Hello, Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast which only has one button and is edited by Danil using a ten year old Logitech Expots controller. That's a submarine joke for those of you who who have not been following today, I'm joined by Alex and Tom, both of them graduate students in the UC system, and we're talking about this really obscene charge of assault that some graduate students are facing after they disrupted.
An alumni event in San Diego.
Hi, Alex and Tom, if you had to introduce yourselves a little bit, as far as you feel comfortable.
Hi, Jens, sure, thanks for having us back. My name is Alex. I'm a graduate student at University of California, San Diego. Some of you have been listening since November. My remember when I first came on the show to tell you about our strike. And I guess we're going to give some some interesting updates since then.
And I'm also graduate student at UC San Diego, and I'm pretty managed in my program. I've been here for a while and I can manage, which very cool.
Yeah, and so I think to start out with we should just explain, Well, we'll explain what happened in detail, at the event in a bit, But can you just explain what these charges that people are facing are and how they found out that they have been charged with assault after doing something which was not violent in the first place.
Yeah. Absolutely, So the most sort of recent thing that's happened is is and we'll talk about the details in a moment, But as James alluded to, we held a peaceful protest back in May related to a number of violations of our most recent collective bargaining agreement, which I'll
also be happy to go into detail on. And in response to what was, by all accounts, by what I witnessed by everyone else that I've talked to, was a completely peaceful protest, the university has decided to allege that sixty seven graduate students, including by our account eighteen who were either not present or not involved, are going to be charged under the student conduct process with committing a physical assault, as well as charges for disruption and a
vague assertion that we were threatening the health and safety of others. These are quite serious allegations. They do carry potential sanctions up to long term suspension and expulsion from the university, right.
Yeah, and that's I think people like the exposure for graduate students is so high, right, Like, if you are on the job market, you know that this could set back your progress.
Already very challenging job market.
It's suspension or expulsion presumably could have long term consequences for employability and something that like I think I spent the better part of eight years at u c SDN. Say you've invested a lot of time, you get paid like shit, and if you then get nothing out of it, that is potentially devastating for.
Each individual illness. This is absolutely never staying. These are careers and invested, you know, a minimum of seven years at least, humanities find there's so many of us more. But it's also never sailing for the university itself because these students that are being charged by from virtually having program, so many of them are working in very prestigious, high
powered laboratories, have you know, fellowships and scholarships. So this is really a bad look for the university as well to you know, potentially have sixty seven graduate students under these charges.
Yeah, totally sixty seven. It's funny, I've been sixty eight.
We could have It's when I like, I don't know when I hear sixty obviously, I think of like nineteen sixty eight, and it's remarkable. This is a university at one point somewhat self immolated at UCSD in protest Vietnam War, and now we are like I had a reputation for radicalism, and now who we are charging people for walking onto a stage and shouting. Do you want to talk about
that they're walking onto a stage and shouting? Can you maybe give us an account of the events and then we'll talk about maybe how those have been represented in the process.
That makes sense, Yeah, sure.
So this particular protest took place at an awards ceremony, very sort of fancy sort of annual events that the university hosts where they give awards to various alumni and kind of as a sort of fundraising opportunity as well.
And what the protest took the form of was that a number of graduate student workers walked on stage uninvited and began giving speeches and holding signs demonstrating the ways in which and informing the audience of the ways in which that our contracts have not been upheld since we signed them in December, the ways in which the university is circumventing some of the raises that we were promised for our research and teaching, and the ways it is
trying to sort of prevent those things from being resolved in the sort of normal channels that you go through with these sort of these sort of union and contract administration things. And that's been I'm gooing for I suppose
six months now with relatively little process. So that demonstration took place about up until the time that some local police officers arrived, and at that time the demonstration was fully compliant with those orders, and the police officers noted such in their dispatch logs, which I was able to
retrieve from the city. And then after that the demonstration continued outside of the venue of the event, where people were still able to you know, make a decent amount of noise and raise their grievances despite the walls separating
the group from the alumni inside. And it certainly did get some attention, since we were in touch after that with people who were sort of relatively high up in a number of university and alumni centric offices and who were surprised to hear of the things that we were alleging and wanted to hear more and be able to
raise those issues further uper of the university. So these charges certainly did sort of come as a shock, given that at first a lot of people at the event seemed receptive in a way, though certainly not all, but some were certainly receptive to our concerns and what we had to say.
