Joanne Kim
As of March 27th, 2025, the non-tenured faculty union, WOAW-UAW has gone on strike at Wellesley, marking an unprecedented time in the college’s history. This strike comes after the college’s administration refused to thoroughly engage in good-faith bargaining and come to terms on many key proposals from the union, especially regarding compensation and workload. Now, in an unsurprising turn, the college has begun to place the full strain of the strike onto the backs of students and tenured faculty, while dodging accountability entirely.
The Provost’s office emailed students a shocking update today: essentially all striking courses without a lab will only be worth 0.5 credit unless a replacement (scab) professor is offered. This ultimately means that many students are no longer at the minimum number of credits to be considered full-time students at Wellesley, let alone seniors who need credits to graduate. Any Wellesley student on financial aid who does not meet the minimum 3 credit courseload requirement will lose their aid, and international students could lose their visa.
The college’s solution, for the problem they artificially created, is allegedly to open up seats for students in tenured professors’ classes. This means that students will sign up to complete the semester in a course they did not attend for half of the semester, may have absolutely no prior knowledge in, and may not even be remotely interested in. On top of that, likely hundreds of seniors and students on financial aid will need to find open seats: these courses will likely become so crowded that it is impossible to gauge how these lectures could even continue to run, or how professors could handle this additional workload. Wellesley does not have many large classrooms available for courses over 32 students, and even 32-student courses can struggle to fit into their allocated classrooms.
70% of tenure track faculty have also pledged not to scab union classes. I assume this solidarity extends to them refusing to open their current courses to more students. If this is the case, very few departments would be able to even offer open seats to students. The economics department is one of the few departments that has decided not to stand with the union and instead scab their courses, so perhaps we will all be taking Econ 101 together in a classroom where we can’t even get desk space.
Let’s put this into perspective for a moment: the college has willingly decided to threaten students with losing their financial aid or visa status if they do not attend scab lectures or replace their current lectures with completely unrelated courses that are halfway through their content. This disgusting move by the college is deliberately meant to harm students. Other colleges such as the University of California, University of Illinois – Chicago, and Community College of Philadelphia have had similar strikes among faculty for very long durations. Despite this, none of these colleges took away students’ credit from their striking classes. These colleges even explicitly stated that the striking courses would not threaten students’ F1 visa status or financial aid, and some even offered refunds to students who had striking classes.
Wellesley College is deliberately threatening their students with major financial and immigration consequences if they support their striking faculty and could even withhold graduation from students in their final semester. Considering the college’s track record, this development is unsurprising but still incredibly underhanded. Students should not be used as a bargaining chip in the administration’s dispute with the union. I ask and hope that department chairs and tenure-track faculty refuse to open up seats in their courses for students and force the college to give students their fair and deserved full credit for their striking courses, as many other institutions have done in the past.