In recent weeks, we have devoted much space in our newsletter to the plight of undergraduates from poorer homes or those who don’t have any homes to go to, graduate students who will face a job market without jobs, and precariously employed lecturers. But our concerns don’t stop here; they reach beyond the university to suffering in our neighboring communities. Thus, we applaud the work of our ESPM colleague on the BFA Board, Seth Holmes, a physician and anthropologist. He has zeroed in on the under-funded healthcare system that has left doctors and nurses working in impossible conditions; on workers in the food industry, from pickers to packers, deemed essential workers but denied essential protection against Covid19; on ICE agents who used scarce masks to continue their raids, causing panic in undocumented communities. He is now supporting community groups in calling on the Berkeley City Council to allow the unhoused to find protected spaces wherever they can, and on Alameda County to declare a moratorium on evictions. We are proud to see faculty mobilizing what resources they have to partake in a collective response to the virus. The imperative for what is called “social distancing” ought to combine physical distancing with social solidarity.
Michael Burawoy and Celeste Langan for the Berkeley Faculty Association