A lot a couple of interesting details. And the first one that the immediate in participate in this event was actually the news that Chancellor Britty Coles Law was in attendance, and this was only a week or two after they become public knowledge that he had received a five hundred thousand dollars arrays as an effort to keep him in the university, which raises his salary to more than a million dollars and I think makes him the fourth highest
paid university chancellor or president in the United States. So we presented him within award for UCSD's most overpaid works, and that was sort of our rationale before doing this specific event. And the other thing is is that when the police arrived, they actually did no verbal orders for us to clear out. We as soon as we saw them, we peacefully started to leave the stage and they stood there as well. Their arrests were made, now interviews, no
orders were shouted. They remained on site for the duration as we stood outside picking. There were no reinforcements, there were no swat teams, and we've just one or two squad cars. The police typically are known for having outsized responses to minor problems, but the fact that they did not have any kind of aggressive response to this indicate to us that they were where it was entirely peaceful events.
Yeah, and the dispatch logs don't show them having any concerns about violence or responding to to any like real violence, them seeing any violence responding to it, right.
Yeah, so I was able to grab those and the Yeah, it's difficult to say because it looks like maybe two people called nine on one even though.
It was three.
Yeah.
Violence, Yeah, two said there was no violence. That third person said they had secondhand reports that we had pushed the chancellor off the stage, which we have video of that very definitely not happening. He stood next to the graduate students and then of his own initiative, turned and walked off the stage. So the only allegation that's documented in real time of any violence occurring was one admittedly secondhand, and two is disproven conclusively by the available video.
Right, and that video is online right, like it's been posted. Yeah, it's easy to find.
There's that particular one that really easily disproves it. There's a video link for the union uploaded it, so I can we can drop that in the show notes. I can send that too.
Yeah, excellent, We'll make sure we do that.
And likewise, the p R that this publicly available, folks could go see it as pras are publicly available. We have like a lot of evidence that no one was find that the assaulted. What is the university alleging that was done? I guess that they claiming what do they claim the student workers did?
Well? The closest thing that we can find, so in a you know, in the documentation that each person was given about the charges that they face, the closest thing we can find to a description that seems to imply assault was that someone claimed to have seen the chancellor. The word they use was bumped, which doesn't even necessarily imply intentionality in my mind. And really the way that I read that sentence is that you know, possibly the stage was a little crowded and someone might have bumped
into him. But I don't even recall ever seeing that happen. I haven't talked to anyone who recalls seeing that happen, anyone who was in our group or not. But other than that, the rest of the report is really just full of descriptions of how they they have I don't even think they talked to anyone who said they were scared of us. They just said people might have been scared of us. It's very strange.
The report reads like propaganda from the class, or it's cuestioning of the highest order. If some Champagne glasses were builken the events of South Class one hundred thousand dollars
to set up with many different caterers and vendors. Somebody flew all the way from Switzerland for the event and actually made us from the report, you know, during the event itself, because I was, as you know, a determinate out of other magic students, and we actually were assaulted by members of the crowd who would come up and put their arms on their hands on our shoulders and
hor us. This is why people hate unions. And you know, hey, I brought my my nine year old grandmother to this and I have some you know, fifty million dollars ranch and I'm being honored for this, but people pumping my trust, people thumping other people's says, sticking fingers in our faces and telling us, really that we ruined their special night.
And our response was, you know, I think that our need to pay rent and feed ourselves is a little bit more important than on your special night at the the Art Museum by the ocean with the bosses of Champagne.
Yeah.
Yeah, And it's not like it was even a like all those happening was that people who had given them money or who they want them to, who do they want to get money from, were being made to feel special. It wasn't as if you even interrupted like a like a meeting or a function of the university. And unless we consider the function of the university these days, seems to be to get money and then distribute it to
people in positions of power in the university. So given that right that this was an event, I guess which reinforced the people who have authority in the university. It's interesting to look what's not interesting, it's upsetting to look at the nature of the process that these sixty seven people are facing right, because it's not They're not being accused in a court of doing a crime. They're being accused by the university, in the university of breaking the
conduct rules of the university. So the university is like, it's all parties apart from the defendant. Right, it's a judge, it's a jury, it's a prosecuting lawyer and the executioner.
So can you yeah, go ahead, I'll.
Just say something about that. You know that this was very much related on the part of the university to charge us as as under the student conduct violation, because if they're charging us as students, they're not charging us as workers. If we have workers, we would have getting representation in our meetings, it would be part of that
litigation process. But as students, the context of the labor fight that is the result altare for the entire event is relevant that it can be divorced from that and treated under You know, the music coades that are meant to charge undergraduates who are drinking in their terms or are sexually harassing their peers in their classes is not something that is in my view appropriate at all to apply to a labor dispute, which is what this was.
