The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I got work. All right. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast network and is brought to you in partnership within these Times Magazine and the Real News Network. This show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. My name is Maximillian Alvarez and we’ve got a really important episode for y’all today, which is the latest installment of our ongoing coverage here on working people and all across the Real News Network on the Trump Administration’s all-Out assault on our institutions of higher education and the people who live, learn and work there. And today’s conversation is going to be a critical follow-up to an episode that we published back in late April where I spoke to a panel of graduate student workers with the graduate employee organization or GEO at the University of Michigan and student workers of Columbia University United Auto Workers, and that was a really intense and frankly surreal episode.

We were talking about some really intense and surreal stuff that was unfolding before our eyes in that moment on Columbia and Michigan’s campuses at the time. If you guys remember just three months into the new Trump administration, we were talking about federal abductions of pro-Palestine student protestors like Mahmood, Khalil Trump’s gangster style shakedown of Columbia involving massive funding cuts and withholding of federal grants, billions of dollars of worth. We were talking about Columbia firing and expelling grant, minor president of Student Workers of Columbia just before bargaining sessions with the union and the administration were set to begin and we were also talking about the breaking story that on the morning of April 23rd at the direction of Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, law enforcement officers including FBI agents, raided the homes of multiple student organizers connected to Palestine solidarity protests at the University of Michigan. As I’ve told you guys many times and will continue to disclose is my alma mater and GEO is my former union and now here in October, 2025, we’ve got headlines like this in the Michigan Daily three pro-Palestine activists arrested for protesting speech given by former Israeli soldiers and I’ve got press releases from student workers of Columbia in my inbox saying Columbia surveilled and threatened student workers of Columbia Union members engaging in protected concerted activity flouting the NLRA and explicitly extending its suppression of free speech to labor action.

Now, as I said in that last episode that we did in April, and as we keep saying in our coverage of this, the battle on and over our institutions of higher education have been and are going to continue to be a critical front where the future of democracy and the Trump administration’s entire agenda are going to be decided. And it’s going to be decided not just by what Trump does and how university administrations and boards of regents respond, but by how faculty respond students, grad students respond, how staff and campus communities and the public writ large respond. And today we are very grateful to be joined by a panel of graduate student workers and union members at the University of Michigan and Columbia University who are on the front lines of that fight. We are joined once again by Conlin, who is a PhD student in computer science at Columbia University and is on the bargaining committee for student Workers of Columbia, also calling in from Columbia.

We are joined by Vayne. Vayne is a PhD candidate in history at Columbia University and is also on the bargaining committee for Student Workers of Columbia and we are also joined by Jared Eno. Jared is a grad worker in sociology and public policy at the University of Michigan and as a rank and file member of GEO, well, Conlan vain. Jared, thank you all so much for joining us here on Working People. I really, really appreciate it and I wanted to ask if we could just go around the table and have y’all introduce yourselves a little more to our listeners and let’s start walking them through what’s been happening in your lives and on your campuses since our audience last heard from you or your fellow union members back in April.

Vayne:

Awesome. Thanks Max. Thanks for having us on. My name is Vayne, as you mentioned. I’m a fourth year PhD at Columbia and this is going to be my third straight year in the trenches and organizing with Columbia around this campus and yeah, it’s hard to try to recount everything that’s happened since April. Really, I was just, when I was looking at some of the, as the last episode, Jesse, who is also on this podcast actually got suspended for two years for a Palestine related activity. There was an action at Butler, a teach in and she wrote an incredible EO essay about this actually, which I think really highlights the state of things since then. She was, I guess readers can check this out with themselves, but she had participated in an eight day occupation of building at Columbia as an undergrad when she was at Barnard many years ago, and I think the discipline was a letter, an apology letter, and over the summer, Jesse and a bunch of others have received various levels of suspensions.

