Biology and a Bialy: Student Protests at Columbia

By Alexis Vagianos | Wednesday, October 22, 1997

The West End is a nice bar on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The walls and table are a worn mahogany, and plumes of smoke roll easily across the expansive room. However, there have been a few complaints about the lack of seating lately — especially during class. Since the onset of a clerical workers strike Columbia students have been forced to attend classes off campus, and the administration is doing little, if anything, to quell the dispute.

After nearly six months of failed negotiations with the University and a Federal mediator, Columbia University's clerical workers union declared a strike on Thursday, October 16, claiming inadequate job security and pay. The union, Local 2110 of the United Auto Workers, represented about 800 secretaries, cashiers, financial aid advisers and other service workers.

Faculty members, led by history professor Eric Foner, have moved their classes off campus to avoid crossing the picket lines. Teachers have been scrambling to make arrangements for classroom space.

Already, classes have been held in pizza parlors, churches, bars, neighboring schools and, in one notable case, a Hungarian pastry shop, much to the ire of many students who have complained of everything from noise to the smell of rancid lox. The strike started just before the week of mid-terms, and most of the sympathetic professors have since postponed their mid-term exams.

The strike has prompted several students of the Columbia Student Solidarity Network to draft a 'Students for a Fair Contract.' The new organization has already set up its own web page, distributed fliers across campus, and held information sessions.

Adina Berrios, Logistics Chair of Students for a Fair Contract, said that many students are just beginning to learn about the strike and that many are confounded by the strike. Many students, she said, 'are not even aware of where the administration and the union disagree.' But she believes that the 'university is buckling down for a long fight,' and vowed to continue on.

Phil Bezanson, a freshman at Columbia College active in student government, voiced a popular concern: 'I think its ridiculous that students are being used as bargaining chips by the union, and particularly by the sympathetic professors. Once the professors moved the classes out of the classrooms, the unions knew that it was only a matter of time before the complaints of the students reached critical levels in volume and number that the administration had to do something to resolve the strike. So the unions can be comfortable just sitting out there, waiting for the students to get angry enough that the administration has to grant them [the clerical workers] whatever they want. The professors have created a situation where students, who don't necessarily agree with the ideological bent of the strike, are being unwittingly used as union pawns.'

The striking workers do not fill either tangible or decision making jobs. They are the extra clerks and middle-management bureaucrats who fill out the ranks of the administration of higher education institutions. One Columbia freshman, who wished to remain anonymous, said, 'Other than the change in location, I can't think of a single way in which life at the College has been affected. Columbia is carrying on just as it would without these 800 workers. I don't see what need they fill. The campus seems like it would work just as well without them.'

Last spring, this newspaper found that Dartmouth College was spending more money on salaries for administrators than on salaries for faculty, and that comparable figures existed throughout the Ivy League, Columbia included. The Review further determined that a vast share of administrative expenses were spent on compensating those administrators without definable positions - the same sort of positions filled by the striking clerical workers at Columbia.

'There are always lots of disputes on campus and this is just another one,' said one inconvenienced student.

Columbia has been a hotbed of campus protest since the late sixties, and this conflagration is only one of many in recent years.

In a 1996 interview with The Dartmouth Review, Columbia English Professor James Mirollo mused that 'I think the current college generation has been accused of being extraordinarily docile and interested only in careers. It's really a generation that isn't concerned with activism.

I suppose this creates a bit of a tradition at Columbia. Every spring, the students feel that they have to prove somehow that they're worthy of the legacy left by Columbia's protests in the late sixties.'

In the 1996 protests, over 200 students stormed a library after weeks of hunger-strikes and demands to Columbia for an ethnic studies department. The protest later died out when organizers could not agree on a coherent and shared set of demands.

Biology and a Bialy: Student Protests at Columbia

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