Welcome to Working History, a production of the Southern Labor Studies Association. Become a member online at www.sotherlaborstudies.org. I'm your host Beth English, and today we're talking to Elizabeth Schurmer, Assistant Professor of History at Loyola University. She's currently working on a book entitled, The Business of Education, The Corporate Reconstruction of American Public Universities.
Her first book, Sunbell Capitalism, will be out in paperback in August. Elizabeth Schurmer, welcome to Working History. Thank you, Beth. It's great to be here.
Excellent. So you're working on a new book project, The Business of Education, the corporate reconstruction of American Public Universities. And one of your main arguments is that the rise of modern universities is deeply intertwined with the labor question. So let's unpack this just a bit and provide some historical context.
Specifically, what were the roots of the current attacks on the system of public higher ed that we're seeing so regularly today? Oh, sure. I'm glad that you asked. And it's really funny because a lot of folks are really surprised to think of education, particularly higher education, as actually connected to the labor question or even a part of the social welfare state.
And it's funny, I think that, you know, had we remembered that, you know, originally the congressional, where education was, K through 12 and post-secondary, it was actually, overseen by the congressional labor committees, right? And we just sort of forget that that was put underneath them and that the health education and welfare of bureaucracy set up after World War II was actually overseeing both social security issues of labor, but also actually education as well, that's where the office of education was. So at least things have all been bound historically. It wasn't until 1979 that education was aggregated out into something else.
And I think that that, you know, that process of just sort of forgetting, you know, in this current moment where education always was, is it actually overlooks that education, you know, what I just said there made it sound like a federal priority, wasn't at all. But actually that, or it was only recently really to be honest, became a federal priority, but that education was actually a priority for working people in this country for a very long period of time, Toga Bhegebi, who wrote that great book, Indistensible Outcasts. His new book is actually looking at labor and people creating their own educational systems in the late 19th century and the early 20th century. And that, you know, intersects with the creation of the labor colleges, of course, which were not just about, you know, training union organizers, but actually giving what we would now kind of recognize as a liberal arts education.
And so I think that, you know, understanding that why this attack today, because it is one of those most progressive sort of impulses that really made higher education in this country, it used to be something for a very small elite stratum of people. And one of the things, one of the great pushes to opening up to getting to mass in that almost universal higher education was the labor movement. Can you give us an example of someone coming out of these labor colleges who has an imprint on education policy? Hilda Smith, what she does during the New Deal is actually oversee the workers' education program for the New Deal.
And that program is really extraordinary because you have communities, you know, coming together, applying so they can actually have the kind of education that they want. New Dealers in Washington largely assume that what communities are going to want is more vocational training, you know, something really just about job skills. Everyone is shocked in that, I should say, the sort of, you know, the world of federal appointees are shocked when what they want are literature, drama, the arts, theater, all of these other kinds of things. And you actually see that as well as higher education was actually opened up to the working class.
And it was actually the great benefit of the labor movement, actually that proved to a lot of liberal Democrats in the New Deal administration that actually the working class is not only desirous of a broad education, but capable of doing it. And that's actually a huge sort of shock to the system. One of the interesting things that goes on during the New Deal is there's a sense that originally FDR had no interest in bailing out colleges and universities because public or private, many of them are on the brink of bankruptcy. And even that includes the state universities, which actually are basically for the most part underfunded.
They're also pretty small in number. And that reflected FDR's, you know, sense that one, his education at Harvard was useless. He showed up to work as a lawyer, his first day out of law school, and had no idea how to actually practice law, but also reflect that some of his most ambitious critics are actually coming out of higher education circles. The same ones who had no interest either during the New Deal or during World War II or after World War II from welcoming a working class into their institutions.
