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The Graduate Students Taking on the World’s Richest University

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.

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........

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