Tag: University of California at Santa Cruz

When There’s Nowhere to Live, What’s a University to Do?

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Peyton Quijano spent the summer before junior year consolidating her life into her Honda.

She squeezed her pared-down wardrobe into two small boxes, which fit in the trunk. School supplies and some packaged food went in the passenger seat. The back seat became her bed.

Quijano, a biology major at the University of California at Santa Cruz, had hoped to win a coveted spot on campus, but she didn’t get one before classes began.

UC-Santa Cruz has enough campus housing for more than half of its 18,000 undergraduates. That’s a lot; in fact, the university houses one of the highest percentages of its students in the UC system. But Santa Cruz faces a challenge: Housing stock off campus is extremely limited and expensive. Most residences are single-family homes with independent landlords, many of whom are hesitant to rent to students.

On campus, housing priority is given to freshmen, new transfers, and sophomores, depending on whether they meet certain conditions, as well as first-generation students from California, military veterans, and international students. Even then, there’s no guarantee.

LiPo Ching for The Chronicle
Peyton Quijano, a rising senior at the University of California at Santa Cruz, lived temporarily in her car.

So Quijano started the 2022 fall term living in her car.

It’s not that university leaders oppose building more student housing. They can’t — at least not easily.

The topography of the Santa Cruz campus — carved into the side of a mountain, surrounded by a protected forest — means there’s almost nowhere to build. When university officials find land on campus and make a plan, they get sued by local residents who fear the impacts of growth. The court fights drag on for years. Meanwhile, the University of California’s Board of Regents wants the system’s campuses to enroll even more students, citing high demand for a UC education.

Across the country, colleges struggle with housing shortages from time to time, and administrators make contingency plans. What’s happening at Santa Cruz, though, isn’t a one-time crunch. It’s a systemic, structural logjam with no clear way out.

University leaders say they’re committed to easing the strain, pushing ahead on construction projects that will take years to complete. In the meantime, many Santa Cruz students must shoulder the stress of trying to get through college without having their basic needs fully met.

Ask any Santa Cruz student about housing, and they’ll have a story to tell.

Their housemate who dropped out for a quarter to save money for rent; their friends who commute 35 miles from San Jose every day, up and down the notoriously hazardous narrow shoulders and tight turns of Highway 17; the guy in their econ class who rents a driveway so he can live safely in his car for $500 a month.

Most students will also tell you that they didn’t know just how hard it would be to find housing until they arrived.

Homelessness and housing insecurity are longstanding problems in Santa Cruz, a beach town nestled between the central coast and the redwood-forested Santa Cruz mountains that consistently ranks among the most unaffordable places in the country to live.

The UCSC sociology professors Miriam Greenberg and Steven McKay surveyed Santa Cruz County residents between 2016 and 2018, and found that 50 percent of 1,737 respondents spent over half of their income on rent. The government defines that threshold as “extremely rent burdened.” The researchers then had to invent a new category, “obscenely rent burdened,” for the 26 percent of respondents who said they spent at least 70 percent of their income on rent.

Then the pandemic hit. Newly remote tech workers moved in. The median price of a single-family home skyrocketed, as did rents. Off-campus houses that had historically been rented to students were bought up and converted into owner-occupied housing.

The squeeze became untenable — and further complicated an already complicated relationship between Santa Cruz and its largest employer, the university.

For much of the 20th century, Santa Cruz was a sleepy retirement community. As the U.S. economy boomed in the 1950s, local business leaders pushed for more development. They eagerly lobbied the University of California regents to choose Santa Cruz for the next UC campus.

LiPo Ching for The Chronicle
UC-Santa Cruz is surrounded by a protected forest, making it difficult to build new campus housing. Off-campus housing is limited and expensive.

The university’s founding in 1965, though, brought about a sharp political turn to the left. An environmentalist consensus took hold that saw any growth as harmful. Residents didn’t want to see their town grow out or up. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, city and county leaders adopted measures to limit housing density. They worked.

“The university’s and the city’s issues became inseparably related to the growth and development sentiments at the time, which was essentially 5,000 ways to say no to growth and development,” said Mayor Fred Keeley of Santa Cruz in an interview.

City officials have long taken the position that UC-Santa Cruz should house its students on its own campus. The university hasn’t completed a new dorm since 2004. But that’s not for lack of trying.

In 2017, the university proposed a housing project to accommodate an additional 2,000 students, part of which would be built on the East Meadow, a 17-acre open field on the southern edge of campus. The project has been tied up in court ever since.

“It’s been extremely frustrating because those lawsuits have real impacts in terms of what it means for UC-Santa Cruz students,” said Scott Hernandez-Jason, assistant vice chancellor for university relations.

This spring, the UC system’s Board of Regents approved the university’s latest plan for the project, known as Student Housing West. One lawsuit against the plan is pending. For now, construction is slated to begin in early 2024.

Faculty, alumni, and community members who oppose the project have argued that it would disrupt the aesthetics of the campus. One student retorted: “I don’t have the luxury of worrying about aesthetics.”

Housing is something that Santa Cruz students always have to think about.

For the first three weeks of the 2022 fall term, Quijano parked near her friends’ on-campus apartment so she could use their shower. She spent most of her free time at the library. In a pinch, she wrote a couple of papers in the backseat. It wasn’t comfortable, and the Wi-Fi was spotty.

