The response to Weinbaum’s let­ter pro­duced near­ly 500 let­ters of protest in a few days, accord­ing to orga­niz­ers for a Save the Labor Cen­ter cam­paign. Local union lead­ers, heads of oth­er labor cen­ters, alum­ni and cur­rent stu­dents also expressed alarm about the sit­u­a­tion in a promi­nent arti­cle in The Boston Globe . Accord­ing to Jeff Schuhrke , anoth­er UMass alum and writer for In These Times, an orga­niz­ing com­mit­tee of at least 30 alum­ni is hold­ing reg­u­lar con­fer­ence calls to plan the next steps of the cam­paign. The upheaval there has many wor­ried about the future of labor edu­ca­tion at pub­lic uni­ver­si­ties nation­wide. Changes in the way edu­ca­tion pro­grams are fund­ed are set­ting off a kind of labor cen­ter ​“Hunger Games,” where some pro­grams grow while oth­ers die.

These days it is most renowned for its lim­it­ed res­i­den­cy Union Lead­er­ship and Admin­is­tra­tion (ULA) pro­gram, in which union lead­ers, staff and rank-and-file activists meet for intense 10-day peri­ods of instruc­tion every sum­mer and win­ter and can earn a grad­u­ate degree in three years if they keep up with read­ings and assign­ments from home (or in the field). As you might have guessed, I’m a proud alum of the program.

Found­ed in 1964, the Labor Cen­ter is one of about 30 labor cen­ters around the coun­try. Most are root­ed in the exten­sion pro­grams of land grant pub­lic uni­ver­si­ties. In addi­tion to its exten­sion work — pro­vid­ing train­ings for unions and work­er cen­ters — the Labor Cen­ter runs under­grad­u­ate and grad­u­ate degree pro­grams in labor studies.

The Labor Cen­ter at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Mass­a­chu­setts (UMass) at Amherst is in tur­moil. Its direc­tor, Eve Wein­baum, says she was abrupt­ly pushed out of the posi­tion. In an alarm­ing e‑mail to alum­ni, stu­dents and allies, she protest­ed fund­ing cuts to teach­ing assis­tants and part-time instruc­tors and, more trou­bling­ly, threats to the ​“Labor Stud­ies faculty’s auton­o­my to make pro­gram­mat­ic deci­sions and to des­ig­nate a Director.”

Aus­ter­i­ty and the cor­po­ra­ti­za­tion of high­er education

The plight of the Labor Cen­ter is root­ed in a very com­mon prob­lem: state divest­ment in pub­lic high­er edu­ca­tion. Pub­lic uni­ver­si­ty sys­tems that were once so ade­quate­ly fund­ed that they charged lit­tle-to-no in-state tuition to stu­dents have seen their state fund­ing decline over a peri­od of decades.

For a state as wealthy and as lib­er­al as its rep­u­ta­tion, Mass­a­chu­setts’ divest­ment in its uni­ver­si­ty sys­tem is par­tic­u­lar­ly egre­gious. The state allo­cates some $508 mil­lion to UMass. That’s only 17 per­cent of the school’s $3 bil­lion bud­get. And the leg­is­la­ture only increased state fund­ing by 1 per­cent this June, which will lead to more increas­es in tuition and stu­dent fees.

The sky­rock­et­ing tuition and crip­pling stu­dent debt caused by this divest­ment have been well doc­u­ment­ed. What is a bit murki­er is how it impacts the func­tion of a uni­ver­si­ty, as every aca­d­e­m­ic dis­ci­pline is forced to gen­er­ate rev­enue. This is what crit­ics refer to as the cor­po­ra­ti­za­tion of high­er education.

Sci­ence and engi­neer­ing fac­ul­ty must secure fed­er­al grants, phil­an­thropic fund­ing, cor­po­rate con­tracts and Con­gres­sion­al ear­marks in order to gain tenure and get pro­mot­ed. Those rev­enue sources fund an army of non-tenured research assis­tants, post­docs and research professors.

Law and busi­ness schools can turn to cor­po­ra­tions and wealthy alum­ni for dona­tions and endowed chairs to fund addi­tion­al fac­ul­ty lines. But the human­i­ties and social sci­ences don’t have the same rich resources to draw upon. Their charge from admin­is­tra­tion is to drum up stu­dent enroll­ment, par­tic­u­lar­ly for prof­itable master’s degree pro­grams — hence, the pres­sure on the Labor Cen­ter to recruit more out-of-state stu­dents for its res­i­den­tial master’s program.

