Harvard grad students strike again, citing inadequate harassment protections

From ScienceMag:

For the second time this year, the Harvard Graduate Students Union has gone on strike after the university failed to provide a “meaningful response” to demands for better pay and stronger protections for survivors of harassment and noncitizen student workers. The first strike, which began on 21 April, lasted 40 days until the university agreed to begin new negotiations. But on 27 October, research assistants and teaching fellows walked away from their labs and classrooms once again following what the union said was a final unsuccessful bargaining session.

“Many of us are really proud to study here,” says Ruth Tweedy, a striking Ph.D. candidate in earth and planetary sciences. Yet “being faced with some of the reality about how little empathy and compassion [the university is] showing for my fellow student workers has been really disheartening.”

In response to Science’s request for comment, Harvard University pointed to a 26 October letter from administrators, posted online, that describes their proposal to the union. “[T]he University has shown an unwavering commitment to reaching an agreement” and “remains fully committed to continued good-faith negotiations,” the letter says.

Harvard students aren’t alone in their discontent. Attacks on universities by President Donald Trump’s administration, the allegations of sexual assault at Cornell University, rising costs of living, and other concerns are roiling many campuses. Graduate student worker unions at universities including at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Brown University, and Columbia University are currently renegotiating their contracts, with MIT setting a strike deadline of 12 November.

For a year and a half, the Harvard union, which represents 4000 students, has asked the university to establish third-party arbitration for harassment-related proceedings. It currently handles them internally, through the Title IX office, which administers the federal ban on sex discrimination in education. Unions at several other institutions, including the University of Michigan, MIT, and New York University, have negotiated such arrangements. But Harvard has refused, arguing that federal privacy laws prevent it from sharing Title IX information with third parties, the union says. Joseph van der Naald, a research fellow at the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions at Hunter College, disagrees. Pursuing this demand “is completely legal,” he says.

According to the union, one in five student workers at Harvard reports experiencing harassment, discrimination, or bullying. When cases are reported, the university can take years or even decades to resolve them, the students say.

Among the standard-bearers on this issue is Claire Traweek, a graduate student in mechanical engineering who says she left her laboratory after experiencing harassment. As she has described in rallies over the past week, some of Traweek’s men colleagues made sexist comments, called women “birds,” and expressed preferences based on women’s physical attributes, among other offenses. For more than a year, Traweek tried to file a formal complaint with Harvard’s Title IX office, without success; emails Science has seen show staff were often slow to respond. “It feels like Harvard’s number one mission is to make the least work possible for themselves and make the complainants go away,” says Traweek, who eventually found a home in a new lab. Harvard did not respond to questions about her case.

Another major topic at issue is compensation, a sore point at institutions across the country. Current salaries for Harvard’s unionized student workers—ranging from $26,000 to $50,000 per year—are well below the living wage estimate of $67,513 for an individual in that region. The union wants the range to increase to $45,000 to $55,000, plus raises or annual cost-of-living adjustments. The union also seeks guaranteed funding so research assistants experiencing sexual harassment or bullying can transition to a new lab without a gap in income. According to the union, Harvard rejected cost-of-living protections and offered to raise its lowest salaries from $26,000 to $31,362 by 2030.

The union’s third demand concerns protecting noncitizen student workers, who have been targeted at universities including Columbia, where federal agents searched student rooms, arrested a student, revoked a student’s visa, and entered a residential building without a warrant. The union wants Harvard to secure sensitive immigration documents, provide pay during visa delays or detention, notify students when U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents enter campus, and require judicial warrants before allowing agents access. Harvard has rejected these proposals.

According to van der Naald, a union contract cannot require a university to violate laws requiring it to disclose immigration information to the authorities. But the university could commit to notifying students of ICE’s presence and not sharing personal information without a judicial warrant.

A heated bargaining session on 5 November ended when Harvard officials walked out in the middle of a sexual harassment discussion, according to the union, suggesting the strike is unlikely to end soon. 

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