Intervention performed with students at UCSD. Ash Eliza Smith, Troy Araiza, Catherine Czacki, Samuel Dunscombe, Matthew Savitsky, Joseph Hankins, with accompanying text.

1. “Why? Fuck. Stop!”
Four UC Writing Instructors Reflect on the Neoliberal University.
Troy Araiza Kokinis, Catherine Czacki, Pepe Rojo, Ash Eliza Smith

2. Sometimes, we think we are part of a last attempt by the United States education system to turn
students into humans. It’s a tongue-in-cheek joke, but it still rings true. We work as Teaching Assistants
(TAs) in the Culture, Art, and Technology (CAT) Writing Program at the University of California San
Diego. During Spring Quarter 2015, we instructed a course called CAT3: Aliens on Earth —The Pat-
terns of Being Human. It is the last in a sequence of three mandatory first-year writing courses. The
course perspective was both fun and challenging. We asked students to imagine they were recently ar-
rived aliens on earth who were trying to understand everyday patterns of human behavior. But the pun
goes both ways: arts and humanities courses are “alien” in a university dominated by the STEM disci-
plines (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics). As writing instructors, we push students to
understand the world beyond themselves by emphasizing that these patterns in human behavior are far
more than just products of arbitrary happenstance, but are instead rooted in larger structures of power
that discipline our everyday lives. We read excerpts from Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place and Angela
Davis’ Are Prisons Obsolete? to explore white supremacy; Kate Bornstein’s My Gender Workbook to
explore the gender binary; Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish to explore modern spatial logic; and
Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed to explore capitalist hegemony and class conflict. We lectured
on Marx’s labor theory of value and showed films like Paris is Burning. Overall, we tried to complicate
their realities and hoped they would leave the course with more questions than answers. We hoped the
alien angle would inspire them to become “human” by not taking everyday life for granted.
Working as a TA in a STEM-dominated university can be frustrating. Student attendance dropped
to about fifty percent by the third week of the quarter, meaning that about 90 of the 180 enrolled stu-
dents consistently showed up. During “discussion sections,” where we encourage conversation about
the course’s material in small classes with 20 students, many voiced their discomfort and pushed back
on the class themes, such as the case of one student who claimed that racial categories and stereotypes
are needed so that we can know who can be trusted. Instead of feeling liberated by a structural analysis,
students often expressed fear about who might challenge their individuality, their security, and their
privilege.
Many students made it clear that we were on the bottom ladder of their priorities. STEM profes-
sors often contribute to the devaluing of the course by booking mandatory lab sessions and midterms
during the same time slot as our discussion sections. When one CAT3 student raised a concern about
the conflict in scheduling, their Math instructor declared, “Your writing courses don’t matter anyways.”
This is not to say that some students were not moved by this course, because surely some who
might have spoken less might be quietly thinking more critically. A few did come forward and express,
in the words of one student, that this class made him ‘question everything’ he thought he knew up to
this point. This glimmer of hope, however was dim, as these cases appeared to be the minority – as evi-
denced by the interventions that were performed, and the students final, curious, verbal gesture.
For the final project, students were instructed to complete the following assignment: First, stu-
dents had to identify and describe a pattern on campus. Then, they had to analyze it as a life form. What
is its genealogy and source? How is it maintained? What keeps it alive and functioning? These inquiries
were to be guided by the analytical tools offered in the course. Playing the role of aliens, students were
to take no patterns for granted. Lastly, students had to “intervene” in one of the patterns, document the

3. results of the intervention, and analyze what types of sustained interventions would be necessary to
change the pattern in the future. Students were offered access to a GoPro camera, projectors, and even a
drone to assist in the execution and documentation of the intervention.
The results were all over the place. Some were downright disappointing, especially considering the
grandiosity of the patterns we covered in the course content. Prison Industrial Complex. Speciesism. Pa-
triarchy. Homophobia. White supremacy. Wage labor and exploitation. One group used the assignment
as an excuse to trash a classroom and another wanted to identify a pattern as “wearing denim.” We had
students interested in reinforcing already existing rules, like using the crosswalk and keeping silence in
the library. Most expressed minimal engagement with the course content, barely managing to question
ideological structures of power and/or avoiding the major themes altogether —most opted to perform
soft interventions. By soft we mean minimal engagement with the course content, in terms of barely
managing to question ideological structures and the aforementioned divisions, or alternately by avoid-
ing the major themes altogether in favor of scratching the surface of the tensions of public life. Interest-
ingly, not a single student recognized or questioned the pattern of subordinating the arts and humanities
to STEM fields in the increasingly privatized neo¬liberal university.
There were also fun and challenging surprises: Profiles of workers appeared at the Price Center
trying to make visible the “invisible labor” that makes UC run, students were pushing a shopping cart
with a cello player above trying to capture the attention of passersby so absorbed by their electronics
equipment they ignored their surroundings, the Vegetable Liberation Front handed out papers with in-
formation; girls were catcalling men on Library Walk. But these were the exceptions to the rule. We still
felt our discussion of critical issues was falling on deaf ears.
On the last day of lecture, Professor Joe Hankins and the TAs organized an intervention on the
class. Throughout the quarter we had emphasized that one of the most exciting characteristics of mak-
ing an intervention is not knowing, nor controlling, the outcome. We asked ourselves: What to do with
180 bodies? We decided to let them speak as a life form - to talk without being individually responsible
for the content.
We divided the 180-student body (attendance mandatory) into three groups upon entering into
the lecture hall. Each group had to select one word to present to the UCSD. We instructed the students
to select their word based on the course themes we had been analyzing over the past ten weeks. We
considered assigning a subject, a verb, and an object between the groups in order to form a sentence,
but we eventually decided against it. Grammar is also a pattern of control —the intervention was meant
to break the normal classroom routine and make space for spontaneity. Instead, we internally divided
each of the three groups so that they had six councils of ten people. The three groups sat in the form of
wheels with six spokes each to allow for students to deliberate in smaller groups. The “spokes councils”
selected a word together and then channeled it to a representative who eventually chose the final word
for the group among the five other representatives. This was predicated by the fact that those in the
center would all have to come to a consensus regarding which word would be chosen from what each
spoke proposed. When the three groups finally selected a word, each group had to spell it out with their
bodies. It was as much an experiment for us as it was for them. It was also meant to be fun. The result
was perplexing.
WHY FUCK STOP
We were as confused as they were, but also kind of amazed at what they had produced. What did

