The Ivy League's Legitimacy Crisis

Columbia University’s incredible profit bonanza after the pandemic is indicative of a wider problem.


As a year of labor militancy comes to a close, the largest active strike in the United States is taking place in New York City, not on the factory floor, but outside the university. Nearly 3,000 graduate workers at Columbia University have been on the picket lines since early November, in a heated battle for increased wages and improved benefits that has seen the administration threaten to fire and replace striking workers. It’s the second time this year that Columbia grad workers have walked out.

The strike is the latest development in a multi-year struggle for a first contract that dates back to 2016, when graduate students secured a favorable ruling from the National Labor Relations Board that affirmed them as employees with the right to unionize. In particular, Columbia student workers are asking for a wage floor of $45,000 annually for first-year doctoral students and a minimum wage of $26 for hourly workers, as well as third-party arbitration for harassment complaints and improved medical and dental benefits. Right now, grad student workers have annual wages as low as $29,000 for student workers at the School of Social Work.

Those negotiations come in the context of a banner year for Columbia’s finances. The university’s endowment reported a 32.3 percent return in the fiscal year that ended in 2021. The holdings soared from $11.26 billion in 2020 to $14.35 billion in 2021. Columbia’s endowment ranks fifth-highest among Ivy League institutions, trailing Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Penn. That prodigious reserve makes a mockery of any talk about the university being too cash-strapped to offer its graduate workers a decent wage.

But Columbia isn’t the only institution to convert the global misery of pandemic into record-shattering financial returns. Indeed, the endowment spike required no financial wizardry on the part of Columbia or any other university, other than owning securities at a time when asset prices zoomed. Every single Ivy League institution returned 32 percent or better in the most recent fiscal year. Brown’s endowment grew by a mind-boggling 51.5 percent to lead the pack; Yale, Penn, and Princeton all grew 40-odd percent. For Princeton, that growth put its holdings at $37.7 billion. Harvard, meanwhile, a laggard of the bunch, returned 33 percent, good for more than $11 billion, its endowment now summing up to $53.2 billion.

Read more: https://prospect.org/education/ivy-leagues-legitimacy-crisis/
(American Prospect)