The Case for Student Unionism: Theory and the Virginia Tech Experience

Facing austerity and repression on campus, organizers in Virginia Tech YDSA have built a student union and brought over a thousand students out to march against the University Board of Visitors. The former chair of VT YDSA writes about their experience and how they see the role of student unions in YDSA.

Today, as students are being kidnapped off their campuses, divestment from genocide seems far from reach, and young leftists remain disorganized, YDSA faces an urgent question to meet the moment and defeat the Right: How will we win over the mass student population while maintaining our individual socialist identities and chapter presence? Two perspectives within YDSA on how to tackle this question have emerged: 

1. Encouraging YDSA chapters to develop student unions to engage entire student bodies of non-socialists in mass struggle against university administration and develop students into socialists for the long haul.
2. Emphasizing strategic campaign work and coalition work that is centralized and externally facing, as YDSA, to promote socialist politics on our campuses.

Despite the current disagreements and “spicy” debate around student unions, the argument for student unions promotes the development of a positive relationship between YDSA’s dedication to its principles and growth, and the building of student unions.

When socialists analyze class dynamics in the workplace, exploitative structures are easy to identify. The workplace is a dictatorship where bosses have unilateral control unless workers have a union. We know that workers are treated unfairly and have a shared class interest. Yet, they also possess the power to fight the boss, install democratic practices, and win fairer contracts. Further, we acknowledge the rich history of union victories in the US and internationally, and take lessons from those struggles. What YDSA must also recognize and embrace in this critical political moment, however, is that students also have the power to fight against corrupt forces. They have the power to develop their peers into fierce fighters and committed socialists for the long haul. Students are not a class like workers, but they are producers of knowledge and are mistreated and disenfranchised by university administrations.

At Virginia Tech, for instance, students who have a family income below $100,000 do not receive adequate financial aid, despite this being the case at the University of Virginia, which offers significant tuition assistance or even free tuition for students who have a family income below $100,000. Virginia Tech’s president, Tim Sands, is pulled by the strings of the Board of Visitors (BoV), a group of wealthy elites appointed by the state’s governor who make unilateral decisions on behalf of professors, staff, and students. When students, the majority of the campus population, are ignored, the dynamics of class at play cannot be glossed over. This past spring, our overwhelmingly popular demand to stop DEI initiatives and programs from being stripped was dismissed and belittled by the administration. In response to our demand, the vice provost of the BoV even openly admitted that students are nothing more than pawns to manipulate for profit within the capitalist system: “I want the students to forgive me here, but at the end of the day, this university is about producing a product, and that is the graduate.” (Recording of this quote) When Virginia Tech directs its profits towards building the Boeing Innovation Campus in Arlington—named for a company invested in the extermination of Palestinians from their homeland—instead of investing in student needs and addressing our popular demands, it is impossible to dismiss the reality that students, though not a class in and of themselves, have a relationship to administration that parallels workers’ relationships to their boss. Students’ and workers’ bosses alike are puppets of mega-rich capitalists. 

The Virginia Tech YDSA chapter has a deep history of organizing against the right and advancing socialist politics on campus. In 2017, our chapter led a semester-long escalation to fire a neo-nazi graduate TA (this was before any grad student organizing or public union presence), which succeeded, and thoroughly campaigned for Bernie Sanders and other popular demands in the following years, moving the BoV to accept a tuition freeze and winning a new grading policy for students as the pandemic began. However, by 2023, our chapter was small and relatively dormant.

After October 7th, we committed ourselves to joining comrades on campus, including Students for Justice in Palestine and the VT 4 Palestine Coalition, to protest against VT’s investment in genocide. During the encampment, the most active participants and collaborators were already within the core organizing layer of the divestment movement, and if they weren’t, they were occasional activists and self-identifying leftists. In the end, our encampment didn’t win divestment, but it did reveal that we needed to organize differently. We knew this much. Before our lull from 2021-2023, our chapter won a tuition freeze and pass/fail option for students during the pandemic through escalation campaigns. The chapter successfully recruited leftist students throughout 2023-2024 (just as it did similarly in 2017-2021), increasing our chapter’s dues-paying membership and meeting attendance from the beginning of the Fall semester in 2023. We played a central role in carrying out one of the biggest demonstrations in Virginia Tech’s history through encampment, and YDSA and other organizations that advocated for Palestinian liberation had mobilized more people on campus than in multiple decades prior.

Lacking a fully democratic process for decision-making, we were unsure of what to do with the political fervor flowing through the student body. Soon after the arrests took place at the VT Gaza Liberation Encampment, news broke that San Francisco State University (SFSU) had won divestment through its encampment. This encampment differed radically from others popping up around the country; it was fully democratic, assembly-operated, and emerged directly from student union organizing against preexisting austerity measures and tuition increases at the university. Through organizational preparation and training by strong YDSA leaders within the SFSU student union, their encampment had achieved one of the most materially impactful wins the US student movement has seen in recent history. Significantly, SFSU YDSA showed that student unions answered the question of how socialists should engage the mass student population and promote socialist principles within mass movements, such as democracy, leadership development, and a passion for justice.

