STRIKE AGAINST FEAR?
How Columbia Student Workers Responded
to Repression in Spring 2025

Gayle B.

1 July 2025

A few days after Mahmoud Khalil’s kidnapping by DHS agents, as fear and confusion swept across Columbia’s campus, a group of grad workers in my department organized a potluck gathering in a colleague’s student housing apartment a few blocks away from the Morningside gates. In our small social science department, many if not most graduate student workers are non-US citizens; several of us (including international worker colleagues) have been active in Palestine solidarity protests, and a number of individuals come from and do research in Palestine or other parts of the Middle East. Thus, the Trump administration’s targeting of international students—especially, but not exclusively, those active in the movement for Palestine—called for a particularly urgent response in our department work group.

Fortunately, we had built a strongly solidaristic culture over time, which helped immensely in this moment. The first thing we did at the potluck was to call a department colleague on a fellowship abroad who had just been doxed by Zionists, and would imminently be boarding an international flight back to the US. I held up my phone, Signal call on speaker, as a small group of us stood around in a circle. It was late for him, and his voice sounded weary and preoccupied, present but drifting. Like Khalil, he was already intimately familiar with forms of state terror and political exile, yet he expressed surprise at his sudden targeting and admitted to feeling isolated. We commiserated, made contingency plans for his upcoming travels, and said goodnight.

Over the following weeks, we held a series of meetings in our department, separately as grad workers and jointly with our Chair and faculty. We shared Know-Your-Rights resources, discussed individual vulnerabilities, and deliberated over possible collective action. We discussed a number of demands, such as a guarantee that the University would not disenroll students with revoked visas (as it did to our colleague in Urban Planning, Ranjani Srinivasan), and an end to the University’s arbitrary surveillance and discipline of student protesters (including our union president Grant Miner, who was expelled the day before our first scheduled bargaining session). However, non-citizen colleagues on TA appointments voiced intense concern about the possibility of withholding instructional labor, including a proposal by our union leadership for a ULP strike prior to the end of the spring semester. Amid such a rapidly changing institutional and legal landscape, it was extremely difficult to assess the risks of striking on an individual or collective level, and many international workers understandably imagined worst-case scenarios like termination, visa revocation, detention, and deportation. Additionally, and somewhat unexpectedly, we suspected that scabbing by faculty might be more pervasive than in previous grad worker actions. We learned that our Chair was particularly concerned about the possibility of cuts to the department budget from centralized University funding sources, amid the general fiscal uncertainty induced by the Trump administration’s federal funding freeze and the resulting loss of overhead income for the University from NIH and other federal research grants (mostly in STEM fields). To an unusual degree, our Chair and a number of faculty vehemently resisted even the most modest suggestions for putting coordinated pressure on University administrators, expressing fear that any sort of confrontational action could single out the department for backlash and retaliation.

Ultimately, after deliberating for weeks on the proposal for a spring 2025 ULP strike, we came to a consensus in our department work group that the most strategically sound path for collective action was to build toward a strike beginning sometime in the fall 2025 semester, after the June 30 expiration of our union’s contract and no-strike clause. At least a few individuals (myself included) expressed some disappointment that we were not ready to respond more immediately, decisively, and effectively to the University’s brazen cooperation with the Trump administration, especially given the urgency of the demands for international worker protections. I asked trusted comrades: had I too quickly sought to validate coworkers’ individual fears, unintentionally sidelining our capacity to act collectively? Yet we all agreed that reckless action could lead to serious retaliation and effectively derail the prospects for a strong fall strike, when our leverage would likely be greater, legal conditions might be clearer (if not more favorable), and we might achieve greater unity with faculty.

