Columbia University has a renowned department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures. It boasts a faculty of 36 professors and lecturers. In the last five years, they’ve produced 52 publications on topics ranging from the regional novel to medieval heresy. This year alone, they’ve offered 119 classes, where hundreds if not thousands of students speak Spanish (as well as other languages).
The Spanish language—written and spoken—is clearly prized by Columbia University.
Unless you’re a worker.
According to a petition being circulated by the Columbia Dining Workers and the Student Worker Solidarity group, the executive director of Columbia Dining, Vicki Dunn, has banned dining hall workers from speaking Spanish in the presence of students. The students don’t like it. She also banned the workers from eating in the presence of the students, forcing the workers to dine in a closet instead. (Mercifully that ruling was revoked.) And more generally she seems to take random student complaints as an opportunity to issue arbitrary and ever-changing edicts.
The two groups are circulating a petition with the following demands:
1. Columbia dining appears to have temporarily reversed the closet rule, but continue to discriminate against workers for speaking Spanish. This must cease immediately.
2. We as students demand that Columbia administration stop using individual student complaints to justify racist and degrading policies such as the prohibition of specific languages and the relegation of workers to cramped and unsanitary spaces.
“This shouldn’t be happening in student’s names, own your own decision, don’t try to pin this on students” – Anonymous Columbia Dining Worker
3. Workers ask that from now on, all new workplace policies be written down, publicly visible, and negotiated with their unions so as to prevent continued abuses.
Please read it and sign it.
{ 48 comments }
Mitch Guthman 04.24.15 at 10:20 pm
I would like to know how many students object to the workers speaking Spanish and why they find it to be objectionable. I find it incomprehensible that anyone would care about what language people are speaking “in their presence†and I simply cannot believe that any significant number of university students would find having food service workers speak Spanish “in their presence†to be objectionable. All other questions aside, what the hell difference could it possibly make to them?
It also seems like a deeply stupid idea for students to make these underpaid, poorly treated workers angry. Speaking for myself only, it has been my lifelong practice to treat the people who handle my food with the utmost of respect. Having briefly worked in the restaurant business, I have some understanding and sympathy for those who do this physically demanding and generally poorly paid work—I think the trends in American society that make it difficult for service workers to unionize need to be reversed. But also, as I say, it’s also very important to remember that only an idiot makes an enemy of someone who is handling your food. Just a word to the wise, so to speak.
William Berry 04.24.15 at 10:23 pm
My God, that is creepy. Petition signed.
maidhc 04.24.15 at 11:16 pm
I could possibly understand this if the food service workers were in the habit of insulting their customers in Spanish. But it seems unlikely. Wouldn’t a fairly large percentage of students have taken Spanish in high school?
Fuzzy Dunlop 04.24.15 at 11:34 pm
Is it common for lower-level management to implement policies like this in non-university settings, like hotels? I second what (I think) Mitch Guthman implied, it’s not the students who wanted this, surely somebody in management wanted this policy for reasons having nothing to do with students.
William Berry 04.24.15 at 11:44 pm
As someone from a working-class back-ground, and born-and-raised in the heart of the heartland, I think I have some idea of what is going on here.
Clueless, white-bread students from a conformist back-ground are likely similar in their attitudes to many of the nativist types I see often in my part of the world. They think that anyone speaking a foreign language around them is saying bad shit about them (because it’s all about me, right?). They also tend to believe that anyone living in Amerika speaking a furrin’ tongue actually understands English and only pretends not to.
And they find a willing ear in someone– well, someone named “Vicki Dunn”, if you get my meaning.
sc 04.24.15 at 11:54 pm
as someone else from a midwestern working-class background… aren’t Columbia students supposed to be better and more cosmopolitan than this? didn’t they all just make hella news this year for toting a mattress around campus?
js. 04.25.15 at 12:09 am
The fuck? I also suspect that this has very little to do with the students, but if more than, I don’t know, _one_ student made this complaint, that is seriously fucking disgusting.
(Petition will be signed as soon as I’m not on a phone. Thanks for the heads up.)
William Berry 04.25.15 at 12:24 am
@sc:
I think the problem here might be the generalization: “Columbia students”.
Some Columbia students are privileged, bigoted ass-holes. Their parents are privileged, bigoted, ass-hole Republicans.
Many, if not most, Columbia students are civilized human beings who “drag mattresses around” and do other things in solidarity with the abused and oppressed.
