Graduate students working at New York City’s two biggest private universities are demanding benefits like increased wages and neutral arbitration for harassment claims, with thousands of Columbia University students participating in an ongoing strike and a potential strike looming at NYU.
An estimated 3,000 students with the Graduate Workers of Columbia Union went on strike March 15th after two years of failed negotiating with the university over demands for a $4,000 increase to yearly stipends and summer funding over the next three years, and hourly and salary increases to meet living wage standards, as well as better healthcare funding.
The union is also asking the university to commit to neutral and third-party arbitration in cases of sexual harassment claims and other grievances. The union said the university has agreed to some concessions like doubling childcare subsidies from $2,000 to $4,000 but will not agree to the other demands, leading to the strike.
"We are committed to continuing to work toward a full and fair contract and remain confident of that outcome, notwithstanding this unnecessary and unfortunate work stoppage," a spokesperson for Columbia said in a statement Saturday. "Our top priorities now are supporting our undergraduates’ completion of their coursework, ensuring on-time graduation, and facing the ongoing challenges for the University posed by the pandemic."
While the strikers say concrete wage and benefits increases are necessary, Columbia students and a faculty member said the university’s denial of neutral arbitration is a more fundamental problem that undermines students in harassment and discrimination claims.
“The school refuses to provide neutral arbitration for instances of sexual harassment and discrimination, and also for power-based discrimination and harassment -- so more like bullying by advisors,” said Henry Towbin, a PhD student in volcanology at Columbia’s Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences who is participating in the strike. “Their argument here is that, since we're students, we're not entitled to the same protections that other workers at Columbia receive.”
Instead of arbitration, the university administration has this week offered to expand the ways graduate students can appeal the school's decisions in discrimination and harassment cases with hearings by a third-party panel staffed by members appointed by Columbia, with input from the union on who sits on the panel.
Still, Towbin said he believes the university justifies the lack of third-party arbitration because administrators don’t “want an antagonistic relationship between the faculty and the students.”
“This school has nominally protective systems for harassment, (but) they're very often trying to protect the university, sort of explicitly or implicitly, from bad press, and large financial settlements,” Towbin said.
One professor supporting the strike said the graduate students are underpaid “given the disproportionate amount of teaching that they do, and given that they're doing it in New York City, where the cost of living constantly goes up,” said Frank Guridy, an Associate Professor of History and African American Studies at Columbia.
Guridy added that he also supported the students advocating for a neutral process for handling claims of harassment. The university’s current policies “don't really prevent the harassment from happening, and, and they also often put the complainant in a position of being very far more isolated and feeling very disempowered when things happen,” he said. “We need to have a better policy with respect to harassment and bullying. Unfortunately, as with other institutions in our society, academia is having its own reckoning around these questions and we need to have a different institutional arrangement that will allow us to combat this problem in ways that we haven’t been able to do so far.”
The union pointed to some recent cases of harassment or violations of university policy that show how Columbia’s current policies have failed, including former professor Thomas Jessell who was allegedly involved romantically with a lab member under his supervision, a medical student who claimed he was sexually harassed by a superior who then fired him, and a student who said she waited months for the university to respond to her reports of being raped inside her dorm room.
“Without a contract, graduate workers are exposed to Columbia’s extremely uneven and unfair approaches to handling discrimination and harassment cases, and lack the opportunity for representation if Columbia behaves in a discriminatory way,” the union said.
NYU’s Graduate Student Organizing Committee is also calling for increased wages and annual 3.5% raises, better healthcare and family benefits, as well as the university severing ties with NYPD. After nine months of negotiating with NYU, the union put a possible strike authorization to their membership for a vote starting on March 23rd and ending March 29th. If at least two-thirds of the members vote in favor, the union’s organizing committee will be able to call a strike at their discretion, according to NYU's Washington Square News student paper.
NYU spokesman John Beckman called the strike vote "an unfortunate development" and said the union's "enormous" demands would ultimately cost the university $500 million.
"NYU has been bargaining seriously and in good faith," Beckman said in an emailed statement. "We have proposed six years of compensation increases, proposed expanded subsidies for health care premiums, proposed doubling the child care subsidy fund, and proposed a service bonus of one week's pay for qualifying graduate employees to name just a few. And we are prepared to do more bargaining. However, the union has refused to budge off of a list of enormous demands -- including doubling hourly wages in the pandemic year, when most NYU employees received no increase at all."
This story has been updated with a statement from NYU.