These conversations might have unfolded differently if we had been able to coordinate organically with other, similarly well-organized departments—including those with more structural leverage (such as departments with a high proportion of graduate instructors of record, very large course sizes, or securely-funded labs). In an ideal scenario, the activist layer of our union (Student Workers of Columbia UAW 2710) might have played such a coordinating role. In practice, however, the union’s activist core was a largely disorganized and disorganizing force during this critical period. The dominant activist bloc, including elected and informal leaders, facilitated a series of emergency general membership meetings to propose and discuss an immediate ULP strike, each of which were attended by hundreds of workers and ran between three and five hours long. These meetings featured much speculation about legal maneuvers and moralizing calls to action; when strategic concerns were raised at all, they were considered in abstract terms, detached from sober assessments of existing organizational infrastructure and worksite-level developments. These discussions paid little attention to the pressing issue of the federal funding cuts, an omission which might have reflected the high proportion of activists from humanities and social science departments (despite the fact that, as the conversations with my department Chair indicated, the federal funding issue would have significant downstream effects on non-STEM fields). Eventually, these mass meetings sputtered out, as the discussions went in circles and newly-activated workers lost interest.

At this point, a small group of comrades involved in the union’s Organizing Committee was able to cohere a wider subset of organizers around a plan to facilitate and report back on department meetings like those that my work group was holding. Organizers from around ten different departments participated in this process. While these departments constituted a fairly small minority of our unit, this degree of cross-departmental coordination (however limited and belated) was an unusual and promising development. Some of these organizers were less experienced in workplace struggle, and it became clear that relatively few department work groups were accustomed to genuinely participatory, democratic deliberation. Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, the report-backs indicated that this mass of workers tended toward caution, wary of immediate, high-risk strike action in a climate of intense fear and uncertainty. In all likelihood, workers were reluctant to act so boldly on a sense of collectivity that in most places remained nascent and untested. But many workers expressed enthusiasm for a fall strike, and a solid organizer core began to grow and mature.

At the time of writing, it is the summer and most of my department colleagues are dispersed for research and writing fellowships. Contract negotiations have stalled over the issue of open bargaining. I’ll be back on a teaching appointment in September, and I feel a knot in my stomach tighten little by little as the prospect of a fall strike looms closer; it seems that trusted comrades share this feeling of anxious anticipation, something between excitement and dread. Like so many others who have been in and around the campus movement for Palestine since fall 2023, I’ve experienced countless moments of struggle, both exhilarating and utterly mundane: eating dinner in the encampment with a student of mine who never spoke in class; barricading and retreating down Amsterdam as NYPD raided the Hind’s Hall occupation; discussing the grievance procedure and Weingarten rights with instructors facing retaliation for teaching about Palestine. In recent months, however, I’ve been struck by an eerie quiet around campus. Waves of arrests, suspensions, and expulsions have taken a toll, as student protests have gradually become small and infrequent. Security checkpoints have become a seemingly permanent feature of College Walk, a space where neighbors and visitors could once walk freely. Since March, a troubling number of international workers have distanced themselves from the union due to its visible support for Palestine, afraid of being singled out by immigration authorities. In some STEM departments affected by federal funding cuts, postdocs and lab technicians have been laid off, and graduate student workers have been arbitrarily pushed out of their programs. The Trump administration has targeted Columbia’s accreditation status and pushed the University administration to agree to a federal consent decree.

Such challenges will continue for the foreseeable future, along with further developments that we can only dimly anticipate. And yet, as we build toward a fall strike, we have a unique chance to fight Columbia in its mask-off era, carrying the struggle into our classrooms, labs, and grad lounges. Workers have discussed numerous potentially transformative demands, which go well beyond the purview of wages and benefits: blocking the University from disenrolling students with revoked visas, rolling back the recently-implemented arrest powers of Public Safety officers, guaranteeing bridge funding for workers affected by funding cuts, and asserting control over the content of our teaching and research. We have seen that left-wing leadership and insular activist formations can only take us so far. However, our 2021 ten-week strike has also taught us that a militant minority can win big with a base in strategic worksites (in 2021, this base was made up of graduate instructors of record in language departments and other programs). If we stand a chance of striking to win in the coming months, a critical mass of workers will need to weigh the dangers of action and inaction in equal measure, and turn to each other for strength in the face of unprecedented and unforeseeable events.