Earlier this semester, the Chronicle of Higher Education published an article exposing decades of sexual harassment at Harvard and institutional failure to address it, showing once again that we cannot count on our university to uphold our civil rights as students and workers. When our institutions of higher education fail us again and again, we must come together to build collective power and hold our university accountable to supporting survivors, sanctioning perpetrators, and fighting the culture of sexual harassment. The urgent need to address sexual harassment on campus is why we’re supporting the graduate and undergraduate student unionization effort at Harvard.

As the Chronicle article revealed, longtime tenured Government professor and administrator Jorge Dominguez had been sexually harassing women at Harvard for over 35 years, even after a university investigation in the 1980’s found that he had committed “serious misconduct.” Harvard let Dominguez stay — but the women he harassed, like Professor Terry Karl, were driven out of the institution, with serious and lasting consequences. The failure to hold him accountable in a meaningful way represents a serious dereliction of duty on the part of the institution, which should have had better protections in place for students, junior faculty, and staff, especially following the investigation. It is unacceptable that in the end, only national media attention to the Dominguez case over three decades later moved the university bureaucracy to take action.

But this case only scratches the surface. In 2015, a campus climate survey conducted at Harvard by the American Association of Universities and Westat found that nearly 50 percent of female graduate students had reported being sexually harassed since starting at their universities, and sexual harassment disproportionately affects queer and minority students. In 1 out of 5 cases, this harassment was by a faculty member.

As the survey data indicate, this is not a one-time incident. Rape culture at Harvard is a serious, systemic, and continuing problem that is bound up in the ways that power is structured in academia. Deeply uneven hierarchies mean that senior faculty often have outsize influence over their staff, students, and untenured peers. Only rarely are perpetrators held accountable, in large part because of the power they often have over survivors’ careers and the looming threat of retaliation for those who speak up. Refusing physical advances or requests for involvement could mean denial of career opportunities and other forms of discrimination.

Promisingly, since the allegations against Dominguez were made public, graduate and undergraduate students have come together to demand change from the Government Department. But we cannot wait for a crisis to be unearthed in every department to make the changes we know are necessary now. The #MeToo movement has thrown into sharp relief just how common experiences of sexual harassment are among women, queer people, and minorities. Sadly, sexual harassment at Harvard did not start with Jorge Dominguez, nor will it end with him. Harassment by those with power over our careers and education is a structural and university-wide problem that needs a structural and university-wide remedy. Every person targeted for sexual harassment is one too many.

That’s why we support a graduate and undergraduate student union.

Unions have been at the forefront of dealing with workplace harassment in industries as diverse as hospitality, nursing, airlines, and academia. And by centering female leadership in unions and centering sexual harassment as a key area of bargaining, we can use our collective power in a union to challenge the power structures that enable harassment in our schools and our workplaces. In particular, we can fight to change a culture that enables harassment and ensure support for survivors on three fronts:

• First of all, campus unionization will expand the options for recourse available to survivors by allowing them to pursue a union grievance procedure if they choose. At University of Connecticut, for example, when a student’s complaint of sexual harassment by a professor was dismissed by the university, she filed a complaint through the union. With the power of her union behind her, instead of leaving her graduate program, the student was able to go up against the university and challenge the power her professor had over her. The student achieved reasonable accommodations and is now pursuing an academic career.
• Secondly, unionizing would require the university to bargain with students on adequate accommodations, including access to mental healthcare services and paid leave, putting a check on Harvard’s unilateral power to decide what options are available to survivors and allowing students to weigh in. In this way, unionizing can help us proactively set in place accommodations to support survivors.
• Finally, a union will provide us with a robust platform for organizing across schools and departments so that we can continue to make needed changes to sexual harassment policy and press for better support for survivors into the future. For example, we could demand that the University issue regular campus climate surveys measuring the rate of harassment and publish the results.

We may have relatively little power as individuals, but collectively, we are a force to be reckoned with. On our own campus, anti-sexual violence activists and union organizers have already been working together to ensure that Harvard abides by its Title IX obligations even as the Trump administration signals that it will turn a blind eye to campuses that violate survivors’ rights.

We recognize that a union is not a silver bullet. Institutional cultures that overlook and enable harassment will not disappear once we unionize. However, gaining a democratic voice in Harvard’s policymaking process is a much needed step towards addressing power disparities between professors and students, and having a union means that we will have additional options for redress when things go wrong. Workers across the country are leveraging their collective power to tackle sexual harassment and violence in their workplaces, and it’s time we do the same here at Harvard.

Sarah Fellman is an undergraduate student studying Government at Harvard College. She is also a former national board member of Rise and an organizer with Our Harvard Can Do Better and the Harvard Graduate Student Union-UAW, as well as a member of the Undergraduate Council.

Niharika Singh is a PhD Candidate in Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. She is also an organizer with the Harvard Graduate Student Union-UAW.

Leena Akhtar earned her PhD from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. She is currently a Lecturer in Studies of Women, Gender and Sexuality and the History of Science, and consults on matters of equity, inclusion, and mitigating sexual harassment.

The image used in this article is from http://www.chicagonow.com/everyday-me/2018/02/the-metoo-movement-and-black-history-month-my-story/.