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Also at issue are the university’s procedures for handling harassment and discrimination charges. As reported by James S. Bikales and Ruoqi Zhang at The Harvard Crimson, “The union has proposed that student workers be given an option to raise sexual harassment and discrimination complaints through a union grievance procedure — a dispute resolution mechanism outside of current internal Harvard channels, and one that could eventually lead to third-party arbitration in some cases.” For graduate workers, the importance of ensuring the availability of such mechanisms was made apparent with the university’s handling of allegations brought against former professor Jorge Domínguez. The administration also raised eyebrows for graduate workers and many faculty by asking departments to monitor graduate workers’ participation in the strike.
Striking graduate workers include Shom Mazumder, a Ph.D. student in government, and Erik Baker, a Ph.D. student in the history of science. Joined by Kirsten Weld, a history professor, they spoke to The Chronicle’s Maximillian Alvarez about the strike, the vexed question of whether faculty are management, and the actions of the Harvard administration.
Why are you striking?
Mazumder: There was a tenured professor in the government department, Jorge Domínguez, against whom charges of sexual harassment and assault were made, which led to a Title IX investigation. It was discovered that he had done this first a long time ago. Even after the administration nominally admonished him, he still rose to pretty high positions in the provost’s office.
A big part of this fight — in addition to the basic demands around health care, dental, parental-leave policies — is protecting student workers in the future from professors like Jorge Domínguez.
One of the key bargaining issues has been this third-party grievance procedure. That’s a standard type of contract that Harvard has with its other unionized employees. But the administration has not budged at all on allowing for a third-party arbitration mechanism. So we’re stuck on that.
Baker: The other issues that we’re fighting for have been about the cost and access to health care, as well as basic compensation for teaching and research work. This is one of the most expensive areas to live in the entire United States. And graduate students are receiving compensation that makes it challenging just to afford the cost of housing. We heard from members who are regularly spending 70 to 80 percent of their entire paycheck on housing alone.
These issues are familiar from the workers’ movement, whether that’s workers at McDonald’s, or hotel workers who have been fighting for protections from sexual harassment and discrimination on the basis of race or nationality.
Monitoring students’ hours and wages is not something that department chairs have traditionally done.
A lot of the rhetoric that opponents of our strike have used to try to delegitimize our action has emphasized the differences between grad-student workers and other kinds of workers. It makes sense that this is the kind of tactic that would be deployed on this campus, where so many members of the faculty, and members of the local community, are politically progressive, and may even do research themselves into the benefits of unions. In order to turn them against the strike, it’s necessary to argue that what’s going on right now is fundamentally different from what’s going on in the rest of the labor movement. But at the end of the day, we are workers who come into work, do work that makes this university a ton of money, and we’re fighting for exactly the same issues that unionized workers are fighting for all around the country.
Weld: One thing that’s notable about what the Harvard Grad Students Union has been able to accomplish is that it’s a relatively new formation in the higher-ed landscape in the U.S. If you look at the Ivies and other big private universities like NYU, there have been organizing drives ongoing for, in some cases, decades. At Yale, where I went to grad school, that dates back to the early 1990s. What I think has been impressive about what’s happened at Harvard is how quickly the bargaining unit has gone from nonexistence to full-on, no-time-limit strike. From an organizing perspective, that’s very impressive.
What’s the foundational conflict between the grad-student workers and the Harvard administration when it comes to things like third-party arbitration for grievances as an alternative to Title IX procedures?
Mazumder: At the end of the day, Title IX is a liability-mitigation institution. It does obviously provide some forum, but it’s failed many of the people who have either tried to go through the system and were encouraged not to escalate, or who were deterred from going into the system at all.
We believe that this type of arbitration system would allow for a different kind of mechanism for people to make a claim about gender discrimination or sexual harassment. From the perspective of the government-department student workers, this has motivated a lot of the pressure. There’s a deep lack of confidence and trust.
Baker: Whatever the inadequacies of the existing Title IX system may be — and there are many inadequacies — there isn’t even a comparably inadequate system to deal with cases of racial discrimination, discrimination on the basis of national origin, and a variety of other categories of discrimination, which occur with some regularity on campus. This is a problem that’s pervasive, and, currently, the way that it’s supposed to be dealt with (through various kinds of ad hoc and informal mechanisms), exacerbates the power differentials that exist between faculty and students, exacerbates the uncertainties surrounding the position of graduate students, who are simultaneously doing work for their advisers on a very short-term, semester-by-semester, week-by-week basis, but who are also dependent on advisers and other faculty members on a much longer time scale for their career advancement and their status within the profession.
