Instructors of record are those workers who are tasked with a far greater level of teaching autonomy (control over syllabi, grading format, etc.) than teaching assistants, and who deliver the substance of a course more or less independently. They also tend to be responsible for submitting final grades for students. Typically, a small minority of courses are taught by graduate student instructors of record, and such courses are often concentrated in languages and writing pedagogy.

For obvious reasons, it is very difficult to find qualified replacements for instructors who write their own syllabi and apply their own grading rubrics. (Teaching assistants, by comparison, rarely have their sections scabbed during a strike, but courses will often continue without them and various arrangements are attempted to replace their grading labor). Extracting grades from striking instructors of record is also an additional challenge for administrators. For instance in 2023, some department chairs at the University of Michigan stepped in to assign students blanket “A” grades. At Columbia, the administration struggled to produce final grades for students of striking instructors of record in Fall 2021, in some cases assigning a temporary grade of “credit pending.” Resolving this situation required some makeup work on the part of both students and instructors (whose strike ended before the start of the spring semester, and some of whom did makeup work for backpay).   

Administrators are clearly recognizing the significance of instructors of record and are making moves to reduce their autonomy and number. Post-strike, the University of Michigan mandated that graduate students may not be formally designated as instructors of record (each is assigned a “faculty lead”). Columbia has recently made moves to eliminate graduate instructors of record and replace them with scabs from other universities, in anticipation of a potential strike by Student Workers of Columbia (SWC).

The cancellation of classes through striking can also force unexpected consequences for the university. In one example, students sued the University of California, Santa Cruz, in a class action lawsuit for continuing to charge tuition while classes were heavily disrupted. The University came to fear the potential of another lawsuit of this type during a strike in 2024: 

Attorney Timothy Yeung: “After a prior UAW wildcat strike at UC Santa Cruz, students filed a class action lawsuit seeking reimbursement [for] canceled classes. The University has settled the matter, but UAW’s conduct raises the risk of further action in light of the newly canceled classes.”  UC second injunction filing (2024), p. 2.

Outcomes like this are hard to anticipate, but the point is that prolonged labor withholding can expose the university to vulnerabilities that would have been impossible in a short strike. We want to emphasize that punishing the university legally in this situation was only possible because of the protracted withholding of labor. Our experiences show that administrators commit plenty of flagrant violations that expose them to ULPs and other lawsuits, which does carry some leverage. However, trying to handle class conflict through legal means cannot substitute for workplace organization and labor action.

This isn’t to say that all instructional leverage rests with instructors of record and that teaching assistants have none. With increasing class sizes, much of the actual learning happens in discussion sections led by TAs, and this cannot be made up easily through scab labor:

UC San Diego Executive Vice Chancellor (EVC) Elizabeth Simmons: “[In UCSD’s School of Biological Sciences] … approximately 100 UAW members work in approximately 52 lectures and 19 labs during the spring quarter. Many of the lecture courses are prerequisites for downstream classes, and disrupting the course would affect students’ time to degree and students’ finances (incurring more tuition costs due to a longer degree timeline). The labs—which are graduation requirements—could not continue without UAW members. UAW members are responsible for, among other things, safety, grading and instruction, and without their management, the labs would be cancelled. Finding substitute instructors would also not be possible for the reasons already stated in prior paragraphs.” UC second injunction filing supplement (2024), p. 12.

The points above illustrate that although the university administration has, of its own volition, debased the quality of education over the decades of neoliberal restructuring, and plans to continue to do so, there is still some educational foundation that the edifice of higher education is built upon. Without this foundation the financial engine of the university loses its pretext, and risks its most important resource: student tuition.

Instead, grades are a terrain of struggle, in which the impact on the administration is a live question open to the intervention of organized workers. Strikers at UC, Columbia, UM, BU and elsewhere have observed that striking throughout grading periods played a significant role in shifting the balance of workplace power enough to win unprecedented contract gains – even when administrators did manage in some fashion to “get the grades in.” At the same time, universities have shown that with the vast array of resources available to them, they are capable of continuing the delivery of grades in spite of an instructional strike. Strikers may be able to create serious headaches for administrators even when they are able to get grades in, forcing them into a position that they would prefer to avoid.

