As both students and employees, graduate students can be busier and less involved in communities outside of their department than undergraduates. But a handful of students decided to coordinate a national campaign called Grad Tax Walkout (or Rally) to Save Higher Education, which encouraged schools across the country to hold protest events on the same day. “It wasn’t even on my radar to hold an event until I saw there was that national network of graduate students who were trying to encourage folks across the nation to organize,” said John Terbot, a graduate biology student at the University of Kentucky. Campuses that already had unions or active graduate student associations seemed to get the largest crowds on this day of action, and they more often sustained their efforts through lobbying.

Indeed, as Johnston stressed, “graduate-student unionization as a movement is a lot stronger than it was 10, 20, or 30 years ago.” The students I spoke with at universities with student-worker unions mentioned they had already been organizing for issues—such as getting their universities to denounce Trump’s travel ban or sexual harassment—before the tax bill sprung up. But the bill brought them new members who hadn’t engaged in their activism yet. At the University of Pennsylvania (my alma mater), where students had been campaigning for a graduate-student union, the biomedical Ph.D. student Olivia Harding said she’d already been participating in an email chain with the people that were campaigning for a union when the tax issue started making headlines. Unions proved to be a convenient way for schools in the same city to organize with one another and hold joint rallies.

In some schools that did not previously have unions or strong graduate-student associations, the experience of organizing for the tax bill has also reinvigorated a push for more political agency and coordination on the part of students.

Today’s cultural climate around campus protest was yet another factor that made the activism noteworthy. The campus free-speech debate continues to evolve, and today campus protesters are frequently criticized in public discourse amid examples of extreme incidents that paint protesters as intolerant leftists who are destructive to democracy. Anti-tax-bill organizers had to grapple with that stigma. At the University of Wisconsin-Madison—where state legislators made national headlines for banning protests that shut down speaking events or presentations—graduate students held a phone bank on the national day of action and later held a rally with other groups in the city. CV Vitolo, a campus activist and Ph.D. candidate in communications, said, “we definitely had concerns about being portrayed as hysterical or irrational … but this is about something much larger than ourselves, and I think most of us here are willing to sacrifice whatever it is that we look like to the public in order to make sure the people are protected.”