For the second time this year, Harvard University graduate students walked off the job Tuesday, leaving classes untaught and research disrupted in an effort to pressure the university to reach a new contract with its union.
Three outstanding demands — safe work, fair pay, and the right to stay, as the graduate student union describes it — have brought negotiations between university leaders and more than 4,000 student workers to a standstill.
The walkout followed a 40-day strike this spring that stalled as school broke for summer but disrupted Mayor Michelle Wu’s participation at commencement ceremonies.
On Harvard’s Science Center Plaza, the kickoff rally looked familiar. Graduate students anchored Scabby the rat, an inflatable icon of labor activity, with sandbags and formed a picket line equipped with cardboard posters. They circled with chants, cowbells, and calls for Harvard to, once again, meet their demands.
This time, the message had a few edits.
“Some of you might have heard some chanting about Harvard’s $57 billion endowment,” said Evan Lemire, a fifth-year PhD candidate and union vice president. “Those chants are going to need a few updates because Harvard’s endowment has now grown to a mind-boggling $68 billion.”
The university endowment, which did generate a 27 percent return largely thanks to investment decisions, does not mean the school inherited billions more to spend freely since the last time the two parties failed to reach an agreement. The vast majority remains restricted, meaning it can only be used for specific purposes as directed by donors.
But the graduate student strike does coincide now with a larger labor movement on Harvard’s campus, and in the Greater Boston area, as employees in academia say they face a high cost of living and inherent uncertainty, largely at the hands of political pressures facing higher education.
At Harvard, nontenured faculty and academic workers, like postdocs, have voted to walk off the job on Nov. 10 if they do not reach a deal, and dining staff just authorized a strike. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, graduate students are also preparing to walk out, and facility workers are considering doing the same. And at Tufts University, a majority of library staff voted to form a union last week.
The three sticking points in the Harvard contract negotiations involve higher pay, protections for noncitizens, and a more robust grievance policy to report instances of workplace harassment and discrimination. Both parties engaged in more than 50 bargaining sessions.
The graduate students union is made up of approximately 60 percent PhD students, according to the university. These students do not pay tuition and receive subsidized health insurance and are guaranteed $50,000 in support for living expenses — from both stipends and part-time employment as teaching fellows or research assistants — according to the university.
Part of the union’s demands of the university were pay parity between teaching fellow and research assistant positions, an increase of overall support to $55,000, and 3 percent raises or annual cost-of-living adjustments (whichever is higher).
The negotiations are also at an impasse over protections for noncitizen students. The union has asked that the university keep sensitive immigration documents secure and provide guaranteed leave for students who face visa processing delays or immigration incidents, such as detentions.
At the rally, Fernanda García, a fifth-year PhD candidate, read letters from Columbia University graduate students that described two incidences where Mahmoud Khalil, a graduate student, and Ellie Aghayeva, an undergraduate student, were both detained by ICE in university housing.
With those examples in mind, Harvard graduate students have requested that Harvard notify the union of any presence of federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers on campus and require a judicial warrant before cooperating with them.
Graduate students also presented a proposal for Harvard to provide a series of safety protections: an independent grievance process, conducted by a third party, for complaints of harassment and discrimination; legal support for Title IX cases; and guaranteed transition funding, so a research assistant could leave a lab over safety concerns without losing income.
In a letter Monday, John Manning, Harvard’s provost, and Meredith Weenick, the executive vice president, said that the university has continued to show “an unwavering commitment to reaching an agreement” and offered graduate students compounded pay increases and ongoing access to emergency funds for legal services for non-US residents.
The university agreed with graduate students that stronger protections should be in place for harassment and discrimination allegations but does not want to provide a separate policy for union members, Manning and Weenick wrote in the letter.
Nate Malone, a third-year PhD student in the chemistry department, said the current effort already felt different to the spring strike.
“We’re much more energized. We have much more experience than we did,” he said. “And we’re confident that this will push Harvard to give us a contract.”
Negotiations continued throughout the summer after the strike stalled, with both parties reaching an agreement on several articles ranging from job postings to intellectual property rights.
This is the fourth time the Harvard graduate student union has gone on strike since students unionized with the United Auto Workers in 2018. The 40-day stretch this spring was the longest, with a walkout that lasted nearly a month in 2019 and a three-day strike over parents weekend in 2021.
Beau Schaeffer, a PhD student in his seventh year at the school of public health, said Tuesday’s rally “already feels like the strongest day we have had so far.”
Malone arrived at the plaza at 8:30 a.m., setting up folding tables that were soon populated with cartons of Dunkin’ coffee and served as a home base to check students in, logging their eligibility to receive strike pay.
Harvard is not required to pay the students on strike. But the United Auto Workers offers them a $500 weekly stipend, given that they participate for more than a week and contribute a certain number of hours to “strike duties.”
A cart of handmade signs was at the ready next to Malone’s check-in table, and several plastic buckets were offered to be repurposed as drums — joining a chorus of recorders, tambourines, and bells alongside the chants: “We walked out once, we walked out twice. We got tired of playing nice.”
From the science plaza, a parade of more than 150 students marched through Harvard Yard as tour groups watched and people pulled out their phones for photos. The procession continued to the steps of the Widener Library, where the group stopped for its own photo. It carried on to Massachusetts Hall, home to president Alan Garber’s office, to deliver a letter printed on a large poster board.
Harvard University Police watched as the procession carried on through the yard, only intervening to prevent two students from coming inside Massachusetts Hall. Instead, an officer called for an employee from Garber’s office to come outside and receive the letter.
“We love our teaching and research,” read Lemire, the union vice president, from the letter outside Garber’s office. “We would rather be mentoring our students than walking a picket line.”
As the march continued out of the yard and circled the outside campus in Harvard Square, chants of “Cambridge is a union town” stopped people and earned honks from Harvard shuttle bus drivers.
Outside Mr. Bartley’s Burger Cottage, one employee stepped out for a break as the parade passed by and wondered, “Do they even go to school?”
This story has been updated to include the correct name for Massachusetts Hall.
Michaela Towfighi can be reached at michaela.towfighi@globe.com. Follow her on X @michaelatowfghi.