Mitch Guthman 04.25.15 at 12:52 am
William Berry at 5,
I wouldn’t bet the farm on somebody named “Vicki Dunn†being who you think she is. I don’t know how things are in NYC or the Midwest, but, if LA is any indication, a lot of the old clues about ethnicity and heritage like names or even appearance don’t count for much anymore. There’s been enough intermarriage that she could be from any background or heritage. She could, ironically enough, easily be Hispanic.
sc 04.25.15 at 12:53 am
they may be privileged, bigoted young-republicans, but they still got into an Ivy, right? i kind of expect them, even the ones with more money than brains, to not act like they fell off the turnip truck.
William Berry 04.25.15 at 1:26 am
@ Mitch:
Well, admittedly rash speculation on my part, but I often have pretty good instincts about these things.
Try: dining.columbia.edu
Greg Hays 04.25.15 at 1:34 am
Mitch Guthman @ 9,
You can find a photo and brief bio of Vicki Dunn here (along with her e-mail address):
http://dining.columbia.edu/about-us
Whether she self-identifies as Hispanic I cannot say. The staff in general looks admirably diverse, which makes this policy (if correctly reported) all the more surprising.
Alexir 04.25.15 at 1:45 am
Wait. That’s 10.2 pubs per year. Or 0.29 pubs/year/faculty. It’s not my field but that seems a bit on the thin side. One suspects that Hispanic/Iberian Studies is maybe not the hottest dept at Columbia. Besides, why and how is this relevant to the topic at hand?
That said, the dining services supervisor at Columbia is obviously the wrong person for the job. She needs to be reassigned. Fast.
navarro 04.25.15 at 2:08 am
in the 80s i had an acquaintance who was a master’s student in geology at a small university in texas, which i also attended, who was so offended at hearing people speaking spanish in his presence that he would approach spanish-speakers in public places, demand to know if they could speak english and if they answered in the affirmative scathed them for not doing so and if they answered in the negative he shouted a phrase he had learned– “aprender ingles o salir !” and stormed back to our group with a look of accomplishment on his face. about half of our mutual acquaintances applauded him for doing so. it only took a couple of times witnessing that before i stopped hanging out with him. still, i can easily believe a sizable number of students did complain about it.
Mitch Guthman 04.25.15 at 3:15 am
William Berry at 11 and Greg Hays,
Interesting. Sometimes the obvious answer is the right one. Thanks to you both for tracking down this information.
And I must agree that seeing such a seemingly highly qualified and diverse group heading down the “English First†wingnut path is very puzzling. Perhaps if there’s an actual professional journalist amongst CT’s readers, he or she might engage in some journalism and go to the campus and talk to the people who are involved?
Belle Waring 04.25.15 at 3:46 am
As an alumna I’ll extra bitch at them. I can call them, even. I think the internet must have to some degree done away with anyone’s ability to be truly out of touch with the mainstream of modern life, so that my anecdotes are irrelevant, but not entirely so, since growing up in a small town in eastern Oregon is still growing up in a small town in eastern Oregon. So I will relate them. When I arrived at Columbia these many 20+ years ago my mom and I decided it would be easiest just to take the train from DC without much luggage, and then buy whatever I needed in NY (and nobody kitted out their dorm rooms like now!) We arrived to find an room with a girl face-down, bawling her eyes out on the bare mattress of one of the beds. My roommate had sent her things very early and under the principle of FILO couldn’t claim them yet. She had never been on a plane before and was from a small town that was all Baptist in east Oregon where dancing was against the fucking law. Yes. This was some Footloose shit. I mean, I struggle to think how you make that a law, but I guess you just ensure there are no high school or organized dances using social pressure. Anyway, my mom and I took her shopping and I
gradually introduced her to a life of debauchery and was often put on the phone to argue against her father, a Baptist lay minister, on fine points of theology, which I am good at, using points from the original Greek and my natural sophistrybecame fast friends with her. Another girl on our floor was from Appleton, Wisconsin, and was exactly as wholesome as you think. One girl kept kosher and had her pans and plates in two labeled stacks on the shared kitchen, with the firm admonition that no one was to use them EVER. That hippie guy that turns an awkward hug into a sideboob grope every time was caught frying bacon in one but in his defense didn’t even know what kosher was, coming from some state that starts with an I where they evidently don’t teach you anything about Jewish people. It’s true that when I was up for a scholarship to go to Oxford for 2 years after graduating, which I would have won (or not) except they had given it to a Classics person 2 years in a