

Our graduate students are an essential part of our intellectual community. We partner with them to deliver undergraduate instruction and to produce cutting-edge research. Faculty would not be able to carry out our jobs without them. We invite the UC Davis administration to recognize graduate students as foundational to the University’s research and teaching mission. We recognize that the student workers’ demands, detailed at fairucnow and UAW2865, are critical to supporting the University’s mission.

We affirm the right of student workers to engage in lawful strike activity, which may include picketing, cancellation of sections, and stopping grading. We will not perform—or hire others to perform—work that would ordinarily be done by a striking graduate student. We will not engage in retaliation against graduate students based on their participation or non-participation in strike activities in all matters under our direct control, and we will publicly oppose unlawful retaliation measures against either striking students or faculty respecting the picket line should these be proposed by the University.

This statement was endorsed by a majority of the English Department’s senate faculty. (Nov. 2022)

Statement From the Department of English Faculty

We, the faculty of the UCD English department, stand against the politics of bigotry and willful ignorance. As citizens and educators, we are committed to opposing the normalization of these ideas and to defending the people most threatened by their material impacts. We pledge to act in solidarity with students who are targets of persecution, and we will refuse to comply with any institutional policy or action that explicitly enacts or tacitly enables such persecution. (January 2017)