At the beginning of the 2024 Fall semester, a cohort of YDSA members that I took part in began to consider the possibility of creating a student union at VT. We knew that this would put our organizational skills to the test, but our ambition had rewarded us in the past. On October 5, 2024, a group of around 30 organizers and activists from multiple organizations met on the Graduate Center Lawn, where our encampment had taken place, and voted to create our student union. We named it the “VT Students’ United Front”, and our goal was to organize everyday students towards our unified mission of fostering free speech on campus, divesting from genocide, and transforming VT to be a school that is democratically controlled by students and workers. We began protesting under a unified message to end a censorship policy, Policy 5000, that was implemented by Tim Sands under the advisement of the conservative Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin. Our petition against this policy reached over 1,000 signatures, and by December, our assembly attendance was growing as we carried out regular outreach and engaged with anti-ICE organizing. As socialists invested in recruiting the average non-socialist student, we trained members within the student union on organizing skills such as how to table, conduct one-on-one organizing conversations, and facilitate assembly meetings. VT YDSA’s organizational ties to the VT Students’ United Front were apparent, and the dynamics between the two organizations are still being explored as we take lessons from the previous semester, but YDSA’s involvement with VTSUF has produced notable positive outcomes. Students joining our student union identified YDSA members as active, trustworthy, and organizationally experienced fellow students who were committed to advancing student rights and a positive vision for a democratically run and progressive university. While building our student union, our YDSA chapter continued to assert our socialist perspective in VTSUF, took a great role in leading an “ICE Off Our Campus” protest, ran regular political education sessions, and sent 18 chapter members to Winter Conference to further our tradition of deep, long-lasting mentorship. 

Since the end of last semester, our chapter has reached this conclusion: We need to create a space where students can struggle together for their shared interests—a student union. YDSA is an ideological, revolutionary organization and consists of self-identifying socialists and left-adjacent students who are committed to engaging students in struggle through a shared interest of growing class consciousness. In order to diffuse said consciousness from the campus into broader society to enact class formation, we have a responsibility to create a space wherein students can struggle together for their shared interests—a student union. A student union is a mass-struggle organization, where students fight based on having a structural relationship as students, the same as workers do in their trade-unions, which acts as a clarifying force that, through their active participation, reveals to students that our demands do not have to be shut down or ignored, but that we have the collective power to win them! Because YDSA is based on political ideology, we are inherently limited by our organizational basis alone in our ability to enact class formation. In simple terms, it takes two to tango. Historically, it was not communist or socialist parties singularly that won mass buy-in to topple unjust regimes; it took union militancy and socialists’ participation within unions to win. In March, our student union, alongside other organizations, such as VT 4 Palestine, Black Mindedness, and Campus Workers United (the wall-to-wall union excluding graduate students), led a protest of 1,000+ students, the We Won’t Go Back protest. Our chapter committed itself to mass-organizing, and over 1,000 students witnessed an instance of student solidarity against the BoV. Although the march united students on a political basis, it allowed YDSA and the student union to see what function a student union must serve: providing a sea of struggle for students to swim in. If students are not being organized by a student labor union or through a political organization, they will remain disorganized. It is for this reason that gives the motivation for socialists to recognize student struggle and agitate/organize around it so that as many students as possible are engaged in struggle. Yes, YDSA can recruit and develop non-socialists, but the existing degree of class consciousness is such on our campuses and in the workplace that political organizations alone cannot sufficiently enact class formation.

When giving my speech at the “We Won’t Go Back” march on behalf of our student union,  I identified as a proud socialist, and was met with applause—an affirmation that students, having seen YDSA’s active participation in the movement for Palestinian liberation, free speech on campus, and anti-ICE organizing, knew that we were serious about winning not just as YDSA, but as students in this broader struggle against the far-right and billionaire class. This experience, just as SFSU’s win did, once again exemplified that when socialists create or engage in mass struggle organizations, our organizational strategies are broadened, and we raise the potential to develop non-socialists into core organizers against university administration. The relationship between student unions and YDSA chapters continues to be properly developed, but when the question arises of how we win students over to socialism, it is not a matter of growing YDSA versus building student unions, but rather a matter of what moves the most people and promotes our socialist principles. Simply because YDSA was not the sole branded name behind SFSU winning divestment or organizing the largest protest at VT within recent history does not mean that socialism is not being advanced or that student unionism is a shortcut. The We Won’t Go Back protest was the second largest in VT history to our current knowledge. The building of our student union at Virginia Tech suggests that socialists are acting as socialists ought to act: cohering a mass student movement against the right and capitalist class, strengthening our organizational skills, and building up our victories one by one. It is for this purpose, setbacks and victories included, that YDSA should prioritize building student unions and embrace this ambitious, experimental strategy.