The severity in responses from administrators and the timing of concessions signal that missing grades do provide leverage. At UC Santa Cruz, for example, in December 2019, workers withheld finals grades with the demand for a cost-of-living adjustment (COLA). The university, in a carrot and stick fashion, announced in January a means-tested $2,500 housing stipend for the following years, and a five-year funding guarantee for all PhD students, alongside threats of discipline if grades remained missing. When this escalated into a full teaching strike, workers on strike were given the deadline of February 21st (nicknamed “Doomsday” by strikers) to resume work or face termination – with grades, not classroom teaching, being the measurement. Notably, when 85 strikers continued to withhold grades past the Doomsday deadline, the Executive Vice Chancellor called an emergency meeting with yet a new carrot. The University made the $2500 housing stipend universal, rather than means-tested, and applied it retroactively for all PhD and MFA students (the equivalent of an 11 percent raise midcontract). Workers were threatened with firing if they did not submit the missing grades. The most significant concessions in the 2022 UC-wide strike, moreover, came during end-of-term grading deadlines.

In each grade strike example we are aware of, administrators have applied various means of pressure to get strikers to submit grades, and failing that have turned to other less desirable methods to produce student grades.

It can be difficult to identify the exact ways that missing grades hurt the university economically and administratively. However, we have some basic propositions:

1. Missing grades have implications for access to financial aid, given that universities often pay for financial aid and are then reimbursed with state funds. Grades serve as a record of student attendance necessary to receive aid.

UC San Diego EVC Simmons: “Delays in grades may also affect student financial aid. Assessment of Satisfactory Academic Progress is a prerequisite for awarding aid to students. Missing grades will make it impossible to assess which students have made Satisfactory Academic Progress (“SAP”) because we will not have a full picture of the student’s grades. This will be particularly detrimental to students relying on financial aid for fall quarter. UCSD packages aid for the upcoming academic year in mid-July. The University must assess every student’s SAP standing to determine if they are eligible to receive funding in the upcoming academic year. In a typical year, we have over 900 students that are ineligible and require an SAP appeal. Even a short delay in grades would impact these students’ ability to complete their appeals and delay financial aid decisions.” UC second injunction filing supplement (2024), p. 14.

UC Santa Cruz EVC Lori Kletzer: “In past strikes, delays in obtaining grades led to delays in financial aid disbursements…” UC first injunction filing (2024), p. 173.

2. Missing grades also put a wrench in enrollment and registration processes. Students typically require final grades in order to apply for internal or external transfers, in order to enroll in summer courses, etc.

UC San Diego EVC Simmons: “As noted above, when exams and final projects are canceled, students’ final grades will not reflect their actual progress in a course. This could be particularly damaging for students who may have struggled at the beginning of a course, but worked very hard to master course content as the course progressed. These students will be left with failing grades, when they deserve better. Poor grades can impact everything from a student’s ability to progress in their major, to graduate school and employment prospects.”  UC second injunction filing supplement (2024), p. 13-14.

UC Santa Cruz EVC Kletzer: “The potential removal of materials and/or grades from Canvas will also cause considerable delay in issuing grades for students in affected classes. At UC Santa Cruz, undergraduates will automatically receive a Pass (‘P’) grade 30 days after the grading deadline if a grade is not otherwise entered by the instructor of record. This grade may have no relation to the student’s progress in the course and will not contribute to the student’s GPA. UC Santa Cruz requires a 2.0 GPA to graduate. Students who receive a ‘P’ grade instead of a higher letter grade, if they are already close to this threshold, may not satisfy this requirement….
“During the last strike in 2022-23, a single division at UC Santa Cruz (the Arts Division) saw nearly 78% of its classes taught by UAW members go ungraded for months after the close of the quarter.” UC first injunction filing (2024), p. 172-173.

Temporary delays to the reporting of grades are much more manageable for administrators to handle, at least when they feel confident about the length of the delay. In the 2023 UM strike, a group of faculty announced they would withhold grades until May 10, about two weeks past the usual deadline; administrators simply waited and then ramped up the pressure to submit after that point. This point is another illustration of the significance of indefinite strike action in higher ed.

Even in “minority” strikes, it has been generally infeasible for administrators to find enough qualified scabs – i.e., instructional workers (internal or external to the given campus) to replace striking workers in the classroom and complete all their grading work. 

UC San Diego EVC Simmons: “The sheer number of academic student employees, volume of courses that they teach, and their specialized skills make finding substitute instructors impossible. UCSD has more than 300 classes with enrollment in excess of 100 students. Each of these classes involve crucial support from UAW members.” UC second injunction filing supplement (2024), p. 10.

However, as bosses often do, university administrators cheapen the value of the product (in this case, instruction and grade assignment) so far as they can get away with it. This can look like:

1. Hiring unqualified scabs;
2. Instructing faculty to remove assignments from the syllabus when there is not enough labor available to grade them;
3. “Simplifying” exams and assignments, for instance by turning long-answer exams into multiple-choice exams;
4. Telling faculty to submit blanket “A” grades for some assignments, or even for the whole semester.

