BOSTON — Mayor Michelle Wu withdrew on Tuesday as the Harvard Law School Class Day speaker after pressure from the Harvard Graduate Student Union-United Auto Workers, which said she should not cross its picket line. Harvard said Wu, a 2012 graduate of the law school, told the university she would not be able to speak at the Wednesday ceremony as planned.
The decision came one day before Class Day, which starts Wednesday at 2:30 p.m., and forced Harvard to recast the program around student award winners and remarks from Class Marshals. Wu had been selected by this year’s class and was first announced as the speaker on May 11, making her withdrawal the latest sign that the strike on campus has begun to reach into Harvard’s marquee commencement events.
Harvard said in an email to graduating law students that, in light of outreach from the union, “Boston Mayor Michelle Wu ’12 has informed us that she will not be able to speak at Class Day tomorrow as originally planned.” The Harvard Graduate Student Union, which represents 4,000 graduate students, said Wu would “stand with Harvard’s striking student workers” by declining to cross the picket line and stepping back from her scheduled remarks at Commencement.
Wu’s office said the mayor was deeply disappointed not to attend. Her spokesperson said she is a strong ally of the labor movement and believes in respecting picket lines, but wished the union had accepted one of the alternatives that were proposed over several days by her team and the HLS Class Marshals. Those options included acknowledging the strike from the podium or participating virtually. They did not work out.
The union’s strike began in April after more than a year of negotiations over a new contract. HGSU-UAW president Denish K. Jaswal said any participation in Commencement activities, no matter the format, would still have required crossing the union’s picket line. “While we understand that Commencement activities will carry on, any speaker participation in those activities, regardless of format, would have required crossing our picket line. We thank Mayor Wu for opting not to,” Jaswal said.
The dispute does not end with Wu. HGSU-UAW has also called on other Class Day and Commencement speakers — including Conan O’Brien, Mitt Romney and Ronny Chieng — to boycott the ceremonies in solidarity with the strike. Harvard Law School said the event will now be refocused on student award winners and tributes from the Class Marshals, while Professor Naz Modirzadeh was unable to take part because of a personal matter.
For Harvard, the immediate question is not whether the ceremony will go on — it will — but how much the strike can keep bending the university’s graduation season around it. For Wu, the answer is already clear: she will not take the stage if doing so means crossing the picket line.
