Students, Adjunct Faculty Stage Sit-In To #SaveColumbia

By Selena Fragassi in News on May 3, 2015 6:15PM

The annual May Day was marked this year by a group of upset Columbia College students and adjunct professors who together staged a sit-in at the South Loop campus on Friday night to protest upcoming changes for the new fall 2015 school year. At the heart of the matter is the loss of nearly 100 teaching jobs, and the reduced salaries of 400 employees, that will result from upping class numbers and cutting class schedules that school officials say is necessary for fiscal budgets.

One teacher explains the situation:

The sit-in was held outside the office of Columbia College President Kwang-Wu Kim, who came into his role in 2013 after serving as the dean and director of the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts with seemingly amicable relations with the adjunct staff. The situation started deteriorating a year later, according to Diana Vallera, president of the Part-Time Faculty Union of part-time college educators. She alleges that a contract that assures the union "prior notice of and ability to negotiate staff cuts" has been all but ignored and told the Sun-Times:

“We started seeing a reversal happening. All of a sudden, the contract’s not being implemented. The amount of harm that there would be to our membership by Columbia not honoring this contract is great.”

College representative Cara Birch denied that claim in a response to the Sun-Times, saying that “adjunct jobs are dependent on demand.” Further, Birch said, “Columbia College Chicago continues to honor its contract with the part-time faculty union. While the College does not eliminate part-time faculty union jobs, only a certain number of part-time teaching positions are available every semester based on curriculum, enrollment and class registration. This is the same process the College uses every year.”

That didn’t stop the PFAC Union from filing official charges with the National Labor Relations Board on Friday while faculty and students took it a step further launching a social media campaign, #SaveColumbia, and organizing the sit-in that ended peacefully around 11 p.m.

The move met with solidarity by nearby Roosevelt University:

Solidarity from our brothers and sisters at Roosevelt!!! #savecolumbia pic.twitter.com/5uYu8mHQZg — casey e w (@caseycew) May 1, 2015

Students have additionally voiced their opposition to a proposed new “Big Chicago” class structure that would swap out a 17-student size freshman seminar class for a lecture hall design for nearly 120 students.

How the fuck am I supposed to get through a valid, helpful critique with a huge class size?? #savecolumbia — Bianca Garcia (@helloimbiancaa) April 15, 2015

Casey Walker, a participant at the sit-in told the newspaper: “Students are fed up. Part-time faculty are being cut without warning. Programs and classes are being cut, as well as a lot of student work positions, while tuition is rising. We feel that raising class sizes goes against the core of what the university is about, and we plan to be here until our demands are met.”