The president of Chicago, Hutchins, who literally says you'll not turn University of Chicago into a hogo jungle. But what's really interesting is when you see this awareness all the sudden about liberal Democrats, like, you know, coming out of this world, including Harry Hopkins, as they're seeing through the CCC campsite schoolhouse program that became included about it, but desirous of it, there's a sense that this could be something that really needs to build a liberal citizen, to really, you know, lift up not only their future job potential, but actually connect with the very point of the humanities, right? And so you see that first in the National Youth Administration, their Work Study program, and the interesting thing about it is that this is a great way of getting students to enroll in colleges, the work that they do for the NYA, largely on campus. So in some cases, they're actually building and expanding campuses and proving buildings that are going to be falling apart, that you see that the working class is actually building the sort of basic infrastructure of what will become, you know, a broader university system.
So what happens as federal priority shift from the New Deal Depression era into World War II and then into the post-war years? I'm thinking specifically of the GI Bill and how many working class veterans took advantage of its higher ed provisions? The GI Bill, University of Roberts, like Harvard's James Conant, bitterly opposed. Absolutely bitterly opposed the educational benefits they had no interest.
And this is where Hutchins famously says, you won't make your Chicago into Hobo jungle. They don't want those kind of education benefits because they don't want the working class. And one of the reasons they have to go back and revise the GI Bill is everyone is shocked how many working class GI's demand to take advantage of their educational benefits. And more importantly, that they're actually kind of, cuzirus of the kind of what we would now consider good pedagogy, small classes, discussions, these kinds of things.
So from what you describe, I'm taking away that in some parts of the higher ed system, educators were against this influx of working class students into universities. And I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about what the position of the business community was. Was it hostile? Was it welcoming?
Was the summary in between? The interesting thing is who is a big push that we need a better educated citizenry is actually a lot of business groups and business organizations, some of them. And this connects to my earlier work. They're the ones who are actually funding the right to work campaigns in the American South and West.
They're also the ones funneling their money to build out these colleges and universities to actually expand them. And they're doing that because what they're trying to do is move their manufacturing out of the Northeast and the West into the American South and West. And what do you do? You don't just need regressive tax structures, you don't just need regressive union laws to attract these high-bound business leaders.
You also need to make sure that the infrastructure is in place to support their enterprises. And that's why they're so focused on we need to build out these schools. And particularly the public ones, because if you think about it, if they're not paying much in the way of state taxes, they're actually just one sort of donation to a school to dump an engineering department as they do at Arizona State Teachers College, which is part of the road for becoming Arizona State University. If you dump this engineering school onto this little tiny teachers college, not only not paying very much in state taxes, not only do you not need to worry about unionizing campaign, but more importantly, you're basically putting off on the state, but also the students in paying for the education workforce training and also in some ways the research and development needs of your business that's moving it.
So it's a way of business to sort of offset. But the big question is, if you see business actually, in many cases, very quietly, doing a lot to underwrite public higher education when states not really until the 60s are going to start spending and there's no direct higher education spending from the federal government really until 1965. Can you explain in a little bit more detail what right to work was or is, I should say, because it's still going on, what right to work campaigns entailed and what were the goals that these campaigns were shooting for? Sure.
That's such a thorny question, especially since it's right back in the news. When I first started all that research and right to work was everyone told me it was a dead issue, not thinking it was worth the time to do the research 10 years later. I wish that was true. What rights to work laws entails very simply after the passage of the Taft Hartley Act, that you see rights to work laws passed before that, after the passage to Taft Hartley Act, the Taft Hartley Act says that you can't have a closed shop.
A closed shop is a membership agreement, which means that a worker in order to be hired for a job has to be a member of the union. So that's made legal under Taft Hartley. What is up for grabs is what is called the union shop and the union shop is that anyone can be hired for a job. But after a certain number of, normally it's a couple of months, if they're still in employee and good standing, then they must become a member of the union.
And what rights to work laws do, they don't actually, if you look at the text of these things, they actually don't say that a union shop is illegal or anything like that. But what they do in practice is make that kind of membership agreement in a contract impossible. This is a huge blow to the labor movement because it was actually those union shop clauses that made the huge explosion of the numbers of Americans and union density in America explode during World War II because it was a part of the kind of the no strikes pledge agreement. Well, all of a sudden, if you have a huge explosion in the number of Americans organized and in unions, one of the first things that the most ardent critical is the labor movement of the New Deal want to go after, actually even starting before the end of World War II are these membership agreements because it really does make sure that union has tremendous amount of power at the bargaining table.
