Stop the Cuts! Restore Graduate Instructor Jobs
As SWC attempts to bargain for a fair contract, administrators have been working tirelessly behind the scenes since at least Fall 2024 to eliminate graduate teaching at Columbia. Most of these cuts are to mandatory classes every undergraduate takes – “the Core,” Columbia’s great books program – a first year composition class called “University Writing,” and language classes across departments. This is not a straightforward cost-saving measure or a Trump mandate. Not only is Columbia one of the richest schools in the country, the University is actually spending extra money to cut graduate jobs by paying out many of our contracts and hiring contingent faculty to replace us. This is pure union-busting.
We call upon supporters of the Core Curriculum and every other program in the University to resist the casualization of academic labor and ask Columbia to recommit to strengthening – not weakening – our academic community.
Learn more and share resources
We’ve collected materials to explain where our jobs went, how, and why. You can also print or download any of these materials and share them on campus billboards or on social media. Please help us spread the word!
Job cuts to the Core have been especially severe. The university describes the Core as the “defining element of a Columbia College education.” We agree. The Core is foundational not only to the education of both undergraduate and graduate students, but to the academic life of the university itself. Through the teaching labor of graduate students, Core classes become a place where students engage deeply and critically with works of art, literature, and music, and orient themselves to the range of perspectives that structure contemporary civilization. Despite Columbia’s stated commitment to these classes, the university is seeking to casualize Core instruction (replacing stable jobs with contingent positions), increase class sizes, and cut graduate student instructors.
Although administrators in the Arts and Sciences had already revealed their intent to eliminate graduate teaching positions, concrete plans to replace graduate teaching labor did not emerge until May. The detailed timeline we’ve reconstructed through interviews with faculty and staff shows that administrators first contacted the Office of the Core in early May to ask them to eliminate graduate preceptors. Then, in early June, the University implemented a series of measures to replace graduate labor across departments. Student workers were never informed of the hiring freeze.
In June, Columbia began surreptitiously hiring adjunct lecturers to replace us. Hiring escalated on July 4, when Columbia posted ads targeting current PhD students at peer institutions rather than hire from its existing grad labor pool or the recent alumni it usually sources. It is our assessment that the contract extension was offered as a thin pretense to convince University affiliates that jobs that were already gone could be won back if SWC made major concessions. But the elimination of our jobs in late May and early June signals that this was pure spin. Our jobs had already been lost.
By organizing to win a strong contract this fall and keeping the pressure on the administration, we can restore and protect these jobs for years to come.
Resources and explainers:
Add your voice
Anyone can sign this open letter calling on Columbia University to restore graduate preceptors to the Core Curriculum, Columbia’s famous mandatory “great books” program every undergraduate takes.
Open letter: Save Core Preceptor jobs
Pledge not to replace graduate labor
This letter is open to ladder and contingent faculty as well as PhD student workers recruited from other institutions to pledge not to replace Columbia student workers’ labor as the University scrambles to fill our jobs.
Open letter: Save Core Preceptor jobs
Sign if you’re Columbia faculty: “Our institutional mission is to train the next generation of scholars and teachers. In this decision [to cut instructor jobs], we find ourselves, as faculty, institutionally unable to carry out this mission.”
In the news
News is always coming in! Here is recent coverage of Columbia’s graduate instructor job cuts and our campaign to restore them.
Selected coverage:
Labor Notes, “Columbia Tries to Undermine Its Unions, Hire Scab Instructors.” Jenny Brown, August 13, 2025
”Imagine you get a letter from your manager a week before you are set to teach classes, removing you from teaching duties but saying you’ll get paid anyway. This odd experience has happened to around 137 graduate students at Columbia University in New York City who teach core curriculum, language, and writing classes. They are members of Student Workers of Columbia (SWC), Auto Workers Local 2710.”Spectator, “‘Textbook union busting’: As SWC-UAW negotiations stall, Columbia replaces grad student teaching positions with external recruits.” Maya Henry and Spencer Davis, August 5, 2025.
”’I was told that teaching my Core class in my seventh year was a sure thing, and so I only applied for a handful of other funding opportunities for the year because I had a solid plan already,’ a seventh-year doctoral student wrote in a statement to Spectator. ‘But now it’s one month before classes are starting and I have no idea what I’m doing next year.’”