Yeah, I think since April we’ve really seen Columbia has unfortunately gained a lot of experience in repressing student action and activism and our labor movement as well. I think at this point I just saw over 200 students have been suspended or expelled for Palestine related actions at Columbia since as of October, 2025. And yeah, the most recent event that you mentioned was this disciplinary warning for members who were picketing, we’re in the middle of a bargaining for our new contract and this has never happened, ever. I’ve participated in pickets, I led pickets without masks on, with masks on. I think there have been more attempts to get our IDs on campus, but this is really a really large escalation really. There was always this understanding even though most of Columbia’s responses to protestors have been completely unjustified, but there’s always this understanding that labor that they were going to respect labor law and it just seems that they’ve been really empowered by the federal administration to take this next step and they issued warnings and not charges, which I think speaks a little bit to the strength, the power of still being part of a union at this point, but it really is a significant departure.

They changed a bunch of disciplinary policies over the summer, but still created some carve outs actually for members of the community university community who were participating in concerted activity protected on their NLRA. But this is very much a departure from that, but it’s just the latest in a pattern of cuts to student worker positions, suspensions, expulsions, and there’s stuff that’s reported and then stuff that isn’t much so, but it’s just really been a lot’s happened since April. I think. I’d say just we’re really seeing the way that repression boomerangs. I think that things that are happening at Columbia are also things that the US government has roughly been doing for a long time and in New York City as well, but also things that happen at Columbia on higher ed institutions, on campuses are really also affecting broad ranges of American societies. So yeah, that’s my summary.

Conlan Olson:

Hi, I am Conlan, as Maximillian mentioned, I’m a PhD student in computer science at Columbia and yeah, I think echoing what vain had said, we’ve really seen an escalation in repression both from the federal government, also from Columbia itself. I think increasingly we’ve seen that Columbia is unconcern with this public image, unconcerned with the law in particular unconcerned with violating the NLRA. And so a lot of the traditional more legal tools that we have to fight repression or the idea that we can appeal to public opinion to fight repression, I think are being undermined and I think we’re learning this hard lesson that what we really still have is our labor power and there’s not that much else that we have these days. Columbia has gone pretty mask off in terms of repressing labor activity and other protests to be on campus. The federal government is certainly not going to step into pushback against Columbia’s moves there.

And so I think that we’ve sort of realized that what we have left is our ability to withhold our labor. We know that grad students run the university and if we can successfully withhold our labor, we will shut the university down and we are fully intending to use that kind of power to fight for a university that actually works for all the people in it, a university that actually contributes positively to society at large. And at the same time, it’s a hard task because the repression is intense and it is scary, and I think that the major problem right now is making sure that we’re moving together as a university community and as student workers at Columbia to keep each other safe and to take this sort of militant labor action together in a way that keeps everyone taking it safe. I think this lesson is also echoed in larger activist movements across the us for example, I think we’ve learned that there’s really no legal guardrails or safeguards against ICE taking arbitrary actions against non-citizens and citizens alike.

And I think that communities and activists have realized that what we still have left is our ability to be there on the ground and fight back against repression. And I think, yeah, so this lesson of the safeguards that we thought we had about people in power sticking to moral standards or the laws being there to protect us have sort of eroded and we’re seeing that now and what we still have is our ability to take militant action together, but mobilizing that is hard, and so I think that’s a lot of the work that we have going forward.

Jared Eno:

Yeah. Hi all. I’m Jared Eno. I’m a grad worker at the University of Michigan and a member of the Grad Worker Union, GEO Graduate Employees Organization, really honored to be here. I appreciate the podcast and I really appreciate y’all and at Columbia Solidarity really on the front lines and we learned so much from you and it’s great to be in conversation with y’all. Yeah, similarly here in Michigan, the battle continues in terms of the repression and trying to fight for worker rights from here to Palestine. I think what’s happened since the last podcast is hard to summarize as others have said, but one thing that’s notable is back then, earlier this year, an Attorney General Dana Nessel had been recruited by the University of Michigan regents to bring felony charges and other charges against folks for the encampment and other actions in solidarity with Palestine and an orientation event called Festival.

And Dana Nessel had just sent in the FBI to raid folks’ homes around that time. Shortly after that, Nestle was forced to drop all the criminal charges against the people who she had targeted, and this was a result of long and intense drop the charges campaign that was waged by workers, students, community members alike, including of course our National Lawyer Guild, wonderful lawyers in the courtroom. But there was like a lot of outrage as others have said, people seeing what was happening and how clear it was that the regents who of course continue to choose to politically and financially support the horrific and utterly depraved Israeli genocide of Palestinians to this day were in cahoots with the State Attorney General who was attempting to attack the Palestine solidarity movement. That generated a lot of outrage and eventually the pressure was enough that Nestle completely dropped all those charges, which was a huge victory I think for us and obviously for the folks who were targeted, especially who held strong through the entire time.

