Boston Stands with Harvard Academic Workers!

Dear friends and community,

We are concerned Bostonians, and need your help to fight for the Harvard Academic Workers union, Harvard's future, and Boston's cultural vibrancy. The union is negotiating its first contract, and the University won't budge on key issues! We need our community to step up and send letters demanding that the University change course.

With Harvard’s policy of arbitrary term limits or “time caps,” it continues to decimate small programs and cycle through instructors who barley hit their stride before they time out. Students periodically endure full reboots of the programs they have come to love and rely on. Harvard has also arbitrarily denied tenure to acclaimed professors and allowed award-winning faculty to time out.

The recently formed Harvard Academic Workers union has been attempting to negotiate a fair contract and an immediate end to time caps, but the University has chosen instead to stall negotiations, impose austerity, and cut programs. Harvard has refused every opportunity to fix these problems, and now small programs are in real crisis.

This is part of a broader trend in higher education to impose austerity and dismantle programs under the guise of surviving “trying times,” and we must object and say that this is destruction, not survival. If Harvard, the richest university in the world, cannot support the cultural vibrancy that Boston and Cambridge have become known for, who will?

Please join us in sending our objections to Harvard’s President, Provost, and Deans. Share this campaign as widely as possible in your networks, communities, and schools. We hope that every single person concerned about Harvard's workers, students, and Boston's future will see this and speak up.

Step 1: Send E-Mail

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To the Harvard Administration,

As a greater Boston community member, I am alarmed to learn of Harvard’s time cap policy and reductions to non-tenure-track workforce that threaten many different programs, including endangered languages which have scant representation in higher education outside of Harvard. This affects not just Harvard or higher education in general, but the very vibrancy of the Boston area that I have come to love and rely on. I urge you to immediately suspend time caps, accelerate good faith negotiations with the Harvard Academic Workers, and renew current faculty appointments for next year, including those affected by time caps.

Harvard admin has recently made questionable decisions with regards to its Yiddish program, shockingly denying tenure to its literature professor, which makes the impending dismissal of the remaining Yiddish instructor a program-destroying event rather than an inconvenience. Similarly, Harvard, allowed an Armenian instructor to time out just months after winning prestigious Harvard and national teaching awards. I know that other programs have comparable stories.

The decimation of these languages and other programs would signal to the world and other universities that they are simply not worthy of study, degrading the status of so many languages and cultures in other institutions as they impose austerity measures. Harvard's language programs contribute to the vitality of the Boston area, with communities in Boston benefiting greatly from the world's richest university supporting programs that preserve and further their cultures. I deserve better than to have my city's rich cultural tapestry diminished, and I would like to see Harvard exercise its leadership by supporting, rather than threatening, its smaller languages and communities.

Negotiations with the Harvard Academic Workers provide Harvard an opportunity to right past wrongs and to secure the future of these marginalized programs. Harvard has thus far stonewalled the union, presenting "solutions" worse than the status quo, while publicly claiming to have fixed the problem. The union has garnered support on campus, with The Crimson recently coming out in favor of completely abolishing time caps. Skewering the University for its inaction, The Crimson affirmed the importance of supporting Harvard’s teaching faculty, the need to protect its programs, and the role that a strong union must play in upholding Harvard’s integrity in these trying times.

I would like to support Harvard’s struggle against government overreach and suppression, but how can I when you refuse to take up the fight — and instead decimate your academic programs and workforce, including endangered and systematically erased languages? Suspend the time caps policy immediately, dispense with fake solutions, renew the appointments of all existing faculty, and accelerate good faith negotiations with the Harvard Academic Workers in order to preserve strong programs.

Sincerely,

Step 2: Share

Please share this as widely as possible among all of your friends, family, and communities.

Printable PDF poster that you can put up in your communities!

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Step 3: Stay Tuned

Stay tuned for further actions! We will stay in touch with the e-mail you used to send your letter, provided you copied us on it. If you didn't, you can sign up for our e-mail list here.