Organize or Perish

All photos by the author.

On March 12, 2021, the National Labor Relations Board officially scrapped a proposed rule that would have denied labor protections to graduate students at private universities. Lauren McFerran, the chair of the Board, declared, “The withdrawal of this proposed rule will ensure that student workers can continue to join together to pursue better wages and working conditions.” The announcement could not have come at a more critical time. As graduate students across the country return to archives, fieldwork sites, and laboratories and try to keep themselves and their families healthy and financially secure during the ongoing pandemic, graduate student unions have worked tirelessly on behalf of their members. Established graduate student unions at universities like Brown and Harvard have already used their leverage to secure financial relief for their constituents.¹ For graduate students at Johns Hopkins University still seeking union recognition, COVID-19 has only underscored the need for collective action to improve our working conditions.

At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Teachers and Researchers United (TRU), the Johns Hopkins graduate student union, met with the university administration and the elected graduate student representatives of the various schools to deal with the fallout of the ongoing public health crisis.² From the outset, our demands were clear: graduate students needed financial resources to compensate for short-term hardships and long-term research delays related to the pandemic; adequate workplace safety measures and personal protective equipment for laboratory personnel; and substantive input into university decision-making. Everyone agreed with the principles behind these demands, and the Provost’s Office contacted all PhD students to reassure them that it would do whatever it could to “accommodate this unprecedented set of circumstances.”³ With the scale and duration of the pandemic still unknown, we had hoped this commitment would lay the groundwork for meaningful action to support graduate students.

Two weeks later, however, Johns Hopkins President Ronald Daniels released the initial projections of the impact of COVID-19 on the university’s budget. Predicting losses of $100 million for 2020 and $375 million for 2021, President Daniels instituted university-wide austerity measures and flatly refused to draw on the $6.3 billion Hopkins endowment to offset one-time expenses.⁴ Amidst the ensuing controversies over the suspension of faculty retirement contributions, staff furloughs, and other misguided efforts to limit costs, graduate students tried again and again to clarify how the Hopkins administration planned to deal with their concerns. The university did not simply deny our calls for help. It ignored us or accused us of asking for more than we deserved.

Since last spring, TRU has consequently spent most of its time and labor helping graduate students weather the pandemic as the university continues to provide excuses for the speed and extent of its relief efforts. We have helped graduate students access poorly-advertised emergency funds, secure additional semesters of funding at the department level, and navigate contradictory information from the Hopkins administration about safety protocols, campus reopening, and our eligibility for the COVID-19 vaccine. Without necessary guidance and resources from the central administration, however, departments and divisions have settled for half-measures that have deepened existing inequities. Some programs with sympathetic faculty and plentiful resources have guaranteed funding extensions. Others have, for one reason or another, left graduate students to fend for themselves. Although this patchwork assistance has led to inconsistency and confusion across the university, Hopkins continues to cite the financial strain of the pandemic to defend its policy of case-by-case relief.⁵

TRU has sought to fill this gap and to bring these problems to the attention of faculty, staff, undergraduates, and administrators across the university. We have sent letters and testimonials to the Provost’s Office and the deans to communicate graduate student concerns. We have delivered petitions with hundreds of signatures reiterating our demands.⁶ When internal pressure failed to produce results, we took to the editorial pages of the Johns Hopkins News-Letter, Baltimore Brew, and Baltimore Sun to compel the administration to engage with us as colleagues rather than upstart trainees.⁷ Even after our advocacy attracted enough negative press to force the administration to respond, it later withdrew its own offer to meet with TRU about the pandemic: “Thank you for the invitation to the below event; we always appreciate hearing from our graduate students. However, we will not be attending.”⁸ The university evidently only wants to hear from graduate students when they have nothing to say.

None of this had to happen. Despite its early, dismal projections, the university has already netted $75 million since the start of the pandemic and currently projects a $76 million surplus for 2021.⁹ An external audit of the Hopkins budget has uncovered over $969 million of “undesignated” reserves specifically set aside for emergencies.¹⁰ The cost of extending all PhD students at Hopkins for one year, meanwhile, would amount to less than $41 million, or $8.2 million per year over five years.¹¹ As some administrators have privately admitted, the value of graduate student labor easily outweighs its expense. So why has Hopkins refused to help?

Dispensing relief on a case-by-case basis does more than lower costs. It reminds us that we work at the will of the university. Graduate students with the right research, the right amount of deference, the right advocates, or the right circumstances can still receive support without making extensions universal. Every time Hopkins has provided financial assistance during the pandemic, it has focused on subsets of the graduate student community. Even as Hopkins publicizes making its COVID-19 Caregiving Relief Fund available to graduate students and releasing minimal emergency funds, it continues to dismiss across-the-board relief as unrealistic or even irresponsible.¹² So long as Hopkins alone can decide who “deserves” support, it can keep graduate students under control. If, on the other hand, we won universal concessions, what would stop us from doing so again after COVID-19? Systematic relief, the administration seems to have concluded, sets a dangerous precedent.