Yeah, Like, I think the only time I've been party to these proceedings is when Anne the graduate did physically assault someone who I was teaching with. But it's not a normal procedure by any means, and certainly to use against grad students are very clearly taking part in a
labor action. I think it's very telling that the university is kind of using one system to circumvent the fair bargaining and the unfair labor practices and all the things that they seem really like, they seem almost like inexplicably committed to not sticking to the contract, even though they got a contract that was largely favorable to them and not as much as people had wanted at the start of the strike. So how does it work from here? Like, what does this process look like?
Well, to start with, each of us has an individual meeting with a representative of the university, and at that meeting, we essentially have the response the option to either accept responsibility for all the charges against us, or to say that we do not accept that responsibility and want to continue the process forward, at which point they will they will schedule or attempt to schedule a conduct review Board meeting, where I believe three representatives from who have been sort
of predetermined to serve on these conduct review boards will judge the weight of the evidence in a preponderance of the evidence standard, and at that point then the Office of Student Conduct, if you are found responsible. I believe that office is then what decides what the sanctions are that you will face. So this is a bit of an unprecedented process, at least for us we actually, I believe,
and I want to clarify some numbers. I think I said sixty seven graduate students earlier, they were actually fifty nine from this event who were charged, and that sixty seven comes from a to who were charged for a protest related to the university's attempt to fire workers for striking,
which is still ongoing. That protest took place in January, and there that conduct process for those eight workers has not yet resolved as we speak today on June twentieth, So it's not clear how they are going to manage the logistics of trying to charge six fifty nine workers in a single case. It could, assuming they follow their entire procedures by the book and don't dismiss any charges, it could take more than a year to resolve the situation Jesus.
And for people who have like they're either defending or advancing to candidacy or these are all things you can do within grad school people who aren't familiar where you sort of level up your grad student status.
I guess are people able to do that?
Yeah, Luckily this does not restrict your academic advancement. It can potentially if it goes from quarter to quarter, they can potentially put I believe, holds on registration. But I think that's only if you don't sort of carry out your sanctions, assuming your sanction is not suspension. I could be a time correct if I'm wrong on that. But what still could be the case is that you could you know, and could well be the case for me
that I defend before the conclusion of this process. But it could still end up as something that would be on a contact record that could be released in certain employment situations. So even if you are able to escape the process, so to speak, it is not necessarily not going to follow you after that point.
By all indicators who already at their first meeting, masking or exact responsibility of course states that no, we die foundations against us, But it seems as if the the of student conduct is quite over problems. By this, people have been trying to schedule a meeting to have not gotten responses from the office.
Uh.
The office then gets back to them a week or two later with you know, only one or two options.
Uh.
The the really calculated evil of this is it means charge is dropped on the very last day of the quarter, which means that at least in the Arts and Humanities, most of us are going out of town or are conducting research or are on fellowships, so we're not around to respond to these. And I think that that was a decision that was purposefully made. But you know, to to process this a hue number of students involved in this is staggering, and I think that the office, a
lot of the offices are really struggling. The other thing that I will say is we have it from the informal channels that this is something that is being directed from the very top, which is the same from the chancellor. This is not something that infacial observers, you know, made of something that the chancellor himself is directing.
Yeah, yeah, that makes sense, give me a chance it
was there. It also like it's just put me in mind of twenty ten, when I don't think either of you were at UCSD, but for those of us who were, and there's a film about it actually called Dear White People, But there was a party where people wore black face, and this happened I think through a fraternity that was associated with the university, and getting the university to do anything disciplinary about that required hundreds off not thousands of people to go on strike, to march, to occupy the
Chancellor's complex, and to like physically demand action for weeks and weeks if not months from the Chancellor's system, right like, and still it was an extremely unsatisfactory process. The resolution was with extremely unsatisfactory. But I guess that.
There's a contemporaneous incident happening right now. I don't know all the details, but it appears to be an individual was a video or videos himself progressing a screening with his professor on it and making new comments and a whole variety of really missosialistic, quldly behavior. Apparently this is this is stored to restraining or that he's received. But as as universe is concerned, this is still a case that's that's moving through it and it doesn't appear to
have had any immediate sanctions. We've heard stories of sexual assaults, as you said, of racist harassment that I really don't know, actually reported the student last summer for very threatening behavior and the very much square english in my flash.
Yeah, it's it's it's yeah. The only thing that sort of they jump to defend is capital, I guess, or in this case the sort of administrators of the university. And so this this could potentially play out for months. What's the and it seems like everyone has accepting responsibility such a strange word, because like, what's what happened is what's a question really not who's responsible for it?
So much?
