Interview with Grant Miner: Union President Fired by Columbia for Palestine Solidarity Won’t Back Down
Jeff Rosenberg: Welcome to Grant Miner, the President of the Student Workers of Columbia, UAW Local 2710, the union of teaching and research assistants at Columbia University. Grant has been a leader in the union for years and also an active organizer with the Palestine solidarity movement.
Recently, millions have been protesting across the country against the arrest and ongoing detainment of Mahmoud Khalil. Mahmoud is a recent graduate from Columbia University and a well-known and loved Palestinian leader of the solidarity movement in New York. Soon after Mahmoud’s arrest, Columbia issued major discipline against workers and students, including firing and suspending Grant just one day prior to the start of the union’s contract negotiations with the university.
To start, can you help us understand what’s been happening recently at Columbia?
Grant Miner: To provide some context, Mahmoud Khalil was abducted by DHS on March 8. DHS then abruptly and illegally revoked his green card. So what was his crime? He helped lead a mass movement against the genocide that galvanized millions of young people across this country. He had served as a negotiator for the encampments at Columbia, as well as a spokesperson more generally at press conferences, so he was always a highly public figure in the movement. For bravely speaking out, he became the first leader of the campus movement to be targeted by DHS. Since his arrest, we’ve seen the government come for other leaders like him as well.
We now know that Betar USA, an extremist Zionist organization in the US, proudly claimed credit for providing Mahmoud’s name along with many others in a list to the Trump administration of pro-Palestine immigrant activists essentially as a deportation hit list. They’ve painted Mahmoud and other leaders stirring up trouble on campus. The trouble is the genocide itself. The movement was built upon the widespread moral condemnation of the genocide in Gaza – a position which has become widely popular and held by most American youth.
We have now had two students at Columbia who have had their visa status revoked. This came after the Trump administration threatened to withhold $400 million in federal funds, with promises to cut more, if Columbia didn’t agree to demands, including political neutrality, campus safety with arrest powers, and what would effectively amount to a ban on almost all forms of campus protest. More immediately, they demanded the expulsion or suspension of student protestors – myself included. While the billionaire’s have been on a rampage to slash federal funding and programs, they saw an opportunity to use these funding cuts to also suppress free speech and dissent on our campuses.
Columbia was all too happy to see that a union officer was caught in the Trump admin’s crosshairs, and is using that as an excuse to try to break our union too. They’ve always been enemies of campus unionism and have fought us hard every step of the way.
JR: Columbia was one of the countless campuses across the country that saw protests against the genocide all last year. The image of these protests has been twisted by the media – representing students opposing a genocide and system of racist apartheid as themselves racist and antisemetic. Help us clear the air. What really happened at Columbia with these protests? Why do we see this narrative about the movement and where does it come from?
GM: The mainstream media would have you think that campuses across the country erupted in violent protests dripping in antisemitism. This really couldn’t be further from the truth, and I say this as someone who was there and have since spoken with organizers who joined these protests across the country. Let me be clear – the Columbia protests, and the encampments as a whole, were protests against our universities’ complicity in genocide. We sat on lawns, protested, and educated ourselves on the struggle of the Palestinian people. The response from the administration was to violently suppress us through the NYPD and by emboldening counter protestors.
This also isn’t the first time students have used these same tactics at Columbia. In fact, Hamilton Hall has been occupied five times previously. In 1968 and 1972, students occupied Hamilton Hall for a week to protest against U.S. crimes in Vietnam. In 1985, protestors blockaded and padlocked it for three weeks to organize for divestment from Apartheid South Africa. And more locally focused, in 1982 students occupied the Hall to stop Columbia’s demolition of the Audubon Ballroom. Then 1996 saw another four day occupation to demand Columbia establish ethnic studies departments. Many in Columbia’s current leadership would have praised these actions not long ago, as a proud part of Columbia’s history. However, that same pride apparently disappears when we stand up today.
Even after these protests took place and the genocide in Gaza raged on with the full support of the Biden Administration, Columbia’s leadership refused to cut their ties with Israel. Ultimately, the divestment of American universities from apartheid South African played an important role in bringing about the end of that horrible system of subjugation and exploitation there. We continue to call on our universities today to stand on the right side of history and cut ties with genocide. We know that history will ultimately judge us, and I’m proud to know where I stood and continue to stand.
