Brandon Mancilla

The question of Palestine has been concretely felt at workplaces and especially at universities. Campuses are facing a direct attack on free speech and the rights to protest and to academic freedom in an unprecedented way. We’ve definitely seen crackdowns on speech in the past, but right now, whether it’s the detention of Rümeysa Öztürk at Tufts or Mahmoud Khalil at Columbia, there’s a very specific targeting on speech grounds. All of our unions on campuses are seeing how that’s explicitly being tied to an attack on their own right to speak out and protest in solidarity.

We recognized right away that the Trump administration is trying to use federal funding as a way to get universities to do its dirty business, whether it’s cooperation with the White House’s immigration policies, its anti-diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, or its suppression of free speech and the end of academic freedom as we know it. Just like with any other authoritarian movement, universities are one of the first institutions to get attacked.

The suppression of free speech and attacks on the NIH and federal funding are connected. They’re part of the same fight. This is not just a “student issue” or a “faculty issue.” It’s a union issue.

It’s important right now that unions are fighting at universities like they’ve never fought before. Grant Miner got expelled, which means he was effectively fired, because as a student worker, he has a job as a condition of being at the university. He was the president of his local. He was fired a day before bargaining was going to begin with Columbia University between the student worker union and Columbia. That’s set the tone for bargaining. Now the union has the duty to not just fight for a new contract and important wage increases but also fight back against the campus climate that Columbia has created.