FALL 2025
ISSUE 04

₁ Rebekkah Dilts and Dylan Davis, “Why we’re striking for fair teaching wages at UC Santa Cruz — even with a baby on the way,” Washington Post, March 9, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/03/09/santa-cruz-strike-graduate-students-unions

When I started my PhD program in literature at the University of California Santa Cruz in the fall of 2015, I did not know I would be represented by a union for my work as a graduate-student instructor. When I did learn about the union during a presentation given during graduate orientation, I wasn’t paying much attention. I was focused entirely on the degree program itself, on sussing out the other students in my cohort, on believing that I was, in a way, on a spiritual path, at the final stage in my ascension toward literature. I was, in short, not at all concerned with collectivity, but only with myself and my aspirations.

I had wanted to be in a PhD program for so long for so many reasons. As an undergraduate, I’d fallen in love with the notion of academia; I’d felt my brain and way of viewing the world rearranged in the philosophy and literature classes I took. In turn, I romanticized the life of the professors who led these classes. There was also the fact that my parents, who had met in a PhD program at Harvard, had both dropped out before completion. There was a part of me that wanted to finish what they had not.

When I made the choice to pursue academia, I’d believed, like many people who pursue academia, that it would keep me safe somehow, inside of a protected tower of ideas and thought. It felt outside of work, outside of the normal grind most people were subjected to. When I finally entered the PhD program, I indulged in the same kind of magical thinking many who enter academia also do, believing that against all the odds – which were getting odder and odder – I’d succeed, which meant earning a coveted tenure-track job so that I would be able to ascend the tower. 

But as three years passed in the PhD program, the promise of academic success began to dissolve. Not only were there fewer jobs in my field than ever before, but there was increasingly less funding in my department. My fellow graduate students and I had to teach every quarter, leaving little time for serious writing or research. Then there became even fewer and fewer teaching opportunities due to low enrollment in literature courses, which meant that even earning a teaching position felt lucky. The focus became not how to stay but how to escape, how to finish the PhD as quickly as possible in order to minimize the pileup of student loan and credit card debt, and to hopefully pivot into another line of work. 

There is a scene in John Williams’s brilliant book Stoner, a novel about a man’s love of and ultimate disillusionment with academia, in which a senior graduate student asks new graduate students if they have “ever considered the question of the true nature of the University?” He goes on to debunk what he believes to be their beliefs – that the university is a “common hive” of creation and “an instrument of good” – to declare the university instead to be “an asylum.” 

Midway through my PhD, I increasingly felt I was being driven insane at the university. Although in the 21st century, unlike the early 20th, in which Stoner takes place, the UC felt more like a ponzi scheme than an asylum, designed to accept more and more graduate students to do grading and grunt work and deliver fewer and fewer scholars. 

As the possibility of an academic career evaporated, a radically different desire began to grow in me: to become a mother. I had been resistant to motherhood in my 20s, when I’d begun the PhD program. It seemed at odds with the theory I loved, with the authors I admired, especially the female ones. I had, for example, chosen to write my dissertation on a group of women writers in Paris at the turn of the century who lived subversive lives, took many lovers, and never had children. It was a trap for women to become mothers. I would never be able to become the kind of writer or thinker I aspired to be if I was a mom. I believed my own mother had sacrificed her intellectual life and goals when she’d had children. 

Yet three years into the PhD program, the world seemed different to me than it had before. The idea of being a part of a totally different act of creation drew me towards it. Even though I felt somewhat ashamed to make such an about-face, to be seen as retreating into a traditional female role, I conceived a child with the graduate student I had married a few years before.

And then, during the early phases of my pregnancy, something else began to take life: the coalescing of a movement resisting the conditions at the university. While I knew that other graduate students, especially in my department and in humanities departments broadly, were struggling with funding and job prospects, I hadn’t thought much about how many others felt so similarly precarious. Or I thought that even if they did, they had figured out some way to cope, whether it be with family money or some other method, and that they were buoyed by their own sense of ambition or magical thinking. The possibility that anything might change never occurred to me – nor did the possibility that the nebulous union, which I never thought about, might be a part of that change. But five months into my pregnancy, in the fall of 2019, I began to get emails from my department’s union rep about rallies to demand graduate students be paid more to keep up with the ballooning cost of living in Santa Cruz. 