Then she heard about an open room in the Village, a sprawling collection of cabinlike temporary structures on the east side of campus. She reached out to the university’s housing coordinators and was placed in one of the units, at a cost of $978 a month.

The walls were thin; cold air and noise could easily get through. There was one shared kitchen. The location was isolated from much of campus, requiring students to hike up a 100-step staircase or walk to the nearest bus stop.

Quijano worked two part-time jobs: one at a day-care center off campus, and one cleaning the university science department’s autoclaves. Her paychecks were going entirely toward housing, and she wasn’t even that comfortable. She wondered: How would she pay her other bills?

LiPo Ching for The Chronicle
Quijano with her Honda. She recently found housing: a one-bedroom off-campus apartment, shared with three roommates. She considers herself “really lucky.”

At the end of the fall 2022 term, she made the difficult decision to terminate her housing contract. When classes resumed in January, she was back in her car.

Zane Chaplin, meanwhile, shared a dorm room with three other sophomores this past academic year. The room used to be a communal lounge for the whole floor. “You can tell because this is here,” Chaplin said, moving the hanging mirror aside to reveal a long rectangular window on the door.

Over the past two decades, the university has placed 3,300 additional students into existing dorms by “increasing the density.” Officials have added new floors to some buildings. Some rooms host five or six students in bunk beds.

So Chaplin and his friends felt lucky to have a bit of private space, with lofted beds and desks placed underneath. But as they looked ahead to their junior year, they knew they most likely wouldn’t have a chance at campus housing again.

Instead, they steeled themselves for the off-campus bidding wars.

At one point, Chaplin and his friends were eyeing an eight-person house going for about $8,500 per month — a great deal, he said, even though it was a “fixer upper,” to put it nicely. But they knew at least five other groups of students interested in the same property.

Typically, Chaplin said, students are forced to bid against one other. A landlord will tell a student that another group has put in an offer and ask if the students wants to raise their bid. Or a landlord will just give the property to the other group without sharing the winning price. “It’s a very secretive exchange,” he said.

Some students will attempt to get on a landlord’s good side by wooing them with baked goods or promises of home improvement. “I have a friend whose group wrote a letter to their landlord about how they were going to do a bunch of gardening while they lived there, and the landlord ended up giving them the place,” Chaplin said.

Chris Minnig, who graduated this spring, hit the jackpot for his last year: a spot in Camper Park. The 42-space complex “is similar to living in a campground,” the university’s website states. It’s by far the most affordable campus-housing option, at around $700 a month.

Residents have to do without a few things that most undergraduate students would take for granted. “If having a consistent internet connection with reliable service within your campus residence is important to you, or for the academic work that you are engaged in,” the university says, “then the Camper Park is not an appropriate choice for you.”

Still, each trailer has a full bed, a kitchen with running water, a mini fridge, and a small table. If students can put up with minor inconveniences, like sharing communal bathrooms and emptying out the water tank every week, “it’s a frickin’ no-brainer,” Minnig said. Especially compared with his accommodations in 2020, as a first-term transfer student.

At the time, Minnig said, he managed to find a place to live off campus a few days before classes began, for $400 per week. But he wasn’t sure how long he’d have the room. The landlord, he said, was trying to sell the property.

So while acclimating to campus life, an immensely stressful period for new students, Minnig wasn’t sure where he’d be living the following week.

Students are frustrated. Some say they feel lied to — as though the university encouraged them to come to Santa Cruz even though there was nowhere for them to live.

Yet many students understand the challenges. They don’t want the university to lower acceptance rates; that hurts access. They’re also worried about the environmental impacts of growth. And they’re trying to work with the city to bridge the divide.

Zennon Ulyate-Crow is founding president of UC-Santa Cruz’s Student Housing Coalition. The group shares the city’s view that the university has a responsibility to house its students. But the coalition also believes that the city has a responsibility to provide for its constituents, including students.

The group has practical goals: more housing, period. Multifamily housing, especially. More tenant protections, like rent control and eviction protections. And they want to get more students registered to vote in Santa Cruz County.

“Both sides are pointing at one another to blame for this crisis,” Ulyate-Crow said of the university and the city. “And in the end, nothing happens because nobody takes responsibility.”

Ulyate-Crow said the coalition has tried to forge a middle ground, but it’s been difficult. The group has even been met with resistance on campus when it has tried to partner with some student groups. There’s a “leftist purity test” that the coalition doesn’t meet when it endorses “imperfect” — in other words, market-rate — developments, Ulyate-Crow said.

LiPo Ching for The Chronicle
Zennon Ulyate-Crow, founder and president of UC-Santa Cruz’s Student Housing Coalition, in Camper Park. The 42 trailer units are the most affordable housing on campus.

Santa Cruz — like San Francisco and many other cities in California — is markedly progressive when it comes to most social issues. “And yet it is also the city with some of the most extreme inequality and the greatest affordable housing crisis in the country,” said Greenberg, the sociology professor.

As a planning commissioner for the city, Greenberg has seen firsthand how difficult it is to get homeowners to budge on legislation that could make housing more affordable. There’s a lack of political will, she said, to take steps to regulate the market and produce more affordable housing. Lobbyists from the real-estate industry, statewide and nationally, and local homeowners’ associations have blocked many proposed changes.

