Maggie Laurel Boyd
Maggie Laurel Boyd earned her PhD in English Literature at Boston University in Summer 2024. During her time at BU, she was a proud union representative. Since graduating, she has taken on a new role supporting students at BU. She swears her Dunkin order is the platonic ideal of a coffee (iced medium with oat milk and two sugars if anyone is curious).
Noise-Making, Possibility-Making, World-Making:
A Reflection on the BUGWU Strike
We might be tempted to think studious means silent, that the ivory tower must also be a quiet place, that we should all tiptoe through the halls of learning so as not to break anyone’s concentration. But not only is such an image untrue—teaching requires communication, after all, and learning just as surely requires conversation—it also upholds the structures that make such spaces so unlivable. As Boston University’s graduate workforce went on strike in the spring of 2024, and our chanting soon echoed throughout campus, it became especially clear to me that such noise does not impede learning but inspire it; noise does not disturb the peace so much as it disturbs the pretense of peace; noise does not get in our way but rather gives us a way. In rebuking the notion of scholarship as a solitary and silent pursuit, such a collectively noisy act reminds us that education inevitably disrupts, that it must be willing to puncture our quiet assumptions and acceptances to deliver us anywhere interesting or important. In this reflection, I contend that the noisy act of organizing is also the necessary action of the responsible educator, a reflection of our scholarly commitment to identifying and inhabiting possibilities and a reminder of learning as both fundamentally collective and corporeal.
Before the strike, before even unionization, in my prior years as a doctoral student, I had spent considerable time advocating and watching others advocate for better working conditions on campus. These advocacy efforts pursued every university-approved channel; we pushed for higher wages and stronger protections through our faculty, through our Director of Graduate Studies, through enormous petitions, through our Graduate Student Organization, and through personal messages to senior leadership. And yet, in response to these carefully-worded, well-researched initiatives, we never heard a word—not even an empty one. So, when BUGWU launched its unionizing effort in September 2022 and the then-provost emailed the entire graduate student body telling us to use our voices to negotiate with the university without any so-called third parties, I saw clearly how the status quo worked to keep us quiet. At that point, I had already tried to use my voice and witnessed others doing the same—but those voices remained soft enough that the university could easily tune them out. After all, it has no legal obligation to answer an email, a petition, a phone call. Sitting, stewing and stressing in silence had not changed the working conditions that made graduate labor so precarious and so punishing. It was only through our whispering, then our planning, and then finally our shouting that we made it possible to begin the efforts to reconfigure our working conditions.
When the strike began in March 2024, it punctured the existing sounds of campus life. In addition to the honks of traffic, the squeals of MBTA trains, and the chatter of students during passing time that typically saturated Commonwealth Avenue, suddenly there was also the refrains of the picket line. Our noise was not consistent in volume, source, form or tone—but it was consistently present, becoming a part of the university’s sonic landscape. Some days our clamor was hundreds strong, other days it came from three of us standing in the pouring rain. Some days our commotion included community allies, other days it was just our union staff and ourselves. Some days we chanted “we can’t teach if we can’t eat” through megaphones as we walked in circles, other days we conversed while sitting in crafting circles. Some days we expelled fury and frustration, other days we expressed solidarity and sureness. I argue that this new addition to the BU soundtrack did not undercut the university’s mission but rather fulfill it. After all, learning is a practice of listening.
Listening engages us in our tangible reality, informed by the space, body, and mood we’re each occupying in any given moment, even as it asks us to open ourselves up to new spaces, bodies and moods. And it forms the basis of academic work, which situates itself in the existing territory of knowledge on a topic and simultaneously searches to expand that terrain. Robin Wall Kimmerer explains that the scientific method is premised on such an act of attention, writing, “Experiments are not about discovery but about listening and translating the knowledge of other beings.”[1] Similarly, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing accounts for her ethnography by emphasizing that “to listen to and tell a rush of stories is a method. And why not make the strong claim and call it a science, an addition to knowledge? […] To learn anything we must revitalize arts of noticing.”[2] Or, in introducing the now canonical anthology This Bridge Called My Back, Toni Cade Bambara writes about the collection as a way to “coax us into the habit of listening to each other and learning each other’s ways of seeing and being.”[3] We learn in conjunction with others—other peers, other texts, other forms of life. We run experiments and develop methods to attune ourselves to these others and slowly come to understand the potential epistemologies and ontologies that they present. Learning thus grows from listening. And what is organizing if not a translation of shared struggles into collective actions and articulations toward a different way of life—built on a rush of stories, arts of noticing, habits of seeing and being?
