The Research on Faculty Unions

On February 4, the Senate began considering the ongoing efforts to organize the faculty at the Urbana-Champaign campus.  To varying degrees and among various constituents, these efforts have raised both excitement and concern.  They have also raised questions.  One strand of my research explores the history of faculty unions and numerous friends, colleagues and stakeholders have asked for my views on organizing, raised questions about the issues involved, and wanted to know what the research on faculty unions says.  While I share my own views on the situation at this campus more privately, several specific requests for a big picture overview of what the scholarly literature says led me to assess the current state of research on faculty unions.

Below, I offer broad overview of key elements of the existing literature.  It is informed by a review of 40 years of literature on faculty unions, but is largely based on those peer-reviewed pieces that have (1) looked at the issues in the modern context, (2) looked broadly across multiple studies, (3) are the most methodologically sound, and (4) to the extent possible, looked at four-year and research universities.  The most valuable of these sources are Wickens (2008), Porter (forthcoming), Hedrick, Henson, Krieg, & Wassell, Jr., (2011), Rhoades (1998), and DeCew (2003).

Perhaps the most important understanding from this review of the literature is that much more is unknown than known about the effects of faculty unionization.  Part of this is due to the relative lack of peer-reviewed research on the topic.  As Gary Rhoades (1998) argued 15 years ago “one can read much higher education literature and not discover faculty unions exist. One can read many of the most widely read books on higher education and not learn that faculty unions exist” (p. 10).  The same complaint remains today.  Moreover, much of the literature that does exist is either dated, methodologically limited, or both.

First, a few caveats:

1)    As Gordon Arnold (2000) argued in his study of organizing at three universities in New England, faculty unionization is simultaneously a local and a national event.  This review emphasizes the national trends, issues and findings.  It is intentionally silent on the local ones, leaving those conversations to others, including the readers of the IPRH blog who are involved in the present local situation.

2)    In light of the comment above, it emphasizes the national studies and broader considerations, rather than institutional case studies.  A review of the latter (or a longer blog post) could offer additional nuance and information.

3)    This review considers the research literature specifically on faculty unions for tenure-line faculty.  It does not speak to the growing movement to organize contingent faculty, including the debates over how the unionization of tenure-line faculty relates to that of non-tenure-line faculty.  It likewise avoids the broader stresses on and changes in higher education that are part of the context faculty unionizing here and elsewhere.  These issues are just as or even more important than those discussed here.

4)    Finally, this essay is not intended to be a definitive statement on the pros and cons of unionization either here or more broadly, or to examine the important philosophical perspectives and political beliefs that inform debates over unionization.  Rather, it is an introduction to what the research on outcomes associated with faculty unions indicates.

Numbers of Unionized Faculty: Though methodological limitations raise questions about accuracy, the best estimate is that 386,000 college faculty are covered by collectively bargained contracts (Berry and Savaris, 2012).  Most of these are in a handful of states, with California and New York accounting for 48% of the covered faculty.  With 20,000 faculty in 53 institutions covered by bargained contracts, Illinois is ranked fourth among states.  Thousands more faculty members across the country participate in non-bargaining units and roughly 60,000 graduate student employees (including both instructional and non-instructional employees) are covered by contracts. Partly due to the Yeshiva ruling, the vast majority of these faculty members work in public institutions (344,762); in Illinois, (18,152) are at public institutions.  Nationally, just over half of those whose institutional type is known are at two-year institutions; while just over two-thirds in Illinois are at two-year institutions.  Just over half both nationally and in Illinois are off the tenure track.

Arguments for and Against Unionization: Unionization in higher education has been a contested issue for almost a century.  Numerous scholars and activists have articulated positions on either side, though not always with significant data to support their arguments. Advocates argue that it protects academic freedom, provides adequate grievance procedures, offers defense during retrenchment, ameliorates discipline-based salary disparities, provides leverage on work-life issues, and is a mechanism for retaining academic values during periods of corporatization. Historically, faculty unionization has also sought to promote broader social change and to provide support for those who are otherwise underserved in educational systems.  While advocates argue that unionization in education promotes professionalization by helping educators control the conditions of their work, some opponents contend that it is antithetical to professionalization.  Opponents further argue that it can mitigate expert judgment, hamstring institutions, damage shared governance, and dismantle faculty status.  Some believe that it reduces institutions’ abilities to keep high-performing faculty by emphasizing equality in compensation over merit.  In Unionization in the Academy, DeCew (2003) identified four broad areas of disagreement:

