SOUTH LOOP — With the Columbia College adjunct strike now in its fifth week, students and faculty are worried about its impact and the future of the liberal arts school itself.
Part-time faculty, also known as adjuncts, took to the picket line Oct. 30 — nearly two months after the start of the fall semester — to protest the private college’s decision to cut 350 courses for the current school year, a move they said would impact their pay.
On their list of demands: smaller class sizes, better job security for part-time instructors and the restoration of courses pulled from the school’s catalog due to budget cuts.
Some adjuncts have questions about the college’s $20 million budget shortfall, which is impacting administrative decisions, including course cuts. Also under scrutiny are the bonuses of Columbia College’s President and CEO Dr. Kwang–Wu Kim and other senior staff. Kim received a $300,000 bonus last year, according to tax documents filed on behalf of Columbia College in 2022.
Despite the prolonged strike, the two sides don’t appear close to a compromise.
The latest round of negotiations between school leaders and the Columbia College Faculty Union stalled over Thanksgiving weekend, union President Diana Vallera said. Columbia posted an update on its website, saying the union’s demands for guaranteed employment would “undermine the college’s ability to make decisions” to address its financial woes.
The union, which represents 600 part-time instructors, is pushing for another meeting this week in hopes that administrators will recognize the urgency of the issue.
“It has had a huge impact on me personally. I’d never expected that it would go on this long, especially when we have such a large unit. It’s unprecedented,” said Vallera, who has taught at Columbia for 15 years. “I can’t stand being out of the classroom. You build relationships with the students. … I just think about all these students that I can’t help and it keeps me up at night.”
Columbia College, however, said it is the part-time staff that is negatively impacting students with the work stoppage. A spokesperson for Columbia said the college has agreed to 16 percent wage hikes over four years, increased health care benefits and payments for alterations in course offerings, among other concessions.
But the two parties are “deadlocked” because the institution can’t sign off on the union’s demands for better employment security and say in course offerings, saying those demands “jeopardize the college’s long-term sustainability by dictating which measures the college can and cannot use to restore its fiscal health,” Jacqueline King Partridge, senior director of external communications, said in a statement.
“The administration is deeply disappointed that the union has chosen to continue to disrupt instruction for students,” said Partridge. “The college has a responsibility to make difficult decisions to steer the college through a financial challenge, for the sake of current students as well as future generations of creatives.”
Vallera said she was drawn to the school initially because of its reputation as an institution rooted in social justice and its largely Black and Brown, working-class student body. Before joining the faculty, Vallera audited a few classes to get a feel for the school and acquaint herself with instructors she’d dreamed of working with.
By the time Vallera started at Columbia, a shift was occurring in colleges and universities nationwide, she said.
That shift was the corporatization of higher education, something Vallera and fellow adjunct faculty members said they’ve seen during their time at Columbia. Over 6,700 students are currently enrolled at the liberal arts college, which traded its open enrollment policy for a more rigorous admissions process in the mid-2000s. The cost to attend has climbed throughout the years as well. Current tuition and fees are $31,026 a year.
The school is also one of several under fire for alleged unfair labor practices. A report from Hunter College found an “unprecedented level” of strikes in higher education regionally and across the country since January 2022, with faculty protests at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Eastern Illinois University, Rutgers University, the New School and the University of California, among others.
Professors and instructors aren’t the only ones rising up. Student workers are mobilizing for fair wages and better conditions as well.
‘A Student Walkout’
When Cheryl Graeff began teaching acting and directing classes at Columbia over 20 years ago, classroom sizes were manageable and usually maxed out at 15 students. The number has slowly risen through the years, and now she’s tasked with teaching 20 students per class, she said.
“During the pandemic, they put 20 in the [Zoom] animation class I was teaching. Animators are some of the most creative, sensitive people and more introverted. You put people in a Zoom situation who are introverted, most of them aren’t turning the cameras on. I didn’t know how to reach some of them. Twenty was just an insane number, and no one asked about this,” said Graeff, a member of the Screen Actors Guild.
When Graeff took her concerns to the-then department chair, she was met with a shrug, she said. Larger class sizes meant changes to her curriculum and less one-on-one time with students, which impacts how they learn, Graeff said.
Matters took a turn last week when the instructor who took over her class clashed with students by assigning an end-of-semester project requiring them to shoot a scene, something that wasn’t part of Graeff’s lesson plan, she said. A small group of students staged a walkout Monday afternoon in response.
Sophomore Leah Williams was one of the students who participated in the walkout, telling Block Club that she and her classmates realized that neither they nor the substitute instructor were on the same page after their initial meeting.
“After that class, we decided to talk with each other to fully figure out what we wanted from the class, what we wanted to do moving forward, the things that we were not okay with and we came to a group decision,” Williams said.
Four out of five of Williams’ instructors are part-time. While she’s in solidarity with them, she’s also sympathetic to the full-time faculty affected by the strike.
Graeff is sympathetic to them as well, but she — like other adjuncts — relies on a steady paycheck. The working artist has had to dip into her savings to stay afloat, she said.
While fellow adjunct Michael Harris isn’t in dire financial straits, he said he’s concerned about the future of his job as the administration intends to reduce the number of part-timers and rely on more full-time faculty to teach classes. As a result, more class sections could be canceled, he said.
Harris agrees with others that Columbia’s shift toward corporatization predates the arrival of Kim in 2013. For him, class size is a big issue.
“If you’ve got a 100-person seminar class, there’s little to no one-on-one,” Harris said. “So if you make that 125, the students aren’t really being hurt that much because they weren’t going to get one-on-one interaction anyway. But when you get to the other classes like film or audio production where materials are being used, if you go from 18 to 25 students, those already precious resources are now either harder for students to access, or they have to come in and out [at] really odd hours because there’s just not enough stuff to work with.”
Harris and others also wonder if the administration is hoping to break the union, as he believes they have “taken an extremely hard line” on the last two union contracts.
“They want the part-time faculty who teach the majority of the courses to have very little to do as possible with the curriculum and the decisions being made,” Harris said. “That seems to be the bottom line.”
Full-time faculty member Joan Giroux, who is president of the Columbia chapter of the American Association of University Professors, told Block Club that the course cuts have affected full-timers, too.
“These financial challenges and the awareness of that has generated anxiety. It’s also generated critique of the decisions that led us to that point. But the general attitude for faculty has been that we need to step up to the challenges and figure out ways that we can effectively work together and collaborate to continue providing excellent education for our students,” said Giroux, who teaches art courses at the college.
Neither Giroux nor the other instructors know how the strike will impact Columbia College’s reputation in the long term, but the ongoing disputes haven’t soured their love of teaching, they said.
Harris speculated that prospective students may shy away from enrolling given the strike, but acknowledged that all may be forgotten as soon as it ends.
“Our culture doesn’t have a memory,” said Harris.
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