The History Department expresses grave concern over UCOP and UCI’s recent requirement that faculty who respected the picket-line during the recent UC-wide strike by academic workers sign attestation forms about any labor they withheld. Faculty have never been required to submit such attestations in the case of other strikes at UCI or during the course of quotidian (or extraordinary) teaching (e.g., the COVID pandemic). Faculty in the History Department thus perceive attestations as retaliatory for faculty actions in a specific labor conflict at the University of California. It is wrong and deeply harmful to the well-being of our university community.
The History Department extends this grave concern to the recent requirement of attestations from ASEs, GSRs, and Postdoctoral researchers and fellows. Not only is the process legally dubious and punitive, it also undermines academic community by asking faculty to make reports on their graduate students. As this violates the foundational trust on which a university education should be based, members of the History Department will not submit attestation forms now and in the future and will not participate in this exercise.
(January 23, 2023)