SPRING 2026
ISSUE 06

₁ This is a revised version of a piece appearing in Long-Haul’s Higher Ed dispatch in November 2025.

The Dartmouth graduate worker strike, launched on May 1, 2024, was a direct outgrowth of years of struggle and militant organizing by workers who comprise the “long-haul tendency.” Our strategic framework was informed by lessons learned from graduate workers at the University of California Santa Cruz and the University of Michigan regarding how to wield strike power in the university, and our eagerness to learn and apply these lessons was perhaps our greatest strength. With this in mind, we aim here to analyze how our implementation of these ideas unfolded within Dartmouth’s particular social and organizational context.

Much, if not all, of the wave of organizing and striking in higher education has unfolded among instructional workers. The grad worker local at Dartmouth is predominantly filled with researchers in STEM fields, with a much smaller number of teaching assistants in a few departments. This forced our contract campaign, and strike preparations, to confront a relatively new situation. Even if researchers had struck in large numbers elsewhere before us, it was usually in tandem with instructional workers. We approached our novel situation as a problem that could only be solved by the workers waging the strike, which required us to inquire more deeply into our working conditions and experiment with methods. Here we offer a “report” on this experiment, which uncovered vital intelligence for our campaign and may help others seeking to assert power in workplaces with diverse and dispersed forms of labor.

Despite its (mostly false) reputation as a small liberal arts college, Dartmouth’s graduate student population consists of roughly eight hundred STEM researchers compared to 30 or so humanities students enrolled in a small Master of Arts program. These workers have a different orientation and relationship to academic work than the cadres of humanities and social science grads that spearheaded many of the organizing drives and strikes in the post-2016 era. Those previous efforts, particularly those that reached the point of striking, typically relied on the leverage of teaching assistants and course instructors to extract gains from the universities by disrupting the production of grades and degrees and the smooth transition from one term to the next. As we began developing our campaign, we reached out to organizers involved in building grad unions at other private universities such as Harvard, Stanford, and Brown. These more experienced organizers warned us that grad workers in the sciences possessed politics and personalities that made them difficult to organize. But in our experience, the biggest organizing challenges came from the uniquely exploitative working conditions of the hard sciences and engineering fields.

Researchers typically work under a single principal investigator (PI) for the duration of their program, who doubles as their advisor. PIs are not technically part of university administration: They are faculty, and, like grads, they are employed by the college to perform research and teaching labor. However, most PIs do not carry out the day-to-day tasks involved in their research. Instead, they act as the immediate supervisor for a lab group comprising grad workers, postdoctoral fellows, research scientists, and occasionally undergraduate students. Most of a PI’s time goes into writing grants to acquire funding to cover their lab’s research and labor costs, usually from federal agencies like the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health. The PI then acts as a lord of their small fiefdom. In the absence of a union (and sometimes despite the presence of one), the PI holds unlimited authority to determine hours, working conditions, and the production of research; and the apprenticeship model makes the advisor–advisee relationship near totalizing. Challenges to that relationship not infrequently end a prospective scientist’s career: Letters of recommendation and academic networking are extremely important for career progression. PIs have sole authority to decide whether the quality, content, and volume of a researcher’s work justifies progress towards their degree, and they can fire grad workers arbitrarily over petty disputes by issuing failing grades for the research course, transforming issues of worker discipline into matters of their own academic freedom.

Further, the idea that research is a self-interested intellectual pursuit rather than labor performed for an employer is deeply ingrained in academic culture, despite the eye-watering returns that research grants generate. Universities often use this narrative to undermine attempts to organize researchers, as evidenced by the 2023 National Labor Relations Board ruling that MIT graduate research fellows are not considered employees under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). Dartmouth cited this decision during our own recognition election when they (unsuccessfully) attempted to challenge the “worker” status of over four hundred Dartmouth grads one week before the vote.

These conditions of work presented particular opportunities for strike leverage. Our teaching load was uneven across departments but relatively light overall. We felt that even a very strong teaching strike alone would be insufficient to achieve many of our demands at Dartmouth, since it accounted for such a small fraction of the total labor of our unit, as well as a relatively small amount of the total teaching labor at the college. By contrast, graduate workers supply the vast majority of the labor of the research enterprise. In labs and departments where the research strike was effective, withdrawing our labor could halt production, and the damage would increase over time as grant timelines drew out and funding expired without results. Figuring out how to do an effective research strike became integral to our strategy. Our approach to power analysis arose from these conditions.