Right, Like you can accept responsibility for doing what was a protected First Amendment activity, but like you obviously can't accept responsibility for assault.
If you didn't assault somebody. But given that no one.
If sixty seven students had assaulting transor of you would think that.
National Yeah, that would have been yeah, that would have been something I think, yeah, that's.
Like a beat down. But that didn't happen.
So what's the plan for defense, I guess is each case, like an individual case, can they mount Can people mount a joint defense like the j twenty one people did in DC. Do we know yet, how does this work?
I'm not sure we entirely know yet. I think the university can make the decision to consolidate cases that share evidence.
I don't believe they've made that determination yet. I think what they are trying to do now, and this sort of leads into another part that I think represents a degree of sort of apathy, border on bordering on cruelty of this process is that we've identified at least eighteen graduate students who were either not physically present at all or had merely registered for the event without even knowing that this would take place, and those people have all
been charged with these ect same things that everyone who was intentionally part of the protest has been. So we think that we're ath the individual stage where they are trying to kind of they know that they have They're well aware that they caught a bunch of people that
had no involvement in this. But we think that we're using really these individual meetings to figure out who those people are to the best of their ability, and perhaps further down the line, they may decide to try to consolidate these cases to expedite the process, but it's hard
to say for sure. The again, this the important aspect of this process is the fact that almost every element of it, in every step and how that is carried out, is entirely at the discretion of a handful of university administrators. There's no real appeal outside of the system, there's no real accountability outside of the system, so they can simply implement these things, you know, as as they see fit.
I mean this. There was.
H when this eventually first broke There were some former graduate students who run on an old radical uc Twitter account who shared some write ups from cases of sit ins that were charged under the same process, I believe at Berkeley a couple of years ago, and in that one the administrators at the Berkeley campus actually went as far as to edit the code of conduct during the process.
Surely you're not responsible for like X post factor edits of the code of conduct or were they.
They were, well, this was primarily in you know, in all fairness, if they deserve any of this was that particular incident was kind of a logistical thing. So it was it was whether or not certain aspects of the process could be waived or could be could be extended. The deadline could be extended, and someone who didn't have the authority to extend it did And when they were called on that, they edited the code of conduct after the fact to say that, okay, designee can extend the
deadline for you know, how this process proceeds. So it wasn't that they invented a rule to charge someone under but they did edit their own due processes.
They went at wat right, Yeah, so you you might be up against the moving target, so to speak. Did they identify everybody like did because I'm presuming people didn't use their legal names to register or like, how were they able to identify some of the people to clearly the people who were just there as undergraduate alumni and happened to be graduate students probably did use their real names.
But do you know how else said in five people, Well.
I think they did. You know some people did. I assume that I was taught you with my real name on the registration and that was simply because I, you know, some some people decided to use different names. I decided, after weighing the frozen cons that I decided that it was you know, I figured that there might be it might be a worse situation if that was, you know, unraveled,
and I didn't think that. Obviously, I had no plans of assaulting someone, and I did not assault anyone, so I had no reason to expect that perhaps I needed to take that level of precaution with this kind of a peaceful protest action. But we believe that they primarily got the names of who did who who they'd decided to charge from simply registration lists. But again the fact and there was a sign in at this event where you picked up a name tag, and you know, it
was kind of a gate. You couldn't really get in without doing that. But they still gave charges to people who actually, we know for a fact were not physically present and have been able to prove that they were not physically present. So it doesn't seem that they even bothered to consult, at least initially, the actual signing list of people who actually showed up and checked in, which is also a bit strange. But yeah, it seems to be a very haphazard process so far. There are people
who have been charged who weren't there. There are people who were there who haven't, you know, necessarily but identified at this point in time. So it's it's it's it's a little bit of a mystery.
And we'd we'd love to find out too, because you know, it's very for some for some reason we're able to determine using union lists obviously would be a massive practice.
Yeah, and already it seems like an unfair labor practice and a violation of like First Amendment rights and protected First Amendment speech and Jesus it it's yeah, it just seems that they're sort of half fasting this thing, which could have devastating consequences for some people, and they they've they've just kind of thrown a wide net and sort of I guess trying to work out after the fact
what to do with this. Has it had like a chilling effect on on campus organizing on protesting their ongoing contract violations.
No, you can't stare us. We're sticking in the union.
You know.
Ironically, as as many of your listeners are probably aware from listening to earlier episodes of your podcast, you know, they have been a lot of tension on campus between the ars an out of the Social Sciences and the stam you know, getting back to the stripe and even before and they have actually gotten are substantially worse in the last couple of months based on the the vacancy
elections that are the people. This ironically seems to be a huge miscolctivation on the part of the university because a lot of those issues that they haven't gone away have been absolutely subsumed in the you know, the injury into one. It's an insured mentality. So there's a great amount of solidarity. But going into the summer, I don't think any work around campus really expected.