In graduate worker strikes, administrators have unfortunately often been able to enlist faculty to help them produce grades and weaken strikes. This has happened via a combination of faculty replacing strikers’ labor and agreeing to produce cheapened grades by significantly altering course syllabi, meanwhile lending the imprimatur of academic authority to what are “bullshit” grades.

For instance, administrators have shown that they seek:

1. Incorporation of as much genuine labor as much as possible. Typically a strike begins mid-way through a semester, meaning that some fraction of the course syllabus has already been covered and there are some graded assignments available to faculty and/or deans. Tracking instructors’ graded work may be non-uniform, and in some cases – particularly for graduate instructors of record (who control their own syllabi) – administrators may have serious difficulty accessing pre-strike grades, forcing them to turn to more desperate methods of grade assignment.
   • For instance at the University of Michigan in 2023, the administration made moves during (and after) the strike to increase surveillance of instructors’ work, but graduate instructors in English and other language classes successfully withheld all grade information and left departments with no basis to assign anything other than blanket “A”s. In preparation for fall, and as an ongoing practice at UM post-strike, many departments assigned faculty “secondary instructors” to GSI instructors of record – one of whose functions is to monitor grades on an ongoing basis.
2. The sign-off of relevant instructional workers: Roughly, the closer the people entering grades are to the classroom, the better and less potentially embarrassing for administrators (as confirmed by their attempts to pressure direct instructors firstly and most strongly). For instance in a graduate worker strike, a graduate instructor’s submission of grades is better than a faculty lead instructor, who is better than a department chair, who is better than an administrator or staff member, and so on. Collective refusal by faculty to provide a “sign-off” is a critical dimension in the leverage of grade withholding.
   • In the UC strikes of 2022 and 2024, organized faculty asked their colleagues to withhold striking workers’ grades with some success. In the University of Oregon finals strike of 2014, unionized faculty opposed the administration’s desperate “academic continuity” plans (including telling faculty to submit grades based on incomplete work). In other past examples, such as the 2019 UC Santa Cruz wildcat and the Yale grade strike of 1995, administrators simply opted for repressive measures against strikers to collect their grades and, in the latter case, enlisted faculty to help do so. But at UM in 2023 and BU in 2024, faculty organization was minimal and faculty largely followed administrators’ orders to submit low-quality grades.
3. Acceptance by outside bodies such as accrediting agencies: While accreditation concerns have the potential to constrain administrators, we cannot claim to have gained major insights into how accreditation bodies operate, nor do we have any reason to take confidence in their integrity.
   • In the 2021-2022 strike sequence at Columbia, accreditation concerns may have played a role in some students not receiving credit until the strike settlement and subsequent make-up work process. In the 2023 UM strike, strikers submitted an accreditation complaint after students were assigned automatic “A”s in many classes – which likely contributed further pressure on the administration in the context of the strike, even as the formal process ended in UM’s exoneration.

In most instructional and research settings, courses and labs are made up of several job classifications. These admit considerable variation but tend to resemble the following:

• Instruction: an instructor of record (member of faculty, adjunct instructor, or graduate student); teaching assistant(s); and other auxiliary workers like support tutors or “readers” (workers who grade without teaching);
• Research: a Principal Investigator (PI), typically on faculty or a senior academic researcher; postdoctoral fellows; graduate students; technicians and other researchers; and sometimes undergraduate workers.

By “cross-unit action,” we refer to concerted activity by multiple types of instructional or research workers towards the same goal. The terminology derives from the existence of separate bargaining units and union locals for these different job titles, which is the norm, although some universities have wall-to-wall unions (the UK has one giant system). We are referring specifically to action or organizing that is “wall-to-wall from below,” and therefore possible regardless of union definitions. (Indeed, unions like PSC-CUNY that are officially wall-to-wall have not, as a rule, found it any simpler to take militant cross-unit action, with the notable exception of the 2023 strike at Rutgers.) There are many other types of workers upon whom university operations, such as instruction and research, depend – staff, building custodians, resident advisors, etc – but our experiences and inquiry have mainly involved labor actions by the listed categories of academic workers.

