Annals Of Oppression: Harvard Graduate Students On Strike!

In case you are not keeping up with events on the Harvard campus, you should know that the graduate students and various other academic hangers-on at that elite institution have recently gone out “on strike.” After all, nothing screams “oppression” of the proletariat like the suffering of a Harvard graduate student.

Ira Stoll has a report at the Washington Free Beacon on November 9. Excerpt:

The strike by Harvard graduate students that has disrupted teaching and learning on the campus is escalating as it stretches into its third week, with a second United Auto Workers union of Harvard "academic workers" poised to join the walkout.

In case you are unfamiliar with the life of a Harvard graduate student, here is a page on “PhD Degree Funding” from the Harvard Kenneth C. Griffin School of the Arts and Sciences. (Yes, it’s the same Kenneth Griffin whose large penthouse condominium in Manhattan inspired our Mayor Mamdani to institute his “pied-á-terre” tax. Griffin got the Harvard graduate school named for himself in return for a $300 million gift in 2023.). Here’s some of what the Harvard page on PhD Funding says about how that works at Harvard:

The Harvard Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (Harvard Griffin GSAS) offers incoming PhD students a comprehensive package of financial support including tuition, health insurance fees, and basic living expenses. This support consists of a combination of tuition grants, stipends, traineeships, teaching fellowships, research assistantships, and other academic appointments. 

So essentially every PhD student at Harvard gets all tuition waived, plus health insurance, plus living expenses. That’s at least $100,000 in value for openers, not to mention getting to live and work on probably the fanciest campus in all of academia, and coming away at the end with the most elite degree possible to kick off your career. Yes, most of them must pitch in on teaching some course as part of the deal. How could there be any suffering greater than that?

Stoll of the Free Beacon has done some research on the background of the leaders of the strike. For example, the October 27 press release announcing the strike identified one Bonnie Jin as the person to contact with any inquiries of the student union. Ms. Jin is the recent co-chair of the Boston chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. Here is how the website of that chapter describes its mission:

We are working against the oppressive capitalist system in its many forms. We see these oppressions — economic inequality, patriarchy, white supremacy, to name a few — as interlinked, intersecting, and inseparable.

Then there is the graduate student union’s President, Denish Jaswal. Her CV describes her area of specialization as “Philosophy of Mind, Feminist Philosophy, Social and Political Philosophy, Epistemology.” She has been working on a PhD in that area since 2018, now anticipated in 2027 — a full ten years sponging off some combination of taxpayers and philantropists getting an almost certainly worthless degree. Ms. Jaswal says that her research focuses on the “role of emotion” in various political movements. That sounds like a perfect idea for something you can write about off the top of your head without having to spend a lot of time doing tiresome research. After all, Ms. Jaswal needs to save her precious time for leading the revolution.

The union’s Vice President is named Evan Lemire. Here is a picture of him from the student union’s website wearing his super cool red keffiyeh.

Lemire is affiliated with the FXB Center at the Harvard School of Public Health, which is recently known for accusing Israel of “unbridled brutality” and “genocide” in Gaza.

The demands of the strikers are three. First is “safe work.” You might think that no sort of work could be safer, certainly from physical danger, than the cushy job of teaching assistant for a Harvard course; but it seems they are talking about “safety” from “harassment and discrimination.” Is there really a meaningful amount of that among the Harvard graduate students? The second is “fair pay and essential benefits.” Apparently, in measuring “fair pay,” the strikers do not count waiver of the approximately $60,000 annual tuition as being of any value. If you had to pay that yourself, it would be an after-tax expense, requiring you to earn at least $100,000 to raise the scratch.

And then there’s my favorite among the demands, what they call the “right to stay.” It seems that some 40% of the graduate students are not U.S. citizens, and those have various immigration issues to deal with. They demand things like “enforceable protections for noncitizen workers” and “secure immigration documents.” It’s not clear to me that Harvard has authority to provide these things, at least in many cases, but assume they do. The concept is that we are being harassed and oppressed by the horrible capitalist system in the U.S. — and therefore we demand that we be granted to ability to stay and continue to be harassed and oppressed.

You really have to be extremely smart to be as stupid as a Harvard graduate student. I don’t understand why Harvard doesn’t just let them all stay on strike indefinitely, and replace them with the next round of applicants waiting in line for the slots in the school.