NEW YORK—Protecting freedom of speech on campus, especially for Palestine solidarity activists and those opposed to Donald Trump’s ICE agents, is among the top issues for graduate student workers at Columbia University, who voted 1,129 to 105 on March 9 to authorize a strike.
The same day, contract faculty at New York University voted 657-37 to authorize a strike, too. The vote came two years after Auto Workers Local 7902 won the union recognition vote at NYU, where it represents 950 workers. That outcome means “we could soon see simultaneous strikes at NYC’s most-prestigious private universities,” tweeted Peter Sterne, New York state editor for BlueSky.
Money, or lack of it, is a problem for the grad student workers at Columbia. Free speech is just as big a problem, however.
“Columbia won’t budge on protecting student workers from an authoritarian takeover and a cost-of-living crisis. It’s time to turn up the pressure,” the workers, members of Auto Workers Local 2710, tweeted on BlueSky. They add university administrators “are foot-dragging” in contract talks.
The “authoritarian takeover” point refers to the fact that President Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents still patrol the Columbia campus. While ICE released one leader of the Palestine solidarity movement, Mahmoud Khalil, after holding him for a year, they grabbed another grad student worker, Ellie Aghayeva, on March 11. It was unclear if she’s part of the movement, too.
“It has been one year since that campaign of terror was launched against me,” Khalil told a rally on campus after he was freed. “It has one goal: To silence those of us who speak out.”
“Just two hours after Aghayeva’s detention was confirmed by Columbia, hundreds of community members gathered outside of the university’s gates to protest,” the local tweeted. Photos showed protesters with signs demanding “ICE off campus.”
ICE’s individual seizures of Aghaveya and Khalil are like its sweeps against many other workers, immigrant and non-immigrant, elsewhere in the U.S. The agents almost never have any legal warrants to carry out their seizures of people.
But at Columbia, ICE targeted supporters of freedom for oppressed Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza. And the GOP Trump regime followed the kidnapping of Khalil with demands Columbia’s bosses yielded to: Change its Middle Eastern curriculum, focus and leadership. Columbia did so to preserve hundreds of millions of dollars in federal research grants.
ICE also had dragooned pro-Palestinian grad student workers from Tufts University in Boston and from universities in the Los Angeles area, sending them to prisons and camps in the hostile South.
Some 22 pro-Palestinian Columbia activists are part of an overall group of 80 students, now serving one-to-three year terms from past protests. In that case, U.S. District Judge William Young, a Ronald Reagan appointee, ordered all the charges dropped against the 22. One union demand: No appeal of the ruling. The union says Columbia is complicit with ICE’s detentions.
The union’s other contract demands, also tweeted, include mandating Columbia divest itself of stock in corporations that profit from or cooperate with Israel’s invasion of and war on Gazans. That demand aims squarely at U.S.-based munitions makers, who supply warplanes, 2,000-lb. bombs, and other equipment to the Israeli military.
“We want a new contract that would safeguard our rights to protest and speech: Cops off campus, limits to surveillance, fairer disciplinary processes, and academic freedom. And we continue to push for CU’s divestment from entities complicit in violations of international law,” the local tweeted.
“The vote signals our intent to strike if Columbia doesn’t meet our” more economic demands, too. They include “a living wage and COLA (cost-of-living increase), protections for non-citizens, expanded healthcare, anti-discrimination/harassment protections, protections against unjust discipline/discharge, job security and union rights.”
At NYU, Brendan Hogan, a clinical professor of liberal studies for 18 years, told public radio station AmNY academic freedom is an important cause. Without it, he added, professors may feel they can’t pursue certain topics, teach what they believe is the truth, and may have to shift with political winds. The 950 contract professors, who are non-tenured, are about half of NYU’s faculty.
“What contract faculty want is just contractual guarantees that their academic freedom is as protected as our tenured track and tenured colleagues,” Hogan said. “It’s not only about protecting us, but protecting the mission of the university in a democratic society.”
Economically, “We felt the pinch of what is the greatest city in the world, as people say, with inflation and other things. So, our living standards were declining because our salaries weren’t keeping up with that.”
NYU’s students don’t like how the university is treating their professors, says third-year history student Anna Detke. In a video Local 7902 posted, Detke reported that “I pay more for my tuition and housing than most union members’ annual salaries.”
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