One morning in late March, Judah Lloyd, a 22-year-old senior at Wellesley College, received an email that sent him into a panic.
Non-tenure-track faculty at the women’s liberal-arts college had gone on strike, administrators wrote. Courses taught by those faculty would not meet during the strike, so some of those classes would have to be reduced from one credit to half a credit.
Two of Lloyd’s three courses were taught by striking faculty. The changes meant he could lose his full-time status at Wellesley and subsequently his financial aid, which he “100 percent” relies on, said Lloyd, who is a transgender man majoring in English and theatre studies.
To help students like Lloyd keep their academic standing, administrators asked nonstriking tenure-track faculty to open extra seats in their classes for the five weeks left in the semester.
Striking faculty described the ask as an effort to get tenured faculty to cross the picket line.
About one-third of all assistant, associate, and full professors “answered the call” to open seats in their existing classes or offer independent studies, said Courtney Coile, the college’s provost.
Leah Okumura, a striking instructor in the biological-sciences department, accused administrators of leveraging educators’ care for students to force an end to the strike. By asking professors to cover for striking faculty members with students’ financial aid and visa eligibility on the line, the college drove a wedge between the union, their students, and other faculty, she said.
“I am flabbergasted that the college has done this,” Okumura said.
Several students described being forced to change their class schedules more than halfway through the semester as confusing and frustrating.
“The student body is pretty disgusted with the college’s treatment of us in this situation,” Lloyd said. “A lot of students feel as though our education [is] being weaponized against faculty.”
The college has argued it had to enforce an unusual plan because it’s dealing with an unusual strike.
While there’s been an uptick in labor organizing across higher ed in recent years, strikes at other colleges have often involved graduate workers or adjunct professors. At Wellesley, the full-time faculty members on strike are primary instructors for their courses, which means class can’t continue without them. Wellesley’s strike has also lasted longer than faculty strikes at other colleges in recent years, several of which had a set timeline and didn’t last more than a week. At Wellesley, non-tenured faculty have been off the job for more than three weeks.
“There is no playbook,” Coile said.
It’s common for striking educators to feel like their management tries to turn students against them, said Risa L. Lieberwitz, the academic director of Cornell University’s Worker Institute and a professor of labor and employment law.
“I think this is a similar kind of a tactic,” said Lieberwitz, who was formerly the general counsel for the American Association of University Professors. “An anti-union tactic to try to put a wedge between the students’ interests and the faculty interests.”
Wellesley’s non-tenure-track faculty members and postdoctoral fellows unionized in January 2024, according to the union’s website. They started negotiating their first contract last May.
Non-tenure-track faculty members make up around 30 percent of the faculty and teach 40 percent of the classes at Wellesley, according to the union. When they authorized a strike in February, the administration sent an email to department chairs instructing them to prepare for courses in their departments to be without instructors.
According to federal regulations, Coile said, in order for the college to award full credit for a given course, students and professors must meet in-person for a certain number of hours.
Coile said the college’s plan had to be implemented immediately to ensure students have enough of those “contact hours.”
“We had five more weeks of classes, plus the exam period, to go at the time that the union called the strike,” Coile said. “That is the problem that we were trying to solve. We have solved that problem … [and] taken action to protect students.”
Not all classes taught by non-tenure-track faculty were affected in the shuffle — over 40 percent of them had already met for enough hours to be awarded full credit, Coile said.
Difficult Decisions
The morning the strike began, the provost’s office wrote in an email to tenure-track faculty that at least 376 seniors, 228 international students, and nearly 1,000 students reliant on federal financial aid were in courses taught by unionized employees and could risk losing their academic standing. That could threaten their ability to graduate on time or maintain visa eligibility and financial aid.
The provost’s office asked faculty to “opt in” to opening their courses by filling out a form by 6 p.m. That deadline was subsequently extended by a day, professors said. No extra compensation was offered for opening additional seats or providing independent studies, according to the provost.
“This plan depends on you, the tenure-stream faculty,” the original email said.