Partly as a result of that, the university has turned toward its own internal disciplinary mechanisms to try and hurt people retaliate against people for standing against genocide. So Nestle drops all of those charges on May 20th and about a week later, our campus police sent over their police reports to the Office of Student Conflict Resolution here, which has supposedly a restorative justice office, but has now been transformed into an office for political repression. As others have said, as has happened at Columbia, the Regents have unilaterally changed the rules of the student conduct process and how that happens to make it easier for them to hurt people who oppose their fascist agenda. So there’s now been three rounds of Oscar charges, as we call them, people being Oscar, I’m one of them, and I was Oscar in the first wave, which was about an occupation of the Ruth and administration building back on November 17th, 2023 where the campus police led a cop riot in response to that and brutalized many people and then subsequently tried to get a bunch of people criminally charged, managed to convince the local prosecutor, Ellie Savitt, who is now running for State Attorney General to charge four of them with felonies, which he later allowed them to plead down because of the public pressure campaign back then.

But now they’ve also brought second and third wave of disciplinary charges and like I said, made it easier for themselves to achieve their goal of convicting these folks through completely processes without any shred of due process. There’s a hundred percent conviction rate. Every person who’s found not responsible for the things they’re being charged with then gets that overturned and is found responsible. So we see the university now beefing up its own internal mechanisms for punishing people because of the public pressure that has been successful against the criminal charges. I’ll say a little bit more about that in that, as others have said, this comes amidst the intensification of the fascist crackdown, which the regents of the University of Michigan have very clearly decided to place themselves as part of that. And obviously that has been first and foremost the attacks on the Palestine solidarity movement, but the regions had already, I think ended the university’s DEI programs as of the last podcast, but they also subsequently decided to end gender affirming care for minors at University of Michigan’s Hospitals, which is a major provider for not just the state, but the region.

They did that without fighting the federal government’s intimidation tactics. So again, we just see them rolling over, over and over and not actually being complicit and actively pushing this agenda forward through every means that they have. There’s the criminal charges, there’s disciplinary charges, they’ve banned people from campus, they’ve had people fired, they’ve brought people into disciplinary hearings from employment, just like every tool that they have, they’ve been trying to go after us, and as others have said, there’s now, yeah, a lot of conversations among workers, continued conversations about how we can fight back and how workers, as others have said, need to look to each other as a way out of this and really figure out what is the world that we can build together and how do we build the collective power to move toward it.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah, I think that’s all beautifully, powerfully and harrowingly put, and I really appreciate y’all laying that out for us in our audience. And I kind of want to stick with those themes and maybe sort of go a little bit deeper because last time, as we said, and as y’all have been reaffirming, we were focusing a bit more on the top down assaults on your universities and your unions from these big scary federal government forces, whether they be Trump or ICE or what have you, but now we’re seeing much more of the universities in response, ramping up their own internal repression machines, which as y’all have mentioned, they’ve been developing and refining and expanding. I can think over just the course of doing this show and doing interviews with union members during strikes at Columbia or GEO or then the repressive efforts on campus after October, 2023 to then, as we’re talking the early months of this year in the second Trump administration, I feel like people can go back and listen to those episodes and hear about how the repression machine that is being ramped up now was being built up over that time.

I wanted to kind of take that and ask if we could give listeners more of a worker’s eye view, a graduate student’s eye view of what it’s like to live and work in those environments right now, November of 2025, because what’s also changed in the country is now we got federal troops marching into cities. We’ve got more ice raids and brutalization of our communities and our neighbors. We maybe war with Venezuela in a week. Like shit continues to roll downhill while the repression continues to ramp up and the ivory tower. And so can you guys give our listeners a sense of what it’s like on campus right now? I want to ask if you could also talk about the surveillance side of it from the university. All of these issues seem to also revolve around that, like the university threatening to identify people who are wearing masks or log and register people for their political activities. The University of Michigan’s contracted private investigators to follow around their own students. Can you talk about, give people a sense of what it’s actually like on your campuses right now?

