Harvard Students Walk Out of Class To Protest Time Caps for Academic Workers

More than 200 Harvard affiliates rallied outside University Hall on Tuesday afternoon to protest time caps for non-tenure-track faculty, amid an extended campaign by the campus academic workers’ union to end the practice.

While bargaining for a first contract, organizers for the Harvard Academic Workers Union-United Auto Workers delivered a petition against time caps with almost 1,400 signatories to University officials. At the rally, union leaders said the University did not respond to their petition.

For the new union — which represents 3,600 lecturers, preceptors, and postdoctoral researchers — the large rally in Harvard Yard represented an escalation of their push to end time caps for lecturer and preceptor positions. Such appointment limits cap employment at two, three, or eight years depending on the position.

When contract negotiations began in September, HAW-UAW asked for a moratorium on time-cap related turnover to keep current faculty in their positions until a contract is agreed upon — a request the University rejected. But in early February, Harvard negotiators offered to remove time caps from preceptor positions, contingent on the union accepting its discipline provision.

The petition, and the accompanying rally, represented a show of public support for the non-tenure-track faculty demands ahead of their next bargaining session on Thursday.

“We were doing it through the usual path in negotiations, but we asked at the very beginning for a moratorium on this policy that keeps turning out people who love teaching at Harvard, and so far, we’ve got nothing in response to that moratorium except a blanket no,” said Sara M. Feldman, a bargaining committee member and Yiddish preceptor in the department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations.

“A group of students, faculty and staff went to their offices to drop off these petitions and ask again for the moratorium so that we don’t lose a single good teacher this year due to time caps,” she added. “They have not responded.”

Organizers from the union and the Student Labor Action Movement called on students to walk out of class at 2:30 p.m. on Monday to support the union as it negotiates the contract.

During the rally, multiple speakers — including students, non-tenure-track faculty, and tenured faculty — climbed the University Hall steps to rail against Harvard’s time-cap policy.

“Harvard’s motto is Veritas,” History professor Kirsten A. Weld said in a speech to the crowd. “Veritas is the Latin word for truth, and signifies the relentless pursuit of truth without fear or favor in three- or eight-year-long increments only.”

“We’re all doing great jobs, otherwise we wouldn’t be here,” said Salma Abu Ayyash, an eighth-year preceptor at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. “The fact that we’re here till the end of our contracts means that we’re performing well in our jobs, and it doesn’t make any sense what they’re doing.”

Germanic Languages and Literatures department chair Alison Frank Johnson called on the University to treat non-tenure-track faculty members’ jobs as “a vocation and not a way station.”

“One preceptor, three lecturers, half a dozen teaching assistants,” she said, describing the non-tenure-track members of her department. “When we lose them, we lose all Scandinavian Languages and Literatures, we lose German classes, we lose our film evening, we lose our writing sessions, we lose our director of undergraduate studies, sometimes we lose amazing classes, we lose freshman seminars, we lose Gen Ed courses.”

“We lose the beating heart of our department,” Johnson added.

Student speakers — including SLAM member Juan I. Pedraza Arellano ’25-’26 — said a non-tenure-track faculty member had been an important mentor and convinced him to pursue a citation in Portuguese.

“I fell in love with Portuguese because of my non-tenure-track professor,” Pedraza Arellano said in a speech. “Without her, I would have never found out how much I love learning this language, and it’s not just me.”

Several speakers argued that Trump administration funding cuts, challenges to diversity programs, and immigration crackdowns should drive Harvard officials toward cooperation with the union.

“We’re the ones on the front lines of this escalated assault on the academy,” History & Literature lecturer Jules Riegel said. “We’ve been fighting back this whole time, and we want the University to join us.”

Former Social Studies lecturer Tracey A. Rosen was the rally’s final speaker. Rosen, one of HAW-UAW’s founding members, “timed out” at the end of the 2023-24 academic year.

She had been giving a visiting lecture on Freud for Social Studies 10b: “Introduction to Social Studies” when the walkout began, and joined the demonstration alongside her students.

“I came here to give a Social Studies lecture,” she said. “I spent seven years here. They kicked me out and then they asked me to come give a Social Studies lecture.”

University spokesperson Jason A. Newton declined to comment for this article, and referred The Crimson to the University’s response to HAW-UAW’s fall moratorium request.

“We understand that during the negotiations of this first contract certain members of the bargaining unit may ‘time out’ under the current policies, but we do not see this as a compelling reason to suspend current rules or to deviate from maintaining the status quo while we negotiate our first contract,” University representatives wrote in October.

“Turnover within a unit during bargaining is not unusual and has occurred during negotiations for other Harvard union contracts,” they added.

Several time-capped workers’ contracts expire June 30, and organizers say departments are already in the process of hiring their replacements.

—Staff writer Hugo C. Chiasson can be reached at hugo.chiasson@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @HugoChiassonn.

—Staff writer Amann S. Mahajan can be reached at amann.mahajan@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @amannmahajan.