Protesters gathered on College Walk to rally against the possible allocation of federal stimulus funding to Columbia’s Manhattanville expansion project on Saturday.
Members of a campus activist group, the Student Coalition on Expansion and Gentrification (SCEG), and a local organization, the Coalition to Preserve Community (CPC), staged the protest in light of statements by University President Lee Bollinger and other Columbia officials, who have spoken about requests for stimulus funding but have not elaborated on the amount or governmental channels being pursued for money.
“It is the University that has touted over and over and over again that there would be no tax dollars involved in this project, but we knew that was not true,” Nellie Bailey, a CPC member and president of the Harlem Tenants Council, said after the rally.
The protesters bemoaned their lack of input in and knowledge about the details of Columbia’s stimulus funding requests, casting such funding for the Manhattanville project as a “blank check” for the University. They called on administrators to be more transparent about their communications with the government, as attendees signed mock blank checks which will be delivered to the administration on Tuesday.
When asked about seeking a blank check, Bollinger said, “Well, I have no idea what that means.”
“Columbia shouldn’t be entitled to getting stimulus funding without a transparent process,” SCEG member Andrew Lyubarsky, CC ’09, said. “If Columbia were to get stimulus funding without anyone in the public knowing the content of their application, that would be a form of a blank check, no matter what amount of money they would be receiving.”
“This is a non-profit educational research institution and we do what we do because there is a public benefit,” Bollinger said, adding, “We have an assignment in this society, and it’s not to make a profit ... it’s just that’s not what we do. And so to be criticized for being selfish, it just doesn’t apply.”
SCEG also maintains that such funding would be inappropriate because of the use of eminent domain—the process by which the state can seize private property for the “public good,” a designation granted to Columbia’s campus development—and the possibility of residential and commercial displacement from the expansion.
“For this very wealthy university to have embarked on a project like this ... it should be financed exclusively with its own money and not that of taxpayers,” Bailey said. “Thousands of tenants throughout the greater community of Harlem will be displaced, and we have to pay for our own displacement—that’s just a bit much.”
But Columbia officials maintain that the expansion will benefit the community economically, making the project consistent with the purpose of the stimulus package.
“At a moment when New Yorkers need new jobs, this is a project that fulfills the multiple goals of the nation’s economic agenda: creating immediate construction employment, investing in long-term jobs with good benefits, and supporting research and discoveries that are important to our City and State’s economic future,” University spokesperson Robert Hornsby wrote in an e-mail.
The event, which began at noon at the Sundial, was the latest in a series of efforts SCEG has led this year surrounding aspects of the expansion. In February, the group worked with Ramon Diaz—the owner of Floridita, a Cuban restaurant on Broadway and 125th Street—to organize a rally at Floridita in support of Diaz’s efforts to maintain the restaurant in its present location within Columbia’s 17-acre expansion zone.
In 2007, SCEG was one of the primary organizers of a student hunger strike, one of the demands of which was a significant modification to the Manhattanville plan.
“It’s an issue of feeling like the school that I’m a part of has the integrity that it claims to have,” Tom Reed, CC ’11 and a SCEG member, said. “We need to make sure that we don’t just talk about how we’re a community about truth and fairness and virtue, and then not really follow through. It’s important for us as students to watch over that and make other students aware, and try to be that oversight group.”
The protest was “a way to get a lot of people who wouldn’t otherwise necessarily get involved with the issue ... to show the administration that they care,” Margo Kulkarni, SEAS ’10 and a SCEG member, said. “It gives people something concrete that they can work on, which I think has been a theme in SCEG this year.”
Still, “It would have been good to have a better steady turnout,” she added, attributing the comparatively small turnout partly to the overcast weather. “A lot of people came but kind of passed through.”
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