Vayne:

As for life on campus at Columbia right now, I am thinking about the two weeks after actually the Hins Hall raid at Columbia in spring 2024 where they banned everyone from campus except for I think the freshmen who literally lived on that block of campus that people normally think of when they think of Columbia. No professors, no students, and there’s just these images of cops guarding this empty campus, and I think right now we’re just living in that reality. People are kind of walking back, they’re back in classrooms, we’re walking around, but I think we’re very much still living in that reality, and I think that’s really the university that we’re almost barreling toward, if not for the struggles of a lot of people who are living and working there on a day-to-day basis. I think the university is in a kind of protracted struggle with community members actually who rely on this thoroughfare in the middle of campus called College Walk.

It’s completely blocked off. It’s been blocked off for years now and it sucks. It is just not pleasant being on campus at all. This is the first year I’m on research fellowship this year actually, so this is the first year in a while where I haven’t needed to go to campus to teach multiple times, and it is quite remarkable how much of an impact on my mental health that has been frankly, not having to be there. It’s hard to really describe what it’s like as soon as you get to campus, you’re being eyed at by campus security, you come out of the subway, there’s the gates, there’s a row of public safety, they’re already and public safety now, that’s also another big change that we didn’t mention before. They have arrest powers on campus. There’s a trained group of some 30 something officers, I forgot what they’re called, but that’s another one of these heinous changes.

And you get to the gates, you tap in, oftentimes they’re in line for a while, they added another box. It’s this terrible gray box in the middle of in front of the gates, and sometimes you have to tap again or they’re just watching you and you keep going and just random parts of this, otherwise I think quite beautiful campus are just fenced off in terrible ways. People, I mean, I was at Columbia in fall 2022 and it’s just so hard. It is just unrecognizable from them. People would sit on the steps during lunch and you’d see people playing Frisbee in front of the library, and to an extent you still see this, but then you are also so jarred by seeing these kids playing Frisbee with security, watching them, some mix of public safety officers and private contractors, and it makes the campus environment just so hostile to what I thought, frankly, what I thought I was coming here to do to learn and teach and research. It’s just way harder to literally bring people to campus to do research. I know people who’ve gotten their guest requests denied by the university.

I know someone who is studying something related to cops and surveillance and was going to bring someone else for a research meeting onto campus, and that request got denied by Columbia Public Safety. It’s like the irony is just so jarring and frustrating and it is a serious impact on just our ability to do the work that we came here to do to begin with. I mean, you’re still always hearing about professors and adjunct instructors and TAs who are still just having to change their syllabi, having to make changes on their and how they teach to because the university is doing so little, in fact, nothing at all to protect the mission that we’re supposed to be doing here, which is why I’m just really fixated on this thinking a lot about this image of this empty university and a bunch of cops. As for surveillance too, I think that kind of stuff just does affect the ways that we approach our current contracts campaign.

Our contracts expired in June and we have yet to sit down with the university, though we finally will be on Friday. The university is just able to kind of play dumb this entire year about not wanting to come to the table. They’ve just outright refused to bargain. They made it about Zoom and then it was about the size of the room, and it’s just really truly nonsensical reasoning that they were using to avoid coming to the table. Things that might have, I mean, people know Columbia is just really terrible, terrible employer full of actual evil, but it’s just kind of shocking still sometimes the things that they feel empowered to get away with now. And I think as others have been talking about, it’s really just this veneer of being passively complicit in evil. Columbia’s just, and a lot of other higher ed institutions, it’s outright cooperation, oftentimes mirroring the same things that the Trump administration is doing, consolidating power kind of doing. It’s really jarring hearing very similar things happening at Michigan, at Columbia, also with our disciplinary offices and the ways that our, it’s now called the Office of Institutional Equity. It is the office that’s supposed to be dealing with discrimination and harassment that’s also consolidated around university administrators. We’re also definitely seeing that affecting our living and working conditions.