row and “didn’t want it turning into a Classics prize” (OK), my single competitor as a finalist was a classmate from my class of 68 at the National Cathedral School for Girls in D.C. I think of my class of 68 four of us went to Columbia? Six went to Harvard, and it was a resented hard upper limit, thought to be yearly enforced.So yes, prep schools prep their kids for Ivy League schools. But yes, Ivy League schools really do want to grab some fresh of the turnip truck person from Oklahoma. They love them some smart kid from Oklahoma. And suddenly moving to New York is probably particularly alienating. So, although it sucks, I can believe that there are some assholes who don’t like people to speak other languages around them. Not to say some of those assholes don’t come from prep schools, they very well might! I just mean there are genuinely likely to be some people for whom it is more of a novelty. I say this, but I think of the immigration from Central America in the last 20 years and I think, really? My small town in South Carolina has Mexican people. But damned if my small town in South Carolina doesn’t have a ton of people who hate people to speak Mexican, so it all makes sense. My dad is a wise man, and he is an incredibly generous tipper, especially at restaurants he likes. He will tip the full bill to somebody, when he finds a new place he likes. Not that he stops later! But it earns him much love and when he walks in the door everyone’s happy to see him and wants him in their section or tells him what’s good or gives him the last piece of pie. I have been a waitress and I know he’s right when he says you should never, ever piss off the people making and serving your food…
Mitch Guthman 04.25.15 at 3:57 am
Maidhc at 3,
I’ve been thinking about that and I agree workers insulting students isn’t likely to be the root cause. After all, if the workers were insulting students who don’t have any Spanish, the students wouldn’t know they were being insulted, so why should they care if the workers speak Spanish “in their presenceâ€?
If a large enough proportion of the workers were insulting a sufficient number of Spanish speaking students for this to be common knowledge, I would suppose that would be cited as violating the actually very reasonable prohibition on insulting students. But the issue would be the insults and not the language; the food service administrators would be on very solid ground then and presumably would be trumpeting the misconduct by the workers as a justification for the ban on Spanish.
I think Navarro is right that there’s probably some students who don’t think people should speak Spanish in this country. Speaking for myself, I think that’s silly and self-defeating but it isn’t something that unique to Americans. The central place of the French language in French-speaking Canada is zealously guarded. And, having recently visited Belgium, I can’t deny that language is an important component of identity and often evokes very strong feelings. So perhaps some of this is worry about speaking English is understandable.
Making the workers eat in a closet surrounded by garbage, on the other hand, was vile and inexcusable. Ms. Dunn seems to have momentarily confused her university with a feudal society and the student body with the offspring of the hereditary nobility, which seems to me far more “un-American†than permitting the peasantry to speak Spanish.
bad Jim 04.25.15 at 4:51 am
I learned Abstract Algebra at Berkeley from a Japanese professor who had nearly no English (and not always enough cigarettes; one day he bummed one from me). Note-taking was a breeze: I just copied down everything he wrote on the blackboard, winding up with two texts.
It’s incomprehensible that this could happen in a place as cosmopolitan as New York. Columbia did refuse Richard Feynman because they already had enough Jews, so perhaps it’s just a continuation of tradition.
LFC 04.25.15 at 5:26 am
navarro @13
This is not the 1980s. A lot has changed since then. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that Spanish has become a de facto second language in parts of the U.S. (And that’s fine with me, although I took French in school, not Spanish.) Also, as others have mentioned, for these (supposed or alleged) student objections to workers speaking Spanish to have been made in New York, of all places, really is absurd. I don’t care if a student comes from a tiny farming town in Iowa or Indiana (or wherever) with few Hispanics; that’s really no excuse. (It might have been in 1970 or ’80, but it isn’t now.)
MPAVictoria 04.25.15 at 5:50 am
We do not respect working people. That is the root cause of all of this.
bad Jim 04.25.15 at 6:23 am
MPAVictoria: precisely. Moreso if there’s an easy way to distinguish them from us.
Belle Waring 04.25.15 at 6:27 am
Agreed. I think the US has changed so dramatically in its demographic makeup since the 80s and 90s that everyone in the country is likely to have experienced nearby residents who are Spanish-speaking. And even years ago it was the default language of D.C. public schools. It was just that no one ever learned any Spanish.