Admittedly, there is so much noise to which we might choose to listen. In our contemporary landscape, as Alex Ross writes in The New Yorker, “noise has come to mean an engulfing barrage of data—less an event than a condition.”[4] If noise is a condition of modern life, then we certainly need the capacity to adeptly discern and distill shades of meaning from all that hullaballoo. Noise literacy, we might call it. What sounds get amplified? To which stories do we attune ourselves? Some sound and fury signify nothing, Shakespeare and William Faulkner insist. But who gets to decide? Because, like seemingly all other aspects of modernity, noise is tied up with power. Ross even understands the word noise to imply “an act of aggression” in which “someone is exercising power by projecting sound into your space” and concludes “silence is a luxury of the rich.”[5] Although it may require power to make noise, silence can be a mark of the powerless, too. Oprah famously asked Meghan Markle, “Were you silent or were you silenced?”[6] Of course, Markle has considerable wealth and influence—and yet these questions of noise and the lack thereof reveal the intricacies of even her power, of any sort of power, and the way it may hide in both silence or noise, in both silencing or noisemaking. When the strike began, I framed it to my students, family and friends as the workers seizing the terms of our working conditions—or, we might say, in commandeering the means of narrativization. Suddenly, we were harder to silence. Ross is quick to challenge noise as a fail-safe mark of resistance: “For millennia, music has been a medium of control; noise, it follows, is a liberation […] The question is: Resistance to what? Nothing about noisemaking guarantees personal or political virtue.” Well, of course not. It is not the mere matter of noise that makes resistance sing. It is what that noise interrupts, and why it does so.
In our strike, our noise operated as a useful reminder of the promises of education not just as a mode of attention but also as a disruptive act. To be an educator is to be invested in upending our thinking, much as we upend soil—in both cases to nurture new growth. To be educated is to invite such upending, to take it on as a worthy task to re-examine and perhaps revise your ideas, insights and ideologies. That work does not necessarily mean discarding any of those thoughts, but rather critically considering them, in collaboration with the world and peers around you. For one example, as a student, I learned in my micro-economics class about the “sunk cost” fallacy, and hence the flaws in my justifications for continuing to attend a yoga class I dreaded because I had paid for the whole series upfront. Or, as an instructor, I aimed to guide my students to rethink their conception of disaster by reading Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones together, a novel which demonstrates both that it is not always possible to evacuate before a hurricane and that catastrophe comes in many forms. Some moments of unsettlement are more profound than others. But, especially in higher education, education requires the willingness to complement or complicate our existing knowledge.
Striking radically upended our university. Not only did it cancel thousands of classes and discussion sections, but it also meant that remaining lectures frequently endured noise trickling in from outside and that community members had to weave through this noise as they traversed our campuses. It wasn’t necessarily pleasant. I recall one moment when a student shoving past me on the sidewalk muttered, “I get it, but can you just not?” Whenever we moved closer to the upper administration building, the police quickly followed the sound of the megaphones. Rumor swirled that one upper administrator called the emergency line when she thought she heard the noise of striking workers near her office—though it was only a cart. Other grad workers reported overhearing faculty complaining about the disruption—and it certainly was a disruption to operations as usual. But I emphasize that I felt motivated to go on strike because I always understood striking as a manifestation of my responsibility as an instructor, for multiple reasons. First, there is the obvious material level: improved pay and benefits would enable me to be a better teacher. Here’s one rather tame example: in the summer of 2020, I worked five different part-time jobs as I prepared to teach my first college class, constructing my syllabus and lesson plans late at night after I finished any number of unrelated duties and an enormous pile of reading necessary for my degree. What if I had been able to devote my entire day to that reading and teaching prep? My students would have received a much more engaging and edifying experience, I am sure.
Second, there is the importance of practicing what you preach. As both a humanities student and then a teacher of English and writing, I have been trained to cultivate self-expression. I have been taught, and taught others, the significance and skill of articulating your experience. Organizing is a form of expression, of our selves and of our communities. Built on conversations with others, organizing requires us to convey our daily realities and our desired ones to one another. The actions we then take and the commitments we then make – from drawing protest signs to writing articles to withholding labor – communicate what we need and want education to be.