And what you see, it is a way flat out to weaken unions not only at the bargaining table, but actually sort of on election day. And so that's really the goal of it. And you start to see them first past in the South and West, the first three proper right to work laws that you would actually call them that are 1944 Arkansas, Florida, pass California does not. The next one after that is Arizona in 1946, then Taffy Hartley acted as pass and it's actually the Arizona rule that actually goes before this from court to say whether or not this is legal because it's an amendment to the Wagner Act.
And essentially, when they say that the rights work law in Arizona is constitutional, that means actually that section 14B, which allows right to work laws at the state level, is allowed to be done. And so that's what rights to work laws were. And they are the same today. The only big difference that I say this all the time when people have been asking me about it is rights to work laws in the post war period could never, where only in one or two instances actually passed by a legislature, it was always thrown out to ballot referenda.
In most cases, if they were actually doing ballot referenda today, they would never have passed to Michigan, it would never have passed to Wisconsin. That is what's new now is the kind of legislative fiat or the case of Michigan, the executive fiat, the right to work laws is our that way. In 1971, future Supreme Court Justice, Lewis Powell, pens a very important memo within higher ed circles. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what the power memo said and why it was such an important moment in the higher ed labor question story.
Lewis Powell is a Virginular when he writes this memo in 1971. And he writes this letter to the Chamber of Commerce. And you actually can, listeners can go Google it and take a look at this thing. It's really an extraordinary, very long memo about business being considered to be on the ropes in 1971 that people have forgotten for enterprise.
And I should say that businessmen have been saying this since the start of the new deal administration actually, but it came into sort of new feeling in 1971, probably because a lot of the student protests, things like that. And he writes this thing to the Chamber of Commerce. And where, why one of the reasons the story is really going on is an important thing is because, of course, just a year later, he'll be nominated to the Supreme Court, which is where he would serve with William Ringquist that same year. But more importantly, what we've shown, and this is the great work by Bethany Morton, is that the Chamber of Commerce actually picks up this memo as a directive of what it should do to greatly expand not only its sort of campaign for free enterprise with all the anti-unism, union embedded within that, anti-social welfare, but they take it and they expand upon everything that they have been doing aggressively so.
And one of the things that she did a great job of showing in her work is actually business groups, business organizations starting to openly fund chairs in free enterprise, like the one I mentioned at Kent State. And I should say, one of the things that I talk about in my work, the way that I sort of see it, is it is a very important moment to have that 1971 Lewis Powell memo where it was earlier a shift that you would have General Electric had decrying the labor movement. You would see that pushing against them in the National Labor Relations Board, all the fear of ungrind going down on the right to work campaigns in the South and West. But in 1971, there's a sense that it's not just the labor movement that is making business in battle.
That's how they feel themselves in 1971. It's in the media, the mainstream media, but more importantly on college campuses. And you see the rise of this idea that business really needs to be much more forceful in making sure that it's free enterprise that is taught in higher education. And it's really this kind of, in some ways, it's the extent that there's never really a watershed moment in history.
It is a very important moment in history that's why dissemination of this. And you start to see the first free enterprise chairs in any given discipline starting to be created. One of the first oddly not is the free enterprise chair in economics at Kent State University just a few years after the massacre. And that's where you're starting to see business have a sense that the universities that they helped fund and build had turned against them, not just student radicals, but also faculty as well.
And that's concurrently with this idea that you don't need to maybe buzz public funding for these state universities if they're not down in your business lines, or if you're now moving your manufacturing to other countries where you may not need the research development workforce training happening right there on college campuses in the way that you did in the post-war period. So I think it's all this very complicated story of, you know, the, if we sort of see that universities have a deep, or deeply intertwined with the labor question, and that as the labor question gets fought out and new venues takes new turns as things develop, you can see as well the support for public higher education, you know, the uses of it being deeply questioned alongside with that. Business had always been underwriting higher education, both private schools or public schools. However, what's new at this moment is that it's so public that you publicly want to name something.
