Strikes and protests reflect discontent with handling of COVID-19 measures

Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA) movements from seven UCs, including UC Davis, went on strike on May 1, International Workers’ Day, withholding labor and organizing car rallies in their respective neighborhoods. 

According to a joint press release from COLA movements UC-wide, the actions were a call for full investment in universities, public education and public services. 

“Not one dollar cut, not one layoff, not one life lost,” the statement reads. “The months-long fight for a COLA has sought to highlight a fundamental, structural hypocrisy of the UC system: Despite sitting on billions of dollars, the UC does not think its graduate student workers deserve a living wage and financial security when it accepts them into their ‘world-renowned’ programs.”

In the press release, COLA organizers called for the UC to give graduate students guaranteed summer funding, extend time to degree and funding packages by a year and drop non-resident supplemental tuition for international graduate students.

Anthony LaBarbera, a first-year graduate student at UC Davis, said in a previous interview with The California Aggie that he hadn’t yet started his research when the pandemic began. 

“We can really just focus on our research,” LaBarbera said about summertime, adding that he’s not “too worried” about his timeline being pushed unless summer began and he still couldn’t go into lab — at that point, he explained, he’d be thrown off “about a year.”

Though there’s a possibility that UC Davis Summer Session II lab courses may be online, both Summer Sessions I and II will be administered through remote instruction. Currently, only research related to COVID-19 is being conducted on campus. 

These changes motivated other UC Davis graduate students to circulate a petition calling for similar concessions, laid out in demands included in the COLA organizers’ press release, from UC Davis’ Office of Graduate Studies.

The Aggie reached out to the UC Office of the President for comment regarding graduate educational changes. UCOP did not send a response before this article went to press.

COLA movements were among the more than 80 graduate and university labor organizations that took part in May Day actions on May 1, International Workers’ Day.

UC Academic Federation of Teachers (AFT), a union representing lecturers and librarians across the UC, was one such organization. UC-AFT put an online picket on its website featuring allies and UC-AFT workers sharing how layoffs would impact them.

As of Jan. 31, UC-AFT lecturers are without a contract.

John Rundin, a lecturer teaching ancient Greek and Latin at UC Davis and the former president for UC-AFT Local 2023, said on the online picket that if all lecturers in his program were laid off, the discipline could be killed. 

Rundin, who has spent 19 years teaching for the UC, also said a layoff on June 30 would be “very sad,” given how close he was to retirement.

“A layoff would damage my retirement severely […] and my partner of decades and I would lose good medical benefits,” he said. “We need those for my partner’s arthritis.”

Another post on the online picket, sent in by Nora, a third-year undergraduate at UC Davis whose last name was withheld, called for the university to be more transparent about where tuition money is going — which will not decrease whether or not instruction is remote.

“The school states lengthy and quite unproductive emails [about] how they will continue to support the community, yet they decide they will lay-off amazing lecturers who provide so much to the university,” she wrote. 

The most recent bargaining session UC-AFT had with the UC was on March 21. 

Other May Day actions occurred nationwide, with workers from FedEx, Instacart, Target, Amazon, Walmart and Trader Joe’s striking for hazard pay, stricter social distancing and cleaning measures and greater sick-leave policies. 

In multiple press releases, all of the aforementioned companies have affirmed their commitment to workers’ safety, citing measures they have taken to acquire protective equipment for workers and lay out social distancing guidelines in stores. 

Workers, however, disagree. One of the organizers of the May Day actions, Willy Solis, said in an interview with The Washington Post that Target is not following through on its commitments.

“In reality, only a very small portion of people received [PPE],” he said.

Meanwhile, protestors unsatisfied with Gov. Gavin Newsom’s shelter-in-place orders headed to Huntington Beach, with The Guardian reporting that nearly 3,000 people protested there. At the State Capitol, where The Sacramento Bee said roughly 1,000 came to protest, 32 protesters were arrested.

These actions underscore the increasing frustration and dissatisfaction at changes the pandemic has caused and, according to COLA organizers, the hypocrisy of larger institutions. 

While the COLA movement has been building since last November, the car rallies on Friday happened in the wake of UC Santa Cruz COLA organizers announcing on April 27 that they planned to submit Fall and Winter Quarter grades that were initially withheld as part of the COLA movement.

“By submitting the grades we have carried through our struggle, we ensure that our students receive the grades they earned despite the administration’s continued indifference towards undergraduate education,” the statement reads.

Organizers also said in the statement that building toward an Unfair Labor Practice (ULP) strike — a strike sanctioned by UC graduate students’ union, United Auto Workers (UAW) 2865 — represents the strongest path to fired graduate student instructors’ reinstatement, with the UAW-2865 proposed contract also calling for a salary raise to $40,000 a year for all graduate students.

