A Spectre Over Harvard: How Radical Unions have “Betrayed” Students

My grandfather, a refugee from the modern-day Democratic Republic of Congo, spent his career working for the Canadian postal service. He was a union member. The Canadian posties were never shy about a fight. Their union defied Parliament, the union president was jailed, and the strikers got maternity leave for workers decades before it was fashionable. I grew up respecting that tradition. Unions like my grandfather’s fought hard for real things: fair pay, job security, protections that actually showed up in workers’ lives. What is happening at Harvard is not what my grandfather’s union was. The posties fought for their members. The Harvard Graduate Student Union (HGSU) is using its members to fight for itself. This is because, as we will show, the HGSU is trying to use these strikes as a way to take over Harvard and repurpose it as the center of a Communist revolution.1

While they publicly advertise their demands on immigration policy and academic freedom, these demands are a smokescreen for their true motivations. Harvard is already doing much of what the union is demanding on these issues through daily SEVIS monitoring, a 24-hour emergency attorney hotline, and active federal litigation on both issues. Indeed, the union has recognized their demands amount to little more than the “formalization” and “codification” of current Harvard policies. These wedge issues delay negotiations and polarize campus while inevitably resulting in nothing except for the continuation of the status quo.