Karla Coté/SIPA USA via AP Images
Over a thousand students and faculty members of Columbia University rallied on December 6, 2021, to speak out against recent threats of retaliation against striking workers.
As a year of labor militancy comes to a close, the largest active strike in the United States is taking place in New York City, not on the factory floor, but outside the university. Nearly 3,000 graduate workers at Columbia University have been on the picket lines since early November, in a heated battle for increased wages and improved benefits that has seen the administration threaten to fire and replace striking workers. It’s the second time this year that Columbia grad workers have walked out.
The strike is the latest development in a multi-year struggle for a first contract that dates back to 2016, when graduate students secured a favorable ruling from the National Labor Relations Board that affirmed them as employees with the right to unionize. In particular, Columbia student workers are asking for a wage floor of $45,000 annually for first-year doctoral students and a minimum wage of $26 for hourly workers, as well as third-party arbitration for harassment complaints and improved medical and dental benefits. Right now, grad student workers have annual wages as low as $29,000 for student workers at the School of Social Work.
Those negotiations come in the context of a banner year for Columbia’s finances. The university’s endowment reported a 32.3 percent return in the fiscal year that ended in 2021. The holdings soared from $11.26 billion in 2020 to $14.35 billion in 2021. Columbia’s endowment ranks fifth-highest among Ivy League institutions, trailing Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Penn. That prodigious reserve makes a mockery of any talk about the university being too cash-strapped to offer its graduate workers a decent wage.
But Columbia isn’t the only institution to convert the global misery of pandemic into record-shattering financial returns. Indeed, the endowment spike required no financial wizardry on the part of Columbia or any other university, other than owning securities at a time when asset prices zoomed. Every single Ivy League institution returned 32 percent or better in the most recent fiscal year. Brown’s endowment grew by a mind-boggling 51.5 percent to lead the pack; Yale, Penn, and Princeton all grew 40-odd percent. For Princeton, that growth put its holdings at $37.7 billion. Harvard, meanwhile, a laggard of the bunch, returned 33 percent, good for more than $11 billion, its endowment now summing up to $53.2 billion.
Every single Ivy League institution endowment returned 32 percent or better in the most recent fiscal year.
Few institutions have exposed the absurdity of our COVID-era inequality more aggressively than the country’s elite private university systems, which, not unlike the country’s cabal of centibillionaires, have entered a runaway-train phase of capital accumulation. There’s simply nothing that these institutions can do to meaningfully spend down that total, without investing in assets that appreciate in value (aside from, of course, making tuition free, paying workers well, massively expanding enrollment, and submitting themselves to heavy taxation, all of which seems to be off the table).
All that has happened while public universities have seen their funding slashed. Despite receiving some money from the CARES Act, the City University of New York, with campuses just a few blocks from Columbia’s gates, continues to struggle with deep, COVID-induced cutbacks. Last year, nearly 3,000 adjuncts were laid off, with course offerings curtailed and class sizes expanded. As governor, Andrew Cuomo withheld approximately 20 percent of state funding to CUNY’s $2 billion budget, in response to the pandemic. CUNY got a $20 million cut in the same fiscal year that Columbia made 33 percent on its endowment. Those decisions were made in lockstep with Cuomo advisor Robert Mujica, whom now-Gov. Kathy Hochul has chosen to keep on. Meanwhile, as of 2018, New York state was providing more state scholarship funds to private colleges than any other state in the country.
What’s more, Columbia, as an institution of the public good, is largely exempt from paying property taxes. It so happens that Columbia, too, is the second-biggest property owner in New York City. In a similarly hot property market, the university’s property holdings have surged in value, the benefit of which has returned nothing to the city. Beyond the bouquet of tax breaks and subsidies that places like Columbia enjoy, the federal government actively contributes over $200 billion a year to private, nonprofit universities.
And that’s not even the only way Columbia has used the coronavirus to strike it rich. With one of the larger hospital systems in the country, the university has also been a beneficiary of a federal aid program that has yielded record profits for all involved in health care, including and especially hospitals. Despite the cancellation of remunerative elective surgeries, almost no major hospital system saw profits fall, especially in urban areas. The Columbia University Irving Medical Center was the fifth-largest recipient of overall funding from the National Institutes of Health in the entire country. Meanwhile, the minimum hourly wage at Columbia remains just $15 an hour, graduate students haven’t nailed down a contract in five years, and the university is openly considering scab hiring.
Few institutions have exposed the absurdity of our COVID-era inequality more aggressively than the country’s elite private university systems.
Columbia estimates the union’s demands will exceed $100 million over the next three years; union members, according to The New York Times, estimate an outlay closer to $79 million. Of course, for an institution pulling down $3 billion a year just in endowment gains (not including tuition and any other revenues) and paying almost no taxes, it’s hard to feel particularly sympathetic about those numbers, no matter which estimate is more realistic.
This is happening at a college with just a little over one-quarter the endowment of Harvard’s. Consider for a moment what $53.2 billion could mean. The United States, with its 330 million people, spends roughly $700 billion a year on its entire K-12 education, summing together all federal, state, and local funding that’s contributed to educating an entire nation of 48.1 million school-age children. Harvard, with more than 7 percent of that money just parked in its investments account, succeeds in educating just 5,200 undergraduate students, who by the way are also expected to contribute $54,000 a year in tuition on their own (the university does have a generous financial aid program that does not require students to take out loans). Even in a world where neoliberal thinking predominates, that’s a profoundly unjustifiable mode of resource allocation.
Incidentally, Harvard dealt with a graduate student strike of its own this year, which resulted in a three-day strike in late October but culminated with a tentative agreement. Those students won a 5 percent raise, “75 percent preventative dental care coverage, pay parity for School of Public Health students, and legal funding that student workers going through the University’s Title IX process can use,” according to The Harvard Crimson.
After strikers at Columbia set up a picket line last Wednesday, the Provost’s Office sent out an email alleging that there were “multiple instances of physical harassment” and “several incurred injuries.” My email to the university, asking for some proof of that claim and whether or not they stood by it, never got a response. But in the time I was at the picketing event, I saw nothing remotely suggestive of street violence, certainly not by New York City standards.
Whether or not that contract is agreed upon, the financial reality of the country’s Ivy League universities and the legitimacy crisis in private education will not go away anytime soon. At a moment when public education remains imperiled by a pandemic that won’t end, it’s a deeply irresponsible use of resources to have what are effectively tax-advantaged hedge funds gobbling up public funding and state, local, and federal subsidies while educating just a couple thousand students a year. A better-paid graduate student workforce is only the first step toward a saner system.
