For weeks now, striking graduate students affiliated with the United Auto Workers union have been disrupting classes at Harvard while the administration stands idly by. Non-tenure track faculty joined the strike on Tuesday, rallying to chants of "shut it down!" The "it" in question is the university.
At a faculty meeting on Tuesday, according to the Harvard Crimson, faculty members demanded a more forceful response to the mayhem. History of Science professor David S. Jones, whose students could not concentrate on a midterm exam that was interrupted by protesters chanting into a megaphone and blasting an air horn, beseeched administrators to "help faculty and students who remain committed to undergraduate education."
"I ask now for a stronger response," he told them. "Surely there is a line between free speech, harassment, or something worse."
Anthropology professor Rowan K. Flad, who took the floor after Jones, noted that "the faculty, and the undergraduates we teach, are those who bear the brunt of the consequences."
They got an equivocal word salad from Faculty of Arts and Sciences Dean Hopi E. Hoekstra, who cited "the tension that we feel between the rights of our students to take an exam uninterrupted" and "the rights of our graduate students in the union."
Students are having their say, too. After the lunatics picketed a conversation between the cellist Yo-Yo Ma and the comedian Stephen Colbert, students took to the social media app Sidechat, with one opining, "After ruining that wholesome event last night, I think it’s fair to say the grad students deserve to be paid less."
If the Harvard administration won’t restore order on campus, President Trump’s new chief of staff, Stephen Miller, has a righteous task to take on. The graduate student union says that 40 percent of "student workers" are non-citizens, according to our Ira Stoll, amounting to what he correctly described as "a kind of foreign interference in the operation of an American university." Among the union’s demands is that Harvard stop cooperating with ICE, provide paid leave even for deported members, and pick up the tab for emergency immigration-related legal expenses. Oh, they also want Harvard to stop requiring proof of citizenship or immigration status for graduate students. Suffice it to say, this is more a political movement than an economic one.
Miller can start by sending ICE to Cambridge and asking for proof of citizenship from the bullhorn-wielding bullies. That’s a surefire way to disperse the foreign radicals—and to protect the majority of students on campus trying to get an education without enduring what Jones referred to as a "sonic assault."
