At the start of the spring 2021 semester, students at Columbia University said enough is enough. With the highest tuition in the country, the university is contributing, in no small part, to the ballooning $1.7tn student debt crisis which now affects more than 45 million Americans and leaves graduates, on average, entering the world $30,000 in the red.
Coming across the strike you may have been led to believe that some students at Columbia, who have been engaged in distanced learning since mid-March, feel they are being overcharged for virtual classes and decided to do something about it. That would be a glaring oversight.
The Columbia University-Barnard College chapter of Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA) have taken it upon themselves to mobilize around a coalition of student groups and campus demands that, while centered around a 10% reduction in tuition and a 10% increase in financial aid, is pressuring the school’s administration to address a list of grievances around: the treatment of Black students on campus; the university’s relationship with the New York police department; the treatment of Columbia union workers; the sprawling real estate investments that have been a driving force behind gentrification in West Harlem; and who has a say in how university resources are distributed.
The last point takes aim at the administration’s refusal to respect a 2019 student council referendum in support of BDS and, until recently, a refusal to withhold investments in fossil fuel companies despite overwhelming student support to divest. (The Board of Trustees said it reserves the right to make exceptions for “certain oil and gas companies” that “develop credible plans” to transition their businesses to net zero emissions by 2050.)
Student organizers claim that more than 1,100 students are now actively refusing to pay tuition until their demands are met. YDSA’s Twitter account also claims the administration has retaliated against striking students by charging them over $157,000 in late fees.
In initiating their strike, Columbia is exercising a collective muscle in the student body politic that some may have thought atrophied altogether.
This is a generation coming of age on the heels of two once-in-a-lifetime financial crises, the rise of Donald Trump, a global pandemic and the mainstreaming of democratic socialism. They face a future marred by an uncertain job market and the existential threat of climate crisis.
Rather than waiting around for the adults in the room to relieve us of our student debt burden – something the Biden administration can do with the stroke of a pen – Columbia-Barnard YDSA is charting a course of action that equips students to take matters into their own hands.
Organizers are aiming to spark a nationwide wave of student strikes and say they have been in contact with seven universities that plan on striking next fall. Even so, there is no guarantee that this will solve the problem of tuition inflation, which has rising at over twice the rate of inflation for some 40 years now.
But for that to make a difference, you would have to be naive enough to believe that the strike is limited to the scope of tuition and debt or even higher education, for that matter.
Columbia-Barnard YDSA is carrying out the mandate, passed down by Bernie Sanders, to fight for someone they don’t know. With this action, they are fighting for all students. And they’re fighting for grad workers pitched in a battle for a fair labor contract, for members of the surrounding West Harlem community, for the Palestinian people and for the future of the planet.
Since initiating their plans late last year, organizers with YDSA say they have seen a spike in interest and a wave of new members joining the chapter.
Columbia may be a beginning, but YDSA’s national organization says it’s reaching out to unions across the country in an effort to form a Labor for Student Debt coalition that will have the power to pressure a Biden administration to cancel student debt through executive order. Back on campus, YDSA has been working together with the Graduate Workers of Columbia-United Auto Workers Local 2110 (GWC-UAW) to win a fair contract by the 25 February deadline, lest the administration face a strike from grad workers, too.
In doing this work, YDSA has been intentionally conveying to students that their agency in society lies not just in the power they have as students, but as workers-in-training for a labor force they hope to see self-governed by committed, lifelong socialists.
Regardless of whether Columbia’s administration decides to tackle tuition or not, the students on tuition strike fight for all of us. The Biden administration would be wise to heed the warning because it doesn’t take a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing.
Indigo Olivier is a 2020-2021 Leonard C Goodman investigative reporting fellow at In These Times magazine
