This essay was first published on April 27 in the Chilean digital newspaper El Mostrador. It was translated into English by the author with Douglas Kristopher Smith, a PhD student at the University of Chile.
My father would often recount an anecdote from the 1994 World Cup in the United States. In the match between Mexico and Bulgaria during the first round of the knockout stage, one of the bars holding up the net broke off. Some of the players from the Mexican team tried to fix it as best they could, using what seemed to be a tripod or microphone stand, so they could quickly get back to their corner kick. The game was held in Giants Stadium, in New Jersey. To the surprise of millions of spectators watching all around the world, a group of auxiliaries immediately appeared, not with a spare bar, but with an entire replacement goal, and the match was able to quickly start back up a few minutes later. Until recently, that anecdote resonated with many as a small but eloquent example of the immense capacity for foresight and organization from the world’s superpower.
Somewhere lingering vaguely in the back of my mind, I was expecting something like that at the beginning of March this year. In the face of a pandemic which had already been spreading across the planet for a couple of months, New York City was set to shut everything down; authorities would establish clear and timely guidelines to contain the spread of the virus. Essential workers would be protected; the National Guard would secure the streets and transportation. There would be continuous disinfecting of public spaces, health workers would carry out massive testing in public and private institutions, companies would take advantage of their know-how and logistics to ensure the distribution of basic goods and services, the still-powerful local industries would quickly adapt to produce state-of-the-art medical supplies and equipment, tech giants would generate tools to provide indispensable data and solutions to the authorities and to society at large, and so on and so forth. America would be great again.
Today, in New York City, they are digging mass graves to bury the bodies that pile up in houses and hospital hallways. What really happened was the exact opposite of that fantasy. One does not even need to mention Trump. In every institution, everywhere, there is someone doing all they can to put immediate economic benefit before the integrity of people. However, this does not affect everyone equally; given the existing racialized hierarchy, African Americans and Latinos constitute a disproportionately high percentage of the total number of dead. This is the way the American century ends, with a spectacle of the crudest and most deliberate incompetence—one in which the most vulnerable lives are sacrificed on behalf of the very economy that oppresses them.
We have been back in Chile since the morning of April 8. Safe and possibly sound. We decided to come back to feel safer and closer to our families, but also because we were forced out by Columbia University’s housing policies.
The situation was more or less the following: you could stay and keep spending thousands of dollars on rent—money that you’d need if you had to leave the city—or you could leave your apartment with all your belongings, during a pandemic, and go back to your country however you could manage. And all of this had to be done by April 22.
The first option was impractical, because in a matter of weeks graduate student workers would no longer have enough money to keep paying rent, or even stay alive, for the months to come. We never really had enough, as is the design of graduate programs and their budgets; and while some contingent solutions exist, none of them are feasible now, for obvious reasons.
The second option was also virtually impossible. For us it meant completely dismantling and vacating our apartment in five days, with all the related bureaucracy, while simultaneously looking for a moving company in a city under lockdown and trying to book flights to Miami and Santiago. Borders were closing and airlines all over the world were halting operations. If anything went wrong, we would have immediately been left with nowhere to go.
This was actually almost the case, when they canceled our flight to Miami for the third time, 12 hours before takeoff and one hour before handing in the keys to our apartment, which was already completely empty. Without wifi or even anywhere to sit down, we managed to change our flight and book tickets with another airline, so as to have a plan B when we woke up later that night after a short nap.
We spent the night in a hotel close to LaGuardia. This came with a side of local folklore, as our Uber driver—the airport shuttles were no longer operating—shared with us his theory on the crisis: the deep state, seeking social control, had devised a plan that required the installation of Chinese 5G antennas throughout the country. Since these antennas were to cause major health problems, the coronavirus was invented to get everyone off the streets and carry out the installation unopposed. The incoherent and erratic nature of his conspiracy theory was akin to statements given by the actual president of the United States, who just recently recommended a treatment based on orally administering household disinfectant; the following day New York saw a spike in poisonings.
At last we passed through three desolate airports—LaGuardia, Atlanta, and Miami—and made it to Santiago. Everything was completely uncertain until the last plane took off.
A lot happened on the way. If it were not for the invaluable help of friends living in the U.S. (who should not have had to help in such circumstances), we definitely would not have made it. And all throughout the journey we would get these formal emails from the university which reaffirmed the urgency to pack up and leave immediately, while also imposing new restrictions that made the situation even worse. From the outset, the university’s priority has been to ensure at all costs that courses continue via online classes. However, this comes at the expense of uncompensated work, of the physical and mental integrity of those who are in the most precarious positions—those same people who, as in the rest of the city and the country, make it possible for things to continue functioning.
For us, as graduate student workers, we did not have any other alternatives than the ones previously described. And the only assistance we have received is a waiver of the early cancelation fee on our rental lease agreements, and the creation of a grant for moving costs of up to $500. Of course, leaving campus in these circumstances, in one of the most expensive cities in the world, entails costs well over that amount, not to mention the infinite number of risks associated, both for us as well as for the workers whose services we needed for the move. That is all there is. Columbia Residential has already formally announced it will not offer any assistance for the summer semester (June – August). In response, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences promptly created an aid fund for eligible students. But as in the famous engraving by M.C. Escher, the aid will immediately flow back to Columbia Residential. By around May 31, all of us will have had to figure out how to make things work, however difficult that may be.