There’s a profound irony with regard to that ambiguity in the faculty-student relationship. Harvard, throughout the negotiations, and especially during our strike, has been trying to have it both ways here: On the one hand, during the strike, Harvard has attempted to impose novel obligations of surveillance and discipline on faculty, arguing that faculty are management and have distinctive management obligations and, therefore, are obliged to report on students who are striking, to keep track of students’ striking behavior, and ultimately to help the administration dock pay of students who may be striking. But at the same time, when students are attempting to argue for these contract provisions that would help provide a safeguard against abusive behavior from faculty supervisors, the university wants to argue that the faculty-student relationship is primarily one of collegiality, that it is a kind of level playing field where pervasive power differentials are exaggerated by student activists, and that retaining a purely informal process of resolution is necessary to preserve the intellectual relationship between students and faculty.
We’re seeing the pervasive ambiguity in the relationship between faculty and students be exploited by Harvard right now, in real time. And that’s why we think that a contract that precisely delineates what these obligations may be, and that provides mechanisms of recourse for students who are victimized by professors in a position of much greater power than them, is so significant for student workers on campus.
Weld: The issue of faculty being management is an interesting one, and kind of a funny exception in U.S. labor law. The Yeshiva decision from 1980 ruled that faculty at private institutions do count as management, whereas their counterparts at public institutions do not (and therefore may, for example, organize in their own unions).
The administration has behaved in this strike based on the assumption that faculty will act as management, and that they will simply do the things that they are told by the university. Most relevant to this discussion is the question of gathering information on which graduate teachers are participating in the strike and which ones are not.
I think that was a real wake-up call for a number of faculty. There is a real sense of shock among my colleagues at the ease with which the administration is assuming that we are going to do their dirty work. For the record, there are some departments that have made the decision not to comply with these informational requests from the administration. It’s bad pedagogy and bad advising, too, for us to assume the authority of policing the labor activities of graduate teachers. There’s more discontent among the faculty than you think.
Mazumder: The chair [of the government department] sent out emails to current Teaching Fellows, asking them about their strike participation. If they didn’t email back, then they would be assumed to be participating in the strike.
Our position in organizing against this in real time is that faculty are not necessarily management. And, moreover, this is not necessarily a task that a department chair should be having to deal with. Monitoring students’ hours and wages is not something that department chairs have traditionally done, nor should they be doing. We view the decision to outsource this type of activity as intimidation.
Baker: One thing that’s been really striking (no pun intended) and energizing has been the solidarity displayed with us from other local and campus unions. The drivers and Teamsters, Local 25, which represents a lot of the UPS drivers and other drivers who make deliveries to Harvard, have respected our picket lines. And that has led to a lot of disruption. As well as unionized workers who do garbage collection on campus. As well as, of course, the workers in the Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers and the Harvard dining workers, Local 26. They have been extremely supportive, speaking at our picket lines, categorically making clear their refusal to substitute for the work that’s being withdrawn by striking students. That has really been powerful — to show students, who may not be used to thinking of themselves as part of a broader labor movement, that there are people on this campus, in this city, in this country, around the world who have their backs, who will show up to respect our picket lines, who are committing to help us win this thing, because they know that the benefits that we win here will be victories for the broader labor movement.
Weld: Periodically, faculty members will say, with reference, for instance, to the wage increases that the union is asking for, “That would make the grad students’ salaries increase faster than ours! Hahaha.” And, of course, it would, because then one of the major bodies of unorganized folks on campus would be faculty, who have no mechanism by which to ask for regular wage increases.
So you do get a kind of funny situation where graduate teachers are standing up and asserting themselves as a group of workers in a way that the faculty never have. There are all kinds of funny ironies nested in there. But, to agree with Shom, of course, there’s no reason why faculty need to comply with instructions from the university administration about gathering information on student participation. I’m pretty sure that all of those kinds of directives are just boilerplate purchased by the university from whatever expensive labor-busting law firm it has contracted to help it manage this strike.
There is a kind of umbrella of legal organizations and lawyers that helps private universities bust their grad unions. And they work with each other across institutions, and they share information, and they share tactics, and language, and that kind of thing. Of course, Harvard doesn’t like to think of itself as being like Target, but in this respect, it is.
What does this strike tell us about the broader political economy of higher education today?
Baker: It’s easy to tell the declensionist story where this conflict shows how corrupted higher education has gotten. And now we have students fighting back. Certainly there have been all sorts of negative structural changes implemented across the landscape of American higher ed in the last couple of decades.
But I am a U.S. intellectual historian. I spend a lot of time reading the letters and diaries of people who taught in American universities in the first two-thirds of the 20th century. Something like this would have been inconceivable then, because at the time, the way that American higher education was formalized was as a profoundly feudal and intensely circumscribed apprentice system, where people from a very particular kind of social background were admitted into the hallowed territory of postgraduate education. They did their time and understood that if they went along with the process, they would get what was coming to them.
What we’re seeing now is the heightening or the emergence of new contradictions as there have been attempts to expand the ranks of the professoriate to include people who have not been able to be rest assured that if they submitted to discipline now, they would rise to the top of the hierarchy in due time.