The question of housing in particular had become a bigger and bigger issue for students, regardless of whether they were single or had children. Rent and housing prices in Santa Cruz were of the highest in the world, statistics showed, and the stress of making the outrageous rent ran up right alongside of the stress of the program itself: no funding, meager salaries, no way to stay in the program, no way to get out of the program. It was talked about all the time by grad students. It was often challenging to recruit even tenured faculty to the university, especially those coming from the Midwest or the South, when they looked at housing prices. But again, it had never occurred to me there was anything to do about it. And our choice to get pregnant in such a state seemed, to many, like a misguided decision. 

Yet, we went to the rally. And then we went to another rally. And lots and lots of other people did too. And then we started going to meetings about next steps that grew larger and larger. Very quickly, a strike was called.

The intensity of the energy that swirled and the shapes that began to take form in those spaces seemed at times as miraculous as the pregnancy itself. It was growing so quickly and seemed to have a life of its own.

My naïveté about the union hadn’t changed much, though. I still didn’t understand its structure statewide or the politics at play when it came to our campus, Santa Cruz, and its place within the statewide union and the other UCs. I didn’t realize the extent to which we were the defiant one, not at all playing by the rules. So I certainly didn’t understand exactly what was meant by a wildcat strike – the strike ultimately called at UC Santa Cruz. All I knew was a large group of us were moving towards something and it felt completely different than the silo of sitting across from one another in seminar rooms, trying to outdo and undo one another’s ideas. 

Once on strike and with no classes to teach, I spent nearly every day of my growing pregnancy dutifully on the picket, only leaving for prenatal appointments and grocery shopping. Often people would approach me and ask how I felt being there, a waddling pregnant woman on a picket that at times became the subject of police violence. But I didn’t really think about my presence being strange, because it seemed like exactly what I should be doing: feeling two things grow. 

And the strike grew and grew. It began to get national attention. Bernie Sanders tweeted support. Press arrived on the picket. My husband and I were sometimes asked to speak and then asked to pen an op-ed for the Washington Post because, again, what on earth were pregnant people doing striking – in an unsanctioned strike, no less – and then getting fired? But again, and as I tried to express in the op-ed, it had come to seem like the only logical way to better our situation.¹ 

Then, in mid-March of 2020, the strike was essentially shut down by the COVID-19 pandemic. And then, on the last day of March in 2020, my son was born after three days of labor. Every aspect of my life and the life of others was entirely different than what was planned and hoped for.

As the simultaneous euphoria and overwhelm of early motherhood passed and the world remained in a horrendous limbo, as those of us who’d been in the strike faced disciplinary action and lawsuits, I was forced to think ahead. Would I finish the PhD? How? We needed more money with a baby. How would we get it? Seeing an email about a part time job with the statewide union, I applied for it, still relatively naïve about its relationship to our campus and what working for a union would mean. I only thought that I stood a chance to get the job because I had just been part of a strike without having been one of the leaders of the strike, who would likely have been seen as too militant. 

I did get the part-time job with the union. I did finish my dissertation and earned my PhD. But there was no formal graduation because of COVID; I simply received my diploma in the mail. It was one of the most anticlimactic experiences of my life. 

Not seeing many other options, I went on the academic job market for a second time, as I’d done the year before, prior to the strike, but this time in the context of a pandemic shutdown. I didn’t get an academic job. 

I did get offered a full-time job with the union, and I took it. 

My role with the union initially came with the hope and promise of organizing toward demands that graduate student parents had. I understood I was hired just as much for being in the 2020 strike as I was for being a pregnant woman on strike and then a new mother. I entered the job with the aspiration of establishing a functional Parents and Caregivers Working Group and making health insurance for dependents one of the core bargaining demands in the next round of contract negotiations (graduate students at the UC to this day must pay thousands of dollars out of pocket to insure their children or spouse).

