I have not eaten for two weeks. I’m one of eight graduate teachers fasting at Yale in protest of our university’s refusal to negotiate with us since we voted to unionize.

When you think of college teachers, there’s probably an image that comes to your mind. Someone with a job for life, summer vacations, sabbaticals every few years. Someone with a roomy office, a flexible schedule and few cares in the world.

Unfortunately, this describes little of today’s reality. I knew this going into graduate school, but I went for it anyway, because I wanted to do nothing more than teach English in college the way it was taught to me.

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Now, though, college teachers have to fight for every scrap. At Yale, graduate student teachers like me are in such a fight right now. Until Yale sits down with us, we will go as long as we are medically able without food.

A fast may seem extreme, so let me give you the context. Universities everywhere have realized that they can save money by hiring teachers on a short-term basis. Why hire a professor for life if you can get someone to do the job for a fraction of the cost and don’t have to promise anything in the future? This may make life easier for the millionaires who now run most universities, but it means that teaching is becoming unsustainable as a career.

This means two things for people like me, who are graduate teachers. First, it means that universities like Yale depend on us to teach their students but don’t give us any of the job security that the professors have. Second, although Yale says I’m in training to become a professor one day, it’s likely I’ll never have the chance.

Instead, if you check back with me in five or ten years, you’ll probably find me among the many thousands of people who have a PhD but can barely hang on to a place in the middle class. I may not have health insurance through my job, much less paid vacation, an office or any control over my schedule. In fact, it’s likely I won’t even know where my paycheck will come from further out than four months. In academia, you’re now less secure the more experience you accumulate.

I decided to fight back against this because I saw it up close. My father spent his career working as an adjunct professor. I remember the stress in our family about whether he’d get hired back next year, the toll it took on his health, and the pressure it put on my mom to provide some stability. He taught six courses right after having a heart attack because that was the minimum to qualify for health coverage.

I don’t think this is how universities should treat their teachers. I especially don’t think it’s something that Yale – the second-wealthiest university in the world – has any right contributing to.

But Yale is actively making this situation worse. The university has a reverse-seniority system for its graduate teachers. After we accumulate a certain amount of experience, Yale cuts our pay by 40%. This comes at just the time when we’re scrambling to find our next jobs, meaning that Yale cuts us loose so that other employers can take advantage of our desperation. There are graduate teachers at Yale living on just $16,000 per year – genuine poverty wages at a $25bn institution. It’s cynical and exploitative, and I’ve seen the harm it does to my friends and colleagues.

For Yale, we’re disposable. Unsurprisingly, many of us lose hope, give up on what we’ve spent years working and training for, and what we do so well. We have to move back in with their parents and sink into deep depressions. Our real skills as scholars and teachers are wasted. This is why we’re fighting for a union.



For a long time, Yale has said that we just need to wait for these problems to sort themselves out. We heard that the pay cut, implemented in 2015, was an aftereffect of the 2008 financial crisis. We’ve all been told that the trend toward low-wage, short-term hiring for teachers will reverse itself, although it gets worse every year. And when we voted to unionize, Yale told us to wait longer while its lawyers created endless delays in court.

Yale wants us to wait? Fine. The eight of us have been waiting every day outside Yale president Peter Salovey’s office. We’re waiting without eating, because we’ve had enough.