JR: Columbia’s repression against pro-Palestine voices on campus marked a sudden escalation against the movement. As you mentioned earlier, it was revealed that Trump threatened Columbia with cutting $400 million in federal funds to Columbia. They essentially told Columbia that if they wanted to avoid these cuts that they needed to comply with a set of demands to harshly discipline and repress pro-Palestine voices. Columbia quickly complied and even went beyond these demands. What do you make of these threats and what it means for the fight on our campuses?
GM: This is an unprecedented move by the federal government to flex this leverage over them to get universities to interfere with the political lives of their students and employees. These withheld funds were without a doubt the main reason for the harsh sanctions against students. Nobody, not faculty, staff, or our lawyers expected such harsh sanctions. The suspension and expulsions were fairly shocking, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard of them revoking degrees from students who already graduated before.
The federal government is empowering the right-wing university admin in order to crush dissent in a mutually beneficial arrangement, albeit with some initial coercion. Worse still, it emboldens the right wing in academia to silence dissent and political discussion in ways they’ve always wished they could over the past 18 months. We already know right-wing alumni, staff, and faculty are in group chats whose purpose is to dox students. Now, they are able to work with the government directly to get their political enemies – people who are their students and coworkers – deported. It’s disgusting.
JR: The illegal arrest of Mahmoud and the overall wave of repression of student activists has hit a nerve across the country, and sits at the cross section of many attacks on working people. The billionaires have actually laid out their strategy clearly, which they refer to as “flooding the zone.” This means issuing so many attacks on all fronts at once – attacking immigrants, education, federal workers, social programs, and the Palestine movement – that we can’t respond to everything at once. The intention is to scatter and divide us, so that all progressive forces are isolated and weakened, and ultimately to demoralize us. The arrest of Mahmoud is part of the war on immigrants, the war on education, the war on organized labor, and, of course, the war on the Palestine solidarity movement – because these are all part of the war on working people and any organized resistance against the billionaires.
The upsurge in response to this egregious case has breathed new life into the movement though. What does this say about the possibility of our fight back when these movements are joined together?
GM: To me, this is certainly a case where the government has overstepped in their efforts to repress this movement. Regular people are hearing about young people being hunted by ICE agents and watching videos of people being snatched off the streets by masked plainclothes officers. Yes, people are scared, but at the same time it’s bringing in so many more people who were not entirely sure they supported the Palestinian cause, but they feel motivated to join us because the opposition is so clearly morally repugnant. They are also seeing that we have a shared enemy and are starting to understand that these aren’t isolated issues.
As of right now, I think we are in a moment where the movement for Palestine has been adopted so widely among everyday American people – and young people especially – that it is no longer politically viable to continue this war without taking steps domestically to ensure protest is crushed. As you said, it's a war on immigrants, federal workers, education, all of us. All of these attacks are being pushed by the billionaires, which makes it all the more necessary that we band together so that we’re strong enough to win.
JR: Columbia grad workers were at the forefront of the latest wave of grad unionization with the NLRB decision in 2016 opening a path to recognition. The grad union movement has grown much stronger since then, with new heights of membership, organization, and militancy. As the billionaire agenda continues to come for all working people, what role can our unions play in fighting back?
GM: Trump is hoping we’ll just roll over and give up, but it’s not going to be like that. The reality is that higher education unions are far stronger now than they were during Trump’s first term. We’ve been seeing an organizing surge in higher ed over the last five years. This means more people are in unions, and even those who aren’t in unions are seeing major change on their campuses. Many grad unions especially have brought a new level of mass organization and power to campaigns on their campuses, and they are sharing those lessons with other struggles on their campuses.
This means that more young people are being exposed to union solidarity politics. At the same time, we’ve seen a pretty unexpected shift from the labor movement over this period as well. There were some progressive unions early on who called for a ceasefire, but that continued to grow across the labor movement. I remember when my union, the UAW, held a press conference on the White House lawn joining the calls for a ceasefire. It felt like a major turning point where standing for justice in Palestine became the norm, not the exception, in the labor movement. It was one of my proudest moments to be a part of UAW. Now a majority of the labor movement is standing for peace and justice in Palestine.
When our members graduate, we know that everyone has the chance to take the union politics they pick up on campus with them to their next job. I would say that unions and workers in general are realizing that they can actually function as an independent pole of US politics outside of the Democrat-Republican binary, and we need to flex our muscle to stand up for what’s right. We are going through dark times, but my hope is that we can see politics in this country transform if we can struggle to the other side of this.
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