Conlan Olson:

As vain said, things feel really bad at Columbia. And at the same time, I think Maximi what you said at the beginning, which is that back in April when I last talked to you, it did feel scarier actually because there were federal agents on campus and like, well, now they’re maybe just undercover. I dunno. And I think that’s actually a real strategy on the part of Columbia, which is that they’ve put, the window has been pushed so far towards fascism towards the right that now when Columbia does anything, they are trying to trick us into being grateful for it. And so I’m really thinking about that a lot in our contract campaign that I think it’s very clear that Columbia’s going to try to offer us a tiny raise, which will of course still be well below cost of living and say, Hey, we’re being really generous.

We’re offering you a raise. We care about you. I’m really worried that I think we need to be really disciplined and understand things have not gotten better. It’s just that the window has been pushed so far towards us accepting such intense repression and such intense fascist tendencies that even a moderate acts of supposed goodwill feel like wins. And so I think it’s really important that we stay very disciplined, very strong and continue to take militant action. I think that this is important first just to effectively get a good contract and effectively operate as a worker union. I think this is also important because we’ve all been referencing the higher ed labor union fight is just one of many, many fights going on, even just in the US and let alone the many, many more vitally important fights around the world. And so I think that something that a lot of people at student workers of Columbia feel really deeply is the importance of keeping solidarity demands front and center.

And so I think even as Columbia will try to get us to stand down by buying us out with a small compensation increase, we have to remember that we are a union that’s committed to things like protecting non-citizens to things like making Columbia align its investments with its supposed moral values and drop its support of the genocidal Israeli apartheid regime as someone watching how things have unfolded and remembering what things felt like in April. I think it’s really important to understand that yes, things felt scarier back then, but it’s not as if things have gotten better or less urgent. One thing that I think about a lot with this idea of discipline and militancy is being a worker and a researcher in computer science. Well, to no one’s surprise, there’s a lot of evil going on in computer science. If I’m looking at my coworkers, if we fight as a union, get them a raise, I’ll be happy.

But then if they, after graduation, go off and work at Palantir and develop surveillance tech that’s going to be used to target civilians and military conflicts or deport people, that is a loss. That is a loss for the left. That is a loss for the labor movement that is a loss for the fight for oppressed people everywhere. And so I think at places like Columbia, which claim to be and are in some senses, in many senses, elite institutions, they explicitly say that they’re trying to train the ruling class. I think it’s important to stick to our solidarity demands and to fight for something much, much more than just our employer pretending to be a little bit nicer to us.

Jared Eno:

Well, plus one to so much of that, I mean, yeah, university of Michigan is also at this point kind of a surveillance state. There’s just so many cops. There’s so many cops everywhere. If it’s not cops, there’s rent to cops. If it’s not rent to cops, it’s cameras. And obviously this is millions and millions of dollars that the university is pouring into building this repressive apparatus. And as comrades have said, it sounds like, yeah, in Columbia, that just resonates. There’s so much precarity everywhere, whether it’s in the classroom, people just being scared to even teach the content that they research or having their funding cut on that research. Yeah, precarity is runs through everything. And part of that, there’s just a lot of fear, particularly among international workers obviously. And I think it’s important to name the police department here. It’s like UMPD as part of the DPSS Department of Public Safety and Security, I think it’s called ridiculously.

It is really a key driver of all of this. And I should have mentioned earlier when I was talking about what has happened, I mean just a couple of weeks ago as an example that kind of ties some of this together, A pro-Israel student group brought some IOF soldiers to campus brazenly. This is part of a national tour that I think is called Triggered. I think purposefully playing on the outrage that they know it’s going to cause to bring gens airs to campuses where people do not accept genocide. And of course, people turned out to protect their community against the IOF. And of course UMPD protected the gens airs instead of protecting the community and violently assaulted and arrested three people. And it’s just indicative of the normalization of violence, of police repression, other kinds of oppression that comrades from Columbia are describing that’s freely concerning.

