Harvard Academic Workers Are at the Bargaining Table. Here’s Our Message.

This year over 3,000 non-tenure track workers at Harvard formed a new union affiliated with the United Auto Workers. After holding concurrent elections for two bargaining units in April, the unit covering the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard Medical School, and Harvard Divinity School began negotiations with the University last week. What follows is an edited version of the opening statement that I read in our first session.

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In 1935, a group of untenured junior faculty at Harvard banded together with colleagues from MIT and Radcliffe to form the Cambridge Union of University Teachers. Although they never aspired to collectively bargain, they worked for the next 14 years to advocate for academic freedom, more sustainable working conditions, and better career prospects for their members.

In 1937, Harvard President James B. Conant, Class of 1913, declined to accept the recommendation of the Economics Department that two junior faculty members, J. Raymond Walsh and Alan R. Sweezy ’29, be reappointed to three-year terms with possibility of future consideration for tenure. Instead, both were granted terminal two-year appointments, the kind of slow-motion firing that is still a hallmark of academic employment at Harvard.

Both were not only union members, but were leaders. Walsh was president of the CUUT at the time, and Sweezy was a founding officer. The appearance of retaliation in Conant’s decision precipitated a surge in the union’s membership across all ranks of the faculty, and calls from both within and outside the institution for the young economists to be reinstated.

Union leaders petitioned a group of senior Harvard faculty to review the case. After receiving a formal commission from Conant, the so-called “Committee of Eight” conducted a thorough study of both the “Walsh-Sweezy Affair” and the more general situation of junior faculty appointments at the university.

The outcome of the Committee’s work was a significant restructuring of the faculty appointment system at Harvard, establishing parameters that would soon be replicated by most universities around the country. Further refinements to the tenure system over subsequent decades, always self-consciously building upon the Committee of Eight report, culminated in the establishment of the tenure track in the FAS in 2005.

Although the organizing of untenured faculty helped catalyze this process, the gradual construction of a “ladder” to tenure for faculty at Harvard had an ironic effect that neither the CUUT nor the Committee of Eight anticipated.

Decade after decade, Harvard’s attempts to ease the burden of faculty building their careers towards tenure led to the creation of an increasingly robust shadow structure of teaching faculty, research scientists, and specialized support staff, all laboring without the job security that their positions make possible for others.

The diversity of these non-tenure track roles reflects the deconstruction of the “three-legged stool” of the university professorship — teaching, research, and service — into discrete, instrumentalized tasks, distributed arbitrarily and often inequitably.

Like our colleagues in the 1930s, we who labor in these untenable circumstances have again found solidarity in each other. We have organized as the Harvard Academic Workers.

Like our predecessors, we span multiple faculties: the FAS, the Medical School, and the Divinity School. (Our colleagues in the Clinical Programs at Harvard Law School join us in a separate bargaining unit.) Today, our ranks are much larger and more diverse, reflecting the tremendous expansion of the academy in the intervening decades.

We are postdocs and career researchers at the cutting edge of virtually all fields of academic knowledge, from the Bio Labs in Cambridge to the Science and Engineering Complex in Allston, from the Boston Longwood Campus to the Harvard Forest. We are the staff who perform the highly specialized work in such fields as microscopy, nanofabrication, and helium recycling that makes Harvard research technologically possible.

We facilitate academic programs and courses of study. We make the visual and performing arts accessible. We are the faculty who staff some of the most popular and historically significant concentrations in the College and teach the languages that open up the world to Harvard students. We impart to first-years the most foundational lesson of an undergraduate education, more urgent now than ever with the advent of generative AI: how to use words on the page to discover ideas for oneself and to communicate them to others.

For decades we have fulfilled these crucial functions of the University without any say in our own working conditions. That ended this year with a two-day election during an April nor’easter, in which 93 percent of our colleagues voted “Yes” to forming a union. Yes, it’s time for change.

This election was the culmination of over six years of organizing, beginning among a small group of FAS teaching faculty. Most of our colleagues who began this effort no longer work here because of term limits on their appointments, including a rule that instructors in FAS cannot teach for longer than eight years without tenure.

This rule was first articulated in the Committee of Eight’s report, following CUUT’s advocacy, in the context of the Great Depression. It was intended to guard against the exploitation of junior faculty, preventing the University from consigning instructors indefinitely to underpaid and insecure employment by guaranteeing them at least a shot at promotion to one of the few tenured positions available.

Now, ironically, the rule is applied to enforce permanent precarity for a faculty underclass working in precisely the career-killing conditions that it sought to prevent. This insult to accomplished and dedicated teachers, in an era of hundred-million-dollar budget surpluses, is the kind of outrage that led even the more stably employed members of our unit to trudge out in a storm to make their voices heard.

The changes we will be seeking through collective bargaining are no less fundamental — and no less achievable — than the reforms our colleagues touched off almost ninety years ago.

Our proposals, if accepted, will transform Harvard University into an international leader in rebuilding the academic career path that has been hollowed out by decades of financial austerity and a culture that prioritizes pursuit of profit over the humble work of scholarship.

They will allow Harvard to retain the brilliant scientists and technicians who find it increasingly untenable to resist the pull of industry as an offramp to a livable wage. They will transform the College into the small liberal arts school within the University that it has long promised its students it would be.

We’re not here to shore up the status quo or tinker with parameters on the margins of minor policies. We’re here to build new, more sustainable structures that both appropriately honor the incredible work that our members are already doing and make it possible for us to do our best work. There are enough resources — and enough excellence — to go around.

J. Gregory Given is a preceptor in Expository Writing and a member of the Bargaining Committee for the FAS/HMS/HDS unit of the Harvard Academic Workers-UAW.