This lag arose from what we now see as a significant mistake we made while preparing the strike. During bargaining, we put a good deal of effort into organizing “direct actions” – particularly informational pickets or protests targeting certain administrators over specific contract demands. This, in addition to departmental organizing, took a significant amount of our limited effort and time. We invested time in such actions essentially believing that we could help build participation in our union by engaging people in these direct actions and eventually use the expanded structure we built to launch an even stronger strike.

We found that these direct actions did very little to build out the organizing structure that we would need to carry out a strike. While they may have helped us gain some contract concessions, they were a tremendous expenditure of energy. People who joined these actions in general did not then join in as core union organizers, but instead seemed drained. The clearest example of this came when we organized a large group to infiltrate an alumni dinner event and chant at the college president over her unwillingness to give us meaningful sexual harassment and discrimination protections. While yelling at the president in front of Dartmouth alumni who were trying to eat dinner was fun (and funny), those newer workers who came along were not successfully integrated into the organizer core that would go on to actually prepare workers to walk off the job.

Throughout our entire union organizing effort, we would consistently speak to people about the idea of striking, why we would do it and how it might work. We realized, however, that we simply did not have our departments well enough organized structurally to carry out something much bigger than a large rally. When we switched our energy towards the deliberate work of preparing individual lab groups and departments for actually striking and focused our general body meetings (GBMs) on preparing for the reality of a strike, our union’s strength grew rapidly. We also began to see more clearly which organizing methods worked well in diverse departmental conditions.

Rather than presenting a predetermined theory of power to workers, organizers operated under two basic premises, drawn from our study of previous struggles in our sector. First, universities are very resilient to short strikes. If we want to threaten our employers with real pain, the strike we prepare for needs to be indefinite in nature and, most likely, quite long. This means that workers must organize themselves such that it is actually possible for them to strike for the long haul, while also avoiding undue damage or setbacks to their own research. Second, the economics of academia are such that leverage over the university is not uniformly distributed across campus. While some researchers could potentially cause the university to lose millions of dollars if their lab were to shut down for a prolonged period, other researchers’ refusal to work may have little to no financial impact.

The strategic implications of these two insights flew directly in the face of the “conventional” wisdom offered to us by our parent union, UE. Strikes are supposed to create immediate crises for the employer, and the potency of the strike threat is supposed to increase linearly with the number of members who pledge to participate in it. Seeing that neither of these premises held for us, our organizers learned to adapt on a department-by-department and lab-by-lab basis. Thus, we developed an exercise in worker inquiry that we referred to as a “group strike plan.” Organizers were given explicit instructions to hold a “strike planning meeting” with a relatively small group of close coworkers who shared a lab, research group, or department. Our goal for these meetings was for workers to map out various aspects of the worksite and then to use that information to devise a plan for how to strike.

To begin developing a group strike plan, workers were asked what specific type of work they were doing: writing papers, writing grant proposals, doing experiments, or preparing for conferences. They were asked how their work was financially supported and whether this work furthered the scientific objectives of their PI beyond what was necessary for their own actual thesis. They were asked what kind of work they did outside of research itself, such as cleaning chores in the lab or responsibilities to department events. With these questions, the mechanics of the complicated machine exploiting them started to become clearer, and a real conversation about throwing wrenches into it could be had.

Many of the labs in large departments such as engineering, computer science, and molecular and cell biology (MCB) brought in the largest volume of grant revenue, due to their direct healthcare, military, or industrial applications, with some labs even producing profit-generating patents. Departments such as mathematics, Earth sciences, and physics tended to have smaller average grant revenues due to their tendency towards “fundamental” research as opposed to marketable applications.

This underlying material reality influenced departmental cultures and attitudes to striking research. Many of the graduate workers in the large profit-generating departments seemed to believe that their future career prospects (including high-paying engineering jobs after graduating) were worth so much more than whatever we might have won through a strike, or that upsetting their advisor or slowing their own research output was not worth it. Appeals to solidarity and communal support tended to have less influence there.

This made the targeting of “high-impact” labs a tougher proposition than we imagined. The departments that were more engaged in the project of the strike (such as mathematics and physics) tended to be smaller and more communal than departments like engineering, so the “targeting” strategy was unnecessary in those departments because we instead focused on engaging the entire department in the strike. In this way, targeting high-impact labs fell to the wayside in favor of driving entire departments to strike.

