Photo: Luigi Morris/Left Voice
It’s been an intense and infuriating couple of weeks at Columbia University. Students expelled. Visas revoked. $400 million in funding held hostage by the federal government. An escalation, when Mahmoud Khalil was told his green card was suspended before being arrested by government agents from the lobby of his apartment building in the middle of the night. And most recently, Thursday night, the announcement that 22 students and recent graduates had been suspended, expelled, or had their diplomas revoked. One of the expelled students is Grant Miner, the president of the Student Workers of Columbia (SWC, UAW 2710), which was scheduled to begin bargaining for its second contract Friday afternoon. Khalil, Miner, and the others are all being targeted by the federal government for their involvement in pro-Palestine protests at Columbia over the last year and a half.
Student Workers of Columbia went on strike twice to win their first contract in 2021. As a graduate student worker at the City University of New York (CUNY) myself, my union comrades and I paid close attention to their struggle, knowing how significant their contract would be not only for them, and not only for other graduate student workers in New York City, but for the graduate student labor movement as a whole. It was the NLRB’s 2016 Columbia decision that re-legalized student worker unions at private universities. What they won would have a domino effect — and it did, both in what they won and in how they won it.
As a faculty member at City College of New York (CCNY), the building I work in is only 20 blocks north of Columbia’s main campus in the Morningside Heights neighborhood, and even closer to its newer buildings in Manhattanville. Eleven months ago, on April 30, the NYPD invaded our campuses and demolished our Gaza Solidarity Encampments one right after the other. Students and workers from Columbia and CUNY spent the night in jail together. We are very different schools, with very different working and learning conditions, but we are neighbors, and the same police operation brutalized both of our communities.
Over the last eleven months, since the start of the encampments, their university, my university, and the NYPD have kept us apart, through security checkpoints and fencing and police barricades. In late February, when CCNY students protested Governor Hochul’s order for Hunter College to take down a job ad for faculty specializing in Palestinian Studies, they closed the gates, forcing allies from other CUNY schools to stand on the other side of the fence; when students walked north from the Barnard College protest that same day to join us, the police set up barricades to keep them even further away. Our enemies know the power of a mass, unified, coordinated movement, and they’ll work hard to prevent one from forming.
So when news of the Columbia expulsions began circulating through NYC labor group chats Thursday night, I was filled with anger on behalf of my colleagues in SWC, and I was filled with rage that — because Columbia’s main campus continues to be closed to anyone without a university ID — I would not be able to be with them in solidarity.
But then I was wrong. SWC announced a call for an emergency rally for Friday, with the slogan “ICE abducted our coworker. Columbia fired our president,” in front of a building outside of the main campus, where their bargaining session was scheduled to take place — a building without gates. We could go.
One thing that’s wonderful about going to a union rally is once you’re in the general area, you don’t need Google Maps — you navigate the rest of the way using your ears. By the time I arrived, SWC was chanting, “What do we want? Our president back! When do we want it? Now!” In addition to me and my colleagues from CUNY, there were labor allies from NYU (the graduate workers union, the non-tenure track faculty union, and the staff union), the Association of Legal Aid Attorneys, at least one Alamo Drafthouse worker (currently on strike), The New School, at least one person from the University of Massachusetts – Boston who came down for the day, and members of the Columbia AAUP chapter and the Columbia contingent faculty union.
The plan had been for the SWC members attending bargaining inside the building to join the rally after the session, but the university cancelled the session two hours before it was scheduled to start. Among the first demands the union intended to pass across the table? For all expelled workers to be reinstated, and for greater protections against ICE for international students.
Chants along these lines included, “You took Mahmoud, now hear us say, ‘No more raids, no ICE, no way!’” and “They took Mahmoud, they broke the law, bring him back or face us all!”
One bargaining team member, an undergraduate student worker who had previously had SWC President Grant Miner as a TA, spoke about Miner’s character and dedication as an organizer before reading a statement on his behalf, since he had been expelled while on a research trip and was currently midflight on his way home to New York.
Other speakers connected the attacks: the expulsions and Khalil’s arrest are attacks on the movement for Palestine, and on the labor movement, and on immigrants rights, and on free speech, and on higher education, and many of the cuts to Columbia are going to medical and scientific research, which is tied to climate change and the attacks on trans rights too. It’s becoming harder and harder to deny these connections, as the government uses the withheld funding as a cudgel to force the university to comply with its far-right demands. The government is connecting the dots for us.
In addition to SWC members, many workers from other NYC higher education labor unions spoke out to extend solidarity and draw even more connections between the attacks at Columbia and the issues facing students and workers at other schools.
Around two hours into the rally, participants from another action organized by the Columbia Palestinian Solidarity Coalition, Within Our Lifetime, and other Muslim community groups marched their way up from Columbia’s main campus and joined the SWC rally, swelling the numbers considerably. In this period of the movement characterized by many smaller rallies led by different groups rather than larger coalitions joining together to combine their forces, it was encouraging that these two protests joined in the end, even though they started out separately.
At the bargaining table, SWC already had their work cut out for them, facing down one of the wealthiest universities in the nation in a time of intense political scrutiny from all angles. Now, they must also contend with fighting for the reinstatement of their coworkers and protecting the immigrant and international student workers among their ranks while ICE and other Department of Homeland Security personnel are reportedly roaming around Columbia properties. Mahmoud Khalil’s arrest opened a new chapter in the ongoing repression, and how the unions, the organizations engaged in the movement for Palestine, and other groups respond will be highly consequential. At the SWC rally, we chanted, “You take one of us on, you take all of us on!” And that’s the attitude that all of us must bring to the defense of students and workers at Columbia right now, with other unions going beyond statements of support and putting in the time to turn out their members in ever greater numbers in solidarity with our higher education colleagues. UAW International has finally released statements about the cuts to higher education and the arrest of Mamhoud Khalil, but it is also simultaneously courting favor with the Trump administration by praising its tariffs and promising to “find common ground” and “work with Trump.” Academic labor unions and our allies in other sectors must organize at the level of the rank and file to build mass labor actions in defense of our colleagues at Columbia — both on principle and because if we don’t put up a fight, they’ll come for us next.
On Saturday, I will march alongside my coworkers and students at the previously scheduled “Stop the Cuts” rally; but while this rally was organized well before the immigration arrests and expulsions, in reality these are two actions in the same war against the far right, and we must always name those connections in order to draw all of these sectors together in a united front to fight Trump and the rest of the far right with many fingers, one fist.