That sort of diversification — or expansion, or however you want to characterize it — has not just been resisted from more revanchist or reactionary elements in the academy; it has also produced a fundamental tension at the heart of this extremely hierarchical apprenticeship model. To me, to the extent that [this strike] speaks to the contemporary landscape of higher education, it shows that there are people who are now in the academy who aren’t in a position to just wait and see. They’re certainly not guaranteed any sort of cushy position. They’re coming in with novel levels of debt from their undergrad education; they’re subjected not just to ordinary kinds of labor exploitation in the academy, but to forms of discrimination and disparagement and victimization on the basis of race or gender, sexual orientation, national origin. And the calculation has changed for a lot of students. All of a sudden, there isn’t this traditional sequence that unfolds before you and you just have to climb up the ladder. It’s a lot harder to see whether there is a ladder, to believe that that ladder was made for you and for people like you. So people are more willing to demand that their graduate education be one of dignity and respect, free from exploitation and victimization, because there’s no guarantee that this is all just part of the game.
Weld: I think 2008 and the financial crisis was a huge watershed in this respect.
Old-timers — my own advisers — would have said, “Oh, well, it wasn’t that easy for us to get jobs either back in the late 1970s and early 1980s.” But I think the statistics are very, very clear. If you look at my discipline, history, the American Historical Association maintains numbers of Ph.D.s produced in U.S. universities per year, and the number of job postings for historians per year. There is a cliff that the discipline falls off after the financial crisis that it’s never been able to scale again.
2008 is 11 years ago now. And I do think there has been a learning curve. But not as quick or not as sharp a learning curve as we might like. Very eminent senior faculty who’ve been at an institution for several decades suddenly, now, are starting to see with their own eyes that even their students aren’t getting jobs, even in top-ranked, very prestigious programs.
As a result of changes to academic-labor relations over the past 40 years, faculty have become increasingly itinerant, and there is higher turnover. You cannot be as assured that the faculty whom you may be working with at one point are going to be there the following year. How does this set the table for organizers on campuses today?
Baker: It is uniquely challenging to create in workplaces like ours a culture of organizing. This is, in part, because of the extent to which the career path of a lot of people who enter into the workplace is extremely individualized. People very much perceive themselves to be on an individualized trajectory that, for a particular moment, may intersect with the career trajectory of others, that may intersect with the HGSU-UAW bargaining unit, but there are challenges that people face in terms of really conceptualizing themselves as members of an enduring and substantial collective.
One example that I have been thinking about this week is that I anticipate the next semester will be my last semester teaching and, therefore, as a member of the bargaining unit. So the contract that I am striking for now may actually not benefit me personally as much as it will the first- and second-year students in my department who do not actually have to teach right now, but who will benefit once they are teaching in another year or two. And yet, it’s been a lot harder to get first- and second-year students out demonstrating with us. And I think that that’s, in part, because you’re encouraged in academia to have a very week-by-week, semester-by-semester view of yourself and your position. And this isn’t just a cultural thing. There are real pressures to constantly be looking at the next step you’re going to take in order to get out of the position that you are in right now and into a position that is more stable or more prestigious or whatever.
The administration has behaved on the assumption that faculty will act as management.
So there’s that sense of constant and individualized movement that makes it harder for a real culture of organizing to congeal. I was just talking with a Teamster, Local 25 member this week, and he was astonished that there were so many people in our unit who were not joining the strike. And he said that, in his union, that was completely inconceivable. But there are sympathetic people who are out of town and unable to join the picket. And there are people who don’t even necessarily understand what it might mean for them to strike in their position right now. But what we’ve always tried to do is to build up that culture of organizing.
Even if, as is the case in most humanities and soft-social-science departments, you are not a member of the bargaining unit until your second or third year on campus, the day that you show up, you’re hearing about our union, you’re forming relationships with union organizers. You’re learning about the issues that student workers face. You’re hearing stories from your friends. People are open and honest about the challenges, and that collective bargaining and collective action is seen as an important solution for these problems. These problems aren’t just the kinds of things that you have to go through as a sort of rite of passage in graduate school. These are problems that are changeable, that are political and that are collective, that it’s not just you who’s in this boat. And that is often a realization that takes some time to dawn on a lot of graduate students. But it is a realization that we try to hurry along as much as possible through our organizing, just department by department, community by community.
Weld: Andrew Ross and others have written about the mental-labor problem — the idea that, if you’re doing something that’s a kind of intellectual and creative vocation, then you’re not a “real worker.” And that’s the entry-level hurdle for organizing grad students, whatever kind of institution you’re at.
The challenge on the faculty end of things is to think about how we can create the most supportive and nurturing environment for graduate students to do their work. That’s not an environment we’re going to be able to build without a much more robust sense of ourselves as a collective, working together to try to hash out some basic ethical principles for how to best be there for our students.
Baker: At the end of the day, it all boils down to a basic irony: Harvard and many other university administrations are trying to have their cake and eat it, too. They want to transform the university into a sort of corporation — in many ways, much more like a conventional business workplace — but they do not want the consequence of that, which is ordinary worker mobilization of the kind that we see in workplaces all across the country.