4. they say? What did it mean? As TAs we met with them one more time before the quarter ended. In our
final discussion section we explored their intentions. Their questions were clear: What was the point
of the intervention? Was it a publicity stunt for the CAT Writing Program? Was it a way to put them
through a test, to prove how easily they were moved around by authority figures?
So we tried to explain how we were trying to get them to spell a collective enunciation for which
none of them was individually responsible, but that through their silence, opinions, indifference or care-
ful thinking, they were responsible for as a group. It was a life form. It had no grammar and no inten-
tion —at least no individual intention— but it said something, something that is not easy to understand,
and which may not be even logical. But that they all said something together in much the same way that
the patterns we had been exploring throughout the course speak through them. It was “their” collective
enunciation.
Then we tried analyzing the phrase:
WHY FUCK STOP
We started with the sexual repression hypothesis that led to making out the word FUCK and how
difficult it is to deal with whatever “Fuck” means when one is 18 years old and hormones are wildly
dancing around in the body. Some students even giggled when we wrote “fuck” on the blackboard. The
Beavis and Butthead antics could have been worse, as the first group was quite close to selecting “Poop”
as their word.
And then we went through the really scary hypothesis of having 180 really privileged students
belonging to a college in one of the most privileged educational systems in the world saying something
so empty and barely being able to spell it:
WHY FUCK STOP
And how scary it was to imagine that after being bombarded with critical analyses of race, gender,
class, space, prisons, surveillance and all the core subjects the course, all they could say was:
WHY FUCK STOP
Particularly because of the ties that UCSD has with the military-academic-industrial complex that
surrounds and funds it and because, in a sense, freshman writing courses are some of the last mandatory
courses providing students with a skill set beyond rote memorization of formulas. “Why the fuck stop?”
labor exploitation, commodity fetishism, gender inequality, white supremacy, neo-colonialism, and
prison slavery? It had the ring of a neoliberal rallying war-cry to not only keep the world as it is, but to
nourish and amplify pre-existing structures of oppression. We couldn’t help remembering what another
CAT TA had once told us while reflecting on how these students’ STEM-discipline education is orga-
nized to fuel both military and consumer market economies without any critical tools: “We are teaching
the people who will destroy the world.”
And then one student, one of the guys who asked what was the point of the intervention, told us
that maybe we could read the enunciation under a different light if we included some punctuation signs:
WHY? FUCK. STOP!
That possibility, to read the three words as a question followed by indignation and then a com-
mand, opened up a different way of reading the collective enunciation. Perhaps the exercise had revealed
a deep collective unconscious yearning for something more from the university experience, education,
and everyday life in general. Maybe our unrest had to do with the way we had to cram all the content

5. into a 10-week quarter (Why Fuck Stop indeed), maybe there was something there that we weren’t able
to help reveal due to constraints that, as most of the patterns discussed in section, seem just frustratingly
out of our control. Somehow, it’s all in there, including the simple pleasure of saying “fuck” in public.
Why? Fuck. Stop!
The collective enunciation made us rethink everything that had happened those last ten weeks. It
opened up a possibility where maybe teaching this kind of courses with these kind of subjects and open-
ing them up for discussion has a positive effect. At the very least, it provided some kind of relief for us.
Placing those punctuation signs, was, in it’s own, a kind of success. After all, it was a college entry-level
compulsory writing course —no one expects ten weeks of curriculum to launch large-scale histori-
cal changes. We can best hope that despite being seen as a nuisance, the compulsory writing course, or
last-ditch-for-the-humanities-education-class, will instill seeds of empathy. Hopefully this empathy will
serve as a deeply embedded trigger to release ‘second thoughts’ before any of the future chemical indus-
trialists, policy-makers, wire-tappers, bio-geneticists, politicians, nuclear engineers and other profes-
sionals in powerful social positions – push the figurative red button.

6. PhotosbyAshElizaSmith.