Harlem: Students March vs. Columbia U.’s Racist Expansion

NEW YORK CITY, April 11 —  Twenty-five Columbia University students met up with fighters from Harlem’S St. Mary’s Church to picket the University’s fake employment office near 125 St. Loud chants rang out and speeches were made by students and community residents. Then we marched to the church a few blocks away and ate a delicious supper. More discussion ensued, and students were transfixed by a superstorm Sandy survivor who, a year and a half later, is still living in a shelter, without adequate financial support. Capitalism and its racist state apparatus can and will never serve the needs of workers!
Columbia’s 17-acre expansion into Manhattanville, the western edge of Harlem, is well underway but will not be completed until 2030. It is making unemployment and affordable housing shortages worse. Columbia itself estimates that 3,300 Harlem residents will be displaced by gentrification in the area surrounding the expansion. They talk about building affordable housing, but “affordable” is based on median income in the whole metropolitan area and has nothing to do with local incomes.
Columbia says 6,900 new jobs will be created, but only 1,500 of those will not require an advanced degree. No sign of apprenticeship programs promised in the Community Benefits Agreement has been seen. As of 2009, Columbia had only 213 employees who lived above 125th St. or in public housing. The so-called “employment” office on Broadway south of 125th St. has not actually offered jobs or job training to local residents.
Manhattanville is a primarily poor black and Latino community, with youth unemployment about 50 percent, rising rents, and poor schools and health care. Columbia’s disregard for the people of this neighborhood is blatantly racist. It is totally in line with Columbia’s mission of training the ruling class of tomorrow and inculcating today’s students with the certainty of their superiority. In 1968, a mass movement of students and local residents defeated Columbia’s plan to build a gym in a park in Harlem, to the exclusion of local residents.
For the past year students have been researching the history of Columbia’s treachery in the neighborhood. They have held two well-attended campus forums about gentrification, in which community groups also participated. Now they are deciding how to proceed on a campaign of action and education next school year, along with their new community allies.
Other student groups, involved in campus-worker solidarity, climate change, and against Columbia’s investment in prison corporations, to name a few, are also participating. The upsurge in campus activism makes it possible to once again build a worker-student-community alliance and engage in anti-racist struggle against this elitist, monolithic university.
More students are also reading Challenge. Several are coming to May Day; many are open to considering how capitalism exploits and abuses all workers, from white collar to blue, and how an alliance between them is necessary to fight for change, from reforms to the ultimate overthrow of capitalism.