Student Workers and the Fight for Academia

Between funding cuts, crackdowns on academic freedom, and the battle over international student visas, it is, in short, not a good time to be a graduate student.

In our everyday work in labs and classrooms, we are facing attacks from both the federal government and university administrations. With the loss of federal grants, universities have cut costs, accelerating a longer-term devaluation of the arts, humanities and social sciences. Our livelihoods have become political bargaining chips, and stable futures for our professions have never seemed more uncertain. Across the country university administrations have paired program cuts with efforts to erode the rights of student workers. Worse, they do so while claiming to defend higher education from the Trump administration. As the title of a recent Crimson column put it, this moment feels like “the beginning of the end for academia.”

But as graduate student organizers with Harvard Graduate Student Union, we also know that there is hope in collective action, and that campus unions like ours are one of the few bulwarks we have against the assaults from both our own University and the Trump administration. Never has collective organizing been as important as in this moment, and we urge all in the Harvard community to recognize that the struggle for fair working conditions, academic freedom, and secure futures — what campus labor movements like HGSU and Harvard Academic Workers are fighting for — is inseparable from the one to preserve the University itself.

The crisis has reached a breaking point here at Harvard. This month, Harvard announced cuts to Ph.D. student admissions by over 75 percent for the Sciences division and 60 percent for the Arts & Humanities. Harvard’s decision represents the most egregious reduction yet of its graduate programs, and it threatens to gut the next generation of academia. Together with Harvard’s actions to erode workers’ protections, such changes paint a bleak picture of the future of academic work at Harvard, much less at institutions less resourced than here. The future of higher education will depend on whether students, faculty, and staff can stand together to defend it as a common good rather than one rooted in austerity and exclusion.

The emergency confronting academia is most visible in the collapsing job market and shrinking graduate programs. Many fields never fully recovered from the 2008 financial crisis, let alone the Covid-19-induced shock, which cut job openings in the sciences alone by 70 percent. This has been compounded by a significant reduction in graduate student admissions at many universities across the country.

Harvard is not alone in its cuts. The University of Chicago, the University of Pennsylvania, Brown University, and many others have announced that they will freeze or reduce admission to many Ph.D. programs. Meanwhile, Columbia University recently removed unionized graduate workers from their teaching positions amid contract negotiations with the University.

For those of us who are left in these dwindling departments, university administrators have shown little interest in providing even basic protections, just as the very conditions for rigorous research and critical pedagogy are now under existential threat.

Since February, graduate workers here at Harvard have attempted to negotiate a new contract, for ourselves and for future generations. We are fighting for wage increases that keep pace with Boston’s skyrocketing costs of living, job security, safeguards for international students and free speech, as well as a better system for handling harassment, retaliation, and other workplace disputes. In other words, we are fighting for the basic protections that allow for the training of the next generation of academics.

Rather than provide these protections, the Harvard administration has instead chosen to take them away.

On July 1 – one day after our collective bargaining agreement expired – the University unilaterally carved out over 900 workers from our bargaining unit. These workers were stripped of union rights on account of their status as stipended research assistants, even though these workers have been eligible for union membership since the ratification of our first contract.

Many HGSU members consider this to be nothing other than Harvard using the government’s anti-worker agenda as a license to pursue its own anti-worker agenda on campus.

The carveout is only one example of Harvard’s ongoing efforts to erode the rights and protections of graduate workers. Our contract expired after months of the University stalling our attempts to bargain. From the outset, Harvard denied open bargaining, rejected proposals for third-party arbitration in discrimination and harassment cases, and rebuffed the demands of non-citizen negotiating workers for protection during bargaining.

Now, without a contract in place, thousands of student workers are expected to teach, grade, and mentor without the very protections and benefits that make possible this essential work for the University.

Harvard’s refusal to bargain in good faith makes clear that it will not change on its own. Real progress will come only through collective action — with graduate workers, faculty, staff, and students standing together — to resist the cuts to our programs and the assault on our rights as workers, as well as to demand a fair contract.

Our fight is one vital part of a broader labor movement at Harvard and beyond — from the 2024 founding of Harvard’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors and the Harvard Academic Workers Union — that must continue to grow if higher education as we know it is to survive. Harvard has made its position clear thus far, but the outcome has yet to be determined.

The question that remains is whether the rest of us will choose to stand by, or whether we will act collectively to save the future of academia.

Oliver Lazarus is a Ph.D, Candidate in the History of Science Department and a HGSU Trustee. Kristen E. Busch is a J.D. Candidate at Harvard Law School and a HGSU Rank-and-File member. Alex Garnick is a Ph.D. Candidate in the History of Science Department and a HGSU Rank-and-File-Member.