Becca Roskill

Columbia students are organizing the largest tuition strike in U.S. history. In the past two weeks alone, over 3,000 students have joined the effort, and the number of committed strikers continues to grow rapidly. But it’s not just the sheer scale of the tuition strike that makes it so unprecedented—it’s also the nature of the demands themselves.

The massive wave of protests this past summer following the murder of George Floyd and other victims of police brutality—the largest movement in U.S. history—has renewed discussions on the role of police and prisons in our society and the interconnections between incarceration, policing, and systemic racism. In light of this movement, the demand to defund and abolish the police and policing entities has become more widely-felt than ever before, whether that involves reimagining Columbia’s Public Safety or dismantling police departments nationwide. But it has also been met with a litany of objections that above all, raises the question: “How will we deal with crime in a society without police?”

You have probably wondered what would happen if you were to contract COVID-19 tomorrow. What kind of care would you require, and would you receive it? And—a question causing as much stress as the illness itself for many—would you be able to pay for it? Unfortunately, if you’re a student who is relying on Columbia for health care this semester, you may be right to worry.

Last semester, the crisis unleashed by the pandemic underscored how Columbia not only serves the role of educational institution and employer for its students and workers but also functions as a landlord for over 10,000 Columbia affiliates—with all of the forms of power over students’ and employees’ lives that this status implies. Columbia frames its position within the New York real estate market as beneficial for the project of higher education, but in reality, it has subjected students and faculty to a particularly brutal form of landlordism while having extremely destructive consequences for the working-class communities that surround the University. Now more than ever, Columbia’s role as a landlord-University must be challenged through an interconnected fight for housing justice, one that would unite both student-tenants and community members behind a vision of accessible and affordable housing for students, workers, and longstanding residents alike.

Although long-winded emails from the administration have attempted to normalize the current learning environment, students are still standing in the rubble of March’s upheaval. As the public health crisis continues to unfold, instructors and students are expected to conduct and participate in classes on Zoom for another semester without blinking an eye. Some lack a safe and quiet place to study or teach, and many face difficulties with online learning. With unemployment rates higher than they were in the Great Depression, a worsening mental health crisis, and a raging pandemic, the challenges and stressors that developed in March have only intensified.

Earlier this semester, we wrote both an op-ed about why undergraduates should support the strike authorization vote and a petition in support of the graduate workers, which was signed by 250 students. Needless to say, a lot has changed since then. Although the strike authorization vote was a resounding success with 96 percent of the Graduate Workers of Columbia-United Auto Workers voting yes to authorize a strike in early March, the strike’s momentum has been severely disrupted by the escalation of a global pandemic that has thrown all of our lives into crisis.

With the launch of a strike authorization vote earlier this week, undergraduate students are witnessing the revival of the decades-long conversation around graduate workers’ rights at Columbia. However, for members of the Graduate Workers of Columbia-United Auto Workers bargaining committee, its allies, and the graduate worker population at large, this struggle has not stopped as the GWC-UAW has waited out the “no-strike” period mandated by the 2018 bargaining framework.