You don't see, you know, I think if you go to UNC for the school of global health, that is the FedEx school of global health. You wouldn't have seen that earlier. That's a big change in the idea that businesses used to put a stamp on the kind of programs that it wants to fund and that I think are of use or value not only to free enterprise, but also to society in general. Okay.
Right. So sort of branding, essentially branding with a name plus an ideology sort of tacked onto that. Absolutely. And you know, the interesting thing is, you know, I'm sure listeners will think, well, what about Vanderbilt?
I know. But the difference is that is a single philanthropist. And a lot of times what you saw a lot of those 19th century philanthropists doing is they're putting their name on something to sense that education was important to their ability, right, to become, you know, a top, you know, a captive industry or whatever else. This is so very different is a company.
And that is actually very, very new, and especially connecting it to a kind of campaign, whereas in the case of Cornell and a lot of these other schools, they were actually connecting with social reformers and the professionals in charge of the foundations that they were creating about the kind of need for a kind of university and that kind of stuff. So it's a very different kind of phenomenon that we've seen in the most recent decades. In many ways, the focus of the fight against unions today, if we sort of launch off of the discussion, you just gave us of this very kind of thorny relationship between unions and business and in higher ed, the fight against unions today has in many ways shifted from the factory to encompass other contested spaces like public universities in a much more visible way, I think, than what you had described, what was happening earlier. So can you walk us through this just a bit, sort of the hows and whys of the ways in which the public university is really now a magnet for the fight against organized labor?
I want to say something, because you just said it sort of beautifully there way about how it's so much more visible now, because one of the things in my earlier work is just actually how, in some ways, surreptitious and underneath the board, all of this is. So a lot, one of the big mistakes about the older literature on right to work, as I was saying, is that these were local fights in the southern West, it was southern textiles, it was Western miners, actually it wasn't even the miners really, Western Ag mostly. And what they missed was a ton of money coming from around the contrary, funneling into these campaigns in the 40s and the kind of 50s that it was invisible because General Electric knew enough not to put their name on a campaign or be the visible face of a campaign helping elsewhere, because it would throw their production lines in the northeast into turmoil. And that's the same, actually, the question you asked about, it seems like now the fight against the labor movement is taking place outside the factory floor from behind the retail county.
Well, the new work has shown, I think of Jean-Claude Chambinelle's new book, The Employee, but actually when he opened up the records of the National Labor Relations Board, a lot of those hearings, who was fighting about making sure that Foreman would not be considered an employee and therefore not have federal rights and recognition for their unions, that was actually General Motors. And that there's a way that there's a lot of undercurrents that these proxy wars have been fighting all the place in the sense that voting booths, if we look at not even just the kind of anti-union legislation passed, like rights and work laws, but actually the kind of candidates who were against labor, in some cases, actually sort of openly hostile to it. Can you provide us with a specific example to illustrate the story that you've been telling that essentially started in the New Deal and has, over the course of the last decades, gone as to where we are today, where we're seeing attacks on the public university system, especially as we ramp up to the 2016 presidential election, having a lot of political sway. I'm going to resist the temptation to talk about Wisconsin because that's, Wisconsin is the one that is in the news, which I think is why a lot of folks have overlooked what's going on in North Carolina with the UNC system, particularly at Chippewill Hill.
And the reason I love talking about Chippewill Hill is Chappel Hill is really one of those tools where you can see that real connection for that New Deal impulse about a much more broader democratic, social democratic sort of idea about what university education could be, because one of the folks who really starts to change FDR's mind in a lot of New Dealers' mind about the only thing that you would be able to find in higher education were all these sort of very conservative university presidents who had no interest in letting go working class in. Well, that's not Frank Porter Graham at all. Frank Porter Graham was actually one of the great southern liberal Democrats famously read when he ran to keep the Senate seat that he was appointed to. Frank Porter Graham, before that, he'd been a historian.
I mean, good for us. He's a historian. He's also the president of UNC in the 1930s when it is really, really cash-strapped because UNC, North Carolina had had a history of not doing much to actually fund Chippewill, even though it was one of the great southern universities. And I say that by the way, as so many went to UVA.
