As the Trump administration has escalated pressure on universities — through immigration enforcement, legal threats, and scrutiny of campus speech — a parallel shift has taken hold at bargaining tables across higher education.

Across campuses, unions are pushing to turn new concerns over academic freedom, non-citizen workers, and visa protections into enforceable contract language. At some institutions, those efforts have already produced tentative agreements or new provisions; at others, they remain under discussion.

And at Harvard, academic unions are advancing many of those same proposals — now under the pressure of an active strike.

The Harvard Graduate Students Union-United Auto Workers began a strike on Tuesday after a Monday bargaining session failed to produce movement on core economic issues.

The walkout — HGSU-UAW’s third since 2019 — follows a strike authorization vote that closed April 1 with 95.8 percent of ballots cast in favor. Weeks earlier, the Harvard Academic Workers-United Auto Workers — representing postdoctoral fellows and non-ladder faculty — opened a strike authorization vote of its own as it entered bargaining alongside HGSU-UAW.

Across the issues that have come to define this bargaining cycle — wages, academic freedom, immigration protections, and union security — negotiations have yet to produce agreement. The next scheduled HGSU-UAW bargaining session is April 28, one week into the strike.

Labor leaders said the broader political climate has reshaped the role unions are playing. Brandon J. Mancilla, director of the UAW region that includes Harvard’s academic unions, called unions the “vanguard” of the movement to defend academic freedom against the Trump administration.

“The UAW and other labor unions in the higher ed sector have had to take the lead in terms of fighting back,” he said.

That shift is also visible in the substance of negotiations. At peer institutions, union priorities have begun to take contractual form: at New York University, academic workers secured an annual fund to sponsor green card applications, and at Princeton University, postdoctoral researchers reached a tentative agreement to codify academic freedom.

At Harvard, HGSU-UAW and HAW-UAW are asking the University to commit, in writing, to many of the same principles.

The Crimson interviewed representatives from unions at Princeton, NYU, Columbia University, and Brown University, alongside members of both Harvard bargaining committees, to understand how negotiations at Harvard compare.

Academic Freedom

Across universities, academic freedom has been a central point of negotiations, as unions push to make those protections enforceable through contracts.

At Columbia, student workers are bargaining over language that would explicitly bar the university from retaliating against members for exercising academic freedom and allow the union to enforce violations directly through the contract.

Sohum Pal, a member of the Student Workers of Columbia-UAW bargaining committee, said existing university policies have not prevented disciplinary action against student workers involved in demonstrations.

“The university is sort of violating academic freedom left and right,” he said.

A Columbia spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

At Princeton, postdoctoral researchers have reached a tentative agreement on academic freedom language — though union leaders said bargaining has become more difficult under heightened federal pressure.

“The pressures from the Trump administration have made Princeton even more stubborn,” Jessica Ng, a union organizer at Princeton, wrote in a statement. She added that the pressures make the “provisions even more important.”

A Princeton spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

At Brown, graduate workers have proposed an academic freedom article modeled on language the university already ratified for postdoctoral workers — an approach union leaders said could ease negotiations by building on existing precedent.

“When it comes to the academic freedom article, we tend to think that’s going to be easy, because it’s patterned on something that the university has already agreed to for another one of our units,” Brown’s Graduate Labor Organization President Michael Zeigler said.

A Brown spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

At NYU, academic freedom remained one of the final issues unresolved in bargaining and did not see movement until after a strike.

Wiley Norvell, a spokesperson for NYU, wrote in a statement that NYU worked “in good faith” to recognize the contributions of faculty members and improve their salaries — independent of action from labor activists.

“We worked in good faith to put forward proposals that would meaningfully recognize the contributions these faculty members make to the life of our University,” Norvell wrote.

“We put forward those proposals because they were fair and sustainable, not because of a labor action,” he added.

At Harvard, negotiations have taken a different course.

HGSU-UAW has proposed an academic freedom article that broadly defines protections across “learning, teaching, research, and scholarship” and ties those functions to principles such as “free expression, free inquiry, intellectual honesty, respect for the dignity of others, and openness to constructive change.”

Subsequent sections outline specific protections for student workers, including control over their research, coordination with supervisors, and expression as members of their fields.

At a bargaining session last month, Harvard deemed portions of the article “non-permissable” subjects of bargaining — meaning the University said it was not legally required to negotiate them — before rejecting the proposal.

According to Lindsey E. Adams, a bargaining committee member and fourth-year virology Ph.D. candidate, the University’s objections centered on the proposed academic freedom protections, but it did not suggest revisions to other articles in the HGSU-UAW’s proposal.

“What we’re seeing is a complete lack of engagement from Harvard’s team,” Adams said. “They’re unwilling to discuss anything, and it’s really frustrating.”