And I’ll just plug quickly, I think we have a zap that I’d like to share with folks if you’d like to support. This is just one way to do it because right now, of course, university police are now trying to get anti genocide protestors once again prosecuted, criminally prosecuted for this. And another thing that I think is super important to note is that this group, like so many others, was not just students. It’s not just students, it was students, workers, community members, which again, I think is one of the powerful aspects of the organizing that’s come out throughout this time that the university desperately wants to break. So if folks want to participate in the Zap, you can go to Bitly bi ly slash email zap T two two, I CT 22 to tell prosecutors not to enable what the university is doing. But again, this is just one particularly pressing instance of a general trend. And as I said, there’s a lot of people who are coming together here and Columbia and everywhere who do not want this.

I think it’s very important given the normalization of this level of oppression for us to build capacity to talk to each other about what’s going on and to remind each other. We do not want this. The majority of people do not want this. The majority of people do not want genocide. And yes, this is scary, but at a bare minimum, we do not have to go through it alone. That’s just a huge thing. And one thing that’s been so inspiring and so life-giving for me personally, is seeing the activity of people just talking to each other, whether it’s door knocking, phone banking, getting together to discuss how to push back against these disciplinary charges is something that I’ve personally been involved in. These are radical opportunities to build the capacity for democratic deliberation, which is of course what the labor movement, what unionism is really about.

And think about what the world we want as workers and who we are. To Lin’s point, we are not just grad workers at the University of Michigan. We are also staff, we are also custodial staff, we also RAs. And one really inspiring part of this is the unionization efforts that resident assistants are pushing University Staff United as a new staff union. So there’s that. But even beyond that, there’s the communities that of course we are embedded in. And part of one of the major organizing points right now is that the University of Michigan is attempting to build a 1.2 billion data center in Ypsilanti, Michigan, which is just next door to Ann Arbor. And which will of course have severe negative impacts on the ecosystems there, on the power grid there, on the quality of life there. And will also, this thing is a collaboration with Los Alamos National Labs.

It is designed to support the US nuclear stockpile. So this is horrible. And community members as well as folks who are within the university formally have come together to push back on this, which has been really inspiring. I’ll also say that within GEO, we are also within a contract campaign. So we’re very much talking about how we fit into this broader picture. And one very important part of that is research. G SRAs research assistance at the University of Michigan have not had a formal union protection. So there’s some really exciting conversations happening to make sure that we are all standing together against this fascism and thinking, as I said, really radically about what’s possible if we are not isolated, if we build capacity for collective action.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And I think that that is one of the many reasons why folks listening to this, even if they currently have no connection to or affiliation with higher education, should care about this fight. And they should care about what happens on campuses and around campuses, and not just for the nut job, Fox News reasons for why they think they should care about what’s going on on campus, but this speaks so much to what I myself have known and experienced living, working, and organizing on a college campus, the very one that Jared is at right now. And during the first Trump administration, I remember these coalitions that we were a part of everyone on campus, like so many different groups including the little one that I co-founded, the campus anti-fascist network. We worked in sort of collaboration with the unions, the unions, not graduate union, the lecturers union, the student democrats, the young socialists, the anarchists in Ypsilanti.

It was a really interesting and beautiful coalition of people that came together out of this urgently felt need to defend our campus communities from open fascist and Nazis who wanted to come to those campuses and spread their hate and misinformation and bring their hateful, violent followers with ’em. Anyway, long story short, I saw over my time there as a graduate student and organizer or what it looked like after those fights and those coalitions started learning how to build and work together. There’s something you learn together when you are working together in those moments. And if you stay together after those initial fights, then you see things like I saw where the student, the undergraduates were going to the lecturers bargaining sessions and cheering them on, and you just had these beautiful sprouts of solidarity growing into something more and something beautiful out of those struggles that brought us together in the first place and out of the struggle itself.

And that is why I think people need to look at universities and campus communities as microcosms of the sort of solidarity that working people are going to need, whether they’re in unions, whether they’re not, whether they just live in the area, whether they have family members attending these institutions or they’re struggles like in sacrifice zones that we’ve been covering on the show where you get Republican voters, democratic voters, non voters, neighbors who were brought together and forced to talk to each other and struggled together because a catastrophe has kind of befall their communities. So in all these different contexts, you have coalitions that need to emerge to fight back, and that’s happening on campus communities as well. With all that said, I wanted to sort of turn things back over to y’all and end on that note. If we could have y’all talk more about what folks in your communities, in your unions are doing right now to fight back and to defend your rights and to defend our right to academic freedom and free speech. And what can people listening do to help and be part of that if they are listening to this and want to get involved?