Finally, I firmly believe that at its best, scholarship is about possibility-making and, at their best, unions are about possibility-making too. If the mission of higher education is to foster new ways of thinking and being, then organizing is a necessary component to our work. In literary studies, we invest in the imaginative work of narrating alternative modes of life. To vacate the classroom where so much of that work happens and place our bodies on the picket expresses, then, the same commitment, angled to actually achieve some alternative modality. And to see that embodiment happen is empowering for our whole community. One student later emailed me to share how he had gotten involved in issues affecting him after seeing the strike. And I myself felt deeply moved to see what graduate workers were willing to do for each other, including preparing community meals, carefully developing contract language in complex legalese, organizing and attending lengthy meetings and, of course, walking off our jobs. That sense of connection encouraged me in the face of dismal counteroffers, exhausting efforts to stay the course, dwindling finances and gloomy skies. And that connection is key, because striking often struck (ha) a demotivating, depressing chord.
The word “noise” sounds much like the word “noisome” (though they only share a folk etymology, interestingly),[7] and my BUGWU experience showed me that to make noise meant sometimes to do noisome things—unpleasant, unsatisfying tasks. I insist on organizing as an act of making noise that reverberates into new possibilities and even new worlds, and I also implore us all to take up that space, even when we do not want to, even when the noise grates our own ears. As I write this reflection, I see increased calls across social media platforms to organize, to commit to our communities. Many already know the stakes and substance of organizing, but let me highlight the reality that it can drain our resources, time, energy, willpower. It is rarely comfortable—in fact, it often demands our discomfort. Striking tasked me with standing out in the freezing cold, confronting administrators, losing my paycheck, and missing out on arguably the most fulfilling part of grad school: teaching. It required me to have challenging conversations with peers and the people in control of my future. And it prompted me to extend, and frankly expend, significant generosity and goodwill toward those around me, even during my most difficult days, even when I was not sure I would receive the same in turn.
As an action, solidarity does not always feel harmonious, and I worry that the supposition otherwise not only leads to improbable expectations but also, and more importantly, might prompt us to excuse ourselves from the work when we find discordance. I want to be honest: striking severely taxed both my mental and physical health. And I admit that others better fit to this work find it less demanding, less damaging—but, I also want to emphasize, we all have a responsibility to contribute to the chorus.[8] There were many days with just a few of us on the picket. There were many meetings that only a couple of us attended. A relatively small number of our unit wrote many of the contract articles, crunched many of the state-of-the-strike updates, posted much of the content, cooked many of the meals. In this, I concur with Alyssa Battistoni, who describes how many of her fellow graduate workers just wanted the union to leave them alone. As she details, it can be frustrating to learn a language, to live in relationality and to sacrifice so much (though I never went on hunger strike for my union)—the choice to organize may seem a sublime principle, but it is also a painful reality.[9] That frustration does not negate the power or purpose of this work. Indeed, just think of the possibilities at play when those numbers swell and the burden of each person shrinks.
Together, as strikers, we created a soundwave to amplify our grievances and eventually address them. I knew I would graduate before I reaped the benefits of our contract. But I also knew I was committed to future generations of academic workers and to the academy itself as a place of transformative learning. And making noise on the picket line was the only way to get there, or at least to get closer. In that sense, I believe that organizing is a form of world building—and by that, I mean to build the type of world that I want academia to be: a world full of possibility, centered on learning, curated for access. I endeavor to reflect on our strike without rose-colored glasses. I recognize that, as Ross writes, noise does not necessarily mean liberation and that education is not always aimed at the liberatory either. But I return, always, to Terrance Hayes, who writes, “having lost faith / in language, have placed my faith in language.”[10] When I lose faith in educating, or in organizing, or in both—I place my faith right back in it.
[1] Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013), 158, ProQuest Ebook Central.
[2] Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 37.
[3] Toni Cade Bambara, “Foreword, 1981,” in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, 3rd ed., eds. Cherríe L. Moraga and Gloria E. Anzaldúa (Berkeley: Third Woman Press, 2002), xlii.
[4] Alex Ross, “What is Noise?” The New Yorker, April 15, 2022, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/04/22/what-is-noise.
[5] Ross, “What is Noise?”
[6] Karen Mizoguchi, “Meghan Markle Tells Oprah Winfrey: I Was ‘Silenced’ and ‘I Did Anything They Told Me to Do,’” People Magazine, March 7, 2021.
[7] See OED Online, “noisome,” https://www.oed.com/dictionary/noisome_adj?tab=etymology#34523105
[8] From a practical standpoint, let me also note that there are so many ways to fulfill such a responsibility. Making signs, speaking with reporters, joining the picket for just 30 minutes, donating, sending supportive messages, coordinating logistics, taking notes at meetings, convening meetings, sharing food—the list goes on and on.
[9] Alyssa Battistoni, “Spadework: On political organizing,” Head Case no. 34 (Spring 2019).
[10] Terrance Hayes, “Snow for Wallace Stevens,” lines 15-16.