UAW-2865, which announced it would hold an ULP strike vote in early April, is pushing for 5,000 union member pledges before it calls the vote. There are currently over 2,300 union members who have pledged to vote in favor of authorizing the strike. 

Written by: Janelle Marie Salanga — campus@theaggie.org 

From business as usual, to no exam at all: different ways professors are administering midterms remotely

With the first ever wave of online midterms now behind us, students and professors alike have been forced to evaluate, and reevaluate, the merits of exam-based assessments and how best to navigate them in this new digital terrain.

At the beginning of the quarter, many professors who normally hold in-class, closed-note and timed exams decided against this model for this extraordinary quarter. 

Korana Burke, a lecturer in the Math Department and current Math 17B professor, chose not to administer midterm exams this quarter due to the sudden switch to remote learning. 

“Part of the reason why I decided not to give midterms this quarter is because I wanted to have some time to gather more information on how to best give exams in this kind of setting,” Burke said.

By choosing not to hold midterms, Burke gave herself time to weigh her options regarding the final — though the exact format is still up in the air. 

As Burke normally provides everything to her students but a writing utensil during exams, her goal in crafting an online examination is to have it be as close to this model as logistically possible. This means that the only barrier to taking an exam should be events out of both her and her students’ control, such as the internet cutting out. 

In place of midterms, Burke has opted for increased homework and weekly quizzes, which she is also using as data points while crafting a final. 

Other professors have decided to continue administering midterms but have changed key aspects of exam taking. 

Chemistry Lecturer Bryan Enderle, a current instructor for Chemistry 2B, has decided to follow this route by making what would normally be a closed-book exam completely open-book. Enderle chose to make the exam open-book in order to mitigate cheating and to level the playing field.

“[A] really negative result would have been a bimodal mean, which to me might have indicated access issues for people: The disadvantaged folks on the bottom of the mean and the very advantaged or savvy people up on the high end,” Enderle said.

Despite the potential for this achievement gap and fears from colleagues who expressed concerns that making the exam open-note would skew the mean, the exam’s histogram was perfectly normal. 

“The plot of the histogram was beautiful,” Enderle said. “Some better than some in-class exams.”

Another aspect of exams that every instructor must address is whether to — and how to — proctor exams. Though Burke had considered the use of a proctoring system such as ProctorU, concerns still remain about the accessibility, accuracy and privacy of such proctoring tools. Other universities, including UC Berkeley, ban the use of proctoring systems for these very reasons. Enderele decided to proctor his exam by having students unmuted in Zoom Discussion sections, allowing TAs to hear a student’s environment while also allowing students a quiet testing environment if they turn their device volume down. 

In addition to simply allowing the TAs to monitor for any suspicious activity, this form of proctoring allowed Enderle more control. 

“I was hoping [for control] in a positive way, of the students and the proctoring situation, to tailor it toward the students and to be understanding of the situation that they were in,” Enderle said. 

This form of proctoring also addresses one of the largest concerns with proctoring systems: their effect on those who have accommodations. 

While using proctoring systems, students who have accommodations to read out loud, to have bathroom breaks or to use assistive technology can be wrongly flagged as having potentially cheated. 

Accessible Technology Analyst Joshua Hori explained that this is why it is crucial that even though exams may be online and students are in rooms alone, students must still seek out accommodations beyond just extended time on exams.

Similarly, many students who didn’t need accommodations on campus now need them in the era of online learning. This doesn’t just affect students: The Student Disability Center is also offering 12–1 p.m. drop-in hours, Monday through Friday, for faculty and other resources on the Keep Teaching website to help support instructors during this time.  

Though the switch to online instruction has made exams more logistically challenging for some students with accommodations, others, such as those who have accommodations to take exams in a quiet room or in a room alone, are often helped by the switch to online instruction. 

In general, the switch to online instruction has made people think more broadly about testing mastery of a subject, beyond simply traditional testing formats. Hori is optimistic that this change in the way exams are administered can positively impact future students. 

Science and Technology Studies Assistant Professor Emily Merchant also expects the way that we administer exams during remote instruction will make a lasting impact on the way we view future exams. 

“I feel like [taking exams is] not a great use of class time because we only have 10 weeks to begin with,” Merchant said. “It’s possible that this will lead faculty in the future to give out-of-class exams using this kind of software rather than giving exams in class.”

Another viewpoint is that exams are not simply a way to separate students who will pass the class and those who will fail, but exams are also a tool for assessing how much students have learned and which topics need more reinforcement.

“[Exams are] a way for faculty to assess if there are areas that students are struggling with and then they can go back and cover the material that students might be struggling with,” said Susan Ebler, the associate dean of undergraduate academic programs in the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences. “I think faculty view exams as an important part of the learning process.” 

Written by: Jessica Baggott — campus@theaggie.org