Harvard Grad Union Requests Academic Freedom Protections in New Contract Proposal

Harvard’s graduate student union requested that the University guarantee academic freedom protections for graduate students’ teaching and research pursuits in a new contract proposal on Thursday, joining a growing roster of graduate unions that have requested similar provisions in recent years.

The proposal, presented during a bargaining session with University negotiators, would establish a definition of academic freedom for graduate students in their work as teaching and research assistants. It would also nod toward broader free speech protections, codifying student workers’ right to “express themselves peacefully as members of society or as representatives of their fields of instruction, study, or research.”

If adopted, the Harvard Graduate Students Union-United Auto Workers’ proposal would become part of a growing trend of using collective bargaining to extend protections for the scholarship of graduate researchers and instructors — an expansion beyond traditional workplace issues.

The proposal is the latest effort by the HGSU-UAW to use its ongoing contract negotiations to fortify protections against federal changes. As the Trump administration targets international students and diversity programs, the HGSU-UAW proposed language requiring the University to bargain over the impact of changes to immigration law and new federal regulations.

Those two proposals on federal changes are unlikely to succeed, but the University may be more open to the academic freedom plank. According to Bora Göbekli, a history Ph.D. student on the HGSU-UAW’s bargaining committee, University officials said they would take the proposal under consideration during negotiations on Thursday.

A University spokesperson declined to comment on Harvard’s response to the proposal.

Harvard’s non-tenure-track faculty union, which is almost a year into bargaining for its first contract, proposed an article on academic freedom in November asking to “teach, research, and conduct creative pursuits without any restrictions except those imposed by legitimate disciplinary criteria.” The University rejected the proposal in May, and the union re-proposed it in June.

The HGSU’s proposal also asks the University to keep graduate workers’ teaching and research confidential upon request and to allow graduate workers to remove course evaluations that “critique” them for actions protected under the proposed academic freedom definition.

According to bargaining committee member Lindsey E. Adams, who helped draft the proposal, the new provision aims to protect workers from doxxing and “keep discourse on the campus open so that everyone can learn and grow.”

Fears of doxxing have risen alongside campus tensions over the war in Gaza. After the names and personal information of pro-Palestine activists were circulated online in the months after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, Harvard adopted new doxxing guidelines.

Meanwhile, universities have long feared that students and instructors have chosen to self-censor rather than express unpopular beliefs. In recent months, many of Harvard’s schools have implemented a nonattribution norm known as the Chatham House Rule in a bid to make students and faculty more comfortable voicing their opinions in the classroom.

And for graduate students, many of whom are preparing to seek out jobs and eventually tenure appointments, fears of negative teaching evaluations can be particularly powerful. A January report, prepared by a Faculty of Arts and Sciences committee, found that many teaching fellows are afraid to provide critical feedback to students because it could jeopardize their end-of-semester evaluations.

According to Adams, there is currently no direct precedent in graduate union contracts for the confidentiality and course evaluation protections. The course evaluation provision expands on current procedures for removing defamatory evaluations, she added.

But some HGSU-UAW members are also worried that the University itself will pose a threat to their academic freedom. In recent months, Harvard has removed the faculty leaders of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies and shut down a Divinity School program focused on the Israel-Palestine conflict — decisions that drew criticism from faculty who saw them as censorship.

And the Trump administration has made explicit demands to Harvard asking for the review of disfavored programs and greater administrative control over academic centers. Last month, as negotiations between the White House and the University continued, five of Harvard’s largest unions signed on to a letter asking administrators to “refuse to cut educational programs in response to authoritarian intimidation.”

The HGSU-UAW’s new proposal defines academic freedom as “the freedom to present and discuss all relevant matters in and beyond the classroom, to explore all avenues of scholarship, research, and creative expression, and to speak or write without any censorship, threat, restraint, or discipline by the University with regard to the pursuit of truth” in teaching, research, publishing, and service duties.

It would be the first centralized, University-wide definition of academic freedom at Harvard. Currently, the closest thing Harvard has to an academic freedom policy is its 1970 Statement on University-Wide Rights and Responsibilities, which affirms the value of free speech, free inquiry, and academic freedom. Several schools maintain their own guidelines.

While academic freedom provisions are not unusual in faculty union contracts, they have generally been rare in graduate union contracts. Lengthy “management rights” clauses, including the one in the HGSU-UAW’s current contract, usually cede jurisdiction over most curricular decisions and administration to the University.

But, in recent years, more graduate student unions have been trying to add academic freedom to their contracts.

In drafting their proposal, HGSU-UAW members drew on existing graduate contracts at Yale University, Cornell University, Tufts University, and Johns Hopkins University. All were ratified during or after 2023, as debate over academic freedom intensified.

Graduate unions at Columbia University and Brown University, which ratified contracts in 2022 and 2023, respectively, do not have academic freedom provisions. Still, officials from both unions confirmed that they would likely request the provision during the next set of contract negotiations — pending approval from union members, in Brown’s case.

In ongoing negotiations at Northeastern University, administrators have repeatedly shot down the graduate student union’s proposal — and have argued that academic freedom is applied to faculty via their handbook, not to graduate students, who are supervised by faculty.

Like several of its fellow graduate unions’ provisions, the HGSU-UAW’s proposal also contains a caveat for faculty supervision: Workers would have freedom on issues relating to their appointment only “in coordination and consultation with their appointment supervisor, where such approval is not unreasonably withheld.”

The HGSU-UAW’s proposal also calls for the establishment of a working group on academic freedom policies with at least two HGSU-UAW representatives, two representatives from Harvard’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors, undergraduates, and representatives from other campus unions who would like to participate.

The group’s establishment would ensure that “all impacted affiliates are involved in decisions regarding closures or significant organizational and/or programmatic changes” to departments, programs, centers, labs, and other University-affiliated institutions on matters relating to academic freedom.

The HGSU-UAW is juggling its academic freedom proposal alongside a clutch of long-held issues from previous contract campaigns, including third-party arbitration for all discrimination and harassment cases and required fees from all represented workers. The union is also still reeling from Harvard’s decision to remove more than 900 members from its bargaining unit, claiming they are not employees.

—Staff writer Amann S. Mahajan can be reached at amann.mahajan@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @amannmahajan.