Conversations about action inevitably provoked questions of risk. What are people potentially giving up by agreeing to any given form of collective action? Organizers in most contexts tend to rely on one-on-one conversations with workers aimed at connecting with their issues and letting them talk themselves into doing things. However, when workers express fears in this context, there is not much the organizer can do except assure them that “the union” will have their back or that there is strength in numbers, with little in the way of a concrete commitment to supporting the worker if something were to happen. Strike planning meetings were spaces where workers were highly prone to catastrophizing, but when they did so, they were catastrophizing to their immediate coworkers, the very people who are in a position to make concrete commitments of support. In the lead-up to the strike, these department meetings replaced one-on-ones as our primary form of communication. They were the spaces where workers decided to take action together with the people they trusted most and where they expressed anxieties to the people who could understand them the most. In retrospect, this single detail stands out as the most decisive feature of our practice, without which the strike might not have taken place at all.

Organizers went into these meetings with an open mind regarding what specific actions we could reasonably expect other workers to take. Having no “master theory” to fall back on, no way to “check their work,” we often had no choice but to take the workers’ word for it that their theories of power were correct. As a result, workers decided in a rather decentralized way where the “picket line” would be drawn – for example, whether it is allowed for a mathematician to continue thinking about a math problem in their head, or whether the experimentalist should throw away years of research by allowing their rats to die.

At its best, the strike was a product of militant workers earnestly trying to hurt the university as much as they possibly could without insisting upon immaterial and purely symbolic commitments to self-sacrifice. At its worst, our approach allowed those clinging to the view that they hold no leverage over the university (and no responsibility to anyone else) to find a path to legitimizing their position on the wrong side of the picket line. These paths diverged along departmental lines. Participation in our strike had one glaring predictive factor, and it was not attending a rally or signing a strike pledge: Workers who participated earnestly in this process belonged to departments that had an established culture of practicing collective action on the shop floor, even at small scales.

Despite the relatively low teaching load, the impact of a given teaching job being struck was easier to quantify than that of a research job. We could clearly see the teaching strike force class sections to combine, faculty to take on additional teaching duties, and tutoring sessions for many classes to be cancelled. However, graduate workers are only responsible for a small fraction of the instructional labor at Dartmouth, which allowed departmental administrators to adapt to the strike conditions and continue to deliver undergraduate courses, albeit in a haphazard and chaotic way. In the mathematics department, for example, we saw that the vast majority of our struck teaching labor was scabbed by faculty. While this pressure on the faculty contributed to our strike power by forcing them to spend time doing work that wasn’t initially theirs, faculty scabbing meant that the strike fell short of halting a vital process of the college: the production of degrees.

Research labor, on the other hand, was much harder to scab than teaching labor. Whereas grad workers were only a small layer of the teaching workforce at the college, we were responsible for performing the majority of research work. Furthermore, random faculty could be tasked with teaching an undergraduate course for a few months but could not replace the role of graduate students in the lab. Graduate workers often possessed very specific knowledge of how a given experiment was set up and how to continue the research process. Oftentimes even the advisors overseeing that experiment were not directly involved with the tasks assigned to their graduate worker apprentices and could not simply pick up their work without a large overhead of time and effort. But it is difficult to quantify the impact of individual research strikers because much of the finances of private universities are shrouded in secrecy. Apart from trying to use contextual information, such as grant deadlines, to guess the effect a given lab’s striking was having on their immediate management, we had to use information like the reaction of individual faculty – PIs and instructors of record – to gauge our impact.

The research strike appeared to press a deeper nerve than the teaching strike. While the faculty seemed annoyed at the teaching strike, the cessation of research labor angered them. Despite the threat of a strike being public knowledge for weeks prior to its launch, many PIs were particularly upset and even aggressive upon finding out that their students were planning to strike their research. Whereas a month or two of research stoppage could be worked around in the long term, the prospect of an indefinite continuation of the strike caused some faculty to begin openly worrying about meeting grant deadlines. While faculty were often tight-lipped about their concerns during the strike, the handful of instances we found of PIs despairing over their grants gave us good reason to believe that our strike was working as intended.