The city has tried and failed many times over the past three decades to pass local rent control. (California passed a statewide rent-control law in 2019, becoming one of the first states to do so.) Measure N, which was on the ballot for Santa Cruz voters last November, would have taxed “empty homes” to raise funds for affordable housing. But it died after Santa Cruz Together, a grassroots political group that says it fights “radical” policies, raised $140,000 to campaign against the measure. The group received a $37,000 donation from the California Apartment Association.

UC-Santa Cruz officials don’t want to be the villains in this story. But for now, they’re working within strict constraints.

In 2022, the university enrolled 700 fewer students than in 2021, due to a lack of beds, marking the first time in years that the institution had reduced its number of acceptances. Officials said they’ll hold enrollment as steady as possible until more housing is available.

That approach runs up against pressure from lawmakers and the UC system for campuses to enroll more California students amid soaring demand. The university received nearly 69,000 first-year applications for the fall of 2023, a record. Last year, UC-Santa Cruz admitted about 31,000 students and enrolled about 5,100.

“When we enroll students to become Banana Slugs, we want them to come here and succeed,” said Hernandez-Jason, the university spokesman. “So we want to make sure that we have campus housing available, and that we feel like if they are not living in campus housing, that they’re going to be able to find some housing in the community.”

New state funding specifically aimed at solving the housing crisis across California campuses will help subsidize some of the cost of developing more housing.

The university’s most recent project — an expansion of Kresge Hall, which includes the construction of a new building — will create 600 new beds by the fall of 2025. Officials also plan to shift the roofline of the existing residence hall to add another floor. Of those new beds, 320 will be offered to undergraduates at 20-percent below the average campus housing rate.

Keeley, the mayor, said the city’s politics are changing. In the most recent November election, he said, every voter he talked to wanted to see more housing. It used to be, he said, that about 70 percent of the electorate opposed development. Now, he estimated, about two-thirds of voters favor “appropriate development.”

That development will take years.

In the meantime, UC-Santa Cruz officials said they’re working to provide immediate aid to students who are struggling.

“No UC-Santa Cruz student should be without a safe and reliable place to live,” Hernandez-Jason said.

The Slug Support program offers a range of housing resources. If students find themselves suddenly without housing, they can get connected with a case manager who can get them placed in a local hotel or partner shelter. Students can also seek financial assistance with a housing deposit, look up tenant legal codes, and get legal help with housing issues.

“What we’ll often see is a student comes in for housing assistance, but it turns out they can’t afford food either, and on top of that, maybe they’re failing their classes,” said Estefania Rodriguez, a basic-needs program manager at the university. “It’s a lot of everything.”

The Redwood Free Market, which Rodriguez helps operate, is one of several free-food options across campus. These cafés, markets, and pop-up produce stands are operated largely by students. The food comes from local food banks, and some of the produce comes from the university’s garden.

Students are continuing their advocacy, too, despite hitting some roadblocks. In January 2021, a group of them tried to open a shelter for students experiencing homelessness. They talked with community organizations, churches, and the university itself, to no avail.

“Off-campus locations would tell us to search on campus for a location, and the university would tell us to look off campus,” said Guneet Hora, who was recently the co-president of Slug Shelter, as the group is called. “It was like a wild-goose chase.”

The club has since pivoted to become a basic-needs service for students, focusing on food and clothing donations, as well as mutual aid.

The Student Housing Coalition is advocating for the university to create a safe-parking program for students who live in their cars. Evan Morrison, a local resident who organized the city’s safe RV-parking program, has advised the coalition on its idea. (Scott-Hernandez said that a parking program “is not a viable short- or long-term solution for our housing challenges.“)

Morrison is the founder of the Free Guide, a nonprofit that serves the general homelessness population in the city of Santa Cruz. Students largely don’t use the resources aimed at the city’s homeless population, Morrison said. Their needs are different.

“There seems to be a good portion of students whose plan to end homelessness is to graduate,” he said. “So while they’re in school, they’re not trying to end their homelessness. That’s a different set of needs than the general homeless population.”

LiPo Ching for The Chronicle
The university is moving ahead with two housing projects. One will add 600 beds to an existing dorm. The other is a planned new complex that would house more than 3,000 students; it has faced lawsuits.

While Morrison has no definitive data on how many students sleep in their cars, “my gut is if we had 30 parking spots, those would be full pretty darn quick,” he said.

For much of the past year, Peyton Quijano was among them.

During the toughest moments, she was comforted, at least in part, by the knowledge that she wasn’t alone.

Then, a few weeks into the spring-2023 term, Quijano found a place to live — an off-campus apartment. She signed a lease that would go through the next academic year, when she’s scheduled to graduate.

She and three roommates are splitting a one-bedroom apartment with a loft in downtown Santa Cruz. The rent is nearly $900 a month per person. It took some convincing for the landlords to rent to them, she said. Subletting would’ve been too complicated, so they’re paying rent for an empty apartment all summer.

She considers herself one of the lucky ones.

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Carolyn Kuimelis

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July 14, 2023
The University of California Is Reversing Course on Its ‘Data Science’ Admissions Standard

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A University of California academic-governance panel has voted to undo a controversial admissions standard that professors fear is not preparing students for college-level math, just as it is on the cusp of being written into statewide policy for high schools.

