Harvard tries to eliminate discrimination protections for campus unions

Boston Globe

5 days ago

A university spokesperson referred to a statement it released in June that said, 'Our proposal is aligned with the University's position that the Non-Discrimination, Anti-Bullying, and Title IX policies are the appropriate processes for these concerns.' The spokesperson declined to comment further on Thursday.
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But union officials say Harvard's resistance is a troubling sign that the school is deferring to the Trump administration's vision for higher education before any legal settlements or deals are made. A potential deal with the White House, they say, may force Harvard to alter its discrimination protections without consulting the union, a move that could hurt its members.
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Since January, the federal government has taken aim at all kinds of provisions that mention race, gender, and 'illegal DEI' on college campuses.
'The Harvard administration is using these attacks on higher education to justify further exploitation by not supporting workers and taking away basic protections,' said Adam Sychla, a bargaining committee member for the Harvard Academic Workers Union. 'While we support Harvard standing up to the Trump administration, it's stolen valor to do so while exploiting its workers.'
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Since Inauguration Day, the Trump administration has viewed Harvard, the nation's wealthiest and most prestigious university, as instrumental in its goals of remaking higher education. After the university rejected government demands that it overhaul admissions, hiring, and governance in April, federal officials canceled nearly $3 billion in research funding; moved to ban the university from hosting international students; and
But to critics, Harvard's proposals on discrimination policies this year are yet another example of how the university is
'If the basement of our protections start to erode, like what we see happening here, it erodes what unions are then feeling like they can demand,' said Shannon Gleeson, a Cornell University
professor and expert in workplace protections. 'It sends a cultural message about what the approach is that our institutions are taking to address inequality and bide by a culture of nondiscrimination.'
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Conservative critics say instead that it benefits students to be under a single nondiscrimination policy across campus.
'It's just good management that the same rules apply to all sectors of your institution,' said Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, a nonprofit that seeks to reform higher education. 'Exceptions can be made where they are truly warranted and should be noted as such, but not in a way that labor organizations can carve out their own special sweetheart deal.'
Harvard's attempts to reverse the nondiscrimination policies
started months ago, in February.
In negotiations with the 3,400-member Academic Workers Union, Harvard declined to include contract language that explicitly protects people on the basis of religion or race, for example. Instead, it deferred to
The same goes for the graduate student union, a unit that has between 3,000 and 5,500 research and teaching assistants during the academic year.
Harvard proposed revoking a longstanding nondiscrimination clause in the union's third contract, immediately after negotiations began. It came as a shock to graduate workers, considering that the union's first two agreements — ratified after 2020 — prohibited discrimination explicitly.
Harvard's proposals about nondiscrimination policies to both unions also include provisions that ban them from challenging outcomes of most discrimination complaints and forbid union representation for workers as those complaints are handled by the university.
Denish Jaswal, a graduate union organizer and PhD candidate in philosophy, said Harvard's moves are a ploy to 'consolidate their power' and undermine workers.
'Their proposal not only rolls back rights we currently have, but more fundamentally, gives [Harvard] absolute power to determine these policies and modify them at will whenever they would like,' she said. 'A union contract is one of the only concrete backstops to ensure that workers have a true say in their working conditions.'
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Should Harvard get its way, union workers would be subject to
In January, for example, its Office for Community Conduct expanded the nondiscrimination policies to fulfill a key condition of its legal agreements with two Jewish advocacy groups. The updated version defined Islamophobia and antisemitism and listed 'advocating genocide' as a possible conduct violation, among other changes,
Harvard president Alan Garber in April also
It's similar to some nondiscrimination
provisions in the deal the Trump administration forged with the Columbia University last month.
The New England Higher Education Commission, the accreditor that oversees Harvard and clears its path to federal financial aid, is also
Hiba Hafiz, a Boston College professor and labor law expert, said nondiscrimination clauses are 'standard fare' in union contracts and 'entirely consistent with existing protections workers are entitled to' under state and federal law. All active agreements between graduate student employee unions and private universities across the country include a nondiscrimination clause mentioning race and gender.
Harvard's move now is 'certainly a novel betrayal that is unprecedented before the Trump administration's attacks on the institution,' Hafiz said. 'It appears that Harvard is willing to prioritize its anti-union principles over other principles it has held dear, and I find that aspect of its position against its graduate students both novel and deeply alarming.'
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Now there are questions, too, about whether Harvard will exclude hundreds of people from union eligibility. The university is arguing that workers paid by a stipend, rather than an hourly wage or a salary, cannot be members of either the Harvard Academic Workers or Graduate Student Union.
It could exclude 900 graduate workers from union membership. Harvard postdoctoral researchers — many of whom are 'stipendees' — also make up the majority of the academic workers union.
Sudipta Saha, vice president of the graduate workers union, said the move to reclassify workers as nonunion employees comes just as federal labor law turns against unions in the second Trump term. And union officials fear that reclassifying workers could make it easier for Harvard to fire graduate research and teaching assistants as
'It's basically a union-busting tactic that is taking advantage of the fact that the normal recourse that we have through [federal regulators] is less available to us,' he said.
Hilary Burns of the Globe staff contributed to this story.
Diti Kohli can be reached at