Editorial Board

Throughout Spectator’s history, our journalism and business sections have failed to represent and reflect the experiences of students of color both in our coverage and in our organization. As the new leaders of this paper, we have all been complicit in or responsible for perpetuating these failures.

Spectator’s mission is to positively impact our community, and with that comes a responsibility to hold institutions of power accountable. We, the new editorial board, want to wield our collective voice in a way that creates this accountability. We want to discuss the issues we face within our organization, our university, and beyond.

As the weather begins to warm, students flocking to bask on the sunny steps should recall that this time last year, the quad was filled with the rallying cries of many of Columbia's graduate students. This year, however, the silence is deafening. The decision by Graduate Student Employees United not to strike is troubling and indicates that the Columbia administration's anti-union tactics are indeed working.

The ongoing debate over graduate student unionization is not about higher wages, or better benefits, or whether or not graduate students can simultaneously be students and employees. What the debate is really about is 1,900 teaching and research assistants gaining a voice in a university that has systematically silenced them for years.

Administrators must now sit down with grad students.

Despite the liberal orthodoxy that dominates campus life, unions have never come easily to Columbia. Without fail, every time a union has tried to establish itself here, the administration —every administration —has opposed them. Now Graduate Student Employees United, preparing to vote on a weeklong strike, are facing this same opposition. Although a one-week strike won't win them union recognition, it will make a valuable statement, and it deserves undergraduate support.

The coveted East Campus suite, in all its glory.

The polls for Columbia College Student Council and Engineering Student Council are now open until Wednesday, April 11 at 5:00 p.m.