In the lengthy strikes by US academic workers of recent years, only one or two layers of the academic workforce have struck: in most cases, graduate instructors, and increasingly graduate and postgraduate researchers. Where strikes by one or two layers of the instructional or research workforce have taken things furthest, their leverage has been significantly blunted (and in many cases, undermined) from workers in other units scabbing. It seems clear that to bring our fullest leverage to bear on the administration, we need to strive towards a strike that is wall-to-wall for the long haul, but this remains an aspiration to this point. It seems clear that the prospect of coordination is a source of fear to administrators:

UC Santa Cruz EVC Kletzer: “Because UAW has described the work stoppage as a ‘strike’ UPS delivery trucks will not cross the ‘picket line’ and enter UC Santa Cruz’s campus. Accordingly, UC Santa Cruz is not receiving deliveries on its campus. Similarly, METRO buses refuse to enter UC Santa Cruz’s residential campus as a result of UAW’s actions. Instead, buses drop riders off near the base of campus and then return to their normal route. Riders must then walk uphill to their homes….

“The UC Santa Cruz Faculty Association, a union of UC Santa Cruz senate faculty, has expressly instructed its members not to assist in covering work done by UAW members engaged in a work stoppage. They have also sent UC Santa Cruz a letter indicating their belief that they are free to engage in a sympathy strike with UAW members. Some faculty have already indicated that they will not submit student grades if their UAW graduate students remain on strike.” UC second injunction filing supplement (2024), p. 23.

While we generally avoid discussion of organizing in this dossier, we will note that the cross-unit problem is far easier to acknowledge than it is to solve. Effective models of cross-unit organizing and coordination at the level of the shop floor (for instance, in a particular department) are needed. To our knowledge, this has been taken furthest at UC Santa Cruz, where it has been achieved gradually across several strikes and concerted organizing among various unionists.

Over the summer, universities typically hold a small number of intensive classes, with course material condensed into a shorter period of time than in fall or spring. A relatively larger portion of these courses tend to be taught by graduate students as instructors of record compared to the regular term. Research work also continues over the summer.

The impact of continuing a strike into the summer period is not yet fully understood (though the Boston University 2024 strike is one example of an attempt to strike summer instruction). But there is reason to believe it could pack significant leverage, even as it raises very difficult organizing questions. In their injunction filing against the 2024 strike for Palestine, the UC claimed, more convincingly than usual, that a summer continuation of the strike might have serious repercussions at Berkeley: 

UC Berkeley EVC Hermalin: “Over 15,000 students have enrolled in UC Berkeley’s summer session. Although classes for these sessions run on varying schedules, assuming UAW’s strike continues only through June 30, it would impact over 12,000 of the enrolled students… Approximately 136 courses and 161 sections in Session A (6 weeks), Session B (10 weeks) and Session C (8 weeks) have UAW graduate student employees as the primary instructor of record, the de facto instructor of the course, or providing essential support to the instructor of record for a course. If UAW members strike for the month of June (or a significant portion thereof), then these courses would be without instruction and would very likely be canceled because finding substitute instructors in a timely manner will, as a rule, be impossible. This is largely due to the lengthy and involved nature of the UC search process at a point when these courses are well underway or about to begin… Also keep in mind that it would obviously be challenging to recruit graduate students to replace striking student workers and that Senate faculty are almost all on nine-month (academic-year) appointments and, thus, cannot be required to substitute for striking workers in the summer….

“Further, given the short duration and nature of the summer session, the University could not make up these courses after the fact… Cancellations will impact their ability to complete courses they need to graduate, likely preventing them from moving forward in their programs and thus delaying their ability to graduate and begin earning wages. Session C is the largest session and includes not only Berkeley students but also thousands of visiting students. These visiting students make travel and living arrangements to come to our campus, costs that will not be refunded to them. It is also extremely unlikely these students will be able to adjust their study dates or return for another summer. This session also marks the start of our Pre-College Scholars residential program, in which high school students come to live and study on our campus. All of our summer student populations will be deeply affected by course cancellations or alterations at this late date. Attending summer sessions are not required and many students and their families are paying extra to attend. Additionally, not taking summer session courses can preclude students taking one or more courses in the academic year for which they have enrolled, but for which the canceled summer sessions course(s) is (are) a prerequisite; and it can lengthen time to degree because those credits will need to be earned later in the students’ careers and/or because students have had to delay declaring a major.” UC second injunction filing supplement (2024), p. 6-8.

When we refer to the university administration as a unified entity, we typically oversimplify – in practice there are many administrators with their own interests, who work together in ways that are often loose and inefficient. An academic strike may impact certain administrators on a personal level in ways that do not reach the “top brass” – for instance by creating extra work and general headaches for the low-level administrators tasked with creating strikebreaking plans, dealing with student grade complaints, etc. Strikes may also open up or exacerbate tensions between different administrative actors. However, we cannot claim to have reached an analysis of which administrators are most heavily impacted by a strike, how they may direct pressure upward, etc. This is similar to the question of how faculty, impacted personally by a graduate student strike (most especially a research strike), might redirect the pressure onto administrators.