JanieM 04.25.15 at 9:06 am
This is not the 1980s. A lot has changed since then. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that Spanish has become a de facto second language in parts of the U.S. (And that’s fine with me, although I took French in school, not Spanish.)
I think the US has changed so dramatically in its demographic makeup since the 80s and 90s that everyone in the country is likely to have experienced nearby residents who are Spanish-speaking.<i/
If the fact that it's not 1980 and that almost everyone might have experienced near-by Spanish-speaking residents by this time is relevant, it’s quite possibly in the opposite way from the one LFC and Belle both seem to implying. I know people from various parts of the country who are bitterly vocal today about all these new people who, in their view, are refusing to learn English, unlike earlier generations, who were (allegedly) eager to learn it. (My grandfather is rumored to have said, “My kids are American, they can talk American” instead of his native Italian.)
The people I’ve heard express this kind of resistance are a long way from being wingnuts, they’re not right-wingers at all, they’re just ordinary people who are afraid of change and not well informed about how things go from generation to generation in every wave of immigrants, including (I’ve read, as far as language goes) the current one.
I was taken aback myself a number of years ago to walk into the brand new Best Buy store (the first one in Maine, where I live) and see signs in both English and Spanish. Not counting kids learning Spanish in school, there’s a vanishingly small number of Spanish-speaking people in Maine (the whitest state in the nation), whereas there was a long history of discrimination against Franco-Americans, and there are still pockets of French-speaking Mainers who remember that quite well. And there are still (if random google sources are to be believed) 15 or 20 times more French than Spanish speakers in Maine. So having Spanish appearing on signs, especially after the history of suppression of French – not to mention native American languages like Passamaquoddy – is ironic, to say the least.
I’m not defending the resentment, much less the appalling stories Corey relays from Columbia. But familiarity does not necessarily inspire comfort; it can just as easily inspire fear and resistance. That the development of a “de facto second language†in parts of this country is a disheartening and threatening change to some people is as predictable as the sunrise, and as familiar. (A letter of recommendation from my dad’s former employer to his prospective new one after WWII: “He’s a hard worker, despite the fact that his people are Italian.†Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.)
BruceB 04.25.15 at 11:38 am
I’m trying to get my head around this one. This is at Columbia University, in New York City, one of the most culturally diverse places on the planet, where, if you walk around the city, you can probably hear most of the world’s major languages spoken (and probably a few lesser known languages as well)?
Are they actually trying to actively discourage bilingualism, or even multilingualism everywhere, as though actively speaking more than one language is a bad thing? And this is at a supposedly world-class university? I mean, I always thought that universities were for, you know, teaching, and for research, and especially for expanding knowledge.
Well, silly me, my bad.
And management doesn’t want the employees taking among themselves or, heaven forfend, mixing with students! The horror, the horror… Who knows, they might actually, you know, like, learn something?
BruceB 04.25.15 at 11:41 am
…oops! Last paragraph, it should read “talking among themselves”.
I gonna get another cup of coffee…
tsts 04.25.15 at 3:29 pm
@Mitch Guthman: While there are many places in Europe and the world where people are intolerant of other nationalities and languages, I have actually found this tendency to object to people speaking another language in their presence to be more common in the US. This weird way in which some (often otherwise very nice) people almost apologetically say that hearing people speak another language “in their presence” somehow makes them “uncomfortable”. Overall, the US is probably more tolerant than most other places when it comes to language, but there is a certain style of polite intolerance that is very American.
That, and of course the strong class structure that allows “managers” to impose arbitrary rules on “workers” that don’t really count.
Lupita 04.25.15 at 3:56 pm
There is also a strong tradition of “the customer is always right” which, together with the new management (a.k.a. leadership) style which includes evaluations, points, improvement plans, and, ultimately, the threat of dismissal, that leads managers to be very, very afraid of complaints, even irrational ones. How else can you keep up economic growth in times of dwindling demographic growth and resources?
Witt 04.25.15 at 8:10 pm
Petition signed. Columbia is wrong, hopefully they’ll be publicly embarrassed, and mayyybe the next supervisor will think twice before imposing such a rule.
But in general — I can’t say that the “not liking other languages spoken around me” has any particular class/geographic isolation connotations in my experience. Certainly I can think of (mostly white, sometimes black) people from small-town America who were more startled/gawking about people from other parts of the world when they encountered them, but in my experience, when it comes to language, rich white cosmopolitan city-dwellers are just as likely to be snots.