Labor cen­ters are chang­ing with the times

But not every labor cen­ter is strug­gling. Some, like the ones at Rut­gers Uni­ver­si­ty and Cor­nell Uni­ver­si­ty, have deft­ly pur­sued pro­gram grants from unions and phil­an­thropic orga­ni­za­tions, allow­ing them to expand and cre­ate new insti­tutes. Cornell’s Work­er Insti­tute is part­nered with the AFL-CIO on a next gen­er­a­tion lead­er­ship devel­op­ment pro­gram and con­venes a work­ers research net­work, among oth­er projects. Rut­gers’ Cen­ter for Inno­va­tion in Work­er Orga­ni­za­tion does lead­er­ship devel­op­ment work for alt-labor groups and is a key part­ner in Bar­gain­ing for the Com­mon Good, among its oth­er programs.

Buck­ing the state-fund­ing trend, the City Uni­ver­si­ty of New York’s Joseph S. Mur­phy Insti­tute for Work­er Edu­ca­tion and Labor Stud­ies has, accord­ing to its direc­tor, Gre­go­ry Mantsios, ​“received a com­mit­ment from the Uni­ver­si­ty to ele­vate the sta­tus of the Insti­tute to a CUNY School of Labor and Urban Stud­ies.” With this come more state fund­ing and con­trol over that mon­ey. It is the result, accord­ing to Mur­phy pro­fes­sor Stephanie Luce, of a sus­tained lob­by­ing cam­paign by local labor lead­ers that labor should have a school with the same sta­tus as CUNY’s busi­ness school.

“It reflects that New York City, and the state, and CUNY have decid­ed to invest in the labor school,” she said.

Luce, a for­mer UMass labor pro­fes­sor, recent­ly issued a report that showed that New York City has defied nation­al trends and seen its union den­si­ty increase to 25.5 per­cent. The NYC labor move­ment has both the pow­er and the will­ing­ness to exer­cise it on behalf of labor education.

Anoth­er labor cen­ter that’s buck­ing the trend is the Kalmanovitz Ini­tia­tive for Labor and the Work­ing Poor at George­town Uni­ver­si­ty. A pri­vate Jesuit uni­ver­si­ty, George­town didn’t even have a labor cen­ter until a few years ago. They had just two labor his­to­ry pro­fes­sors, Michael Kazin and Joseph McCartin.

George­town pres­i­dent John DeGioia sought to cre­ate a labor cen­ter at the uni­ver­si­ty in 2006. He was even­tu­al­ly con­nect­ed to the Kalmanovitz Char­i­ta­ble Foun­da­tion (which, iron­i­cal­ly, was carved out of the estate whose care­tak­ers left a deep scar in the city of Mil­wau­kee by shut­ter­ing the union­ized Pab­st brew­ery in the mid-1990s). An influ­en­tial board mem­ber, who was steeped in the Catholic social jus­tice tra­di­tion and whose chil­dren had attend­ed George­town, want­ed to steer a sig­nif­i­cant grant to a labor edu­ca­tion pro­gram in the Wash­ing­ton, D.C. area.

McCartin agreed to head up the new labor cen­ter, bring­ing the influ­en­tial labor strate­gist Stephen Lern­er along as a fel­low. The mod­est­ly-fund­ed ini­tia­tive (its annu­al bud­get rarely tops $700,000) served as the incu­ba­tor for Bar­gain­ing for the Com­mon Good — a union coali­tion effort that aligns bar­gain­ing demands with those of oth­er mem­bers and with com­mu­ni­ty demands around pro­gres­sive tax­a­tion, afford­able hous­ing, youth incar­cer­a­tion and gov­ern­ment transparency.

But, if you’re won­der­ing why Kalmanovitz is an ​“ini­tia­tive” and not an ​“insti­tute,” the char­i­ta­ble orga­ni­za­tion pro­vides rolling grants — not a bequest or an annu­ity — which leaves the Kalmanovitz Ini­tia­tive as vul­ner­a­ble to the fick­le pri­or­i­ties of a char­i­ty as the pub­lic labor cen­ters are to the indif­fer­ence of state legislators.

The future of labor edu­ca­tion at UMass and beyond

John A. Hird, dean of social and behav­ioral sci­ences at UMass, assures In These Times, ​“We have no inten­tion of allow­ing the ULA pro­gram to stand on its own.”

He says the uni­ver­si­ty is work­ing with the Labor Cen­ter to increase res­i­den­tial enroll­ment in both the under­grad­u­ate and grad­u­ate pro­grams, which have declined in recent years. He sees some promise in the planned ​“4+1” bachelor’s/​master’s pro­gram for increas­ing labor stud­ies enroll­ment. The pro­gram would allow under­grad­u­ate stu­dents to earn grad­u­ate cred­it in their junior and senior years and walk away with both a bach­e­lor’s and a mas­ter’s degree in just five years.

“Rest assured we are doing every­thing we can to fur­ther devel­op this jew­el of a pro­gram,” Hird said about ULA.

