Join the Grade Strike to Drop the Charges

Posted on November 29, 2009 by azdelslade

http://www.petitionspot.com/petitions/ucgradestrike/

Please sign the petition if you are willing to participate in a grade strike and pass the word on! In the comment section where it says “I support this petition.” please add your school and title (lecturer, professor, TA, etc)

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We are furious and so, so deeply upset seeing the videos of police brutality from UC Berkeley and UCLA:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1PuiY4Go8Y
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOI5l2_RghQ

and as if it weren’t enough, now many students are facing felony charges:

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=183824131771&ref=nf

We are willing to pledge to withhold grades until the charges against students are dropped. If you are too, please sign this petition!

With the current passage of the 32% fee increase on UC students statewide, major cuts to student enrollment, and the ongoing series of
devastating cuts and reductions to campus workers, staff and faculty. We hope that you will sign this petition and pledge to withhold grades to express our anger against the current state of public higher education in California.

We stand in solidarity with students, workers, staff and faculty organizing against the cuts at the CSU and CCC systems, and for us all to unite together in the fight to defend public higher education in California.

By signing this petition, we refuse to be complicit in tuition increases, layoffs, furloughs, the selling off of public education and the criminalization of student dissent!

WHEN YOU SIGN: Please specify YOUR UNIVERSITY AFFILIATION with your name, affiliation (undergraduate student, graduate student, worker, staff, faculty), department, and campus

Thank You!

in solidarity,
The Undersigned

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Also, check out the latest Q&A post from Anti-Capital Projects, the authors of The Necrosocial:

http://anticapitalprojects.wordpress.com/2009/11/19/anti-capital-projects/

Why No Demands?

First, because anything we might win now would be too insignificant. Countless times past student struggles have worked months and years – striking and occupying buildings and mobilizing thousands upon thousands of people – only to win back half of what they had already lost, a half that was again taken away one or two years later. But in any case, we are as yet far too small to win anything on a scale remotely close to the mildest of demands – a reduction or freeze of student fees, an end to the layoffs and furloughs. Even these demands would mean only a return to the status quo of last year or the year before – inadequate by any but the most cowardly measure. If we set our horizons higher – free education, a maximum salary differential of, for instance, 3 or 5, a university managed by faculty and students and workers – then we must realize, immediately, that nothing short of full-scale insurrection could ever achieve this. And if we were strong enough to bring the existing order tumbling down around us, why would we stop short and settle for the foregoing list?