Graduate Students as Changemaker - Penn State Unionization

In November 2025, Penn State graduate student workers finally won their decade-long battle to form a union. The union was approved in a landslide 1,882-198 margin out of approximately 4,500 eligible voters. In this talk, I will provide a retrospective on this process and a collection of lessons learned here that can be applied to similar pushes for institutional change in other departments and universities. The main foci of this talk will include how to form a broad coalition across a department or college, interacting with cooperative and uncooperative administrations, and advocating to colleagues without coming across as inauthentic or irritating. I will also compare this process to a similar department-level initiative within the physics department that led to an overhaul of the core coursework and qualifying exam.