As the COVID-19 pandemic stirs student organizing campaigns at colleges and universities nationwide, a growing number of undergraduates are demanding a greater role in how their schools operate.
When the organizers of the UChicago for Fair Tuition (UCFT) campaign ended their tuition strike on May 18, they saw it as the beginning of something much larger.
In May, a tuition strike at the University of Chicago brought to light one of the most radical new dynamics in campus activism: undergraduate students mirroring the tactics of, and organizing alongside, labor unions. When the organizers of the UChicago for Fair Tuition (UCFT) campaign ended their tuition strike on May 18, they saw it as the beginning of something much larger.
“We want to focus our resources on making this a national movement and building our power,” says Anna Attie, a senior at UChicago and a co-founder of UCFT. “We got what we wanted out of the strike. We got a tuition freeze, and we changed the narrative surrounding tuition.”
The nearly three-week-long strike was launched to address the needs of UChicago students who were unable to afford tuition payments amid COVID-19’s financial fallout. While only around 200 students refused to pay their spring tuition bill, nearly 1,900 signed the UCFT petition to cut tuition by half and to waive fees during the pandemic.
When administrators refused to engage with UCFT organizers, students filed a class-action lawsuit against UChicago to seek reimbursement for tuition payments. A strike fund organized by the campaign’s leadership to cover potential late fees charged to strikers has since been split between two community organizations in Chicago’s South Side.
Talk of both a tuition strike and a general strike by both graduates and undergraduates had circulated at UChicago over the previous year. And when the campus closed in March in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, organizers like Attie saw an opportunity to rally support for coordinated action.
The support of parents, who often pay the tuition bills, was also vital to the strikers’ cause. Attie says UCFT organizers distributed a guide to discussing the strike with parents of differing political views.
Just as vital to the strike was the blessing of UChicago’s Graduate Student Union (GSU). According to organizers in both the GSU and UCFT, university administrators attempted to cast the demands of the undergraduates as a threat to the graduate students’ demands for extended funding and research grants, and even to graduate student salaries.
Despite that rhetoric, leaders in both groups have made clear their commitment to solidarity. In an editorial in The Chicago Maroon in April, UCFT spokespeople assured their supporters that they “would not accept tuition reduction at the expense of staff or financial aid.”
Moreover, the two organizations have found a common cause in pressuring administrators for greater financial transparency; in fact, UCFT relied upon research on the university’s endowment and real estate holdings to develop their demands.
Though COVID-19 energized undergraduate organizing, it built on an earlier wave of college students seeking to unionize. In recent years, undergraduate dining hall and library workers, resident advisors, tutors and teaching assistants have joined unions at more than a dozen institutions across the United States.
As of this year, undergraduate student workers at Washington University in St. Louis can become full dues-paying members of the WashU Undergraduate & Graduate Workers Union.
Despite the inability to collectively bargain, union membership carries some benefits for undergrads. When Jessica Yu, a junior and union member, was arrested in April during a sit-in to demand a $15 minimum wage for campus workers, the union paid her bail.
As Attie sees it, universities rely on the tuition of undergrads as much as they do on the labor of their workers. “If the product [that students pay for] is simply a diploma, that’s an incredibly bleak view of the higher education system,” Attie says. “If the product of the university is not the diploma, but rather knowledge, experience, and relationships, students do crucial, irreplaceable ‘work’ to make the university what it is.”
While some universities have implemented a tuition freeze for next fall, others, such as George Mason University in Virginia, have opted to raise it. Interim President Anne Holton acknowledged that “even a small tuition increase can affect our students and their families,” but said “we must make strategic investments to serve our students and keep them on track to graduate.”
Now organizers at UChicago are reaching out to students across the country, laying the groundwork for a national network of undergrad unions.
Now organizers at UChicago are reaching out to students across the country, laying the groundwork for a national network of undergrad unions. This is especially important for students like Philippa Zhang, an organizer at the University of Pittsburgh.
Zhang’s university has a student body three times the size of UChicago’s. It also lacks a graduate student union that Zhang and her compatriots could turn to for support. “We’re trying to pick up the momentum of the strike at UChicago, especially because a tuition strike can be organized remotely,” says Zhang. “But they had to do a lot less wrangling.”
At some public universities, campaigns for students to have a greater say in how their schools operate is taking a different form than a tuition strike. Dulce Escoria, the leader of the University of Iowa’s branch of the progressive group Student Action, has asked students unable to afford tuition to consider withdrawing to place financial pressure upon the Iowa Board of Regents, which oversees the state’s public universities.
But while the mechanisms of Escoria’s efforts are different from those at UChicago, a private university, and the semi-private University of Pittsburgh, they’re animated by the same idea: that students need to apply financial pressure in order for administrations to pay attention.
“I always heard that students have power,” Escoria says. “But I have never believed it as much as I do when I see how scared the administration and the regents are of students withdrawing. Every day we’re on campus, students are made to feel that we owe them something for letting us be here. In reality, students are funding higher education, and a lot of students are beginning to believe that at the end of the day, we’re the ones who decide what happens.”