Why We’re Voting Yes in Our Strike Authorization Vote

In a historic move, Harvard’s non-tenure-track faculty and post-doctoral fellows are voting on whether to authorize a strike. If two-thirds of participants vote yes, the Harvard Academic Workers-United Auto Workers bargaining committee, which has been negotiating with the University for over a year and a half, will be empowered to call a strike.

We, three lecturers on History and Literature, are voting yes. We care too much about our teaching and about Harvard’s mission not to.

If the union goes on strike, teachers will cancel classes and researchers will stay away from their labs. Assignments will go ungraded and course material untaught. The work that keeps this University running — our work — will stop. We don’t want this outcome for students any more than the administration does.

But we cannot stand aside while Harvard, the richest university in the world, undercuts its own devotion to the education of students and the production of knowledge. As things currently stand, Harvard administrators refuse to bargain at a reasonable pace, leaving thousands of our most important educators and researchers in a vulnerable position, unable to serve students to the best of our ability.

Take, for example, time caps — the arbitrary limits to the length of time teaching faculty can be employed, no matter how high-quality their work or how great the need for their teaching. The administration has previously offered to “remove” time caps, which in theory means instructors would no longer be forced out of their jobs after a certain number of years. But while administrators have proposed job classifications that have no time limit, those positions require us to do more work and to teach more students.

The University’s proposed contract article also adds a new job title, “Annual Lecturer,” which just so happens to closely resemble the jobs we already do. And that title? Capped at three years. If that weren’t enough, their offer comes with the provision that the University be unilaterally permitted to “create or eliminate” any job classification, meaning it could restore time caps at any time.

On other issues, administrators have been even more intransigent. They have refused to agree to meaningful protections for our most vulnerable non-citizen workers, offered little in the way of meaningful childcare support, and insisted that the Harvard administration itself can arbitrate claims of harassment and discrimination in the workplace. Their compensation proposal fails to keep up with even the rate of inflation, actually cutting our wages in real terms.

Deans of the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and Medical School have claimed that we must all make cuts to survive this time of funding uncertainty. The FAS has announced 25 percent cuts to non-tenure-track faculty and drastic cuts to the budgets of academic departments and centers, which may force some programs to offer fewer courses.

We are being told that somehow, the world’s richest university cannot afford to pay its teachers fairly or maintain consistent funding for its teaching mission. Worse, we are being told that this moment, when this University is under attack from its own national government, is the moment when we must cut back on our educational mission.

These plans have largely been drawn up behind closed doors, by administrators who are not directly answerable to faculty or students. Faculty can vote on the much-discussed grading proposal, but cuts to teaching or to their Ph.D. programs have not been meaningfully brought to the table in the same manner.

All of us know the few people making decisions are not, in fact, the University itself, even though we often refer to them as “the University” or “Harvard.” The University is us: the teachers, researchers, workers, and students. Without us, Harvard is just buildings and a collection of bank accounts.

Our union, along with many others on campus including our sibling union the Harvard Graduate Student Union-United Auto Workers, offers one of the few ways for the people who make up this University to have a say in how it is run. And that’s not just the case at Harvard.

Across the nation, higher education workers and students are organizing and fighting on behalf of themselves and the most vulnerable among them. When they go on strike, they come out the other side having fought for and won a better university. From NYU to Rutgers to the University of California, unions that have gone on strike have won greater support and dignity for their members while strengthening their universities’ commitments to the teaching and research they were established to do.

We teach for the oldest concentration at Harvard, History and Literature. It’s a concentration that has long been dedicated to close support of undergraduates and to the promise that hard thinking can be its own reward. Our students go on to take what they’ve learned into all parts of the world in all kinds of roles. We take pride in the work we do, yet most of us are forced to leave our teaching jobs after only three years.

We think that’s shameful, and we think most of this University community agrees. It’s high time we finally do something about it. So we’re voting yes.

Nicholas F. Bloom is an Assistant Director of Studies and a Lecturer on History and Literature. Chloe Hawkey is a Lecturer on History and Literature. Emmet von Stackelberg is a Lecturer on History and Literature.