graduate-students

I was sitting in my bedroom in Recife, Brazil, when the video of Columbia’s campus announcing I had gotten in opened on my computer screen. As I jumped up and down and stared incredulously at the image of Alma Mater, I still couldn’t believe it. In just a few months, I would be in New York, meeting people from all over the world and living the college experience I had dreamed of for years.  

Students and faculty erupted in protest this weekend after Columbia announced that it would require graduate students to return to the United States to keep their teaching and research positions regardless of their citizenship status. Following widespread criticism, the University has since announced that it is exploring other options to the policy, though no update has been released.

Student Financial Services started issuing registration holds for graduate student tenants on July 21, which barred them from registering for academic classes in the fall term until they paid their outstanding rent.

International students who are pursuing degrees in the United States will have to leave the country or face deportation if their universities are operating entirely online, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement declared on Monday. At Columbia and Barnard, which are both reopening with a mix of in-person and online classes, international students must be enrolled in at least one in-person class to remain in the United States and keep their visas.

When Columbia switched to online instruction in March, Eduardo Vergara Torres’ computer died. His aging laptop could not handle the bombardment of videoconferencing, and he could not afford to fix or replace it. Normally, this would be a major inconvenience for a Spanish instructor and second-year Ph.D. candidate in Latin American and Iberian cultures—but in a world transformed by COVID-19, a broken computer spelled catastrophe.

Faced with unsustainably dire housing and work conditions, graduate workers at Columbia are now joining thousands of other workers who have responded to the economic and public health impacts of COVID-19 by going on strike. In over 20 departments, many primary instructors and teaching assistants are refusing to teach Zoom classes, grade assignments, and administer exams. Other graduate workers are participating in collective actions such as teach-ins, petitions, and socially-distanced protests, and several hundred workers have committed to not paying rent in University-owned apartments come June 1.

As the Columbia community continues to grapple with the consequences of the COVID-19 crisis, each new day seems to dawn with news of fear and tragedy. While many professors have done their best to adjust to these new circumstances, some students have said that their professors have chosen to ignore this and have increased their workload with the excuse that students will “slack off” otherwise, and there are others who are actively using the “F” grade as a threat against their students. The standardization of academic practices during this crisis is essential to providing an equitable educational experience to all. The Committee on Instruction of all four undergraduate schools each has the ability to adjust academic or instructional policies to further reflect our current needs.

Tamara Hache was supposed to spend her summer researching 19th-century literature in Argentina. The third-year Ph.D. candidate in Latin American and Iberian cultures had secured a research grant and planned on subletting her Columbia-owned apartment, hopping on a plane to her hometown of Buenos Aires, and working on her dissertation while spending time with friends and family.

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.

For Rendabel Radian, CC ’23, the month of Ramadan has long been a time to connect with family, self-reflect at a mosque, and join his community in prayer. In Indonesia, where he spent much of his life before coming to the United States, Ramadan was a large-scale family affair.