by Evan Mackay
The following is a speech delivered by Evan Mackay on Saturday April 12th at the Stand Up Harvard! demonstration held by the Cambridge City Council.
—
When I say people you say power people power people power
When I say fight, you say win, fight, win, fight, win
My name is Evan MacKay, I’m the former president of the Harvard Graduate Students Union HGSU-UAW Local 5118
We are so proud to be here today as workers fighting together alongside our neighbors, faculty, staff, students, and community members. We are out here fighting for our research, our education, our teaching, our freedom of speech, our ability to organize.
The radical right has tried for decades to undermine scholarship on things like climate change and inequality. My own research is on wealth inequality. They want to cancel our work—but we don’t give in.
The federal administration and ICE are coming for our community, and they are particularly targeting people from the most marginalized identities and backgrounds. Students and scholars of color. Immigrants. Muslims. People who spoke up for a ceasefire, people who spoke up for Gaza. We are fighting for free speech, and we are also fighting against a Palestine exception to free speech.
Giving in to Trump’s demands doesn’t protect our university, our students, our research, or our community. The Trump administration held research funds hostage. Columbia University Administration capitulated. They still didn’t get their research funds back! ICE abducted Mahmoud Khalil in front of his 8 months pregnant wife, inside a Columbia University dorm. Just yesterday, a conservative judge took steps to deport him.
Refusing to fight doesn’t make anybody safe. Columbia University Administration fired and expelled the president of the Student Workers of Columbia UAW Local 2710. The day before the university administration was bargaining over the rights and protections for international students, they expelled and fired dozens of the most vulnerable students as a union busting tactic.
Complying in advance does NOT keep us safe. It does not protect our research, our funding, our university.
We need a campus and a community that are safe for everybody, for people from all identities, for scholarship that is both supported and opposed by the current administration. We need fully funded research, good jobs in and beyond education, and protections for free speech and our unions. In order to get the future we deserve, we’re going to have to organize. Coming from the labor movement, I know that there is power in every single one of us. It is going to take a groundswell from everyday people to stop this administration’s attacks. But we know that we can do it together.
So what do we do? We fight. We organize. We show up—for each other, and for the world we believe in.
When I say “When we fight” you all say “we win”
When we fight, WE WIN
When we fight, WE WIN,
When we fight WE WIN
Solidarity Forever!
—
Evan Mackay is a union leader, pro-democracy organizer, and a Harvard teaching fellow