(1)  arguments concerning collegiality on campus and the extent it is enhanced by unions versus arguments claiming that unionization merely incited and increases adversity;

(2)  arguments citing the practical effectiveness of unionization versus those that find unions ineffective, harmful, and a liability on campus;

(3)  arguments about the nature of university and union organization and whether unions are needed because of a new corporate structure at institutions of higher education versus arguments that unions only cause colleges and universities to become more businesslike; and

(4)  arguments for and against faculty unions based on fundamental academic values. (p. 31).

Though some will likely disagree, DeCew finds these arguments evenly balanced, at least in part due to the variety of institutional contexts (and, thus, power relationships) in which unionization is considered.

Salaries & Compensation: Unionization in higher education has never been just about compensation but salaries, benefits and related issues remain important to considerations of them.  The most recent evidence indicates that there is no statistically significant gain in average faculty salary for unionized faculty in four-year institutions, though there is for faculty in two-year institutions (Hedrick et. al., 2011; Wickens, 2008).   Some union leaders are among those who admit that there is no union wage premium (Nelson, 2011) and some research has pointed to a slightly negative effect on wages at public research universities (Ashraf & Williams, 2008).  Still, the research on the topic needs to be handled with caution due to concerns involving spill-over effects (that is benefits that unionization provides to non-unionized faculty), due to the possibility that salaries are affected by institutional efforts to forestall unionization, due to non-wage compensation that might be affected by unionizing, and due to the methodological limitations of many of the early studies.

Although there is little recent evidence of increased average salaries, Porter (forthcoming) recently found that both presidents and faculty senate leaders believe that bargained contracts provide greater faculty input into salary scales and salary distribution.  In so doing, he echoed claims made by Tullock (1994) almost two decades ago: unionization may not influence average salary, but might affect who gets what.  Porter likewise suggested that faculty unions might positively affect compensation relative to working conditions through their bargaining on issues such as teaching loads.

Some opponents of faculty unionization point to the leveling of salaries as a negative that would harm institutions’ abilities to attract and retain “high performing faculty” (a highly problematic term that might be used to privilege certain types of productivity to the neglect of other equally important types).  Leaving aside counter arguments that the benefits of such leveling in terms of community and traditional academic priorities, one useful ways of examining this claim is to consider whether collective bargaining necessitates such leveling. Rhoades’ (1998) examination showed that numerous faculty contracts include specific language allowing institutions to surpass set salary scales to hire and retain faculty; more than two-thirds of contracts at four-year institutions contain traditional merit-based pay systems and almost half contain provisions that allow for market-based adjustments.  Indeed, Rhoades critiqued contracts for allowing, rather than ameliorating, the continuation of salary disparities across fields.  A second way is to consider whether bargaining is associated with the flight of highly research productive faculty from four-year institutions.  To this point, there is no research-based evidence of such flight, despite findings that such faculty may be less likely to vote in favor of unionization.

Rhoades’ (1998) analysis also included considerations of faculty control of their intellectual property, which implicates compensation among other issues.  Rhoades found that roughly one-third of faculty union contracts included provisions for ownership of intellectual property, with most providing faculty with substantial or complete control of their work.  Rhoades called for greater emphasis on faculty rights of ownership in bargained contracts and Klein (2012) argued the major national faculty unions have done so in recent years.  In 2008, 55% of contracts included provisions on copyrights, patents, and related property, but the terms of such provisions were not as favorable to faculty as those that Rhoades examined.  This shift occurred as institutions increasingly sought to control faculty intellectual property and Klein’s study only looked at the contracts, not specifically whether faculty rights were improved through them.

