Dear colleagues,
The last several weeks have been trying for our community, and our thoughts and sympathies are with all of our colleagues and students, and of course with those suffering in Gaza.
The SCFA remains dedicated to its core purpose of protecting faculty rights and interests, and advising faculty on those rights. We have worked to provide relevant information during the current UAW strike, which has now spread to several campuses, and we have been clear about our support for a negotiated conclusion to the strike. We supported the Academic Senate resolution calling on the administration not to bring police to campus and to negotiate with encampment organizers, and we condemn what seems to have been, predictably, the excessive use of force in breaking up the encampment and their demonstrations near the campus entrances. Three Senate faculty colleagues were arrested in the early morning of May 31, and we are collecting information about the circumstances of their arrest and about any disciplinary measures that the administration may take. We are committed to ensuring that these colleagues enjoy the full protections to which they are entitled, especially in light of a nationwide pattern where universities have taken disproportionate actions against faculty advocating for peace and justice in Palestine.
As your union, we take seriously our responsibility to provide you with legally accurate information. To that end, as we communicated in our email of May 19, the SCFA has been and remains available to meet with individuals or groups of faculty, as well as departments, to listen to colleagues’ concerns and to discuss faculty rights and responsibilities. Our representatives were invited to several departments in this capacity and yet on May 22 SCFA Co-chairs Kimberly Lau and Jessica Taft received a formal notice from the UCSC Director of Employee and Labor Relations prohibiting SCFA representatives “from attending department meetings to answer questions about union business, including questions related to the union’s position on the strike.” For the administration to attempt to regulate speech in this way is unprecedented, and this discriminatory prohibition constitutes an unfair labor practice. We have accordingly filed a formal Unfair Labor Practice charge with the Public Employee Relations Board.
We want you to know that we remain available for consultation about faculty rights, including meeting with departments, and we welcome colleagues to come to us with any concerns, especially as we approach final grading deadlines. We reiterate our position that it is not in faculty interests to pick up the struck work of Teaching Assistants and Readers. If there are other changes the administration is making to your working conditions, please let us know. The purpose of the SCFA is to defend faculty rights and interests, which are especially at risk in times like these.
In solidarity,
The SCFA Executive Board