HAW-UAW has advanced a similar argument, framing its proposal as an effort to formalize protections the University already claims to uphold.

“These are things that are fully in line with the values that the University leadership will promulgate at any opportunity,” said Gregory J. Given, a Harvard preceptor in Expository Writing.

Union leaders have argued that without contractual language, academic freedom protections depend on Harvard’s discretion. With it, they can be challenged through a grievance process.

At peer institutions, that shift is already underway. At Princeton, the tentative agreement would largely codify existing university policy. At Columbia, the union’s proposal similarly builds on existing protections but would add enforcement mechanisms — including explicit bans on retaliation.

At Harvard, that step remains unresolved.

“If they don’t want to put it on paper — that this is the policy — then it suggests that maybe this won’t be the policy for long,” said HAW-UAW bargaining committee member Sara M. Feldman.

Protections for Non-Citizen Workers

For academic unions, immigration protections have moved from a secondary concern to a central demand — shaped by a sharper and more unpredictable enforcement environment.

At Harvard, both HAW-UAW and HGSU-UAW have called on the University to enshrine protections for international workers in their contracts, arguing that existing policies are no longer sufficient without formal guarantees.

Harvard labor organizers have repeatedly pointed to recent events at peer institutions as evidence of what is at stake.

At Columbia, several students have been detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents since the Trump administration intensified immigration enforcement last spring. Those incidents, organizers on Columbia’s campus say, transformed what had once been a policy discussion into an immediate workplace concern.

Pal, the SWC-UAW bargaining committee member, said strengthening Columbia’s policy around immigration enforcement quickly became a top priority after a student was “kidnapped by ICE.”

“We hoped that it would be very clear to Columbia how urgent the need to strengthen non-citizen worker protections would be,” he said. “I think Columbia agrees. I think that they recognize that there’s definitely a need for some movement.”

The union’s latest proposal would require Columbia to withhold information about student employees’ immigration status unless federal authorities present a judicial warrant. It also calls on the school to formally “establish itself as a sanctuary campus” committed to protecting non-citizen student workers from deportations or detentions.

Unions are pursuing similar language at Harvard. Both HAW-UAW and HGSU-UAW have proposed an “ICE off campus” clause requiring immigration agents to present a valid judicial warrant signed by a federal judge before entering any university worksite — a provision union leaders said reflects Harvard’s current policy, but lacks contractual enforcement.

At Monday’s bargaining session, HGSU-UAW dropped several non-citizen worker provisions that Harvard had objected to as falling outside the scope of labor bargaining, but reasserted its demands on judicial warrant requirements and a guarantee that workers forced to leave the country mid-appointment over immigration issues be rehired upon return.

The University has not agreed to the remaining provisions. A Harvard spokesperson pointed to several school-wide resources centered around support for international students or immigrants — including the Immigration and Refugee Clinic, the Harvard Representation Initiative, and the Harvard International Office — in response to a request for comment.

At NYU, academic workers secured a $200,000 annual fund to sponsor employees’ immigration applications — a significant gain that provides direct immigration support. But the union did not succeed in writing broader enforcement protections, including judicial warrant requirements, into the contract.

Norvell, the spokesperson, wrote that the school has “explicit and longstanding” policies on interactions with federal law enforcement publicly available on its website.

Benedetta Piantella Simeonidis, an NYU professor and member of the bargaining committee for the university’s Contract Faculty United-UAW, said the outcome was mixed.

“I think I can speak for everybody and say we’re still disappointed with the lack of commitment and protections that we went in really trying to fight for,” she said.

At Harvard, HGSU-UAW is also asking for an annual fund of $225,000 to support legal expenses for immigration issues that prevent international graduate students from doing their work at the University.

But union leaders on campus said even narrower provisions — such as formalizing policies Harvard already claims to follow — remain unresolved.

Given framed the push for immigration protections as part of a broader shift in academic labor organizing.

“The project of organized academic labor across the American higher ed sector, I do think, is trying to be a broad, coordinated push for a course correction against the corporatization of the university,” he said.

Wages

While compensation has long remained a central issue in bargaining, unions said the Trump administration’s financial pressure on Harvard — and the multimillion-dollar deficit that followed — have intensified disputes over wages.

At Harvard, both unions have proposed significant increases. HAW-UAW has pushed for a 20 percent upfront raise, while HGSU-UAW is seeking a 12 percent increase to base salaries and a 74 percent raise for teaching fellows.

In their fifth-years, when financial aid usually runs out, teaching fellows currently earn about $26,000 annually, according to Adams. The estimated cost of living in the Boston area is roughly $67,000 per year, including typical expenses, she said.