Governance and Faculty Input: The relationship between governance and unionization is difficult to untangle, with conflicting findings resulting from the empirical studies of the topic. There is some evidence that a loss of faculty influence in governance is associated with some members’ desire to unionize, though the evidence of the outcomes of that unionization is less consistent.  In her review, Wickens (2008) cited research largely from the 1970s and 1980s to note both that “there has been some support for the contention that unionization improves faculty power in university governance” (p. 549) and that “there is some empirical support for the argument that unions actually reduce faculty influence over university governance” (p. 550). Based on differing views of shifts in power, she concluded that the overall research lacked consensus on the roles of unions in governance.  Building in part on Rhoades’ (1998) examination of union contracts, DeCew (2003) was more positive, if still hesitant.  She noted, “The effects of faculty unions on faculty governance and academic freedom are varied and complex, but generally positive” (p. 64).

Porter (forthcoming) concurred that unionization has not only not decreased faculty input into governance—a contention of some critics—but that it has increased faculty input in governance.  In the working paper version of his forthcoming piece, Porter notes that in addition to affecting salary scales, unionized faculty “also have more influence in many other areas, such as appointments of faculty and department chairs, tenure and promotion, teaching loads and the curriculum, and governance…. With the exception of setting degree requirements, areas where unionization has little impact tend to be administrative, such as the size of faculty at the institution, construction programs, appointment of deans, budgetary planning, and selecting members of institution-wide committees.  However, note that even here unionization has small, positive effects for weak influence.  Unionized faculty are more likely than non-unionized faculty to have some influence over the size of the faculty, appointment of deans, budgetary planning, and institution-wide committees” (p. 13).

Tenure and Promotion: Perhaps the greatest consensus in the research is around the effects of unionization on promotion, tenure and related issues.  As Wickens (2008) concluded, “Although not entirely unanimous, most empirical researchers agree that unionization has provided benefits to job security and tenure, promotion procedures, and due process” (p. 552).  Recent research (May, Moorhouse, & Bossard, 2008) also suggests that female faculty members benefit substantially from these formalized procedures, hold a greater proportion of faculty positions at unionized institutions, and are more prevalent at both the associate and full levels at unionized institutions.

Collegiality/Relationships: Debates about unionization frequently invoke concerns over whether the faculty unions are an outgrowth of or contributor to lacks in collegiality between faculty and administrators. Hutcheson (2000), Arnold (2000) and several others have highlighted that conflict between faculty and administration can help organizing succeed, while others have argued that unionization negatively affects such relationships.  Wickens’ (2008) found evidence that faculty-administrator relationships suffered as a result of unionization, although all of their supporting evidence is based on studies undertaken in or of the 1970s and early 1980s.  Like Wickens, DeCew (2003) argued that unionization can negatively affect relations, though her evidence was similar and she cautioned that both national affiliations and individual personalities will influence whether it does.

Wickens (2008) further argued that “one of the primary concerns expressed during a drive for faculty unions is that inter-faculty relationships may be harmed” (p. 556).  Although the evidence was sparse and spread over several decades and contexts—the most recent studies in the United States States (Ormsby and Ormbsy, 1988; Lillydahl and Singell, 1993) offered conflicting findings—she argued that it was “fair to conclude that inter-faculty relationships in an unionized environment may be more strained” (p. 556).  Although some anecdotal claims concur, the issue has not been adequately studied in recent decades.

References

Arnold, G. B. (2000). The politics of faculty unionization: The experiences of three New England Universities. Westport, CT: Bergin & Harvey.

Ashraf, J. & Williams, M. F. (2008). The effect of faculty unions on salaries: Some recent evidence. Journal of Collective Negotiations 32, 2, 141-150.

Berry, J. & Savaris, M. (2012). Directory of U.S. Faculty Contracts and Bargaining Agents in Institutions of Higher Education. New York: The National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions.

DeCew, J. W. (2003). Unionization in the Academy: Visions and Realities. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

Hedrick, D. W., Henson, S. E., Krieg, J. M., & Wassell, Jr., C. S. (2011). Is there really a faculty union salary premium? Industrial and Labor Relations Review 64, 3, 558-575.

Hutcheson, P. A. (2000). A professional professoriate: Unionization, bureaucratization and the AAUP. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press.

Klein, M. W. (2012). Ten years after Managed Professionals: Who owns intellectual property now?  Journal of Collective Bargaining in the Academy 2. Available at: http://thekeep.eiu.edu/jcba/vol2/iss1/2

May, A. M., Moorhouse, E. A., & Bossard, J. A. (2010). Representation of women faculty at public research universities: Do unions matter? Industrial and Labor Relations Review 63, 4, 699-718.