And Graham really tries to make his university of use to the New Dealers. The workers' education programs there, for surrounding communities are there really sort of pushing the idea of trading unions and working people's democracy and a lot of the programs, that kind of connection. He also turns it over for the kind of to welcome NYU students because schools did not have to participate in the Work Study Program, the National Youth Administration's Work Study Program. More importantly, he does a lot to make the University of Youth to war efforts, either in terms of the kind of training that is needed or actually just encouraging students to actually stay in school when Frank Porter Graham leaves for the Senate.
The person who's really going to start to oversee what UNC will become in the post-war period is a man named Bill Friday. Now, Bill Friday is an interesting one because he's more moderate than Graham is. But with Bill Friday, he's still faced with not only a cash-strapped university, but a governor coming in by the name of Luther Hodges, who's not coming out of the world of agriculture and tobacco and things like that. But he's coming out of textiles because he's been plucked.
He's been plucked from, he worked his way up from the mill boil. He's actually UNC graduate. Mill boil worked his way up. Then went on to oversee Marshall Fields' textile mills all over the world.
And then when he retires, he comes back to North Carolina, gets it and said that he wants to be governor and really do a lot to industrialize North Carolina, lure lucrative manufacturing down. He initially says that North Carolina's colleges and universities are wasteful and redundant. And what he wants to do is limit a lot of academic autonomy and freedom and most importantly, expansion of the post-war period, that kind of expansion is being done to welcome G.I.'s back until Hodges' friends and business community start to talk about the potential of maybe making a kind of research park modeled off of the one already created in Stanford by this time between the North Carolina State College at the time, Chapel Hill and of course, Duke. And that's when really Hodges starts to say what really oppressed upon him the need for this was that when you would try to promote and draw industry down to North Carolina, they kept saying that your labor force just doesn't have the education you want.
So with the idea of the research triangle park where he funnels a lot of private and public money into it, channels a lot of it into it, he says that basically what he's trying to do is make education the chief business of North Carolina. And in some ways, Bill Friday, this is great for him and the kind of expansion that he wants to do serving industry, particularly outside industry. And one of the big things that happens is North Carolina had been so strong in the liberal arts. I mean, look, at this president, the former one Graham was a historian.
What is less thought well of at the time is this little tiny pharmacy school which is on top of something called Pill Hill. And the funny story about the research on a park that no one likes to talk about is that it was actually a basically a failure up into the 60s. You can actually get the manufacturing come in there until Luther Hodges who in 1960 was made the Commerce Secretary under Kennedy because he seemed like an acceptable Southerner. He's a Democrat, obviously.
He had done so much to industrialize North Carolina, which had really been transformed under his watch. And he seemed, you know, interested in education, especially since not only what he was doing at UNC Chapel Hill and Duke and North Carolina State College, but more importantly, he had refused to shove her schools after the Brown decision seemed to be an acceptable Southerner. Well, this puts Hodges in Washington when there are debates about changing Social Security Act to include medical medical insurance for the poor and elderly. And his deep connections to the Triangle Park at struggling Triangle Park, he says, I really think that, you know, the future of the park lies in medicine, in the pharmacy school.
And he's absolutely right. Because that is what really sort of transforms into the whole triangle area. It's telecommunications, it's big medicine, it's pharma. And that was posted, those lucrative post-industrial sectors.
He leaves a certain after Johnson & Academy, or on Wisconsin, Scott Walker, for four teaching loads. Also mentions getting rid of tenure, really super punitive attacks on the faculty, all of these other kinds of things. You can really see, you know, how the transformation of these schools, how, you know, the withdrawal of state support, the reliance on private enterprise, that concerted campaign to put business as a gender, you know, into the very fabric of every corner of the university crippled. And actually, I would say endangered, actually, to be honest, is endangered, one of the flagship universities of this country, one of the public ones, no less.
Okay, great. So thinking about sort of where we're going in this story, and again, you know, we're talking quite a lot about Scott Walker and what's been happening in Wisconsin. And the fact that he is running for president, do you see this as becoming, or do you think it is right now, a central sort of political debate that's happening in the country? And what do you think the stakes are?
