Opinion: The UC walkout: one professor’s account
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To walk out or not to walk out? That was the question UC Riverside creative writing professor Susan Straight was going to pose to her senior fiction class on the first day of school Thursday (see her Op-Ed article here). Here’s Straight’s account of what happened:
This morning I handed out the syllabus to 32 students and told them what their assignments would be for the quarter. We talked briefly about the walkout and I asked them to vote on what they’d like to do. Twenty voted to stay in class and do their work, seven voted to walk out, and five voted to write letters to the Office of the President. Then one student expressed solidarity with the striking workers, and another student said she was worried about being penalized for not finishing today’s classroom work if we walked out. When I explained that the first day of class mostly amounted to a discussion of what was coming up for the quarter, they decided to vote again. Twenty-two voted to walk out, five to stay in class and five to write letters. Most of us joined the rally, standing in the hot sun, watching and listening to 1960s-style speeches, complete with megaphones and chants: ‘Fur-lough, hell no.’
-- Susan Brenneman