Nelson, C. (2011). What faculty unions do. Retrieved from: www.popecenter.org/commentaries/article.html?id=2489

Ormsby, J. G. & Ormsby, S. Y. (1988). The effect of unionization on faculty job satisfaction: A longitudinal study of university faculty. Journal of Collective Negotiations in the Public Sector,  18, 327-336.

Porter, S. R. (forthcoming). The causal effects of faculty unions on institutional decision-making. Industrial and Labor Relations Review. Retrieved from: http://www.stephenporter.org/papers/unionvoice.pdf.

Porter, S. R. & Stephens, C. M. (2010). The causal effects of faculty unions on institutional decision-making. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Association for the Study of Higher Education.

Rhoades, G. (1998). Managed professionals: Unionized faculty and restructuring academic labor. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Tullock, G. (1994) The effect of unionization on faculty salaries and compensation. Journal of Labor Research 15, 2, 199-200.

Wickens, C. M. (2008). The organizational impact of university labor unions. Higher Education 56, 5, 545-564.

–Tim Cain

 

Bailyn, Ethel, and Archival Work

Each year, when I teach a course on the history of higher education, I spend a bit of time talking about Bernard Bailyn, the renowned Harvard University historian.  Although only a small fraction of Bailyn’s work addressed education, his 1960 Education in the Forming of American Society is widely recognized as a crucial piece that helped shape the modern subfield of the history of education, including expanding it beyond the history of schooling.  As Ruben Donato and Marvin Lazerson wrote, Bailyn “began the debate by arguing that American educational history had been distorted by educators’ desire to use the past to glorify the triumph of public schooling in the United States.”  He was soon joined by Lawrence A. Cremin, who, in The Wonderful World of Ellwood Patterson Cubberley, according to Donato and Lazerson, “echoed and extended Bailyn’s view by indicting previous generations of American historians and showed how to fashion a history of schooling that met the canons of the late 20^th-century of historical scholarship.”  In class, we then talk about the waves of revision that then swept the field of the history of education, including how the smaller subfield of the history of higher education was somewhat separate but was remade by scholars such as David Potts, Stanley Guralnik, Barbara Solomon, and James Axtell (whose 1971 “Death of the Liberal Arts College” begins with a satirical obituary).  Along with others, they offered a series of new understandings and arguments about the participants, purposes, forms, and stratification of American college and universities.  In class, we spend the rest of the term then reading their and others’ works, considering them in relation to the pieces that they were revising, and trying to come to shared understandings of both the history and historiography of higher education.

Our short discussion of Education in the Forming of American Society is at least the second time that Bailyn is mentioned.  During our opening session, in which we consider why one of only three required courses in a professional masters degree program is explicitly historical, I usually ask a version of “Why should one study history?”  After we work on it for a while, I read the response that Bailyn gave to the same question in On the Teacher & Writing of History, a book based on recorded conversations that he had with historians Jere R. Daniell and Charles T. Wood while in residence at Dartmouth College.  His response began with the comment that it was actually two questions: “why history should be studied and why I—or you or any other individual—should study it in any but the way a normally well-informed person would.”  Bailyn’s answer to the former started, “History should be studied because it is an absolutely necessary enlargement of human experience, a way of getting out of the boundaries of one’s own life and culture and of seeing more of what human experience has been.  And it is the necessary, unique way of orienting the present moment, so that you know where you are and where you have come from and so you don’t fantasize about the past and make up myths to justify some immediate purpose—so you can make decisions based to some extent on what has gone before, on knowledge of actual experience.”  His answer to the second included, “Somebody’s got to study it thoroughly and systematically… but I think that the individuals who study history professionally should do so because it attracts them, because it satisfies them intellectually.  If it doesn’t interest one, there are many other things to devote oneself to.”

