Sign the petition to save EECS/DS: eecsdsstaff.org/petition
As you might have heard, TAs, tutors, and readers (or academic student employees, ASEs) in the EECS/DS departments are currently bargaining with the University of California. After last year’s historic strike, the university agreed to negotiate with us over increasing staffing and improving instructional quality in the EECS/DS departments. We hoped this would be an opportunity for us to solve the long OH wait times, packed classrooms, and overwork which have plagued the departments for years.
We’ve been bargaining for almost two months now. A bunch of detailed proposals are involved, and if you’d like to learn more about them, please visit our website at eecsdsstaff.org. But here’s the bottom line: the university currently spends $9.8 million per year on undergraduate instructors in EECS/DS. Its proposals want to take that to $5.8 million. That’s a $4 million, 41% cut. There is no way to improve instructional quality when you slash teaching spending by 41%. It is not mathematically possible.
As a student worker at the bargaining table, it has been extremely frustrating to me that the faculty on the other side of it—including the university’s lead negotiator, Professor John DeNero—have been publicly advocating for me and my colleagues’ pay and benefits to be cut by 76% rather than focusing their efforts on pressuring central campus administrators for more funding. And while ASEs are willing to take less pay and benefits than the university agreed to pay us to help the department save money, it is simply not possible to make up that 41% cut. The only reasonable solution to this crisis is an increase in support from campus administration. And the only way we can achieve that is if we come together as a community—students, ASEs, lecturers, and faculty—and demand it.
The first thing you can do is sign our petition at eecsdsstaff.org/petition. The next thing you can do is to call and email EVCP Ben Hermalin at 510-642-1961 and hermalin@berkeley.edu (cc: EVCP@berkeley.edu) to tell him to fully fund instruction in the EECS/DS departments. You can use a template email/script here, but make this your own — describe the unique and troubling circumstances within the EECS/DS departments that you have personally experienced as a student/ASE.
This is a battle for the soul of the EECS/DS departments. And we need your help to win.
Gabe Classon
CS 61A uGSI