Oh my gosh. I think, I mean, I think that there are two things on the agenda about higher education. I do think it's going to be very important in 2016. One is the public of the funding of higher education, the direct funding of higher education.
It's a huge issue, you know, and especially since the only real attacks, the only real attempt by the federal government to actually fund higher education, to take it away from the purview of states to not let make the finance supercarious or not make these schools very tuition-dependent was the 1965 Higher Education Act, the first three titles of which are actually about directly funding higher education, particularly the first one to make sure that universities are going to be 21st century urban land grant universities, a recognition that remote land grants for farming communities are less important as it US becomes more and more urbanized. Basically the final title in that, the fourth one, there's a fifth one that has something to do with some early legislation that's not really that important, but the fourth title in that was student assistance. And that's where all this stuff is about the loans. And of course, what's happened over time is there's been less and less money devoted to those first three titles as they continually come up for reauthorization because one of the frustrating things about a lot of the great society legislation is it's continually in the written in the law that it has to come up for reauthorization, which has been a disaster.
I mean, take a look at what's happening with the Voting Rights Act right now. And that's what's going on in terms of the Higher Education Act was supposed to be where I authorized in 2013. There's not been a single movement on it. Now, that's a huge issue because, you know, who's funding this as state governments are feeling more and more impacted and you have a populace who is still less and less willing to actually underwrite higher education at the state level.
But what that has also meant is that tuition, of course, is going up and that is the point to be the other big issue in 2016 connecting to this, which is student loans and the whole industry that was built around the federal guarantee or later the federal direct student loan industry. And the way that I think about this is if you ever want to think about how much higher education is wrapped up in the labor question is we're at a point where in order for a person to actually even have a chance at a well-paying job, the chance to compete for a well-paying job, the chance to really have a viable application, they have to go to college or university, which typically means that they're going to have to go into a tremendous amount of debt on the hope that they're going to get the job to pay that back. And that is the system. If you look at, you know, Hillary Clinton has refused to say anything about this yet.
She's putting off any kind of policy ideas to, she's not going to make any concrete statements about until July is what she said. Bernie Sanders, bless him and those with warm, are saying we want debt forgiveness or restructuring and then we also want to directly finance everything. On the other side of the on the aisle, Scott Walker is talking about cutting, spending, not doing anything about student loans. Marco Rubio, I believe what he wants to do, again, nothing to do with making sure schools are actually adequately funded, he wants to just, oh, improve the mechanism to make sure that it's harder to go into fault, that you can't just walk away from your loans, an income share plan with a future employer, and that you'll just automatically get it deducted from your paycheck.
And so this is, I think, is where we are because we have this thing that, you know, people ask me all the time and they listen to you, the narrative about higher education, which were fleshed out, one about, you know, how it's developed since the famous Morrell Land Grant Act. They're like, well, aren't universities better now than they were 100 years ago? It's like, sure, they certainly are, but it doesn't change the fact that they have always been on very shaky finances. And that means that universities, which are not only embedded in the very, you know, core of opportunity and advancement, but also the kind of research that we need for society as a whole, not even just medicine, but some of the tremendous work being done about, you know, about, you know, social issues as well, what kinds of things actually do and don't work, what kind of ways can we use to solve our infrastructure programs, and we're not funding these most basic public goods, these civic institutions.
And that's something that doesn't need to be solved because at a certain point, someone has to pay for it. And that's where the conversation is going. But I'm not entirely, I'm not entirely agree to me that the true candidates who have the most likelihood of getting elected are really actually thinking about it in those terms, even though it's been three or it's almost three years past when the higher education act was supposed to be reauthorized. And on that note, we'll say thank you to our guest, Elizabeth Schurmer, for joining us on this edition of Working History.
Thank you so much. Elizabeth Schurmer is Assistant Professor of History at Loyola University, Chicago. She is the author of Sendel Capitalism and the forthcoming book, The Business of Education. Working History is a production of the Southern Labor Studies Association.
Visit us online and become a member at www.sothanlaborstudies.org.