I tried to do those things. I tried to establish a statewide working group and galvanize around the health insurance demand. On Santa Cruz’s campus, there was a group of graduate student parents that had been in the wildcat strike, many of whom had become my friends; they were already organized and were invested in the health insurance demand – and in making conditions for graduate student parents better across the board. We organized a “stroller march” that was well attended and even attracted some postdoctoral-scholar parents – a group of members that tended to be uninvolved in most organizing. Yet there was little to no effort made on other campuses to do anything similar, and most of the other staff I worked with seemed uninterested and unimpressed by the march or any of the other parent organizing happening at UCSC that I reported. Ultimately, the dependent health insurance demand didn’t go very far, as there were so few graduate student parents; the demands that appealed to the broader contingent took hold. 

And then there was another strike in 2022 – this one sanctioned by the statewide union and involving all of the UC campuses. My days of being a pregnant picketer were long gone; the full landscape of the political differences between Santa Cruz and the statewide union came into focus, and fallout from the wildcat strike came into the fore. Those differences were both personal and political: I was, of course, no longer a student, no longer rank and file – I was an employee of the union. Yet, while I was not fighting for demands that would impact my working conditions or change the terms of my contract, I was still, in a sense, fighting to keep my job; being in a staff role was far more tangled than I could’ve known. I rode it out, but the pressure of navigating the massive organizing differences between Santa Cruz and the statewide union nearly broke me. As the success of the wildcat strike showed, Santa Cruz had an incredibly organized, like-minded rank-and-file leadership, yet most other campuses did not; their approaches to organizing were largely guided by statewide staff, and my job, in the eyes of my boss, was to do what other staff did. This would never have worked at UCSC, and my attempts to explain that Santa Cruz would, at times, take its own approach to the strike and to organizing regardless of what I or anyone else did was usually met with disbelief. 

I also felt alienated as a mother in all directions: I was not a real part of what had become a robust group of graduate student parents, because I was not a graduate student anymore, and our working and living conditions were no longer the same. When it came to my job, I was at that time the only staff member who had a child, and it was uncomfortable to try and explain why, for example, it was difficult to attend work meetings that were set at all hours of the day and often on the weekend during the strike. Six months after the end of the strike, I gratefully moved into a research position, and I am no longer a field organizer, nor involved with the UC.

The transition out of organizing for the UC was one I needed. I was drained mentally and physically from the strike and from constantly navigating tensions between UCSC and the statewide union. But transitioning into a research role also meant a complete foreclosure of my time at the university and of the energy of organizing. No longer a graduate student and no longer working for the grad workers’ union meant fully leaving academia. And no longer being a field organizer meant no more participating in strikes. I felt both pangs of longing and of relief during the UC Palestine strike in 2024. It also took a long time to let my grip on academia fully loosen; I felt both pangs of longing and of failure when colleagues and friends announced they had indeed secured academic jobs. 

In this moment, I feel grateful to have pivoted out of academia. In many ways, I feel grateful to have become involved in unions and in organizing – worlds I was theoretically supportive of but didn’t know at all and whose principles I didn’t quite practice or understand to be as important as I now believe they are. But the waters are muddier than they are clear. Would I have taken the job at the union if I wasn’t a mother? Would I have continued to try and apply to academic jobs, to lecture, to stay in a world I had in some ways fought against by participating in the strike? I don’t know, but I know that my way of viewing the world had changed with a level of nuance I couldn’t have understood before having my child. I knew being a mother involved an intense level of self-sacrifice, which was one of the reasons I thought I should avoid it if I wanted to write or study or make art. Yet, it was so different than I’d imagined, deeper and far more knotted. I wanted a stable income and health insurance for my child. I was so tired of precarity after years of it. I wanted something else. 

My movement through academia, through the wildcat strike of 2020, through the staff role at the UC and another strike, and through motherhood all share a similar sentiment, one I’d also never considered before becoming a parent: simultaneous loss and emergence – a finality of moments that can never be replicated, while at the same time, new landscapes of possibility continuously emerge.