What happens to higher education when institutions dedicated to critical thought increasingly align themselves with the logics of war, surveillance, and national security? Unless we mount an organized resistance, we may viscerally experience the answer to this question all too soon. We are already watching this transformation play out in both the U.S. and Canada as universities face growing…
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When members of The New School’s Student Senate were faced with a report detailing how Hillel International was providing material and logistical support to Israel’s atrocities in Gaza, they voted on May 1 to cut all ties with their campus chapter of the national Jewish college network and to strip its funding. The student leaders hoped the school’s administration would go on to investigate Hillel’…
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Seated behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office in early May, Donald Trump delivered a disturbing lecture to a group of children huddled around him — most of them not yet even teenagers. They had been brought to the White House for what was supposed to be a celebratory event marking the reinstatement of the Presidential Fitness Test, dressed in brightly colored T-shirts bearing the government…
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After 14 months of fruitless contract negotiations with the Harvard University administration, over 4,000 workers represented by the Harvard Graduate Students Union (HGSU-UAW Local 5118) walked off the job on an indefinite strike on April 21. According to the union, “Graduate student workers will suspend teaching and research labor until Harvard’s bargaining team takes substantive action in addressing the union’s key issues: pay that keeps pace with the rising cost of living, recourse for harassment and discrimination, support for non-citizen students, protections for academic freedom, and ‘fair share fees’ to equitably distribute the expenses of union representation, among others.” In this episode of Working People, we speak with three striking graduate student workers about the issues at the center of this strike, and about what it’s like to live, work, and strike at the country’s richest university amid political attacks from the federal government, scandals connecting high-ranking Harvard officials to Jeffrey Epstein, and a nationwide cost-of-living crisis.
Panelists include: Sara Speller, a fifth-year PhD student in the Music Department at Harvard and president of the Harvard Graduate Students Union; Zoë Feder, a seventh-year PhD student in the Biological & Biomedical Sciences program at Harvard Medical School and a research assistant in the Microbiology Department; and Jacob Wolf, a third-year PhD student and Teaching Fellow in the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Additional links/info:
Harvard Graduate Students Union (HGSU-UAW Local 5118) website, Facebook page, X/Twitter page, TikTok, and Instagram
Harvard Graduate Students Union Strike Update/FAQ Zine
Lydialyle Gibson, Harvard Magazine, “Harvard graduate student workers strike”
Noah A. Ferris, The Harvard Crimson, “Grad students rally outside Garber’s home as strike enters third week”
Hugo C. Chiasson & Elise A.
Journalist Steven Thrasher’s second book, The Overseer Class, begins with a quote by James Baldwin from a 1967 essay in The New York Times, where Baldwin writes, “we feared black cops even more than white cops, because the black cop had to work so much harder — on your head.” To see the continuing relevance of that quote, look to the horrific murder of Tyre Nichols in 2023 — a Black man…
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