On Friday, a systemwide faculty committee that oversees admission policies voted to stop high-school data-science courses from counting toward the UC’s math requirement, according to an email obtained by The Chronicle. Since this policy was adopted in 2020, faculty members across California have expressed concern that the UC system is rubber-stamping courses that bill themselves as “data science” but that do not impart the algebra needed to major in data science or other science, engineering, math, and technology majors, as The Chronicle reported last week.

The governance panel — called the Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools (Boars) — seems to have delivered a major setback to these popular courses. “Introduction to Data Science” is taught at some 165 high schools across California, claims to have been taken by 42,200 students to date, and was developed at the University of California at Los Angeles by Robert L. Gould, a statistics instructor.

Another course, “Explorations in Data Science,” is taught at more than 105 schools in the state and has been taken by more than 160,000 students, according to Jo Boaler, a Stanford professor of mathematics education who helped develop the course at Youcubed, a Stanford research center. Gould and Boaler have said that their classes teach the useful skill of crunching real-world data, and engage students who might otherwise drop out of math and won’t need calculus in their careers.

But on Friday, Boars, which consists of representatives from each UC campus, voted unanimously to drop data science from its math admissions standards, two people who were present told The Chronicle.

“Those courses, especially ‘Introduction to Data Science’ and Youcubed, should not have been approved as an advanced math course or a replacement for algebra II,” said one attendee, who requested anonymity to discuss the confidential deliberations. They said that none of the members tried to defend the policy.

The UC director of undergraduate admissions confirmed the vote in an internal email obtained by The Chronicle. She also wrote that Boars will establish an advisory group this fall “to address definitions of ‘advanced math.’”

The vote throws into question California’s math framework, which gives guidance to the state’s K-12 schools about how to teach math. After being in the works for three contentious years, the third and latest version was released on June 26. It currently encourages high schools to consider offering data science — and cites the UC’s data-science policy as evidence that the UC system will “value a range of mathematics courses as pathways to college.”

The California Board of Education is scheduled to vote on the framework on Wednesday morning. In a public comment submitted late last week, Barbara Knowlton, the Boars chair, indicated that her group was having “significant discussion” about whether the currently approved data-science courses would continue to count.

As of Tuesday afternoon, the Boars vote to ditch the policy had not been announced. On Monday night, Knowlton told members that she did not think that the group had the authority to implement the vote. “I do not think we have the power to do this,” she wrote in an email obtained by The Chronicle.

Neither Knowlton nor a spokesperson for the UC president’s office returned requests for comment by publication time.

A spokeswoman for California’s Board of Education said it was aware of the panel’s vote. “Given the decision, the Board would consider amendments to the framework during deliberations on Wednesday to ensure framework language is correctly aligned with the UC system,” the spokeswoman, Janet Weeks, said by email.

Traditionally, the UC system requires applicants to take at least three years of high-school math, including algebra II. Its current troubles began in 2020, when it expanded its definition of acceptable advanced-math courses.

In May of that year, an advisory group of mathematicians and statisticians, convened by the UC administration, recommended allowing data science and other courses to count toward the math requirement. One of the advisers was Gould, the UCLA statistician who’d led the development of “Introduction to Data Science.” That October, the Boars members unanimously adopted the proposal.

At the time, Gould called the decision “a great relief.” “There are enough old guards out there in the UC math system that a serious challenge to revising the policy was a real possibility,” he wrote to colleagues on October 3, 2020, in an email obtained by a private citizen through a public-records request. “In fact, in our ad-hoc committee, some of the mathematicians expressed concerns that some colleague[s] would not be happy with the change.”

He also raised the question of whether Boars could revise the policy or whether the UC Academic Senate needed to vote to make it official (which, to date, it has not). “I believe that the plan is to move ahead as if BOARS has the right, and see if it is challenged, since the attempts at researching this were ambiguous,” Gould wrote.

Reached for comment on Tuesday, Gould said by email that Boars “has always had that right as far as I know.” He said that his message from 2020 was “expressing my ignorance of what happens once the ad-hoc committee makes its recommendation.”

He also said that it was not a conflict of interest for him to serve on a committee that recommended green-lighting courses like his. “It worries me when decisions are made about statistics courses without input from statisticians, just as it would worry me if a decision were made about a geometry course and only statisticians were on the committee,” he wrote. “So it seems appropriate to me that a faculty member who writes statistics and data science curriculum would be asked to weigh in with his experiences.” He said that he has been paid for the courses through grants proposed by him and awarded to UCLA, as well as by an external funding agency for work related to the grants.

When it unveiled the policy, Boars said that data-science classes must still “build upon” concepts from algebra II and be designed for juniors and seniors. But “Introduction to Data Science” and “Explorations in Data Science,” which are both UC-approved, teach only concepts from algebra II that overlap with statistics, and “Introduction to Data Science” can be taken in the first half of high school, according to critics who call the curricula more akin to “data literacy.” Skipping or delaying algebra II, they say, threatens the likelihood that college freshmen, including those from underrepresented backgrounds, will enter calculus-ready, as quantitative majors across the UC system require. (Ryan King, a UC spokesperson, previously told The Chronicle that “many” applicants are still taking algebra II in addition to courses like data science.)

