Nell Geiser is a Columbia College senior majoring in comparative ethnic studies.

the following article appeared in The Spectator on April 26, 2006

We Are All Manhattanville

Columbia says it has to build a 17-acre biotech campus in West Harlem in order to stay on the cutting edge of academia. But should we trust this premise and identify ourselves with the goals of the trustees and President Bollinger?

What’s good for Columbia is not necessarily good for its students. In the analogous context of the nation-state, theorist Wilhelm Reich explains that the exploited lower-middle-class office worker engages in “a complete identification with the state power” and “his whole person is refashioned in line with the ruling class.” In the same way, students are tricked into thinking our interests are congruent with those of the University. From profit-driven patent scandals, in which Columbia made millions by illegally “double-patenting” pharmaceutical technology, to renovation of an $8 million townhouse for a star professor, many of the University’s pursuits do not serve education or public interest.

If we are interested in finding out whose interests the University does serve, we might note the difference between the institution’s actions and its rhetoric. Columbia’s willingness to employ eminent domain and bulldoze an entire low-income community demonstrates the University’s blatant self-authorization to develop without the consent of those affected. In order to obscure the negative impact of these actions, Columbia representatives make statements lauding the mutual benefits of the expansion. These pronouncements serve as crucial building blocks for consent on campus and among politicians. Despite this obfuscating layer of rhetoric, however, there are many people whose vantage points force them to see the contradictions.

Tomorrow at 4 p.m. outside the gates, West Harlem residents, workers, and business-owners will rally with students to protest the University’s unaccountable expansion plan. These aren’t anti-development die-hards. In fact, they’ve lined up behind a framework for mixed-use development put forward by the local community board, known as the 197-A Plan. I could spend the rest of this column explaining how that plan prioritizes affordable housing, local businesses, and good jobs, all while encouraging new development by entities like Columbia; hopefully you already know that. I’m more interested in devoting this, my last column of the year, to exploring why students should identify with the people on the other side of the bulldozer.

As we have seen, Columbia is not acting in the interests of students. We drag out what we can get educationally and walk away with a brand-name diploma, but we have little power to affect University processes and structures. Students are not part of governance, yet our presence is necessary for the existence of the institution. This puts us in a fundamentally antagonistic position in relation to University power structures.

Though we are bound up in a sophisticated, hegemonic plot that posits our presence at an elite educational institution as our key to success and social responsibility, attendance here actually reflects student investment in reproducing our own exploitation. Like the duped citizens of an authoritarian nation-state, we are trusting the University to protect our access to the free market, access that actually places us in a prime location for exploitation by globalized capital.

Similarly, we are told expansion will be good for students, yet the plan is to build science research facilities, classrooms, and eventually housing that will serve only faculty and graduate students. Our endorsement of the expansion plan based on the dubious claim that it will enhance the status of our University, and hence our degrees, has no concrete evidence to back it up.

If we recognized our relationship to the University, we might decide to drop out, or at the very least identify with those parties outside the gates of Columbia who also inhabit a fundamental antagonism vis-a-vis the University’s real estate machine.

Columbia’s history as a landlord and developer is the original sin of the institution against the surrounding community. By depleting the rent-stabilized housing stock and implementing “quality of life” measures in Morningside Heights, the University has constituted itself in opposition to Harlem’s low-income black and Latino majority.

The Manhattanville expansion is an extension of these constitutive exclusions. Even administrators acknowledge that Columbia will be a powerful motor for rising rents in the area surrounding the development footprint. Yet they tell us that the expansion is a positive, just as all free market initiatives that generate economic growth are unquestionably good. Many residents of Manhattanville, however, have a very different conception of the ethics and ramifications of the expansion.

This alternative epistemology of expansion looks for the effects of Columbia’s actions on long-term residents and businesses, the power dynamics at play when a university develops in a low-income area, the inherent value and rights of the existing community, and the importance of state and corporate accountability to vulnerable populations. As distinct from a free market frame that privileges the movement of capital, this interpretive lens engages notions of self-determination and economic justice.

If we can open ourselves up to this oppositional way of knowing the expansion, students will be the community’s strongest allies. But in order to revoke our consent, we cannot merely claim neutrality, because it indicates approval. Instead, we have to take action, and we have to tell the administration loudly and clearly that we are all Manhattanville.