The Tuition Strike Is Over—What Is To Be Done?

This past month, the tuition strike concluded, and the Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA) have begun looking towards next steps we can take to advance the movement’s five demands. 

This decision was the result of a vote held on April 3rd, in which participants indicated whether they can personally commit to striking through the coming weeks and how many students they would be comfortable striking alongside. We have held similar votes leading up to each payment deadline and have been met with brave and enthusiastic responses from students prepared to remain on strike. Even now, most respondents voiced support for continuing, but, in the face of heightening risks imposed by the University, we could not reach the quorum strikers desired to continue the collective action. Because the University has imposed registration and graduation holds on those withholding tuition, strikers would now face deferred graduation or the loss of housing, healthcare, food plans, or international student visas. 

YDSA has always considered the tuition strike only one tactic within a long campaign to transform the University’s relationship with its students, workers, and surrounding community, and we will continue to fight for our demands. As we reflect on this semester’s organizing efforts, we invite strike participants, supporters, and coalition partners to contribute their thoughts on how we can strengthen the movement into the future.

 Looking back, we would like to note the victories we achieved by uniting students behind an interrelated set of struggles, many of which have existed at Columbia for years, to fight against the University’s profit-driven financial logic. Our democratically adopted demands connected the University’s unaffordable education, callousness toward workers, and extractive relationship with the communities of West Harlem to a common issue: Columbia relentlessly pursues financial growth and the wealth of high-level administrators over the needs of its own community.

We began this campaign last semester with an almost unprecedented tactic and no pre-existing organization. In the course of just a few months, we organized a movement involving over 4,400 students. More than a thousand of these went on to withhold tuition payments in support of our demands, many of them continuing to do so until the vote to end the strike in April. 

In the early stages of our campaign last December, our movement prompted a response from President Bollinger via email denying the possibility of institutional reform. While this sparked anger amongst our organizers and disillusionment amongst the student body, looking back we realize its tremendous significance. Not only did it show that our collective organizing sparked fear amongst administrators, but it also displayed a principle that our movement has kept close to its heart: the statements of our University’s leaders seldom align with the true power they hold to implement institutional change. 

Indeed, in the following month, we won two concessions from the University. Merely two weeks after President Bollinger’s response, the administration accepted the CARES Act aid that it had previously rejected and granted emergency funding to students in Columbia College and Columbia Engineering. Then, on January 22nd, the day that our strike began at all schools across Columbia except Teacher’s College and Barnard, the University announced its intention to divest all direct holdings in the fossil fuel industry. Both of these victories proved our ability to pressure the Columbia administration through collective action. 

Following these concessions, the University maintained silence while the tuition strike continued for months. Days after news broke of the strike’s end, however, President Bollinger addressed an email to the entire student body promising action on our demand for increased financial aid. The timing suggests that the administration was attempting to respond to the movement’s demands without encouraging participation in the tuition strike.

In this email sent four days after the strike concluded, Bollinger acknowledged that “there is more to do” in terms of the University’s commitment to financial aid. To address existing student financial needs, he announced an effort to raise $1.4 billion by 2025 as a supplement to existing forms of financial assistance across all 16 schools. Considering the University dedicated around $340 million in grants last year, this fund has the potential to significantly improve tuition affordability.

Yet, if Bollinger’s promises to support students in need are to hold true, the funding must go towards financial aid and low-income students, rather than inaccessible fellowships. Evidence from Columbia's prior distribution of funding attests to the contrary, raising concerns that tuition for all programs across Columbia institutions will not remain affordable for low-income students. 

Moreover, the administration plans to source this fund via alumni and parent donations over four years. Administrators refuse to take expedient action in order to address the pressing needs of students struggling to pay tuition by cutting their own multi-million dollar salaries or pulling funds from an endowment allegedly maintained as a “permanent source of funding to support professorships, financial aid, research.” Columbia does not need charitable donations in order to make affordable education a reality; it merely needs to put its financial resources toward its own students rather than gentrifying real estate projects and executives’ wealth.

The remote conditions of this semester posed somewhat of a challenge to mobilizing students: our base was dispersed all over the world, and there was almost no possibility of in-person organizing or actions given COVID safety measures. In future semesters, we will be able to host more disruptive in-person actions like pickets and to organize a much larger number of students. We now have a more organized student body that is ready and able to take collective action on issues that affect us. And finally, we will be part of a nationwide movement—according to YDSA outreach, students at fifteen other universities have already confirmed that they are interested in or committed to organizing a tuition strike at their campus next semester.

The YDSA Organizing Committee has also learned several crucial lessons that will guide us to greater campaign success in the future. 

Despite our broad base of over 4,700 students, we know that there are thousands more students across all Columbia schools, including Teachers College and Barnard, that we did not reach in our campaign. With the backing of even more of the student body, we may have been able to hold larger rallies on campus, exert more financial pressure upon the university by withholding a larger sum of tuition, and make more direct calls to administrators to concede to our demands. Additionally, we know that it is not just students impacted by Columbia’s financial policy. Faculty have also suffered in the past year and received limited assistance from the university. 

Understanding this issue, in the future we hope to generate more solidarity within the University by connecting with more students and faculty across campus, hearing their concerns, and establishing a greater diversity of voices within our organization to accurately reflect and fight for the collective needs of various University constituencies. The administration has, thus far, actively attempted to divide us by stating that benefits to students must come at the expense of benefits to the faculty. Knowing that this is far from the truth, we will work towards engaging with students, faculty, and other workers on campus.

We have also learned that our organizing must strive to accomplish something even larger than winning these demands from the administration. We cannot depend on existing democratic institutions to adequately address our concerns. The establishment of the University Senate was a step in the right direction, but it does not go nearly far enough. The Senate fails to incorporate members of the local community in its processes and does not ultimately decide budgetary allocations. Student councils hold even less power to challenge the will of the Board of Trustees: as read in President Bollinger’s response to the BDS referendum, the administration will readily discard decisions that contradict its pre-existing aims. Therefore, our organizing cannot just aim to achieve these five demands. Rather, understanding that the future will require even greater reform to the campus beyond our immediate demands, we must aim to foster a culture of sustainable, strategic, and inclusive student activism. 

Leena Yumeen (CC ‘23) and Becca Roskill (SEAS ʼ22) are organizers with the Columbia-Barnard Young Democratic Socialists of America. YDSA organizers invite students, workers, and members of the local community to give your input as they strategize to continue fighting for the tuition strike’s demands. To get involved in YDSA at large, fill out their membership form or reach out to columbia.ydsa@gmail.com.