In the meantime, we are expected to continue with our studies—by attending seminars and researching—and to keep teaching without interruption from home. However, the conditions that made all these things possible are no longer there. Many of our students have not only had difficulties adapting to the new online format, most of them have also been told they have to leave their campus housing. Others have had trouble accessing the internet, lost access to basic academic services and resources, gotten sick themselves, lost jobs, lost family members due to the virus, and have had to deal with situations of domestic violence; in some cases, all of the above.
As we have begun to realize in Chile and elsewhere, the burden of the transition to online classes falls squarely on each individual. While the administration boasts of putting thousands of classes online, it has become clear that this continuity is incompatible with the conditions that the university itself is imposing on us. On that note, how do you conjugate the verb desalojar (to evict) in the indicative past perfect? We can leave that one for homework—if you have a home to work from.
The ways of capital are mysterious. Columbia University is the second-largest property owner in New York, where real estate prices have reached astronomical heights. In just one month, under the urgent pressure of material needs, our relationship with the university has degraded from one of researchers, students, and professors, to captive clients of an educational real estate company (or perhaps less than that). Its current policies are leaving hundreds of its affiliates in situations which are absolutely unacceptable, and which risk making us part of the daily statistics.
By openly contravening the state and federal health policies currently in place, their operation is pushing the boundaries of legality. By allowing our working conditions to deteriorate, the very continuity of their numerous programs is under threat. By making our physical presence in the country unfeasible, they are exposing us to increasingly hostile immigration policies. Here is one important fact: more than half of us who are affiliated with the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences are immigrants. We are also subject to restrictions imposed on us in our home countries, whether Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, Italy, Iran, or China. The university’s strategy, aside from divisively isolating us from each other by responding on a case-by-case basis, seems to be little more than biding its time until the end of the semester, promising solutions that get put off from one week to the next. That extra time, of course, helps the university administration while simultaneously making our situation all the more untenable.
A very similar reality is taking shape, so far as I can gather, in several universities throughout the U.S., from San Francisco to Chicago to Boston. A friend of mine from Chile, who has been desperately trying to return home from California, told me that she received an urgent offer to buy her car. The buyer, however, does not need it to commute, but rather as a place to live during this crisis. In the meantime, LATAM constantly cancels and postpones my friend’s flights, leaving her in limbo with her partner and son.
In Chile, following a well-worn policy pattern, ANID (the National Agency for Research and Development) has been doing everything humanly possible to completely ignore the critical situation in which Chilean researchers around the world, like my friend, are living and working. With that twisted form of honesty characteristic of bureaucracy, they have admitted they have no contingency plans at all, not only regarding funding, but also in terms of health insurance. The Minister of Science, whose mission is to promote science, is now administering budget cuts which make that mission unviable. Moreover, a right-wing group in Congress has been trying to take advantage of the crisis and undermine the future of scientific research (upon which the development of Chile depends), by proposing that the graduate study-abroad scholarship Becas Chile be eliminated. Of course, the Chilean ruling class has for decades lacked any sort of national-development project, hence their hostility to such programs.
More than a sudden collapse of a managerial model, all over the world this process has served to gradually expose that model’s nature. The dichotomy between life and accumulation was already one of its cornerstones, and a basic aspect of contemporary experience. These latent conflicts, which we are all familiar with, crop up at every turn, at both the global and local level. In other words, this crisis is not bringing anything new to the scene; it is merely its truth blossoming under the same sun.
For now the issue is not whether Columbia University, like many other universities in the U.S., has abandoned its graduate student workers. That is already a fact. The question is whether or not they will reverse course, and if so, when and how. It was only on Friday, April 17, that mayor Bill de Blasio found out about the questionable policies Columbia University has been implementing, during an interview on WNYC radio—a call made by one of the members of our graduate cohort. The mayor responded that he was astounded and perplexed, especially considering the university’s vast financial endowment, which places it among the wealthiest institutions in New York—a state whose GDP is six times that of Chile. He stated he would look into it immediately.
Meanwhile, the university administration has been taking advantage of the crisis by implementing budget cuts that, far from offering any solution, are part of the program of precaritization prevalent throughout the world since at least 2008.
But no more. In response to all of this, and after years of negotiating to get the university to acknowledge us for what we are—workers—hundreds of my fellow graduate students at Columbia University have gone on strike as of Friday, April 24. Our immediate demands aim at reversing the race to the bottom and safeguarding the lives and working conditions of all student workers. What we are demanding is the bare minimum. Other institutions have agreed to implement comparable measures; Columbia remains intransigent.
The outcome of this situation will make clear what kind of institution we are dealing with, and what kind of future we are willing to build. But one thing has to be clear: if we manage to achieve a solution for all of us in the short or medium term, it will not be due to the benevolence of the administration, which, far from showing flexibility, has only hardened its position. Any solutions reached will be the result of collective and organized action by students and workers.
For the record: Mexico lost 1-3 in a penalty shootout, and Bulgaria ended the tournament in a dignified fourth place. The US has become, by far, the country with the most confirmed infections, and the death toll in the New York area alone is now close to 15,000. Before being connected to a ventilator in a New York City hospital—in an almost entirely privatized health care system—a dying patient asked a fundamental question to his nurse, “Who’s going to pay for it?” Sadly, there are no more spare soccer goals.
