Chancellor of UCSD
Point: UCSD Is Honoring the Contract from the 2022 Strike
I have kindly decided to honor the tentative agreement from the 2022 strike. UC San Diego graduates are getting paid $35,000 per year at part-time jobs where they’re working as little as 60 hours a week. Back in 1889, when I was a Ph. D. student, my yearly salary was $100 and a pack of cigarettes, but I survived! I worked my way up the ladder, and look at me now. I pretty much get cash thrown at me, and what do I even do for work? Not even I know! Being a graduate student was hard, but if students are struggling, they should just do what I did and call their parents. These kids have it easy. When I needed my parents to pay my rent, I had to send a carrier pigeon. Now all you have to do is send a text.
UC San Diego is a public school; we just don’t have the money for luxuries like employee salaries. Because the new graduate stipend is a 200% increase, I was forced to raise undergraduate tuition by 500%. What other choice did I have? Did they want me to forfeit my private jet allowance? I’m telling you, once you fly private, there’s just no going back to first class.
Students are lucky to be at a prestigious school where everyone gets to wake up every morning to a beautiful ocean view. That should be enough. The fact that they want us to pay them anything at all is outrageous and downright selfish. It’s almost like they care more about themselves than UCSD’s
financial interests …
Graduate Student
Counterpoint: It’s the Year 2040
It’s the year 2040, and that strike was 18 years ago. We have gone on strike 14 times since then. You have turned this school into a laughingstock. All of the other UCs begrudgingly paid their students according to the contract that UC negotiated down to table scraps — but you said that the school just doesn’t have that kind of money, all while posing for the cover of Architectural Digest with the home that UCSD bought for you.
$35,000 doesn’t even cover one month’s rent in San Diego anymore, but you should be well aware of that because HDH just raised the rent of my single room to $40,000 per month since they weren’t “making enough profit,” as if that’s my problem somehow. And that doesn’t even include the recently implemented mandatory 20% “service tip” that goes straight to the director of HDH.
You even banned the student-run Triton Food Pantry because the thought of people not being able to afford food “makes [you] sad.” But when we asked you to pay us more so that we could afford to eat, you said that your hands were tied, because “losing money also makes [you] sad.”
You also didn’t “kindly decide” to do anything. You were forced to pay us minimum wage after multiple lawsuits. We’re tired, but we’ve had enough. You’re lucky that this time all we did was sue you, because next time we’ll auction off your precious Stuart Art Collection, and you won’t be able to do anything about it.