While UMass is earnest­ly con­duct­ing a search for a new direc­tor of the Labor Cen­ter, Hird con­cedes that it is like­ly the posi­tion will go to an inter­nal can­di­date, and not a new hire, due to the finan­cial pic­ture. Sources at the Labor Cen­ter say they hope their cam­paign might result in a com­mit­ment to hire a new tenure-track labor pro­fes­sor to direct the cen­ter, or, at a min­i­mum, to win more input for Labor Cen­ter fac­ul­ty and staff in the selec­tion of its next director.

“This cri­sis is going to bring more atten­tion to UMass and more of a com­mit­ment to fund it,” said Paul Mark, a Demo­c­ra­t­ic state representative.

Mark was a shop stew­ard and exec­u­tive board mem­ber of his IBEW local when he was a class­mate of mine at ULA. He notes that Mass­a­chu­setts’ sen­ate pres­i­dent is also an alum of UMass, and that the Demo­c­ra­t­ic leg­is­la­ture is mov­ing a plan to insti­tute a grad­u­at­ed income tax in order to bet­ter fund edu­ca­tion and trans­porta­tion. You read that right, the state that Repub­li­cans love to malign as ​“Tax­achusetts” has a con­sti­tu­tion­al flat tax. It will take two suc­ces­sive leg­isla­tive ses­sions to vote on a pro­gres­sive tax amend­ment before the mat­ter can be put before the vot­ers in 2018.

Mark also reports that he has sat in on strat­e­gy meet­ings this past week­end with Tom Juravich, who is serv­ing as inter­im direc­tor of the Labor Cen­ter, and state AFL-CIO pres­i­dent Steven Tol­man, among oth­ers, to brain­storm ways to direct more union fund­ing and pro­gram­ming to the cen­ter. If the cur­rent cri­sis gets Mass­a­chu­setts’ unions to real­ize that they can­not take for grant­ed that the Labor Cen­ter will always be there, well, that is cer­tain­ly a sil­ver lin­ing. Although, even this may not be enough. As the Kalmanovitz Initiative’s McCartin laments, ​“Even if you’re tak­ing care of your labor con­stituents well, they don’t have the resources they once did to keep you funded.”

Many peo­ple I talked to note that the Boston area is thick with pri­vate col­leges, includ­ing elite insti­tu­tions like Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty and the Mass­a­chu­setts Insti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy. Their many grad­u­ates have moved on to careers in pol­i­tics. As a result, UMass doesn’t com­mand quite the same alum­ni loy­al­ty among leg­is­la­tors that many oth­er state uni­ver­si­ties do. The oth­er intrin­sic chal­lenge for UMass that sup­port­ers will note is its phys­i­cal remote­ness. Most of Mass­a­chu­setts’ labor move­ment is based in Boston, in the east­ern end of the state. The beau­ti­ful flag­ship UMass cam­pus is locat­ed ​“in the sleepy west of the woody east” of Amherst.

I hap­pen to think that remote­ness is an asset.

Most of the sur­viv­ing labor cen­ters sprang up after World War II. They were found­ed in the spir­it of labor-man­age­ment part­ner­ship, a post-war con­sen­sus that empha­sized medi­a­tion, arbi­tra­tion and respectable polit­i­cal states­man­ship. This is a frame­work that most employ­ers aban­doned long ago. But, to this day, most unions approach the labor cen­ters as places for shop stew­ards and staff rep­re­sen­ta­tives to learn how to han­dle griev­ances or the fin­er points of col­lec­tive bargaining.

What our move­ment needs from our labor cen­ters is to be a place where lead­ers, staff and rank-and-file activists, from all kinds of dif­fer­ent unions, can get the hell away from their offices and dai­ly griev­ances and meet togeth­er in a retreat-like set­ting and study, read, dis­cuss and debate — and maybe come up with some poten­tial break­through strategies.

A mod­el worth revis­it­ing is the labor col­leges of the 1920s. Brook­wood Labor Col­lege in upstate New York was a bucol­ic retreat where thought­ful activists stud­ied and debat­ed the big strate­gic ques­tions of the day. These includ­ed how to adapt craft union struc­ture to mass indus­tri­al pro­duc­tion and orga­nize key sec­tors of the economy.

Brook­wood made a sub­stan­tial, if under­ap­pre­ci­at­ed, con­tri­bu­tion to the strike wave that revived labor’s for­tunes in the late 1930s. Our cur­rent eco­nom­ic order is marked by mas­sive inequal­i­ty that some call the New Gild­ed Age, and our cur­rent union struc­tures are as ill matched as those were in the 1920s to the ways indus­try restruc­tured to avoid our reach. Look­ing back­wards to that time makes sense.

We need more spaces like the UMass Labor Cen­ter to regroup and recon­sid­er our strate­gic choic­es, not few­er. Labor cen­ters are worth fight­ing for.