Vayne:

Yeah, I think top of mind right now, I’m actually thinking a lot about my coworkers who are actually eligible for SNAP benefits and are facing food insecurities. I think we were just talking about these broader ways that all these struggles are interlinked, the attacks on welfare, on working class people, these are all felt, so some of our coworkers are feeling these directly. We have a independent group called Student Workers Aid Collective swac, that is Mutual Aid group that folks who are listening can contribute to. It’s a mutual aid organization, provides emergency relief for student workers. And any amounts that aren’t used are, I think, contributed to local mutual aid organizations or Palestinian mutual aid organizations. As for fighting back as a union too, I think that we can’t afford to give up on little fights. You want to be able to pick your battles, but these days, every little one really does matter for rank and file democracy for the strengths of our union, we really have to always be putting our best foot forward.

And we’ve just seen in the past year, we’ve been, even as we’ve been going through all of these really surreal attacks on our rights and our livelihoods, one of our biggest fights as a union has been around our bargaining conditions, which felt so kind of untethered to things that were also happening, but it was a terrain. It was just we couldn’t give up on every inch of power that we can have. We have to fight for it. It was about fighting for as many of our workers as possible, everyone who wants to come to participate directly in our union. And that’s the way that we’ve been structured for a long time. Now we have this commitment to rank and file led democracy, and that requires direct participation. And Columbia knows that that’s a impediment on their ability to organize. But that’s not to say we weren’t also organizing on all these other fronts.

We were building these strong mutual aid and safety networks that I think maybe Colin can also speak to as well. But I am just thinking a lot about how we really had to fight for every inch of our power to keep it on our side. Just knowing that Columbia, like many other employees right now, is going to take any opportunity they can to try to weaken us. And a lot of the protections that we had before, we can’t take for granted, especially legal protections. And as Colin was saying earlier as well, that we really have each other. That’s what we’re doing to fight back, is just continuing to stay united. And it’s hard. It is really hard. I think it’s just required a lot of personal interpersonal growth and pushing each other really hard in ways that I didn’t expect to experience. But I think, yeah, it’s just also being disciplined about what that struggle requires.

Conlan Olson:

Yeah, I think seconding what vain was saying, I think, yeah, the mutual aid fund I think is a good example of a place where, I mean fundamentally the sort of forces at play here are we can withhold labor and then we can take care of each other. And I think taking care of each other in the form of mutual aid is really important as sort of just a foundational value of taking action together. Yeah, I mean we have our fund, we support funds around campus and our community and then also support funds in places that any of our members care about often on the ground aid in Gaza, but also other solidarity campaigns throughout the world. And then I think way back on the contract campaign side, I also want to highlight something that I think we’ve mentioned a few times but not talked about in depth, which is our fight about academic freedom.

And I think we’re fighting for contract articles that solidify our right to teach and learn about topics that we choose in the contract because we’ve seen that Columbia has no qualms about squashing our academic freedom, about disciplining people who even mentioned Palestine in the classroom. I know professors who have been forced to change class descriptions or even whole class topics. And I think that accepting little for, I mean these are not particularly little, but even accepting forms of censorship like this one at a time is how we sort of backslide step-by-step into full scale fascist control over not only knowledge production, but also our actions and the technology that’s developing. This is again, speaking from a person in engineering, which is the technology that our universities develop fundamentally shapes the landscape of the places where we live. And people and computer science are building the technology that’s used to repress activism and also just control populations around the world right now.

And so I think the fight over academic freedom is a specific thing, but I think serves as a really important step to resist this piecemeal erosion of our ability to think and do things that we want to do. And I think this is sort of something that’s important to fight tooth and nail every step of the way. This is similar to what Vain was saying about maybe a different topic, but the same principle that yeah, we can’t just accept little things because they don’t seem like the worst possible thing. We have to really push back against this. So I think our academic freedom fight is something that I think I would like more people to know about, not just at Columbia, but across higher ed institutions and across the world in general. And I think, yeah, I also want people to know how aggressively Columbia is cracking down on academic freedom, however this fight feels to us.