Hundreds of professors in California have signed an open letter that protests promoting data science as an alternative to algebra II. And over the past year, Boars and UC leadership have been fielding concerns from representatives on behalf of the Berkeley, Santa Cruz, and Irvine campuses; Riverside’s math department; Santa Barbara’s computer science, mechanical engineering, and physics departments; and a group of Black UC faculty in STEM fields. California State University’s Academic Senate also sent in resolutions passed earlier this year. It called “Introduction to Data Science” “inadequate preparation for college and career readiness” and also said that it would no longer automatically accept UC-approved advanced-math courses, as it had traditionally done.

As recently as May, the UC system was promoting the Youcubed data-science course to high-school administrators.

Gould, who has defended his course as “considerably more complex and ‘advanced’ than algebra II,” said that he was disappointed to learn of the Boars vote.

“I fear that a pathway to college for the many who fail Algebra II or who know that they are not interested in STEM might have been shut,” he wrote.

A spokesman for Boaler, who helped create “Explorations in Data Science,” did not return a request for comment by publication time.

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Stephanie M. Lee

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July 11, 2023
This Professor Criticized Diversity Statements. Did It Cost Him a Job Offer?

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A psychologist spoke out this week about what critics see as a job offer gone awry over an ideological spat about diversity statements.

Yoel Inbar, an associate professor at the University of Toronto, was up for a job at the University of California at Los Angeles. But the psychology department there decided not to proceed after more than 60 graduate students in the department signed an open letter urging the university not to hire him.

At issue, the students wrote, were Inbar’s comments on his podcast expressing skepticism about the use of diversity statements in hiring, as well as about other efforts intended to make the academy more inclusive.

In the letter, which circulated on Twitter, the students wrote that Inbar’s hiring “would threaten ongoing efforts to protect and uplift individuals of marginalized backgrounds” and that Inbar “prioritizes advocating for those he classifies as political minorities in academia” over fostering inclusivity. In a meeting with graduate students, the letter continues, Inbar’s answers to questions about diversity, equity, and inclusion were in some cases “outright disconcerting.” (Inbar shared his account on a podcast episode released on Tuesday, and spoke with The Chronicle on Wednesday.)

Days after the letter came out, the psychology-department chair emailed Inbar to say she wouldn’t be extending him a job offer, following the recommendation of an ad hoc committee.

“There is no doubt that unusual events occurred surrounding your visit,” Annette L. Stanton wrote to Inbar, who shared a copy of the email with The Chronicle. “After much consideration and consultation, I believe that following the department’s standard process spanning more than two decades is the right way to go. That said, I’m disappointed with the outcome.” (Stanton told The Chronicle on Wednesday that she was in a meeting and not immediately available for comment; the three members of the ad hoc committee did not return requests for comment. Efforts to reach several of the graduate-student signatories on Wednesday were also unsuccessful.)

There is no doubt that unusual events occurred surrounding your visit.

While the students’ concerns extended to a broader critique of Inbar’s sensitivity to DEI issues, his comments about diversity statements were what initially gave them pause, and what has dominated the debate online.

The situation illustrates how diversity statements have become a live wire nationally, with several university systems and states banning their use in hiring over concerns about their legality or potential use as a “political litmus test.” One professor sued the University of California system last month, saying a requirement that he submit a diversity statement for consideration for a job in the Santa Cruz campus’s psychology department violated his First Amendment rights. (The professor, John D. Haltigan, coincidentally, was formerly employed at the University of Toronto, but left because his grant funding had run out.)

The Inbar case is also rich with drama: A scholar of moral judgments and the psychology of political affiliation is questioned — publicly, by graduate students — about his own commitment to the DEI values they hold dear. Much of the story has played out in podcast episodes Inbar recorded nearly five years apart: one in which he posed questions about the utility of diversity statements in hiring, and another, released this week, in which he shares his view of what happened at UCLA.

“It’s funny because from a research perspective, I understand a lot of what’s going on here,” Inbar, who co-authored a 2012 paper in which he asked psychology professors whether they would discriminate in hiring based on a candidate’s political views, told The Chronicle. “I understand how people feel that they have to protect a certain set of moral values and that they don’t want people around who threaten them. I would just say, often those moral instincts can mislead us into rushing to judgment.”

What Happened?

Behind the scenes, Inbar’s potential hiring had rocked the department.

A group of graduate students had emailed the department’s entire faculty to argue against it, Stanton wrote in a February email to the department explaining the situation. (Stanton forwarded that note to Inbar, who shared it with The Chronicle.) Airing such grievances publicly, Stanton wrote, marked “a significant and problematic departure from our typical searches.”

Then there was the matter of the podcast Inbar co-hosts, Two Psychologists Four Beers, which was repeatedly cited by the graduate students in their open letter opposing Inbar’s hiring. Because the podcast episodes weren’t part of Inbar’s formal application materials, Stanton and other administrators asked UCLA’s Office of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion whether the search committee was allowed to mention them in interviewing Inbar, according to emails reviewed by The Chronicle. No, the UCLA office said: The search committee’s interview questions had to be limited to a candidate’s submitted materials, though other faculty members could bring up other topics.

So members of the department’s diversity-issues committee instead asked Inbar about the podcast material, which Stanton wrote in the email was “consistent with their standard process this year of being free to ask follow-up questions of candidates, as long as the restrictions all faculty follow during interviews aren’t violated.”