Work-to-rule actions in general involve workers performing the absolute minimum of their required duties, and therefore diminishing the output of their labor (which often goes beyond explicit requirements as a matter of course). Workers pursued this strategy following the multi-week strike for Palestine at UC Santa Cruz in Spring 2024, in a way that was experimental and achieved only partial success – resulting in the continued withholding of a portion of final grades that were set to be withheld had the strike continued (5,000 grades, ultimately). In this case, three-weeks of striking gave workers an opportunity to leverage the contract’s workload protections, saying there was simply too much make-up work to grade everything and turn in grades on time before their teaching appointments ended, after which they could not be made to work.

We do not know the circumstances in which work-to-rule is most impactful on a university administration, but it bears further thought and experimentation.

The UM math department, which heavily relies on graduate students for teaching labor and where striking grads withheld grades longer than in other major departments, is a potentially instructive example to understand the impacts of the 2023 strike. The intro program at UM – precalculus, calculus I, and calculus II – consists of small classes (typically fewer than 20 students) taught by a GSI, lecturer, or postdoc. These classes are overseen by one or two coordinators who are normally lecturers, often assisted by a GSI co-coordinator; coordinators write exams and some assignments on top of various administrative and mentoring duties. Some flexibility is available to instructors in teaching and grading, while most of the syllabus is course-wide and most (typically 75 percent) of students’ grades are determined by three exams, each of which consists largely of highly conceptual questions and is graded by the instructional team synchronously in lengthy (~four–eight hour) sessions. A supermajority of the 80 or so math GSIs were on strike throughout April, most of whom taught in this intro program and whose students were therefore without an instructor of record. About one-third to one-half of students were in these struck sections.

In the early part of the strike, systematic scabbing mostly took the form of certain faculty volunteering additional labor by offering large “review sessions” to these students, which by student accounts were a poor substitute for the classroom. As final exams approached, calculus coordinators cited pressure from department leadership and deans, as well as lack of faith that UM would not force them to overwork to handle the mess of grades post-strike,* as reasons for their decision to significantly deteriorate the final exam and modify the course grading system.** Strikers’ attempts to convince coordinators otherwise, and to reach out to potentially sympathetic faculty to organize a non-scabbing effort or relieve pressure on lecturers, were unsuccessful. In the end math strikers held a picket outside the finals grading sessions, but grading was nonetheless completed. 

Determination of calculus grades seemed to pose a greater challenge for UM than the determination of grades in other departments, since: (a) entering all As for calculus, a known weed-out course, would likely lead to serious repercussions (suggesting that such STEM classes may carry special leverage); (b) lecturers coordinating the calculus classes refused to enter grades in place of strikers; (c) in the meantime, the missing calculus grades were creating a minor crisis as students flooded the emails of coordinators, administrators, and former GSIs not knowing what to do when summer courses or internal transfer applications (particularly to the business school) demanded their calculus grade. Ultimately because coordinators had made it possible to assign final exam grades, a dean was able to collude with the math associate chair and a notorious faculty scab to enter grades with a formula unknown to us, but very likely incorporating exam grades.

As fall approached, we learned through course coordinators that deans approached department leadership, requiring them to develop a contingency plan in case of a continued fall strike. By all accounts, everyone in the department was aware that finding enough instructors to replace striking GSIs would be impossible. Instead, math department leadership implemented notable changes to fall intro courses: almost all GSIs were assigned to Calculus I, rather than spread out across courses (so that strikebreaking plans need only be developed for a single course); class sizes were slightly increased, to reduce the number of sections; some course assignments in Calculus I were temporarily eliminated, to reduce grading labor; and GSIs would be required to promptly report the results of quiz/assignment grading during the semester in a centralized database. All of these measures remained in place in fall, despite the settlement of the new contract, and created some messiness in the intro program.

Notes:

* The lecturer union’s staff and elected officers warned rank-and-file lecturers that unless they met grading deadlines, they would be subject to discipline. That these lecturers – far from radicals, and inactive in their union – nonetheless refused to submit grades in place of their GSIs, suggests the strike had a workplace impact that could exceed union officers’ understanding and control. Had this behavior been more widespread among faculty, the strike could have perhaps been settled earlier.

** The exam lengths were shortened, and the questions simplified to reduce partial-credit opportunities, so as to limit the labor needed to grade. One coordinator wrote that “the strike has severely crippled the course — I really dislike giving exams with minimal partial credit.”