Posted on 11/13/2026 4:35:27 AM PST by MtnClimber
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.
Dear FRiends,
We need your continuing support to keep FR funded. Your donations are our sole source of funding. No sugar daddies, no advertisers, no paid memberships, no commercial sales, no gimmicks, no tax subsidies. No spam, no pop-ups, no ad trackers.
If you enjoy using FR and agree it's a worthwhile endeavor, please consider making a contribution today:
Click here: to donate by Credit Card
Or here: to donate by PayPal
Or by mail to: Free Republic, LLC - PO Box 9771 - Fresno, CA 93794
Thank you very much and God bless you,
Jim
Manhattan Contrarian ping
I love the headline as it is correct even with “annals” misspelled as “anals”!
WGAF
I would go on strike every time my contract expired.
“I am privileged but I wish I could be oppressed. Oppressed people are so cool”
One of the best things that could happen to the US would be if the Harvard Schools of Business, Government, and Law were burned to the ground and all the faculty and staff driven into the wilderness with nothing but the clothes on their backs.
L
A plumber or electrician will never need the services of a PHD.
A PHD, on the other hand…
I seriously don’t see this issue as being a problem for anyone outside of Harvard.
LOL! Good article. Thanks for posting.
Doctors and lawyers have a PhD.
Heaven forfend that a professor should actually have to teach.
Today that would be being governed by people with names like Al Omier, Al Dalfa, al Husseini et cetera.
r
AI could do leftist propaganda so much better than humans.
It probably could do better science, law and business as well.
(That includes a certain percentage of hallucinations and grotesque errors. It would still be better than humans.)
I was a Harvard graduate student back in the day, entering Harvard from the “firehose” of MIT, with a NSF Graduate Fellowship. I eventually earned a PhD.
Graduate students typically spend their first year taking courses. They are expected to earn As—or at the worst B-minuses—in all their courses. These are NOT participation trophies. Those selected for graduate school are good enough to earn As on their own.
In later years, graduate students generally take oral qualifying exams, and then advance on to research. These steps are harder than the first-year courses. Earning a PhD requires making a contribution to knowledge, which can be tough indeed!
An addendum on graduate student “strikes”:
I in no way support graduate students forming unions (especially not under the United Auto Workers—UAW), or striking like common laborers!
Moreover, graduate student unions typically exclude holders of NSF Graduate Fellowships (such as I was) and similar awards from their bargaining units. NSF Graduate Fellowships include financial packages that are better than university fellowships, and also include financial awards to the university itself.
Holders of elite fellowships are looked on by the UAW as being too high and mighty to join a union. However, not all graduate students with ordinary university fellowships want to join a union either! And if we are being ground down by the long and hard work of thesis research, we are not all that “high and mighty” anyway!
In my opinion, graduate student unions under the UAW are a bunch of baloney! Right now, they are doing a lot of damage to Harvard and to academia in general.
......AI could do...... better science, law and business as well.....
Nope!
When I interviewed for a doctorate program in the mid-90s, I was told by my interviewing professor, who was only there because the regular head of department was on sabbatical, that I'd never be able to complete the work because although he agreed that my socioeconomic premise merited further study, my topic would incite the females on the faculty against me, because it would challenge many of the assumptions of feminism. (I am a woman, btw.) And this was 30 years ago.
It can only have gotten much, much worse today. Look at the persecution of anyone questioning the climate narratives...
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.