The goals are good, but I don’t know if the diversity statements necessarily accomplish the goals.

The story began, Inbar said Tuesday on the podcast Very Bad Wizards, when his partner received a job offer from the UCLA psychology department. When she inquired about the possibility of bringing Inbar on as a partner hire, the department was receptive, Inbar said. During a campus visit in late January, faculty members seemed enthusiastic about him as a candidate.

But he told the hosts of Very Bad Wizards that his meeting with the diversity-issues committee was one of several “strange things” that happened while he was on campus. At the end of the meeting, in which the committee asked standard questions about his approach to diversity in his teaching and research, Inbar said he had been asked about a December 2018 episode of Two Psychologists Four Beers.

In that episode, Inbar said that diversity statements “sort of seem like administrator virtue-signaling,” questioned how they would be used in a hiring process, and suggested “it’s not clear that they lead to better outcomes for underrepresented groups.”

The committee asked: Was he prepared to defend those comments now?

“To be honest, I wasn’t, because this episode is like, four and a half years old,” Inbar said on Very Bad Wizards. But he explained his current stance: “The very short version is, I think that the goals are good, but I don’t know if the diversity statements necessarily accomplish the goals.” (One host of Very Bad Wizards, David A. Pizarro, a professor of psychology at Cornell University, said he’d let Inbar’s comments on the podcast speak for themselves.)

The UCLA faculty members “seemed satisfied” with Inbar’s answer, he said. “Then one of them said, kind of almost apologetically, ‘Well, you know, we have some very passionate graduate students here, which is great, but what would you say to them if they were upset about this?’” Inbar said he didn’t know what he’d say beyond explaining his views, as he had to the committee.

Then Inbar met with some of the graduate students. Both parties recalled the meeting as unusual. The students wrote in their letter that Inbar had told them that his “work does not really deal with identity,” which they found problematic. Inbar studies morality and political ideology, the students wrote, so “it was deeply troubling to hear that he does not believe identity (i.e., individual background as it pertains to race, gender, sexuality, class, or ability) has bearing on these research questions.”

But Inbar said the graduate students had never asked him directly about the podcast episodes mentioned in their letter. “To be honest, it wasn’t entirely clear what they were getting at” in the meeting, Inbar told The Chronicle; if they had asked more-direct questions about, for instance, his approach to mentoring students from diverse backgrounds, he said he could have answered them.

The department’s graduate students didn’t all share the same view of the matter. A handful of students drafted a response to the first letter, defending the nuance of Inbar’s comments and calling for further conversation among themselves. Inbar shared a copy of that letter with The Chronicle.

‘Just Stay Out of It’

Stanton, the department chair, told faculty members that she had tried to play the situation by the book, according to the emails shared with The Chronicle. As is standard procedure for potential partner hires, Stanton convened an ad hoc committee to make a recommendation on whether to hire Inbar. The members of that committee — Benjamin R. Karney, Carolyn Parkinson, and Hal E. Hershfield — opted not to recommend Inbar’s hiring.

Whether to give a candidate a green light rests entirely with that committee, Stanton wrote in an email. But because of the unusual circumstances in Inbar’s case, she said she’d considered a few alternatives — a “do-over” interview or a faculty vote on Inbar’s case, for example — before ultimately deciding to let the committee’s decision stand.

She did, however, ask the committee to write an internal report explaining its decision, which she described as an unusual step.

Inbar told The Chronicle that the report had not been shared with him. Meanwhile, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression has requested from UCLA documents related to Inbar’s case, including the committee’s report; the university denied that request in March and an appeal this month. Alex Morey, director of campus rights advocacy at FIRE, told The Chronicle that her organization is preparing a second appeal, arguing that the records are a matter of public interest.

They can hold faculty to viewpoint-neutral type of criteria, … but they can’t say, ‘If you don’t pledge allegiance to our particular view on diversity, you can’t have a job.’

“What we suspect may be happening here is that because Professor Inbar allegedly did not parrot the correct views on DEI and some students objected to that, he may have been discriminated against because of his views in the hiring process,” Morey said. That’s not allowed at a public university, she said: “They can hold faculty to viewpoint-neutral type of criteria, objective standards, but they can’t say, ‘If you don’t pledge allegiance to our particular view on diversity, you can’t have a job.’”

On Tuesday, during the Very Bad Wizards episode, Inbar said the graduate students who opposed his hiring had missed the nuance in his remarks about diversity statements.

“You can pull out selective quotes that make me sound like I’m a rabid anti-diversity-statement person, which I’m really not,” Inbar said. His main concern is with their effectiveness, he said: “What you want is somebody who’s going to be able to teach and to mentor people from diverse backgrounds. But what you get is somebody writing about what they believe, and perhaps what they’ve done to demonstrate that.”

In their open letter, the students also contested Inbar’s comments in a more-recent Two Psychologists episode about how the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, the field’s professional organization, uses DEI criteria to evaluate submissions. He also took a public stance against Georgia’s anti-abortion law. Inbar said on Two Psychologists that, while he considers himself “pro-choice,” he believed it wasn’t the organization’s place to take sides: “When we align ourselves with a political side or faction, it’s bad for our science.”