Yeah, that's excellent, that's great to hear.
So talking of solidarity, I guess what can people do to help, Like it seems like do you have a legal defense fund? And if you're even allowed to have a lawyer? Is there something they can sign? Is there someone they can write to.
Go ahead?
So there is a petition going around for a kind of students faculty along nine community members. The address to that is a bit dot l y slash lucy SD drop the charges.
One word all the lowercase the case.
Yeah, anything else, like are you a would you plan like marches and pigots and stuff as the process continues that people could join.
Yeah, definitely, and and if if you sign that petition. That's one way where the petition sort of has the dual goal of of sort of getting you know, demonstrating, uh to the administration that there's a wide level of awareness of this issue and concern over this issue, but also to make sure that anyone who wants to be involved in any way that they're able to support us,
will be able to be kept in the loops. So if you use an email the address that you actually read when you sign the petition, you will certainly hear about any actions that we have. We are still very much in the early planning stages. As as Tom alluded to earlier, there is you know, a certain as there appears to be a certain aspect of strategizing here where the charges were given right at the point where campus becomes the least populated potentially of any time throughout the
whole year except perhaps Christmas. But you know, there's still plenty of graduate students here. They are all, you know, just as shock as we are to see this unfolding. So I think we can definitely plan for, you know, some kind of actions to take place this summer.
Nice, Yeah, maybe.
We'll get some.
Yeah, it'd be good if alumni if if people are alumni, like I know a decent number, if you see alumni listen and they reached out when we talked about the strike, that it would be great if those people could leverage that status because they U see goes hard on alumni for donations and they've stopped calling me now they know
I'm poor. But I think those those of you who that you see is still calling for the nations, you know, that would be a good time to raise this or you know, you can email or whatever, an email the alumni office. But yeah, it's this is obscene and ridiculous and obviously like a continuation of union busting and their fundamental refusal to acknowledge student workers as workers apparently and
only see people as students. And so, is there anything else you want people to know about this, anything else you'd like people to do to show solidarity before we wrap up?
I think the big thing is just you know, sign the petition that will help you, you know, kind of stay in the loop, especially if you're kind of in the local area and are able to mountain join us
in solidarity for any protests. Yeah. Again, if you're a UC alum of any kind, certainly make your thoughts known to u UCSD because apart from I would say that the two people, the two groups of people who have the most power to act in decent numbers in the situation, our professors in alumni and and so that would be Yeah, like what you said, that's a huge a huge would
be a huge point of support. Other than that, I think just the way you know, I've I've been here for almost six full years now, and you know I've four of those were without a union. I'm a student researcher, so our union is brand new, and you can go back to the November episode to hear that whole story.
But my point is that, you know, before we had this kind of network and this kind of collective organization to protect our rights, a lot of you know, I've seen a lot of friends who, through no fault of their own, ended up in some kind of you know, one sided process where it's them versus the bureaucracy, whether that's you know, they're a bad relationship with their professor or or you know, any number of things that might have come up along the way, health issues leading to
lower you know, not not finishing work on time and you know, getting on the bad side of advisors or anything like that. You know, it is very easy in the status quo of the way the large university works to fall through the cracks and to have a bureaucracy act in secrecy to just simply kind of remove you without anyone really saying a word. So I think the most important thing is to keep eyes on this, to
make sure the university knows that people are watching. That they can try to bring this process against us, but it is not going to be a pleasant experience because you know, the public and the the the workers here in the community here are going to be watching and they're going to be supporting us. So I think just just keep keep an eye on the situation if you can, if it's something that that you're interested in and able to do, and that that's really the biggest way I think to support us.
I would also say that if you are a you see men either Statewie or and you see San Diego. The easiest way to prevent future alumni or events from being disrupted if it's actually.
Out of the contract, Yes, that'd be a fantastic idea.
Yeah, I do know several.
Professors listen, So it's time to do something hopefully, Yeah, they're hopefully they will do something in solidarity, but I know a few of them listen and have reached out before. Well, thank you very much. I'm sorry this is happening to you. We will keep people updated as the long process continues. But yeah, I hope, I hope you can enjoy your summer without teaching a little bit without this hanging over you.
We'll try it. That's kind of my motivation is they you know, they're using it as a little bit of a psychological warfare in terms of live organizing. So I will just simply choose not to let it bother me at least as much as I can. Yeah, all right, thank you very much, Thanks James, Thank you.
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