However, as the strike went on for the long haul, direct pressure from PIs decreased. Their anger turned into a more panicked concern as the strike continued into the summer term. It became clear they had little interest in dismissing highly skilled workers, in whose training they had invested years of their time and funding. Their interest was primarily in a resolution to the strike, on terms either favorable or unfavorable to us. Worker-to-worker solidarity this was not. Rather, we found the faculty to be a disorganized middle stratum, which would side against whomever they felt to be the weaker party, exerting their influence either downward in an attempt to break the strike or upward to management to press them towards an agreement. Demonstrating our power to stop production earned, in some cases, their begrudging respect, which endured in our working relationships beyond the strike.

This denial took the convoluted form of the administration constantly expressing that faculty had the absolute right to fail graduate workers and kick them out of their program if they were making insufficient “academic” progress. (Protection against such arbitrary dismissal was, in fact, an important demand in the strike itself.) Both teaching and research positions are formally associated with a “grade,” which functions in practice simply as a ledger to indicate a given worker has completed their assigned job. Dartmouth leaned on this to argue that their right to assign grades was uninhibited by the NLRA and that withholding teaching or research labor was grounds to fail graduate workers. Since failure would lead to expulsion from the program, they were essentially defending their right to fire anyone they desired. These threats were repeated often in bargaining sessions, in Dartmouth’s mass communications, and by faculty loyal to the administration.

In response to these threats, the union maintained a straightforward narrative. We constantly emphasized to our members, in GBMs and on the picket line, our inviolable right to strike our labor. This had been a major point of discussion in GBMs leading up to the strike, where we collectively discussed that perhaps the most important precondition for ending the strike, beyond any contractual win, was our refusal to allow Dartmouth to punish anyone for engaging in strike activity. The organizing we did around Dartmouth’s attempt to flagrantly violate one of our most important rights as workers brought intense momentum to our fight against retaliation and even fired up people who were even somewhat ambivalent when it came to the contract fight itself. 

To turn this strongly held collective belief into actual power we could wield against the college, however, required more effort. At the strike’s beginning, we used department meetings conducted on the picket line to organize workers to stand firm against the deluge of messages from their respective faculty advisors telling them that striking their research was subject to discipline. We believe that organizing members to collectively refuse faculty aggression pre-strike helped prevent individuals from being targeted for discipline on a large scale early on. 

There were nonetheless some attempts by Dartmouth management to ramp up strike retaliation. Our union’s strategy was to respond swiftly and intensely to the first signs of such retaliation, in order to nip them in the bud and prevent strike discipline from becoming the norm. The starkest example of this occurred in the math department, when an international worker was threatened by a faculty member with effective termination were she to refuse to perform her teaching duties the first week of the strike. The math department workers responded by packing the department admin office with a majority of math workers that same day and demanding protections from retaliatory discipline for us all. Taking such early, decisive actions whenever signs of retaliation appeared sent a strong message back to the faculty and administration school-wide. Despite Dartmouth’s initial heavy-handed declaration of their absolute right to discipline anyone, it was clear that their confidence was shaken as soon as workers began fighting back. After these early struggles, the administration continued with similar rhetoric, but no attempts at serious discipline were made, and our union considered our battle over retaliation to have been won. 

Throughout the strike, we held weekly GBMs in which members would vote to either continue or stop the strike. Preceding the vote, organizers reported on strike participation in each department, and the bargaining committee outlined which contract demands we had won or which outstanding demands members had decided to maintain or concede during the previous bargaining session. The discussions at GBMs and bargaining caucus sessions were often highly contentious, emotional, and difficult to facilitate. Workers fervently argued to continue or end the strike, usually aligning with others in their department. Despite the uneasy nature of the discussions themselves, workers nearly reached consensus whenever the time came to make a concrete decision. Furthermore, those who vehemently argued for ending the strike during meetings largely abided by the group’s decision and refused to cross the picket line each time the general body voted to continue.

For eight weeks, an overwhelming majority of workers chose to remain on strike. Strike participation held steady, and we gradually won contract demands. At the beginning of the ninth week, organizers began to report a decline in strike participation. A small contingent of workers argued to continue the strike in pursuit of back pay and other demands left unwon. However, with our strike fund running out and the summer term approaching, workers overwhelmingly decided to accept the offer on the table and go back to work. We soon ratified a new contract that included an immediate 17.5 percent raise with annual cost of living adjustments to match or exceed inflation; free dental insurance; reimbursement funds for childcare, medical expenses, and visa renewal fees; and innovative just-cause protections for teaching assistants and researchers.