To the students, Inbar’s remarks about the professional society were more evidence he wouldn’t be a good fit. “Time and time again in these episodes, he fails to reflect on how these issues structurally affect marginalized individuals,” they wrote.

Meanwhile, Inbar is not asking for sympathy. His partner received a one-year extension of her job offer from UCLA, which he told The Chronicle was “spectacular,” and the couple may consider moving to Los Angeles if Inbar can find a job in the area. “I don’t want people to cry over this for me,” he said on Very Bad Wizards.

In the past, he added, he’s urged faculty members to speak up about potentially controversial topics they believe in. His recent experience has changed his mind.

“Is there a cost to opening your mouth about this stuff? Absolutely, there is,” he said. “Would I advise a junior person to take any sort of heterodox position on this publicly? Absolutely not, because you only need to piss off a few people. It just takes one or two to sink you. Just stay out of it.”

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Megan Zahneis

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June 28, 2023
How the Largest Higher-Ed Strike in U.S. History Blew Up Finals

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Inside a campus coffee shop at the University of California at Los Angeles, students were hunched over laptops on white plastic tables, armed with cups of coffee. The students didn’t react to the cries and chants happening outside, largely drowned out by chatter and music streaming through AirPods. Finals were coming up, and students were starting to cram.

Steps away from the cafe, a group of 50 UCLA workers and faculty members walked in circles and carried picket signs around the university’s iconic inverted stone fountain. Around 1 p.m., they resumed their chants — calls for higher wages and better benefits.

A three-week-long strike by graduate students, postdocs, and researchers has profoundly disrupted life at one of the nation’s most prominent university systems. Now finals are here, and with no teaching assistants on the job, there’s widespread confusion among students and professors on how to proceed.

Students and professors say the campus feels emptier than usual. Since Thanksgiving, some have left entirely and not returned, due to modified and canceled classes and exams. Those who have stayed stuck around for a reason: Their classes are forging ahead.

With the end of the term approaching, faculty members say they’re struggling to fulfill obligations to their undergraduate students. Undergraduate students are concerned with how the strike will impact their grades — and wondering whether they’ll even get grades in the end. All are worried about how long the strike will last.

The UC system reached a tentative agreement with postdocs and academic researchers this week, agreeing to wage increases that the union says reflect the cost of living in one of the most expensive states in the country. But graduate students are still negotiating, and postdocs and researchers are continuing to strike with them.

The university has repeatedly emphasized that it expects faculty members to meet teaching and research responsibilities and ensure the continuity of instruction for students. A Wednesday letter from the UC system’s provost suggested alternate ways that faculty can show support for the strike. Colleges often respond to striking instructors by criticizing how work stoppages harm undergraduates’ learning.

People across the UC system have different perspectives on the strike and whom to blame for the ensuing chaos. But just about everyone feels conflicted in one way or another.

Peyton Quijano, a third-year biology major at UC-Santa Cruz, says she’s caught between wanting to support her TAs and being frustrated by yet another disruption to her studies. She says she understands why the strike has to happen. She’s also paying for her education and wants to get the most out of it.

“I just didn’t think the strike was going to go on this long,” Quijano said.

At UCLA, life hasn’t stopped. It’s just slowed way down.

Grading has been backed up, particularly for large lecture classes. Some students have had finals canceled or made optional. Other courses are operating as usual — save for the echoes of strike chants seeping into classrooms.

A spokesperson for UCLA didn’t respond to a question about how many classes had been canceled or affected by the strike.

Students who have returned to campus are there because their instruction is continuing — either modified or business as usual. By midafternoon on Thursday, nearly every desk was full inside UCLA’s main library.

Dylan Winward, a first-year student at UCLA, said one of his finals was made optional only five days before his exam was set to take place.

Over the last three weeks, Winward and his friends had been completing lectures and assignments from The Hill, a student hub for dorms, dining, and student services on UCLA’s campus. Winward and many of his friends said on Thursday that they were returning to the main campus for the first time since the strike began.

Although students said they sympathize with the TAs and others who are on strike, some are also concerned about grades. “I’ll be really upset if I put in all this work for finals and get nothing back,” said first-year student Sydney Roberts.

It feels a lot like when we were taking classes during the pandemic.

Jacob Castaneda, a third-year political science student who transferred to UCLA this semester, said his course load hasn’t been impacted. His final exams and essays are proceeding as usual. For his three lecture classes, each of which typically have TA-led discussions, his professors have committed to getting grades in on time.

For Mauve Spillard, a fourth-year comparative literature student, one of her professors who usually works with a TA has said grades will be turned in late.

Trent Brown, a first-year American literature undergraduate student, hasn’t had any classes or finals canceled since the strike began. But Brown is worried that delayed grading could affect students trying to apply for honors or other programs.

At UC-Santa Cruz, Quijano said her classes were canceled or moved online during the first two weeks of the strike; by late last week, some were back to in-person. She said her professors respect the cause of the striking workers, but they said they need to continue lessons for students to be able to complete the course.

But Quijano is struggling to get answers to her questions about the material without the help of TAs, and her labs have been canceled. Instead of conducting her own experiments, she has to write a paper based on a photo of the results she would have gotten.

“It feels a lot like when we were taking classes during the pandemic,” she said.

Much like during the pandemic, faculty members have had to make contingency plans.

