In public, Harvard has waged a battle against the Trump administration. In private, workers say the university wants to appease it.
The Widener Library on the Harvard Campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts.(Cassandra Klos / Getty)
In May of 2024, Alan Garber, the interim president of Harvard University, was met with boos at commencement, followed by a thousand-student walkout in protest of the Harvard Corporation’s denial of the degrees of 13 students who had participated in a pro-Palestine encampment.
A year later, May of 2025, Garber, no longer interim but the official president of Harvard, was met with resounding applause at the same event. Amid a sprawling legal fight with a similarly freshly inaugurated Trump administration, Harvard’s PR campaign had successfully spun Garber into a titan defying unjust attacks on academic freedom from an increasingly authoritarian presidency. The Atlantic wondered if he was the man that could “save Harvard,” although whether that meant from the Trump administration or from pro-Palestinian student protesters remained unclear.
This past commencement ended in a third way—most faculty, students, and families sat contently through the hours of ceremony. But the second Garber, or Provost John Manning, began speaking, echoes of clanging and booing reverberated around Harvard Yard as the Harvard Graduate Student Union crowded outside the university’s gates.
By May 28, commencement day, the graduate students were on the 38th day of their strike and 15 months into negotiations for a new contract, which had expired June 30, 2025. The union has several key demands among the many articles on the table, starting with pay for graduate student workers, most often employed as teaching fellows or research assistants.
Under the current pay structure, teaching fellows make $26,300 per year guaranteed for two semesters of teaching,with bonuses throughout the semesters and the summer which bring their total compensation to $50,000. For humanities PhDs, however, the bonuses only last for four years, after which they make only the base $26,300 amount without lessening their teaching schedules. Research assistants make around $40,830 shouldering the same workload—20 hours per week for ten months on top of the academic work for their programs.
As the union has noted, the MIT living wage calculator estimates that a living wage in the Boston-Cambridge-Newton metropolitan area is around $32.46 an hour, or roughly $67,000 yearly for a single adult with no children.
The union put forth its demand, a raise to $55,000 with five percent or inflation-equivalent raises, whichever is higher, and began waiting for a response.
Over a year into negotiations, Harvard still had yet to provide a response to this wage demand as well as several other proposals, including increased protections for noncitizen student workers and benefit fund eligibility. In one instance, according to HGSU President Denish Jasawl, when the union presented an article that would codify the university’s existing policy forbidding ICE from entering campus without a judicial warrant, “it took them 10 months to even give us a response.”
“That response, of course, was just rejecting everything,” Jasawal added.
Similarly, HGSU asked the university to allow student workers to turn to third party arbitrators to resolve harassment, bullying, or discrimination complaints, of which HGSU bargaining committee member Sarah Johns says one in five members report experiencing. Johns noted that peer institutions, including Yale, have these procedures in place.
Union members had been asking for more harassment protections since the last contract was ratified without them following a short strike in 2021. As HGSU Vice President Evan Lemire said, the exclusion elicited “disappointment” from many members at the time, especially “on the heels of high-profile harassment cases, particularly the Comaroff case.”
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When questioned about this article, Harvard spokesperson Jason Newton quoted a 2021 Crimson article which reported that the union had “conceded its demand for third-party arbitration of gender- and sex-based harassment and discrimination claims” during those negotiations for the now-defunct contract.
At the bargaining table, Johns and others described “frustration” after months of negotiation at how the university representatives seem to view their demands.
“They’ve laughed at us. And audibly laughed at us.” Johns said. “They even show up sometimes without their computers charged. And so it’s just very clear over and over again that they’re not coming to engage. They’re coming to do their job, and their job is not to give us a protective contract.”
Now, over a year after the contract expired, the union has ended its historic 40-day strike, which ran from April 21 to June 1 and ended with no contract and little progress. Union organizers say they are willing to go on stroke again in the fall, if given a new reason. Harvard seems to be committed to waiting the union out.
Organizers, as well as faculty and other unions, have theorized why the university is set on doing so, outlining what they see as the university’s desire to privately appease the administration and conservative donors amid its very public legal battle, accompanied by a media blitz from Garber, against billions of dollars in federal funding cuts.
The fight is still ongoing—while a district judge ordered the money to be restored last September, the Trump administration has appealed and the case is pending in federal court.
Government professor Steve Levitsky questioned the timing of HGSU’s strike considering what he assumed Harvard’s position would be given its ongoing fight.
According to Levistky, Harvard “has been prioritizing establishing and maintaining an image as sufficiently right of center to try to fend off attacks from donors, Congress, the White House. And it has been very, very consistently trying to portray a sort of non-left, non-woke image.”
“It was not a moment where it was willing to pay the external political price of being perceived as giving in to striking graduate students,” Levitsky said.
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Jasawal and her fellow organizers felt similarly. When faced with backlash, they said, the university often pivots the blame to the Trump administration, obfuscating its own financial and legal ability to mitigate the effects of Trump’s attacks. The administration is invoked as a powerful threat and is therefore an easy scapegoat.
Carrie Barbash, former president and current organizer with the Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers, observed similar justifications from Harvard in their round of proposed Faculty of Arts and Sciences layoffs, for which Harvard paid McKinsey & Company at least $250,000 in consultancy services.
“They just essentially were saying ‘Trump’s attacks are scary, our finances are so precarious, so we’re going to lay off 20% of our staff,’” Barbash said. HUCTW, like HGSU organizers, are skeptical of Harvard’s financial claims.
In a draft report of FAS’s finances obtained by HUCTW, which was not published on the FAS website as it had been in previous years, FAS reported around an $8 million deficit, compared to hundreds of millions in surpluses in previous years. However, notably, this did not include the entirety of the funds that, stripped by the Trump administration, had been retroactively restored.
“Payments received on federal sponsored grants that were subsequently reinstated will be recognized as revenue in fiscal year 2026,” the draft report read.
Regardless of the cuts, both HGSU and HUCTW pointed to the school’s infamous $57 billion endowment (including $6 billion in reserve funds excluded from the $57 billion total) which is larger than the economies of over 120 countries, as a place where the university might look in times of financial upheaval.
The endowment saw an 11.9% increase in fiscal year 2025, including a total of $10,249,710 in unrestricted funds, which can be distributed at will. Barbash said Harvard’s claim that it is struggling financially, including Dean Hopi Hoekstra’s communication with staff about FAS’s proposed $350 million structural deficit, is misleading considering its endowment and its record-breaking year of fundraising.
Jasawal, meanwhile, qualifies for food stamps after making around $26,000 for the last few years. So do other union members, according to Johns. “At the end of the day, I think what they’re doing is they’re fashioning themselves in the image of Trump,” Jasawal said. “They are bringing the authoritarianism that we are fighting across this country…home, and they are making the lives of their workers and communities much worse.”
The future remains to be seen on both sides. According to Harvard’s financial report, endowment spending must be “deliberately managed to balance the demands of today with the needs of tomorrow’s scholars.” Those scholars, Johns said, are who the union, particularly the bargaining committee made up of soon-to-be graduates, continue negotiating for.
“This has had a significant impact on our own progress as in the PhD program,” Johns said. “But we’re not benefiting from this contract, we’re fighting for this for younger years. And so we keep showing up.”
Mira NalbandianMira Nalbandian is a recent graduate of Harvard College and a journalist based in Washington, DC. She was previously an editorial intern at The Progressive Magazine.