The Dartmouth strike is a case study for understanding and improving the application of the research strike, and of organizing STEM workers more generally. The research and the teaching components of the strike had an impact on different time horizons, the synthesis of which increased the damage dealt to the college and the social momentum of the union. The faculty in particular seemed strongly affected by the research strike, and the college administration firmly postured against our right to strike research and indicated a willingness to punish those who engaged in it. It seemed that only quick and aggressive pressure from departmental organizing prevented them from carrying out serious retaliation.

At the smaller individual lab scale in particular, the strategy of understanding leverage played a crucial role in waging this strike. In discussions with individual researchers or lab groups, we always put forward the question, “What is your leverage over the college?” as the fundamental basis of forming a strike plan. Understanding strike plans in this way helped workers identify the forms of labor necessary for them to strike if they wanted to have a meaningful impact. This formulation, and our collective discussions about our leverage, helped both to drive workers to strike important labor and to internalize the acute pressure they were putting on the college, even when obvious indications of the research strike impact were hard to find.

The research strike proved more difficult to organize and more difficult to analyze (both during and after the strike) than the smaller instructional strike, but it also seemed to cut deeper where it was working well. Ultimately, we believe the two-pronged nature of our strike was necessary for our success. Without the teaching strike, there would have been little to no immediate disruption to business as usual at the college, which was an important factor in giving workers confidence and building momentum. It also possibly produced concessions in the short term that helped build our momentum. Without the research strike, however, the departmental administrations could have effectively scabbed enough of our labor to make our strike insufficiently disruptive.

In retrospect, it is clear that there are many granular strategic decisions that could have been made differently to improve our strength both during and in the lead-up to the strike. We believe that the most fundamental point underlying both our successes and failures, however, was the degree to which we centered strike preparation in our organizing, and specifically when we correctly identified the scale (lab, departmental, school-wide, etc.) at which to organize collective actions.

The series of recent strikes in higher ed continues to reveal that departmental organizing is a vitally important component of building a strike. Many grad organizers, ourselves included, have best understood a school-wide strike as a sort of confederation of departmental strikes. This framework is helpful in part because it emphasizes building socially coherent and independently functional subgroups of the total unit, which can then act all together, rather than haphazardly attempting to bring together disparate individuals. 

This lens can be extended by adapting the scale of what we consider the basic components of a graduate worker strike to the particular conditions on the ground. There are times when we think an overly dogmatic attempt to fit our organizing approach to a given scale slowed our progress. This took forms such as trying to force the formation of a departmental structure before sufficient groundwork had been laid (especially in larger departments) or in trying to create campus-wide movements when smaller-scale departmental organizing would have built more enduring structures. Better understanding the existing social contours of our unit, and therefore more careful decisions made about which groups to agitate, would have improved our strike preparation. 

These lessons were especially significant in the case of the large departments, namely engineering and MCB. For months, we struggled to build coherent “departmental unions” within these departments, instead having a number of isolated individuals who participated in the campus-wide union. As the strike drew near, organizers in engineering found that certain groups of labs, who all happened to share a given sub-discipline of study, were much easier to cohere into an organized “unit” than was the whole department. Shifting towards lab-focused organizing in MCB in the strike lead-up also led to success in bringing in more prepared strikers. 

While adopting this approach where necessary helped us prepare some workers to strike in difficult departments, the formation of smaller coherent groups occurred only in the last few months before the strike began. Even in smaller, stronger departments like math and physics, truly cohering the workers into a powerful and autonomous decision-making body happened very late in the timeline of building the strike. 

Major questions still remain. The departments that tended to be most difficult to organize were those whose research has more direct industrial value and whose graduate workers will tend more towards industry than academia. How to effectively organize such departments, like engineering, is a common problem across graduate unions. Power-mapping served well as a tool for strengthening lab-level strike plans, but it is difficult to apply to larger-scale strike strategy in the more difficult departments without developing a strong organizing base composed of smaller subunits. Focusing on sub-departmental and lab organizing in such departments had some success, but the development of a truly effective approach is still an open problem. 

Quantifying the effects of the research strike, particularly in real time, is also difficult during a strike. Figuring out how to do this more effectively would allow striking unions to better measure their real leverage, make strategic decisions, and help motivate striking workers to continue wielding their leverage. 

As research workers build strikes in the years to come, they will no doubt confront and solve these problems and continue developing on the strategies we used at Dartmouth. We look forward to seeing our movement develop creative new ways to bend our employers to the workers’ will.