Anna J. Markowitz, an assistant professor of education at UCLA, spent the weekend before the strike recording videos of lectures for her undergraduate Introduction to Quantitative Methods class. The next day, she stopped teaching.

Markowitz’s classes enroll 40 students, and she works with two graduate students. One of them runs the coding lab portion of Markowitz’s undergraduate course and grades all student assignments — work that has now been left ungraded. Markowitz said she will not submit grades or hold a formal final during the strike. For students who want to test their knowledge, she will release an optional exam, but it will not be graded.

I couldn’t look my students in the face and not fully support their right to strike.

As a graduate student at Georgetown University more than a decade ago, Markowitz said she earned the same wage as her graduate students make now: $25,000 for a three-quarter academic year. They are paid for part-time work capped at 20 hours a week, she said, but many graduate students work more.

“Knowing what my students make and knowing how bad I’ve been feeling about that for a long time, I couldn’t look my students in the face and not fully support their right to strike,” Markowitz said of her decision to not cross the picket line.

Markowitz is among 1,000 faculty who have pledged not to teach or submit grades until the strike ends. For some professors, it’s an act of solidarity. Others say that without the help of teaching assistants, it would be impossible to complete grading for classes with hundreds of students — no matter their personal positions on the strike.

David Shorter, a professor of world arts and cultures at UCLA, stopped teaching in solidarity with the graduate-student employees. He’s still holding listening sessions for his students, many of whom aren’t receiving clear directives from their professors or the university about how to exist amid the strike, he said.

Shorter is teaching three classes this quarter and doesn’t know how he’ll grade 300 papers before the end of the term, even if the deadline to submit grades is extended to January. He’d usually have the help of six TAs.

He stopped teaching his classes, one of which is an 80-person lecture, when the strike began. Nearly 25 percent of his students haven’t even returned to campus since Thanksgiving. And a lot of courses for the next term, he said, don’t even have TAs assigned yet.

While Shorter’s classrooms sat empty, a 300-person life sciences lecture at UCLA was nearly full on Thursday. Students were wrapped up in last-day-of-class chatter as the professor continued to make announcements about review sessions, about practice-exam questions, about their final — yes, there would be a final.

The professor went around the room as students were tasked with answering a practice question. Murmuring picked up among the students. They graphed their guesses and checked their responses with one another. The strike hadn’t changed much for these students, beyond canceling their TA-led discussion sections.

The Academic Senate at UCLA has released guidance suggesting that professors could shorten final exams or make them multiple choice, to ease the grading burden.

There have been a handful of incidents where strikers have interrupted midterm exams, said Winward, the first-year student; he reported on them for the campus newspaper, the Daily Bruin. He said some students are concerned about such disruptions happening again during finals week.

The University of California system views its graduate students like most colleges do: Their employment is “strictly part time,” and campus policy prevents them from working more than 20 hours per week. Meeting some of the students’ demands, university officials say, would cause an “unprecedented” and “unpredictable” financial impact.

The university has proposed paying TAs between $25,000 and $31,000 per year, and graduate-student researchers between $28,000 and $47,000 per year, for part-time work — which officials say would make UC graduate students the highest compensated among public institutions in the Association of American Universities. The union has called for a minimum salary of $54,000.

Another sticking point is housing costs. University officials have stressed that UC-owned housing for graduate students is already 20 to 25 percent below market rates. Tying raises to housing costs, as the union has called for, could cost hundreds of millions of dollars annually, according to the university.

We’re eager to get back to work. We just want to make sure we are living and working in dignified conditions.

UC officials said they had reached agreements with other employee unions in the past year, demonstrating their “flexibility and a genuine willingness to compromise.” The university has proposed working with a private mediator to resolve differences, which the union doesn’t support.

Meanwhile, on most campuses, the deadline to submit final grades this fall has been extended — but only by a few days. And there’s little consistency across campuses.

Faculty members are also struggling to figure out what legal rights they have to participate in a sympathy strike.

A Wednesday letter from Michael T. Brown, the UC-system provost, stated that if faculty members choose not to hold classes or submit grades during the strike, the “university in turn may withhold their compensation.” If faculty members participate in a “partial strike,” where they don’t submit grades but continue to do research, they could also risk disciplinary action.

The letter said that faculty have the responsibility to maintain course and curricular requirements, including “the timely awarding and submission of grades.” The Council of UC Faculty Associations called the letter “misleading.”

For some faculty members, the university is making a frustrating, if not impossible, ask — especially after the pandemic left them feeling burned out and exhausted.

“Most of us are confused, if not stressed, because we just spent three years being very agile for our employers due to COVID,” Shorter said. “And now the expectation is that we would spend our holiday breaks or winter breaks grading hundreds of papers for a situation we did not create.”

The faculty associations’ council also released a Google form for professors to fill out if they expect not to be able to submit final grades without the help of TAs. As of Friday, the group said the total number of expected missing grades was 23,000.

Bernard Remollino, a graduate-student researcher and teaching assistant at UCLA, said what’s happening across UC campuses now sends a critical message: The university works because of its academic student workers. The question of when their work will proceed is up to the UC system, he said.

“We’re eager to get back to work,” Remollino said. “We just want to make sure we are living and working in dignified conditions. And that’s it.”

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Grace Mayer and Carolyn Kuimelis

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December 2, 2022