On March 13, news broke that Columbia University had sanctioned 22 students with expulsions, suspensions, or degree revocations for alleged involvement in pro-Palestine protests on campus last year. Nine students at Columbia University and Barnard College were expelled, the highest number of expulsions ever issued at once in the university’s history, according to groups on campus. Among the expelled students is Grant Miner, the president of United Auto Workers (UAW) Local 2710, which represents graduate students at Columbia. Miner’s expulsion and firing as a graduate student worker himself came one day before the start of contract negotiations with the university—negotiations which the university cancelled the following day.
“First you fired our union president. Now you cancel bargaining 2 hours before it was set to begin,” UAW Local 2710 wrote in a post on X. “Columbia admin, is this what you call bargaining in good faith?”
“This is an egregious attempt to break the Union and squash the movement against genocide in Palestine. We will not be intimidated on either front and will not stop fighting to get the contract we deserve,” said Miner in a statement.
The United Auto Workers, one of the largest unions in North America which represented nearly 400,000 workers, denounced Miner’s firing by the university as a “wave of crackdowns on free speech against students and workers who have spoken out and protested for peace and against the war on Gaza.”
“It is no accident that this comes days after the federal government froze Columbia’s funding, and threatened to pull funding from 60 other universities across the country. It is no accident that this firing has occurred the day before contract negotiations begin,” said the union in a statement. “It is no accident that the University is targeting a union leader whose local went on strike in the last round of bargaining. It is no accident that this is happening at Columbia University, where student workers won back the right to collective bargaining in 2016.”
The UAW is referencing a 2016 decision from the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) that came as a result of a petition by graduate workers at Columbia, which won the right to form unions for student workers at private universities.
This latest round of repression from the university comes the same day that Trump administration officials issued a widely-condemned letter to Columbia’s president Karina Armstrong, as well as the co-chairs of the Columbia Board of Trustees. The Trump administration last week terminated USD 400 million in federal funding to the university, and the letter made several demands of the administration in order to reverse this decision. These include disciplinary action against students for pro-Palestine protests on campus, specifically citing “Hamilton Hall and encampments.”
“Meaningful discipline means expulsion or multi-year suspension,” the letter writes. Other demands include placing “the Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies department under academic receivership for a minimum of five years” and holding certain student groups accountable “through formal investigations, disciplinary proceedings, and expulsion,” and implementing a mask ban.
Students at Columbia walked out of classes in protest of the new wave of university sanctions against students on March 14, shortly before student workers at Columbia, organized by UAW Local 2710, held a rally on campus. Columbia University students are demonstrating against the new crackdown as well as the ongoing ICE detention of Columbia graduate and leading pro-Palestine activist Mahmoud Khalil, who remains in one of the most notoriously brutal ICE facilities in Louisiana.