“In no other position do people take a pay cut the more experience they get,” Adams said.

Both unions are also seeking annual raises of five percent tied to the cost of living. To arrive at those figures, union negotiators said they rely on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s living wage calculator and comparisons with contracts at peer institutions.

Harvard has countered with annual increases of roughly two to three percent and no upfront raise.

University officials have referred to financial constraints in defending those offers. Union leaders, however, said the University’s response reflects a broader pattern — invoking financial uncertainty while maintaining long-term underinvestment in academic labor.

“The whole point of hoarding assets to weather storms is so that you can get through storms, even very historic, significant ones without compromising your values,” Given said, adding that union members have been underfunded through “flush times and tight times.”

A Harvard spokesperson pointed to the University’s ongoing litigation with the federal government, noting that the White House has indicated it may sever future funding to Harvard and is attempting to take back funds previously allotted.

The spokesperson also referred to the endowment tax increase signed into law in July 2025, which is expected to cost the University more than $200 million annually.

At peer institutions, recent agreements and proposals offer a range of responses to similar pressures.

At NYU, academic workers secured a one-time $6,000 raise to base salaries for all existing employees, alongside annual increases of 3.5 percent — gains that came only after a strike.

Simeonidis, the NYU professor helping represent CFU-UAW in bargaining, said negotiation had shown little movement until workers escalated.

“Up until the strike authorization vote, the whole experience was pretty frustrating,” she said. “There was very, very little movement from the administration.”

At Brown, the graduate student union has proposed a series of double-digit stipend increases — 12 percent in the first year, followed by 11 and 10 percent increases in subsequent years — reflecting a broader push to bring stipends closer to local living costs.

At Columbia, student workers have proposed tying wage increases directly to inflation. Their latest proposal would require salaries to rise to at least two percent quarterly, or by twice the three-month change in the regional Consumer Price Index.

Across institutions, unions have relied on similar benchmarks — local cost-of-living data, peer contracts, and inflation metrics — to justify their demands.

At Harvard, those arguments have yet to produce movement.

During a bargaining session last month, Harvard declined to treat HGSU-UAW’s latest proposals as a counter, instead describing it as a “reassertion” because the union had not moved on its core numbers. The University then reasserted its own language across multiple articles without offering new proposals.

Adams described the exchange bluntly.

“Harvard is basically spitting on us at the table,” she said.

Union Security

Of the major issues on the table, union security may be the most clear-cut point of divergence between Harvard and its peers.

HGSU-UAW currently operates under an open shop model, meaning employees are not required to pay dues if they do not join the union. Both HGSU-UAW and HAW-UAW are now seeking to move to an agency shop system, in which all represented workers either join the union or pay “fair share” fees as a condition of employment.

Union leaders argue that the change is less about expanding the union’s reach than about standardizing it.

Under an agency shop, all workers who benefit from a union contract contribute to the cost of bargaining and enforcement. Without it, unions say, the financial burden falls unevenly on dues-paying members while non-members still receive the same contractual protections.

A Harvard spokesperson referred to a prior statement asserting that an open shop provides student workers with “freedom of choice regarding joining or paying fees to a union as a condition of employment.”

At peer institutions, agency shop is the norm.

Graduate student unions at NYU, MIT, Brown, the California Institute of Technology, Cornell University, Tufts University, and Brandeis University all operate under agency shop agreements. At Columbia, student workers are looking to adopt similar language in their current negotiations.

At Brown, for example, the graduate student union’s contract requires all workers covered by the agreement to either join the union or pay fees.

At Harvard, the absence of such a provision has persisted across bargaining cycles. HGSU-UAW sought an agency shop in its first contract negotiations and is now proposing it again, while HAW-UAW is seeking to include it in its first agreement.

Progress has been limited. For HAW-UAW, the issue has not been a central focus in recent sessions, with the last union security proposal introduced in December. For HGSU-UAW, union leaders said the proposal has received little substantive engagement from the University.

Jeffrey R. Freund, a former director of the U.S. Office of Labor-Management Standards, said Harvard’s current arrangement is unusual for a private university in a non-right-to-work state, meaning a state where laws do not prohibit mandatory union dues.

“The current Harvard union security clause is something I have never seen,” he said.

For union leaders, the goal is to bring Harvard in line with peer institutions and close gaps across contracts in higher education.

“How can we kind of even the playing field?” said Adams, the HGSU-UAW bargaining committee member. “There are many areas where our contract lacks behind the industry standard, and Harvard’s counters are reasserting our old contract.”

—Staff writer Taylor M. Bierwerth can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her on X @tmbierwerth.

—Staff writer Noah A. Ferris can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on X @noahaferris.