“Clearly you don’t know how to do math.”

May 4, 2021

That’s what Pierre Ouillet, Chief Financial Officer of UCSD, said today to me in a meeting between residents of UCSD housing and Chancellor Khosla where we presented our case to the Chancellor and his staff that rent hikes of up to 85% for new residents are completely unreasonable. But as Graduate Student Researchers in the natural sciences, it turns out that we do math quite well, certainly well enough to know that graduate students cannot afford to pay $1,365 (up from $873) on a $2,500 monthly income, as the next resident of my room will be asked to do.

UCSD’s main justification for increasing rents so greatly is that housing must be “self-supporting,” and HDH’s only source of income are rents. As we pointed out in today’s meeting, that simply isn’t true: UCOP’s Rule 72 on auxiliary services such as campus housing explicitly states that, “Chancellors may subsidize auxiliary enterprises with appropriate available campus funds.” Clearly, Khosla has the power to balance the budget without putting it on the backs of graduate tenants.

Here’s what we said:

Rents must be frozen, not increased, during this historic pandemic.
HDH must stop pushing degrading double occupancy as a solution to our rent burden.
The University has the money to make graduate housing affordable, but instead administrators are once again making the choice to shift the cost onto underpaid workers.

Ouillet went on to say to us, “by the time you leave grad school, maybe you’ll learn how to balance a budget.” To that we said, we balance our budgets every month! That’s why we’re fighting these rent increases. We already have to choose each month between paying our rent and other life necessities.

Khosla committed to continuing to dialogue and look further into the points we made. Residents have their attention now, but it’s clear that UCSD administration won’t budge unless we continue to hold them accountable.

Forming a union for Student Researchers is one powerful way to give graduate employees at UC more power to fight for affordable housing and fair wages, because with a union UC must negotiate a contract with us collectively. Housing is a workplace issue, especially while so many of us continue to work from home. Khosla is slow listen, but with an SR union he will have no choice. Please ask your friends and labmates to sign a union authorization card if they haven’t already.

And if you’re a resident of graduate housing, you can get involved in the movement to freeze the rent by reaching out to this email address, and attend the socially-distanced rally this Sunday April 25th at noon outside Mesa Nueva.

In solidarity,

Zach Goldberg
PhD student, Biological Sciences
UC San Diego

P.S. – here’s a link to the SRU-UAW union authorization card.