Moreover, I have on hundreds of occasions been among groups of immigrants in the US, and it is disheartening to say the least that this attitude is moderately prevalent there too. (Most often, given the numbers in the US, the situation is Spanish-speaking immigrants being upset that other immigrants are speaking Vietnamese or Wolof or whatever. But it can run in any direction.)
The kindest explanation I can come up with is that apparently (I can’t find the cite) our brains work harder trying to decipher background conversation in another language, just as they do when we overhear half of a phone conversation (in that case, our brain is trying to fill in the “missing half”). So perhaps that unconscious extra effort produces frustration.
The less-charitable part of me just thinks this is about power.
Marshall 04.25.15 at 8:20 pm
@Witt
Ethnocentrism, is all. Everybody (for some value of everybody) likes their own culture, but it’s too bad when difference = challenge. A general problem with human cultures high and low, I think.
adam.smith 04.25.15 at 8:25 pm
Having interacted a lot with students with a very similar demographic (and observed them interact with janitors, food workers, etc.), I’m not buying that there is any significant number of Columbia students who’d complain about food workers speaking Spanish. That’s not because I don’t think that there’s not a fair number who look down on food workers. There probably is. But everyone is used to food workers speaking Spanish–not just in Spanish Harlem, but also in corporate chains like Chipotle (where workers frequently speak Spanish passing on orders and otherwise). (Complaints about workers taking up space at tables I find horrifying, but less implausible).
This very much sounds like management looking to control workers. Btw. here’s the Columbia Spectator article: http://columbiaspectator.com/news/2015/04/24/student-worker-solidarity-circulates-petition-alleging-mistreatment-butler-caf%C3%A9 management appears to claim such a rule does not exist, though they don’t say it outright.
chairman 04.25.15 at 10:38 pm
Ever more, organizations seem to love dehumanizing any (non-executive) employees they have. Workers feeling comfortable enough to speak to each other in a language other than English? They should be too busy adhering to bureaucratic procedures during their shifts to talk to each other anyway! Sitting down and eating comfortably in a public area of their workspace? Absurd! Looking for “reasons” for these rules is probably missing the point, their justification is the very fact that they exist and that they make experience of the job more unpleasant and uncomfortable.
Collin Street 04.25.15 at 10:39 pm
I’ve worked at a place with an english-only policy: “work discussions in english” and “seriously, keep non-work discussions to a minimum on the factory floor” are both pretty sensible policies.
[whether student complaints actually exist is not hugely relevant, I think]
Witt 04.25.15 at 11:28 pm
Collin, just to clarify, are you arguing that those policies can be sensible or that they always are sensible?
I certainly understand why a policy that work conversations must happen in English could make sense in, say, a high-speed, dangerous setting where bad communication could harm or kill your co-workers.
But this is a university dining room. Probably the most dangerous thing around is a meat slicer or an oven. What important need is being served by preventing workers from chatting in the language of their choice?
Collin Street 04.26.15 at 12:47 am
If I were arguing “always” it’d mean I had convinced myself “always” which would mean I had what I felt was an adequate non-existence proof for alternatives, and I would have mentioned it.
Collin Street 04.26.15 at 12:57 am
My actual first-impression take is that if this were a legit OHS-type issue the students wouldn’t have been mentioned, and that mentioning “student complaints” kind of blows the game away: if you use bad arguments, it means you don’t have any good ones.
[I am working on the firm provisional conclusion that the manager is kind of entitled and terrible. “Student complaints don’t matter” because there are people in the general public who will complain about literally anything; the existence of complaints on some specific issue conveys no information.]
Witt 04.26.15 at 1:00 am
OK — in that case, obviously I misread you, because I took your “pretty sensible” and your comment about student complaints to imply that if there were student complaints, Columbia too might be “pretty sensible” in applying such a policy.
Do you think that? Or not?
(If you do think so, then I return to my question in 33.last — what important need is Columbia serving by implementing this policy?)
Witt 04.26.15 at 1:01 am
Whoops, comments crossed. Apologies!
maidhc 04.26.15 at 8:36 am
Around here, and I’ve heard the same thing about NYC, just about anyone who works in food service is Spanish-speaking. High-end, low-end, whatever type of cuisine. If you read anything about how to become a professional chef, you’ll hear that you’d better learn Spanish because that’s what people are going to be speaking in your kitchen. That includes very highly skilled workers in very upscale venues.