Jared Eno:

Yeah, it’s kind of nice going through it, I guess because I get to just plus one what other folks have said. I feel that so much, and I’m also just going to hit on the point that we got to do this for ourselves. We cannot rely on these universities or any other corporation. And let’s be clear, these universities are just corporations. They’re really just hedge funds, capital pools that have universities and hospitals attached maybe. And that weaponize the idea that they’re interested at all in knowledge and humanity. We can see that they’re not, but they are full of human beings like you and me, and that’s where the potential is. So I think last time geo comrades, Lavinia and Ember talked about the ice hotline that grad workers had set up when the service cancellations were happening. That was a wonderful example of workers just getting together and being like, how do we solve the problem given that the university is not taking action here right now?

Another similar thing that’s happening is the federal government is trying to change the rules around I 20 duration of status for international students, putting some very restrictive rules in place that will, for instance, limit people’s authorized stay here. International students authorized stay here to four years and then they’ll have to renew, whereas before they could expect it to be here for the duration of their program. And that’s going to be now approved by DHS itself rather than being delegated to the universities. So this is a huge change really, that I think has massive implications for international students and workers and the University of Michigan is not doing a whole lot to get the word out to let people know about this. So again, grad workers are doing it and talking to each other one-on-one in department meetings. We’re having a town hall coming up in a week or so.

So again, it’s an example of how we can turn to each other and show each other what’s possible, which I think really connects to what vain is saying about this is not a time to be letting fights go because our power is in our unity. And it is of course about winning very important concrete things. And it is simultaneously about building the power to win those things, building the unity among ourselves. And as others have said, this is not easy. This takes serious labor. I think the kind of reproductive labor of organizing is so crucial because again, we’re doing world building, which is major labor. It’s not something you just do on the side, right? This is our lives. And to that point, I think I want to note one thing I’ve been thinking about lately that Laura Shihi, who’s a Ian Psycho psychoanalyst, has been offering this concepts that are useful for this about psychic militancy.

She was recently on millennials or killing capitalism if you want to go take a look. But I think part of that is the power of just naming things, naming the tactics that are being used against us to disempower us. And so much of what this repression has done, I’ll speak personally as somebody who’s been targeted through this student disciplinary process. So much of it is just gaslighting taken to the organizational level and to undo that, we need to be able to talk to each other, as I keep saying, and as others keep saying, we can think about the practices that enable us to maintain our psychic militancy through that. For instance, naming what this is really about, when people are repressed, it is not about individuals, it’s about the institution trying to destroy movements. Just being very clear about that.

Another part of that is being real about what we are doing is serious knowledge production. I think in higher ed in particular, but I think this is true of just any worker, any organizer, any person who’s standing up for their community is producing cutting edge technology like political technology and very important knowledge that I think we should take seriously and talk with each other. I love this conversation. I’m learning so much from you all because that’s always what happens when people talk to together about resistance, resisting the suppression, and that can be so transformational and change our consciousness in ways that are very dangerous to those in power. And I think that’s why they understand that. That’s why they are repressing us so hard, particularly in the type of consciousness that sees that our power comes from our unity. That is not only unity between people on campus and off campus, unity between people here on occupied Turtle Island and an occupied Palestine. This is a transformational process that we are doing the labor of. And I think when I struggle, when I feel despair and fear, which I think are totally valid and make sense in these contexts, what it always turns it around for me is talking to comrades to understand what’s going on and to think about how we might resist. So yeah, I appreciate you y’all.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right, gang. That’s going to wrap things up for us this week. I want to thank our guests, vain and Conlin to graduate student workers at Columbia University and Union Bargaining unit, members of student workers of Columbia, and Jared Eno, a graduate student worker at the University of Michigan, and a rank and file member of the Graduate Employees organization. And of course, I want to thank you all for listening and I want to thank you for caring. We’ll see y’all back here next week for another episode of Working People and if you can’t wait that long, then go explore all the great work that we’re doing at the Real News Network where we do grassroots journalism that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Sign up for the Real News newsletter so you never miss a story and help us do more work like this by going to the real news.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. I promise you guys, it really makes a difference. I’m Maximilian Alvarez, take care of yourselves. Take care of each other, solidarity forever.