I thought of Bailyn’s sentiments while on a trip the University of Washington’s Special Collections earlier this month.  It is the archival work—the process of seeking and uncovering evidence, the anticipation that something crucial might be in the next box or the one after that—that attracts me, satisfies me, and excites me about my research.  I vividly remember numerous experiences coming across a seemingly important document, and the rush of enthusiasm and the leaps in connections that followed.  My first trip to an archive at an institution other than my own was to the Special Collections Library at Johns Hopkins University.  I was a young graduate student and did not really know what I was doing, but when one of my first requests for a document was answered with Daniel Coit Gilman’s handwritten plans on how to organize the new institution to which he had been appointment president, I recognized that I was doing something serious—or at least something that required me to wear ill-fitting white gloves.  Of course, I have since come to recognize that much of the important and serious evidence comes from those in very different positions and with very different statuses than Gilman.  I also recall bounding in the door of our rented duplex a few years later upon returning from the Walter P. Reuther Library in Detroit and telling my partner that I had a great day because I had found a letter in one of the collections that I was using.  Her comment was roughly, “You drove more than an hour through traffic, spent 8 or 9 hours looking in boxes, found only a letter, and drove more than an hour back home. And you are happy?”  I tried to explain that yes, I was delighted; the letter meant that I was probably correct in interpreting a letter that I had found three weeks earlier on a different trip to the Reuther.  She did not quite understand my excitement, but it was real and was evidence that this was a thing to which I should devote myself.

My trip to Seattle involved archival work for my in-progress book on the history of faculty unionization.  The University of Washington was home to one of the more important locals founded in the 1930s, American Federation of Teachers Local 401.  The local was, as Melvin Rader wrote in his memoir False Witness, “the most left-wing faculty organization on the campus,” a status it shared with AFT locals at other institutions during the era.  Its leaders included activists such as Kermit Eby and Hugh DeLacy, the latter of whom lost his faculty position in 1937 when he ran for city office in defiance of institutional policies.  DeLacy won the election, and later served one term in Congress before becoming ensnared in Red Scare attacks.  The local and some of its members likewise fell to concerns over Communism in higher education.  In the late 1940’s the state’s Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities, commonly called the Canwell Committee, turned its attention to the university and held a series of hearing into the Communists on campus.  The university supported the investigations and then launched its own hearings, eventually dismissing faculty members Ralph Gundlach, Herbert Phillips, and Joseph Butterworth, and putting three others on probation.  All had been members of Local 401.  The AFT, as part of its second purge of allegedly Communist-dominated locals, expelled the local from its ranks.

The archival evidence that I explored—in a library named after the president who oversaw the dismissals—showed that Local 401 included elements of the three main prongs of faculty union activity in the 1930s and 1940s: social activism, concern for K-12 education, and fights for institutional change.  Beginning with the first campus local in this era (Local 204 at Yale University), faculty were attracted to and participated in the AFT for political reasons that both spoke to and were separate from their own working lives.  Many faculty unionists believed that the conservative attacks on education, the business influences in schools and universities, the corporate disdain for labor, the on-going economic strife, and the rise of fascism abroad were interconnected and related to larger class struggles.  If education was going to be a fulcrum to leverage change, teachers at all institutional levels needed to get involved.  Joining the AFT was a step toward engagement and provided an avenue through which direct action could be taken.  At the very least, sympathy with the movement could be shown.  College locals passed resolutions on political issues, condemned fascism, and supported unemployment legislation.  They participated in municipal labor federations, contributed to larger union efforts, and, in the cases of the locals at Yale and the University of North Carolina, supported efforts by other workers to organize on their campuses.  Other locals, such as the Chico Federation of Teachers, saw promoting worker education as their main purpose.  In fact, Harry Steinmetz, a faculty member at San Diego State College and officer in the Teachers Union of San Diego and Imperial County, argued that the Chico local was too involved in the issue to its own detriment.  Steinmetz, who himself encountered difficulties for his leftist activities, also pointed to Local 401 as an exemplar in its state and as an active political agent—one whose activities he was reluctant to enumerate.  In many of these activities, Local 401 partnered with the Washington Commonwealth Federation, an organization with which it frequently had overlapping membership.

