Standing up for Science, Standing Up for Ourselves: Unionized Graduate Students at the University of Oregon

Organized graduate students have the power to win huge raises and a real say in the governance of their institutions. Through collective organizing, graduate students can reshape their institutions to serve their needs and the public good, and can directly and materially challenge abuses of power— whether from uncaring faculty advisors, self-serving university bureaucracy, or entrenched anti-education and anti-science interests at the state level and beyond. At the University of Oregon, unionized graduate students are using a diversity of strategies and tactics to realize these aims, and organized researchers in physical science departments have been crucial to our progress. In this talk, I will describe some of this progress, like how rank-and-file union members have created structures of material and economic support for equity and inclusion that go beyond rhetoric; how organized researchers in the sciences asserted their role as critical producers of knowledge, funding, and prestige to compel an unwilling administration to deliver desperately needed raises; and how the financial transparency bill written by a physics PhD student to uncover the billionaire investments controlling our university rode to the halls of the Oregon legislature on the support of his fellow union members. The moral of these stories is that graduate students need not wait for powerful interests to help them. Genuine one-on-one conversations, a collective recognition of aligned interests, and a commitment to action that is realistic, consensus-driven, and collective are the only necessary ingredients to achieve real change.