I am more used to seeing students working in university cafeterias, but I guess that shows I don’t hang out at the Ivies. Also I would expect to hear students chatting among themselves in Mandarin, Vietnamese, Hindi, Spanish and other languages. Is Columbia really such a white-bread place?
The idea that students should be kept apart from from the working classes is vile. As I said, I’m more used to cafeteria workers being other students, but maybe students should learn to have a little respect for the people who mop their floors.
I am sure you could find a few entitled jerks who would complain about their eardrums being assaulted with foreign phonemes, but I find it hard to believe this would be a majority view among students.
I mentioned the point about insulting people because there was a case like that a few years ago, but that was more of a case about women being able to feel comfortable at work, i.e., that other employees were not making remarks about them in another language.
Neville Morley 04.26.15 at 11:32 am
For some reason I’m reminded of Plato’s warning against having a load of slaves who speak the same language and so can communicate amongst themselves without the owner being certain what they’re up to; forcing them to talk in the master’s tongue makes them much easier to control.
AnthonyB 04.26.15 at 1:31 pm
If the students have a problem with foreign tongues, they will be unhappily surprised when they receive their diplomas, which are in Latin. Just to be mean, if they ask they should be told, “oh, that’s Spanish.”
stubydoo 04.26.15 at 2:40 pm
I’m inclined to think they there are real student complaints, but they are pure trolling. The kids who hang around in college Republican Club type circles will have learned that pissing off liberals is itself an important terminal value.
The idea of banning Spanish from a kitchen located in New York City is just beyond ridiculous. The city is full of delis where the staff is half Korean and half Honduran/Guatemalan &c and they constantly alternate between speaking to each other in Spanish and to customers in English (and every once in a while to a customer in Spanish). The idea that there is cause for complaint there is just plain mystifying and very foreign to any New Yorker. Supposedly some people who fundamentally hate the concept of a city like New York are ending up as students at Columbia for some reason, when they all could’ve just gone to Square State A&M and been much happier.
bianca steele 04.27.15 at 12:01 am
So I get back from vacation to find a reminder of my recurring nightmare where, due to some error or delay in signing up for meal plan, or the advent of the weekend or some other occasion, my only option is to eat at John Jay? As an alumnus, my reaction is yuck. Who cares what language people are using? (And as Belle said, everyone in New York speaks Spanish. For years I had somehow learned to understand Puerto Rican Spanish much better than Mexican, even though it’s supposedly hard to understand, presumably because that’s what I heard so much of the time.) And people deserve a decent place to take their breaks, which isn’t a garbage room. The administration should be ashamed to blame their decisions on rumors of complaints from students. “They should own their decisions” is exactly right.
OTOH I knew a grad student, for instance, who was freaked out by the whole city thing and insisted on referring to street musicians in Times Square, and to the sax player outside the main gate on Broadway, and to people selling used books and things on the sidewalk as “beggars.”
Jay C 04.27.15 at 1:23 am
bianca steele @ 42:
So, just out of interest, how did your friend the grad student refer to actual *beggars*??
bianca steele 04.27.15 at 2:55 am
@43
It’s not a word you hear much, is it? I think he used the same word to refer to homeless people or people asking for spare change. That’s what I thought he was talking about, but it turned out he thought it was weird that people were allowed to play music near the TKTS booth, I think, or in subway stations. I didn’t know him well, he was a lunch friend and more of a friend of a lunch friend, and he hadn’t been in New York long.
ragweed 04.27.15 at 6:10 pm
I think Neville Morley at 39 might have the real reason. Are the food-service workers unionized? Could preventing union organizing conversations be part of the issue.
ragweed 04.27.15 at 6:16 pm
I also think there is merit to the idea that workers and students at Columbia should only be allowed to speak in the native language, and that foreign languages should be prohibited outside of specific language classes. That would still allow languages such as English to be used in English classes, but public conversations and communication should be restricted to Munsee or Mahican.
adam.smith 04.27.15 at 8:47 pm
@ragweed — reading the University’s response, it does appear the workers are unionized, at least the Columbia Spectator article says:
I have no further insight into this, so this may not actually be true or the union might be crappy (shopfloor issues are at the core of what US unions do, so I’m kind of surprised this isn’t going through the union).
e abrams 04.27.15 at 9:10 pm
no no no
we should encourage CU in this, so that the distinctions between the ruling class and the rest of us are sharpened
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