Not All Disruptions Are Created Equal

This time, the picketers have crossed the line.

Since Oct. 27, members of the Harvard Graduate Student Union-United Auto Workers have been on strike, primarily demanding higher pay, independent processes for discrimination and harassment complaints, and legal protections for non-citizen student workers.

Tensions escalated on Oct. 29, when a midterm exam for “Medical Ethics and History,” taught by professor David S. Jones ’93, was disturbed by striking workers chanting through megaphones and blasting air horns outside of Emerson Hall, where the exam was taking place. Students reported experiencing difficulty concentrating during the midterm due to the commotion — professor Jones called it a “sonic assault.”

We understand that the union must disrupt the College’s goings-on. That said, the union has agency over whose experiences its strike most directly hinders, and we find it regrettable that they’ve chosen to disrupt an exam rather than the administration.

As a board, we are broadly sympathetic to the economic demands of the union, especially when it comes to the issue of inadequate pay. We wrote in favor of the University and union reaching a fair agreement, and we continue to hope a contract arrives sooner rather than later.

Nevertheless, the ends do not justify all means — disrupting an exam goes too far.

Any time workers, especially teachers, strike, their actions are necessarily disruptive for students. That’s exactly the point — by interfering with the College’s core function of education, striking instructors gain leverage against the administration. In other words, the HGSU-UAW cannot strike without impeding Harvard’s pedagogical activity in some way.

But the problem is not disruption in the abstract, it’s where the disruption is directed.

Instead of loudly picketing directly outside a classroom during a midterm exam, Harvard’s striking workers could, for example, strike outside University Hall, where the administrators who directly oversee Harvard’s working conditions reside.

Seeing as the College’s professors and students are presently spread thin due to the lack of teaching fellows and course assistants, we find the union’s decision to exacerbate classroom disruptions especially disappointing, particularly when administrative disruption remains an available alternative.

The union’s decision was wrong not only in kind, but in degree. It appears one protester even chose to yell into a megaphone. Acts like these, outside an exam hall, go beyond the reasonable bounds of an effective strike. It harms students and faculty disproportionately to their ability to influence bargaining.

We believe disciplinary action for the disruptors is warranted here, provided the University does so in a manner consistent with precedent — unfortunately, a standard Harvard has not always followed.

Nonetheless, we emphasize our continued support for the teaching fellows and course assistants who enrich our academic experience as they fight for equitable working terms. We merely hope to remind the union that administrators have the power to improve working conditions at Harvard, not undergraduates taking their midterms.

The union is right to draw a picket line, but it need not be through the exam hall.

This staff editorial solely represents the majority view of The Crimson Editorial Board. It is the product of discussions at regular Editorial Board meetings. In order to ensure the impartiality of our journalism, Crimson editors who choose to opine and vote at these meetings are not involved in the reporting of articles on similar topics.

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