I remember quite clearly how I dealt with the strike of the graduate students. It wasn't just a strike; it was a unionization drive. So, there was enthusiasm for graduate student unionization, and there's enthusiasm for all kinds of unionization. We're another peak period now and among graduate programs, state employee, state graduate programs are governed by state employee laws for private universities. The ability to unionize or not is governed by the National Labor Relations Act and that Act had held that graduate students were not employees, they're students. And long before I was Dean, I think in the seventies, there had been efforts to unionize graduate students that had been defeated and efforts to, most importantly, unionize and Yale was targeted as the place that would bring the case to the NLRB to have this decision reversed. So, Yale was kind of always on the cusp of graduate student unionization.

So, I did not know this because this was an issue that impacted the medical school little. So, the graduate programs and medical school, actually the graduate programs and most of the sciences were not wrapped up in it. This was an effort mostly out of the humanities and social sciences. So, I accept the assignment to be Dean of the Graduate School. Oh, surprise, there's a unionization campaign going on. So, I have to say that I take very little credit I had faced, I was the tip of the spear, but it was a very shared effort because it was understood among the university leadership, the frankly malign consequences of having our graduate students see themselves as union workers and not as part of the fabric of the academy.

So, there was a group of people who were all involved in it, it was the president, the provost, the secretary, the dean of the college, me, the top people throughout the university who worked together to articulate the university's position was that a union of graduate students was not in the best interest of graduate students and not in the best interest of the faculty. The thing I discovered once I was the tip of the spear was that one of the most important tools of those who were driving the unionization effort was suppression of speech. There was a huge amount of intimidation. I mean, some of it was psychological intimidation, frankly, some of it was physical intimidation. Yale did not have a happy history of union relations, unfortunately. And that unhappy history was coloring the unionization drive of graduate students.

Susan Hockfield is a neuroscientist whose research focuses on brain development and glioma, pioneering the use of monoclonal antibody technology demonstrating that early experience results in lasting changes in the molecular structure of the brain. She is a Professor of Neuroscience and President Emerita at MIT. She was the first woman and life scientist to serve as MIT’s sixteenth president from 2004-2012.

Hockfield earned her B.A. in biology from the University of Rochester (1973) and a Ph.D. from Georgetown University at the School of Medicine (1979). In 1980, Hockfield completed an NIH postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California at San Francisco. She then joined the scientific staff at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, New York where she ran her own lab for five years. She also served as director of the Summer Neurobiology Program from 1985 to 1997. In 1985, Hockfield became the William Edward Gilbert Professor of Neurobiology at Yale University. She went on to serve as the Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences from 1998-2002, and Provost from 2003-2004.

In December 2004, Hockfield assumed office as the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She held this role until June 2012 and continues to hold a faculty appointment as professor of neuroscience and as a member of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research.

Hockfield has received numerous awards including the Charles Judson Herrick Award from the American Association of Anatomists, the Wilbur Lucius Cross Award from the Yale University Graduate School, the Meliora Citation from the University of Rochester, the Amelia Earhart Award from the Women’s Union, and the Yale Science and Engineering Association 2021 Award for Distinguished Service to Industry, Commerce or Education.

She also holds honorary degrees from Brown University, Duke University, Georgetown University, Mt. Sinai School of Medicine, New York University, Northeastern University, Tsinghua University (Beijing), Université Pierre et Marie Curie, University of Edinburgh, University of Massachusetts Medical School, University of Rochester, and the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory School of Biological Sciences.