In the meantime, TRU continues to ratchet up pressure. Last December, we held a Car Caravan to publicize our demands and to protest the decision to reopen for in-person classes this spring, a decision that has led to hundreds of new COVID-19 cases.¹³ On March 10, we marked the anniversary of the campus shutdown with an award show satirizing the failure of the university to keep us, our students, and our coworkers safe.¹⁴ We will continue to fight until Hopkins takes steps not only to mitigate the impacts of the pandemic but also to recognize us as workers. For far too long, Hopkins and other universities have classified graduate students as “employees” when they expect our labor and “students” when they set our wages and benefits. Over the past year alone, this logic has enabled Hopkins to call us “essential employees” to send us back to laboratories last spring and then exclude us from the $500 “thank-you” bonuses issued to its other employees this winter.¹⁵

If graduate students at Hopkins and elsewhere take away one lesson from our experiences, let it be this: graduate students will never receive the respect and support their research, teaching, and service deserves until they have a seat at the bargaining table and a legally-binding contract as university employees. COVID-19 has undoubtedly changed how we organize, but it has also driven home why we organize. More than anything else, we organize to ensure that our employers hear what we have to say and make our input central to the structure of our workplaces. The pandemic has shown what happens when universities assume that they do not need to answer to graduate students. We have the responsibility to make them listen.

1. “To Brown Graduate Students: COVID-19 Appointment Extensions for PhD Students,” Healthy Brown: Community Response to COVID-19, Oct. 16, 2020; Marina N. Boltnikova, “COVID-19 and the Graduate Student Union,” Harvard Magazine, May 14, 2020.
2. Graduate students at the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences came together as Teachers and Researchers United in 2014 to win parental leave and improved healthcare coverage for their coworkers. Since then, TRU has expanded to represent graduate students across the university and has conducted campaigns to save the KSAS Humanities Center, to help terminate contracts between Johns Hopkins University and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and to provide more funding security for PhD students. For more information, see “About Us,” TRU JHU: The Hopkins Grad Union, Jan. 2021.
3. Sunil Kumar, Nancy Kass, and Stephen Gange, “Supporting Johns Hopkins PhD Students,” Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Information, April 10, 2020.
4. Hub Staff, “Daniels Details Financial Implications of COVID-19 for the University,” JHU Hub, April 21, 2020.
5. For one among many examples, see Matthew Roller’s May 2020 email to KSAS program directors and department chairs.
6. Teachers and Researchers United, “Demand Johns Hopkins Protect Its Graduate Employees Amid COVID-19,” Change.org, accessed March 16, 2021.
7. Alex Parry and Heba Islam, “Hopkins Makes It Clear: Graduate Students Will Confront Fallout from COVID-19 Alone,” Johns Hopkins News-Letter, June 8, 2020; Kristin Brig-Ortiz and Caleb Andrews, “More Essential Than Ever, Johns Hopkins Graduate Students Demand Some Basic Rights,” Baltimore Brew, May 4, 2020; Caleb Andrews, Alex Parry, and Kristin Brig-Ortiz, “COVID-19 Leader Johns Hopkins Fails to Protect Students, Staff,” Baltimore Sun, Dec. 31, 2020.
8. Nancy Kass, Stephen Gange, and Denis Wirtz, email message to Teachers and Researchers United, March 16, 2021.
9. Hub Staff, “Daniels Updates University’s Financial Outlook amid Ongoing COVID-19 Challenges,” JHU Hub, Oct. 15, 2020; “Frequently Asked Questions,” Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Information, accessed March 16, 2021.
10. Howard Bunsis, “Financial Situation of Johns Hopkins University in the Middle of the Coronavirus Pandemic,” presentation to the Homewood Faculty Assembly, Nov. 5, 2020.
11. Teachers and Researchers United, “Cost Estimate for Yearlong Funding Extensions for All Johns Hopkins Ph.D. Students,” Teachers and Researchers United, accessed March 16, 2021.
12. The administration reiterated this position with its response to the Baltimore Sun op-ed cited above. Hopkins initially sent this response to the coauthors of the op-ed but later distributed its email to various “student leaders” across the university. See Stephen Gange, Nancy Kass, and Denis Wirtz, email to Caleb Andrews, Alex Parry, and Kristin Brig-Ortiz, Jan. 5, 2021.
13. Peter Weck, “Car Caravan Press Release,” Teachers and Researchers United, Dec. 11, 2020. For the recorded numbers of student and employee cases of COVID-19 since the start of the 2021 semester, see “Johns Hopkins COVID-19 Testing Dashboard,” Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Information, accessed March 16, 2021. Hopkins has already had to temporarily close campus to deal with outbreaks among the student body. For more information, see Sunil Kumar, Alanna Shanahan, and Kevin Shollenberger, “Two-Day Suspension of Homewood Undergraduate Classes and Activities,” Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Information, Feb. 3, 2021.
14. Peter Weck, “COVIES Press Advisory,” Teachers and Researchers United, March 10, 2021.
15. Matthew Roller and Renée Eastwood, email message to KSAS graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, March 16, 2020; Hub Staff, “University Employees to Receive $500 Thank-You Payment for ‘Extraordinary’ Contributions,” JHU Hub, Dec. 16, 2020.