In the midst of Northeastern’s welcome week this year, a coalition of student activist groups forming NU Disorientation held its first in-person event, determined to disrupt the university’s official orientation agenda by sharing information about social injustice issues happening on campus instead.

“We really want to show new students, especially, but also returning students, the hidden truth that’s all around them when they’re on campus,” said Jonathan Bacdayan, a third-year environmental studies major and research lead at Sunrise who helped pioneer the event. 

Chief among the organizers of NU Disorientation are Sunrise Movement, a climate activist group, and the Progressive Student Alliance, or PSA, whose core focus is on addressing labor injustice at the university. In the past, Disorientation initiatives have only taken the form of a website, but Sunrise and PSA spearheaded the coalition’s first in-person event Sept. 10 alongside other social justice groups on campus such as the Young Democratic Socialists of America, Huskies Organizing With Labor, NU Mutual Aid, NU Sexual Health Advocacy, Resources and Education, the Graduate Employees of Northeastern University and the Save Mills College Campaign.

While titled Disorientation, a play on the official orientation meant for new students, the initiatives are really directed towards anyone “who may realize that Northeastern isn’t telling the whole story,” Bacdayan said. 

Together, the coalition’s primary aim is to enlighten both new and returning students on an ongoing range of ethical concerns raised against Northeastern, including the university’s contributions to climate change, gentrification, labor injustice, unsustainable infrastructure and the military-industrial complex, according to their 2022 Disorientation Guide.

While many of the issues brought up during Disorientation have been long standing, with some involved activist groups working for over a decade, Northeastern’s recent merger with Mills College — finalized in September 2021 and officially completed in July 2022 — was a new point of concern at the event.

Since its inception, the merger has raised numerous allegations by students and alumni at Mills, who filed a class action lawsuit in May against the Mills administration for delivering false promises that have impacted the cost, quality and timeliness of students’ educations. 

Standing in front of Ell Hall to officially begin Disorientation, Mimi Yu, a second-year computer science and political science major and HOWL organizer, read a statement on behalf of Abby Selby, a former Mills student whose education, like many others, was heavily impacted by the merger. 

“We tried talking with the administration, who locked us out when we peacefully protested and disrespected us by not listening to the same students they failed to serve,” Selby wrote in the same statement published on NU Disorientation’s website. “I urge you to please remain open to Mills and its history, as well as the stories of students disappointed by its administration and to support them however you can.”

Frustration with the college administration is the common theme for the rest of the event — a campus tour in which each participating activist group took turns situating a particular social injustice at a physical location on campus. 

“[Once vaccines rolled out], Northeastern stopped listening to the science … and put on the appearance of ‘back to normal’,” said Alexandra Madaras, a third-year history, culture and law major, who began the campus tour portion of the event in front of the Cabot Physical Education Center to speak out against the university’s gradual elimination of many protective COVID-19 measures, including mandatory testing, masking and quarantine housing. 

Claiming that the discontinuation of the testing and masking mandate — in February and March  respectively — caused an infection rate six times higher than the previous semester, Madaras was the first representative to reveal one of the “whole stor[ies]” that Disorientation speakers said Northeastern is failing to address. 

In between Forsyth Hall, which houses the University Health and Counseling Services, or UHCS, and one of the Bank of America ATMs on campus, Bacdayan rebuked Northeastern’s lack of investment in its health and counseling staff. As of March 2021, UHCS reported a student-to-therapist ratio of around 1,300:1, paling in comparison to nearby universities like Harvard, which boasted its own ratio in 2020 of 468:1. 

If any students in the crowd wondered where all of Northeastern’s money was going, Bacdayan quickly answered by pointing out the parallel between Bank of America’s significant funding of fossil fuel projects and Northeastern’s decade-long refusal to divest its endowment from the $138 billion fossil fuel industry. Bacdayan said despite receiving 75% student support on DivestNU’s divestment referendum — a student-led campaign on the matter — the university invested $25 million of its endowment in “sustainability” efforts instead of divesting from fossil fuels because the real decision-making power lies elsewhere.

“The reason Northeastern is able to shrug off students’ demand for change is that students do not have decision-making power at Northeastern,” reads NU Disorientation’s official statement on the matter. “That lies with the Board of Trustees … And when it comes to fossil fuels, a former ExxonMobil official being the Vice Chair of the board does not bode well for change.”

The topic of Northeastern’s ties with corporations came up frequently throughout the tour.

“Does anyone know how donors — in this case, corporations — get their names on university buildings?” Ava Bertolotti, a second-year international affairs and environmental studies major and campus labor justice chair at PSA, said to the crowd. 

In front of the Raytheon Amphitheater, Bertolotti explained that the answer is by “greenwashing,” a term usually associated with a company’s misleading claims on its environmental friendliness, but in this case, Bertolotti described it as Raytheon Technologies, a major U.S. defense contractor company, “showering Northeastern with blood money.”

In February 2020, students and members of anti-war groups protested Raytheon’s recruitment at Northeastern’s spring career fair, criticizing the company for “creating weapons of mass destruction and distributing them throughout the Middle East.” While Northeastern defended its ties with Raytheon then, Bertolotti explained that the partnership runs far deeper.