After the union set the strike’s start date for March 27, it urged tenured colleagues to refuse to cover their classes on an FAQ page labeled “for fellow faculty.”
“Taking on our labor directly undermines our strike and our negotiating power,” they wrote. “While we recognize the concern for students’ educational experiences, the ability to withhold labor is our strongest tool to reach a fair resolution as quickly as possible.”
Nonstriking faculty members said they feared for their international and aid-dependent students, especially as the Trump Administration has revoked the visas of, detained, and threatened to deport foreign students.
One tenured department chair who spoke with The Chronicle said that after receiving the college’s email, she began racing around her building, knocking on the doors of her colleagues’ offices to figure out a plan.
“They sprung this new plan on us with zero warning and gave us a day to decide,” said the chair, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retribution. The college was dealing unfairly with the union and with students, she argued, by lacking urgency to avoid a strike then implementing a last-minute, high-stakes plan. “The rest of us,” she said, “are left to clean up the mess.”
Administrators’ request of tenured faculty created “a moral dilemma,” said Dan Chiasson, a tenured poetry professor. “A lot of faculty just feel they can’t put students in that position. So they have very reluctantly, and with a ton of bad blood, agreed to do these expanded classes.”
Chiasson refused to take on more students in solidarity with his striking colleagues.
Some tenured professors who spoke with The Chronicle said they were hesitant to open their classes, fearing it would be disruptive to current students and disorienting to drop-ins.
Yu Jin Ko, another tenured English professor, said he is personally supportive of the strike but felt he needed to push personal feelings aside.
“The idea that students would lose credit played a decisive role in the choice of some of us,” Ko said. He decided to offer five slots for independent studies in literature, and four students took him up.
Adam Van Arsdale, a tenured anthropology professor, opened 28 new seats in his Introduction to Biological Anthropology course, bumping the number of students from 32 to 60. His other course, Introduction to Human Evolution,” brought in fewer additional students but required a switch from projects-based instruction to seminar-style, he said. Many of the students who joined his classes are seniors, international students, or on financial aid, he added.
“When I see the students who have joined the class, I am glad that I opened up the seats,” he said.
No End in Sight
If an agreement is reached and the strike ends, students might return to classes taught by non-tenure-track faculty, depending on the timing, Coile said. Administrators are still determining at what point it would be too late for students to return to those courses.
The two sides disagree sharply on workload and compensation.
The union has accused the college of slow-walking negotiations. Faculty offered to bargain around the clock to reach an agreement sooner, according to the union. The college has so far agreed to two-hour sessions twice a week at most. On its FAQ site, the college said its bargaining team needs more time between sessions to read through the latest proposals. The college canceled a recent session scheduled for April 10, according to union officials. It then agreed to resume bargaining a week later, it wrote in an April 16 community-wide update.
After registration reopened to students that Saturday, there were 309 new course enrollments among Wellesley’s 2,300 students, said Coile, the provost. Only “two or three” students may still fall below full-time standing, but they are not dependent on that standing to keep financial aid or international visas, according to Coile.
Students sat in new courses by Monday. Some remain bitter.
“Everyone at the college is really upset right now,” Riannon Last, a senior,said the day before registration reopened. Last, a double-major in biology and women’s and gender studies, penned an op-ed in the student newspaper calling the college’s credit reduction “disgusting.”
Last wanted to avoid registering for other classes in support of the union, but she needed to maintain her financial aid, so she signed up for an independent study. After the first two weeks in that study, she said it was going fine. “But I’ll be honest,” she said, “I’d be learning much more in my striking classes.”
On March 31, Lloyd, the English and theatre major, attended his first day in his new Bible and Film and American Short Fiction courses. Professors spent the day rehashing syllabi, he said.
That was “fine for me, but it definitely interrupted the flow the classes already had,” Lloyd said. “There was a sense of annoyance from the pre-enrolled students because of that.”
Adrienne Lu, a senior reporter at The Chronicle, contributed to this report.
