NEW YORK CITY, November 23 — For the second year, Columbia University (CU) students have been organizing a group, Student Worker Solidaity (SWS), to support workers’ struggles on campus, and they are now beginning to explore racist and anti-worker aspects of CU’s expansion into West Harlem. Last year the students militantly agitated for workers at Barnard (the affiliated women’s college) and for employees of the faculty dining room, who were being miserably exploited by their respective administrations. Partial victories were won in both cases.
This year began with a campaign to lower the temperature in the sweltering kitchen of one of the dining halls. The University tried to claim that ventilating the kitchen would force a raise in tuition and that they had ascertained that students were not concerned about the issue. But SWS demonstrated in the dining hall, collected about a thousand signatures on a petition and confronted the administration, together with the workers. Given SWS’s history of mobilizing hundreds of students, the administration quickly gave in and took measures to cool off the kitchen.
Now SWS is planning to fight the injustices wrought by Columbia’s building a new campus on 33 acres. That land was previously occupied by small businesses and low-income housing for mostly black and Latino residents, all of which have been leveled. The unemployment rate in Harlem is near 50 percent for young black men. The average income is about $30,000, making paying unsubsidized rents impossible. Although Columbia promised jobs and monetary benefits to the community in compensation for lost jobs and housing, none of this has happened. The whole surrounding area is also being affected by gentrification, with landlords raising rents and forcing out low-income tenants to offer housing to students, faculty and other wealthier tenants attracted by the lure of Columbia.
Last week about 40 students joined a walking tour of the expansion area, where they heard from local housing organizers and a restaurant owner who was forced to move at great expense. They learned about Columbia’s plan to build a biohazard lab right on 125 Street. One older student related how a group of students and community residents had occupied 125 Street for five days in May, 2011, to protest the expansion. On the weekend, three students came to a conference against racist gentrification involving Harlem and Brooklyn tenants (see page 5).
SWS has now built alliances with several other campus groups who came to an expanded meeting to plan how to fight CU’s attack on its Harlem neighbors. They will build upon the research and struggles of smaller groups of students over the last several years and are aiming toward developing struggles relevant to jobs and housing. Some students have also been supporting the City College (CCNY) students who are fighting militarization and fascism on their campus. They attended the court hearing of two CCNY students who were arrested for fighting the closing of the political student organizing center on campus.
Several of the more left-wing students have begun to raise a broader political context in the group. It is important that the mostly well-off CU students do not simply see themselves as fighters against inequality from a moral point of view, but recognize that they are future workers, who will likely have difficulty finding employment and housing themselves. Capitalism is the cause of unemployment and increasing racism, fascism and war. The declining position of the U.S. in relation to China and others is making those problems more acute. It will take unity between low- and high-paid workers, men and women, citizens and non-citizens to have a chance of overthrowing this system and building an egalitarian communist society.
As of now, most students are taking CHALLENGE and some are meeting to discuss the ideas of communism and revolution. With hard work, many more will come to see the need for revolutionary change over the coming period as we engage in struggle together.