Before his passing in 2019, Thomas Phillips served as the president and CEO of Raytheon for nearly thirty years. As a Northeastern alumnus, Phillips returned to serve as a trustee on the university’s board from 1968 to 1984, and is credited with fostering the strong partnership between the defense conglomerate and the university that remains today. It is alleged that at one point, there were 2,300 Northeastern alumni working at Raytheon. 

“The Raytheon Amphitheater — people walk by it everyday but they don’t know its connection to the military-industrial complex,” Bacdayan said of the “hidden truths” that surround unsuspecting students all around campus. “And they walk past the dining halls and they’re served at the dining halls, and they don’t know about the worker fights, so we see, especially at the beginning of the year, a great chance to reach a lot of students and help them learn and teach what is actually going on and connect them to resources.” 

Similar to the uproar against Northeastern’s involvement with Raytheon, the fight for the university’s dining hall workers has been outspoken and ongoing. In May, Northeastern students, dining hall staff and their union, UNITE HERE Local 26, formed the Huskies Organizing With Labor, or HOWL, coalition to advocate for a new contract that guarantees livable wages, improved working conditions and affordable healthcare. 

Joshua Sisman, a fourth-year political science and economics major and chair of the Young Democratic Socialists of America, or YDSA, stood with dining hall workers in front of International Village and told the crowd, “Unfortunately, disrespect is the norm for the dining hall workers … Northeastern does not take care of them, but they [still] take care of us.” 

On Thursday, Sept. 15, HOWL announced that after eight months of organizing, protesting and negotiating with the administration, Northeastern dining workers from Chartwells Higher Education, the food service vendor that employs the workers, voted to affirm a new contract guaranteeing significant provisions over the next five years. 

Here, Sisman also detailed YDSA’s efforts to combat the food insecurity problem on campus with its No Hungry Huskies campaign, the main goal of which is to guarantee three meals a day for all students in meal-plan-required housing at no cost. Madaras spoke at Centennial Common about NU Mutual Aid’s food distribution efforts further addressing food insecurity. 

Both students emphasized that the very existence of programs like Swipe2Care — which allows students to donate meal swipes to other students in need — are a sign of a serious problem that members of Northeastern’s community are not able to rely on its own university for a basic staple. 

“We don’t even think that Swipe2Care should be around because we think that no student should be needing a program like Swipe2Care, and that’s why we’re fighting for Northeastern to use their $240 million revenue surplus to guarantee students the food that we need,” Sisman said. 

In front of Shillman Hall, Noble Mushtak, a fourth-year computer science and mathematics major, took the stage to address the university’s repeated attempts to block full time, non-tenure track faculty members from unionizing. In 2019, Northeastern blocked the faculty’s union election petition for the second time, writing in a 2019 statement of position that the faculty are “technically managerial employees.”

The Graduate Employees of Northeastern University, or GENU, who hosted a table at Disorientation, said these students are particularly affected by Northeastern’s refusal to acknowledge unionization. Galen Bunting, a PhD student in the English department, said that despite being treated and taxed as such Northeastern does not pay or provide them the same benefits that are extended to other faculty members. 

Bunting — who said he gets paid about $33,000 a year — told The News that graduate students at Northeastern do not receive sick leave, vacation time, workers’ compensation or childcare. As a result, some of those who have children, cannot work off-campus due to international statuses or are more likely to experience discrimination face more precarious financial situations. 

“Northeastern, in particular, [doesn’t] allow us to work more than 20 hours a week, so a lot of us have to make up for that with jobs outside of Northeastern and have multiple [sources of] part-time work and deal with that insecure situation,” said Javier Rosario, an English Master’s student and member of GENU. “This is actual labor, and people depend on this for their livelihoods and it should be seen as a job that is respectable and able to sustain a person for their lives as they study.” 

If granted unionization, the graduate students would be able to negotiate their contracts with the administration, which they are currently unable to do. 

The Disorientation group then gathered at the intersection of the Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering Complex, or ISEC, its new accompaniment EXP and the LightView apartments to talk about the gentrifying impact of these structures as well as the militarization of its next-door neighbor, NUPD. To close the tour, Bacdayan ended in front of East Village with a primer on the housing shortage at Northeastern.

After Northeastern admitted almost 1,000 more first-year students than usual last year, its plan in February 2022 to add 900 beds into the East Village and International Village over the summer — turning singles into doubles and doubles into triples — faced an outcry of student backlash. Feeling unheard, student leaders repeatedly cited EXP throughout the Disorientation tour, emphasizing that Northeastern had spent $300 million on another science and engineering building while refusing to invest an appropriate amount into its UHCS services or solving the housing crisis. 

With the long list of grievances behind and ahead of them, many of the student activist groups at Disorientation told The News they plan to return to the event every year for their ongoing fight against the administration. 

“At Disorientation, you get to learn that Northeastern, as a private institution, is really screwing up the community, and they see their students as dollar signs rather than people that are here to be educated and treated with respect,” Sisman said. “[NU] exploits their workers, they underpay their grad students [and] their non-tenured professors and they don’t pay [resident assistants]. There’s a whole suite of things they’re not doing. In our view, they’re emblematic of the issues of capitalism as a whole.”