Starting November 14, 2022, nearly 48,000 graduate student workers in the UC system were on strike protesting unfair wages, many of them TAs for undergraduate classes. While the UC student union strike has slowly been pushed to the background of current news, the strike affected many undergraduate classes throughout the UC campuses. For many undergraduate students, this meant canceled classes and assignments, limited resources due to overwhelmed professors, little to no grading of classwork, and just an added degree of uncertainty to the end of the fall quarter.
Personally, each of the four classes I had taken fall quarter had been affected by the strike in different ways. One class is more like a seminar, with roughly 20 students and taught by a professor. Since that class didn’t have a TA, it remained entirely unaffected by the strike. On the complete opposite side of the spectrum, one of my classes was taught entirely by a TA. When the strike began, we lost our only teacher. The department sent out an email essentially saying that the last four weeks of the quarter would simply be canceled. No final, no projects, no homework, and no more grading to be done. Without our TA, there truly was no class.
My last two classes were affected very similarly where their TA-led discussion sections were completely canceled. As for assignments, in one class the final paper was made optional and for the other, the class was given a nearly two-week extension to finish the essay.
When finals week drew to a close and final assignments were submitted, the effects of the strike continued. In an email, UC Irvine chancellor Howard Gillman announced that faculty would be given nearly a month extension to submit final grades. Instead of being due the week after finals are over, they had until January 19th. Not only did students have to wait well into the winter quarter to find out their fall quarter grades, but professors were expected to spend their winter breaks catching up on their backlog of grading instead of preparing for the next quarter of classes.
There were over 200 students in my class where I had a final essay, so my professor had to single-handedly grade each and every one of them. To make matters worse, my class was not the only class he taught, so there were hundreds more papers he had to grade from those other classes as well.
The point of this strike was to show the vital role that graduate students play in undergraduate education as TAs, and their point has been made crystal clear. The system simply doesn’t work without the hard work of our teacher assistants and they should be compensated accordingly, or at the very least given a livable wage.
Even with the strange nature of the quarter and how frustrating at times it had been to deal with the many changes made to my classes because of the strike, I continued to stand with the graduate students. They have proved that they are invaluable to my education and completely deserve the terms that they wish for.