The Tuition Strike: Five Demands are Not Enough. We Need Student Action to Democratize Columbia

Low Plaza, the historic cite of student protests to the present day. Photo by Magnus Manske. 

Ever since the tuition strike has garnered campus-wide and national attention, many students have questioned the coherence of our demands. The authors of “Response to the Tuition Strike: Five Demands is Too Many” have gone so far as to claim they are “contradictory, misleading, or performative.” Such statements lack an awareness of the history of these demands, which represent years-long efforts by students to transform Columbia into a more democratic, transparent, and equitable university for all community members in Morningside Heights and Harlem. 

Despite arguing that “several” of our demands are problematic, the authors fail to mention four out of five of them. The five major demands are to 1) address the economic burden of tuition on students, 2) fulfill the University’s responsibilities to the people of West Harlem, 3) defund Public Safety and invest in community safety solutions, 4) commit to transparency about university investments and respect democratic votes of the student body, and 5) bargain in good faith with unions on campus. All of these demands aim to democratize the University by holding it accountable to the needs of its students and community members. For years, students have conducted sit-ins and protests to advocate for permanent fossil fuel divestment; this March, thousands of students asked for tuition remission; this April, 96 percent of GWC-UAW members voted to strike due to bad faith bargaining by Columbia; this August, over one hundred organizations backed Mobilized African Diaspora in their calls for respecting commitments to Harlem; and this September, Columbia College students voted in favor of BDS. Yet, the University has failed to take substantial action in response to every single one of these movements. All demands are intrinsically connected—when presented together, they collectively represent a movement to restore the power that students should hold at Columbia.

Choosing to include some demands and not others would undermine the tuition strike’s overarching goal to democratize the University. The authors of the article pay special attention to Section 4(b), arguing that our demand letter is deceptive in stating that the Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) advocates for divestment from companies involved with human rights violations. But where were we deceptive? That is exactly what CUAD is calling for—divesting from companies involved with Israeli human rights abuses, which violate international law. 

Additionally, as evident from the outcome of the BDS referendum in September, more than half of voting students at Columbia College and SEAS support divestment from the Israel-Palestine conflict. The decision of YDSA and early signatories of the tuition strike to add this demand to the strike letter was not a political one. Rather, it was an acknowledgement of administrators’ continuous disregard of student referendums. The tuition strike puts weight behind students’ calls for reform and conveys that we will not remain complacent in the face of empty or absent responses. Support for the tuition strike should not—indeed, must not—be based upon political ideology. It must be based upon the belief that universities should function as democracies and student decisions should hold meaning. Students are striking precisely because these votes have lost “practical bearing” in the eyes of President Bollinger. 

YDSA did not force a “preposterous binary” of obedience or disobedience to a political agenda by grouping these demands together, as the authors of the critical article have alleged. In fact, even the adoption of the demands was democratic: demands were proposed by coalition and YDSA members and then voted upon by early tuition strike signatories for inclusion in the demand letter. Any pressure students feel to sign the pledge is the fault of Columbia administrators for ignoring community concerns and pushing activists to strike as a last resort. Each demand represents a monumental failure of the University to respond to the needs of students, staff, and faculty. Columbia’s administration has plugged its ears to community outcry for too long. Our tuition strike will make it so that they have no choice but to listen to the long-held demands of the Columbia community.

The Columbia College Student Council must acknowledge this truth when deciding whether or not to support the strike. As a democratic body representing all students in Columbia College, it would undoubtedly contradict council members’ duties as public representatives to vote on these demands based on personal opinion or ideology. In considering whether to support the strike, representatives must ask themselves: do the majority of my constituents support these reforms? For each demand, based on years of student activism, meetings, movements, and referendums, the answer is yes. 

These demands are neither contradictory, misleading, or performative. They are all necessary for bringing about a university that prioritizes the requests of the student body rather than the fiscal growth of its endowment. This strike is about more than skyrocketing tuition prices. Students are striking to transform Columbia into the institution that it claims to be—a leader in higher education, not an expansionary real estate mogul. Regardless of whether students agree with every demand, we hope that all students will stand with us to fight for a democratic, community-minded university. With the goals of this strike in mind, we believe that the demands we have presented to the University thus far are simply not enough to bring about the change that we desire. Rather, we require the collective action of the entire student body to transform the University into a more equitable institution for all. 

 This article was written by Taylor Walker and Leena Yumeen on behalf of the Columbia-Barnard Young Democratic Socialists of America. 

Taylor Walker is a second-year master’s student in the Clinical Psychology program at Teachers College. He also serves as a student senator in the Teachers College Student Senate and is part of the organizing committee for the Columbia-Barnard Young Democratic Socialists of America.

Leena Yumeen is a staff writer at CPR and a sophomore in Columbia College studying Political Science. She is also a member of the organizing committee for the Columbia-Barnard Young Democratic Socialists of America.