College unionists were also often engaged with larger issues of public education, arguing for changes within American schooling and espousing progressive educational ideologies.  Many of the members of the teachers union who taught in normal schools and teachers colleges focused their union activities on K-12 issues but they were not alone.  The main activities of the Easton Federation of Teachers, founded by faculty at Lafayette College, were organizing public school teachers and fighting laws detrimental to public school teacher tenure.  In 1935, Washington University instructor Paul W. Preisler endangered his own career to found the Teachers Union of St. Louis and St. Louis County because yellow-dog contracts precluded K-12 teachers from doing it for themselves.  Over the next few years Preisler waged a political and legal campaign that eventually allowed for teacher union membership in the city’s schools.  Even though 17 of the 18 charter members of AFT Local 284 were on the faculty at the University of Michigan, the union’s initial program consisted of addressing issues related to school finance, school legislation, teacher compensation, and propaganda in the public schools.  In ensuing years, the local remained outside of university politics but became heavily involved in academic freedom and tenure issues in K-12 schools.  For its part, Local 401 was highly involved with the Washington State Teachers Federation, the statewide AFT umbrella organization.  Its members played leadership roles and pressed for legislation aimed at promoting teacher tenure and welfare, although their efforts were not always appreciated by the more conservative K-12 teachers with whom they were affiliated.

Many campus unions emphasized K-12 issues and some were more concerned with social and political change, but institutional issues were also present and took on new urgency toward the end of the 1930s.  The University of Wisconsin Teachers Union provides some of the best evidence of this interest, including its focus on the instructors and assistants who were most endangered by the financial struggles associated with the Great Depression.  The union sponsored studies of faculty and graduate student salaries and living conditions, published articles critical of the university’s treatment of instructors, and assistants, and appeared before the regents to advocate on behalf of the most vulnerable members of the faculty.  Its “Report of the Committee on Educational Policy of the University of Wisconsin Teachers’ Union,” for example, addressed institutional policy and administrative practice, including as related to hiring, promotion, and tenure.  It warned against the “exploitation” of graduate assistants, especially teaching assistants.  It was presented to and discussed with the university’s president, served as a model for other institutions, and influenced opinion and practice at the institution.  In New York, the College Teachers Union led a multiyear “struggle for academic democracy” in the City Colleges, ultimately garnering an increased faculty role in institutional governance.  Campaigns for academic freedom were even more pressing for college locals, and faculty engaged in numerous efforts to defend allegedly aggrieved (and overwhelming leftist) faculty.  They urged the union to become more active in the field, contributed funds for defense campaigns, and argued that the union needed a maintenance fund to support wrongly dismissed educators.  As is often the case, the issue was coupled with efforts to establish and enforce tenure policies.  At Washington, academic freedom was important and the union weighed in on specific cases.  The union’s most pressing institutional concern was the plight of the so-called “sub-faculty” —the more than 60% of the instructional staff at ranks lower than assistant professor that were denied any say on institutional issues and any sense of permanency.  Such mass contingency was the norm in the period, and has been the norm for much of the history of faculty employment.  After several decades of robust tenure provisions, it is, of course, a condition to which we have returned.

In the archives, I encountered several useful documents related to Local 401 and its larger political context: DeLacy’s unpublished autobiography provided insight into his political activities and affiliations, Local 401’s records included meeting minutes and general correspondence, and the multiple collections involving the investigations provide additional evidence that supports and elaborates on the published accounts of the events.  I trust, though, that I will most remember the collection of Garland Ethel’s materials.  Ethel was a longtime faculty member in the English department at the University of Washington, where he was active in AFT 401 and, for a while, a member of the Communist Party.  He was among those investigated by the Canwell Committee and the institution but his earlier resignation and his admission of membership allowed him to retain his position.  He was, though, among the three who were put on probation, something for which he suffered.

Among the most striking items in Garland Ethel’s papers are his correspondences with his wife, Clarissa.  Clarissa’s letters to the enlisted Ethel during World War II were especially moving.  She described the combination of excitement and pain in watching boats come in to the harbor—he was not on one of them but could be some day.  She repeatedly talked of “haunting” the post office, eager for his letters to help her deal with living in the limbo of wartime dislocation.  She told him that she had spent a lifetime waiting, but had never waited for anything so important as his return.  Garland Ethel did return from service and the Ethels spent their lives together, by accounts in great harmony.  That ended, though, in September 1980.  Following an argument with Clarissa’s sister and her husband, whom the Ethels were trying to evict from rented rooms in their house, Garland Ethel shot and killed his wife, her sister and her sister’s husband.  He then called the police, informed them of his actions, and shot and killed himself.  Some of the papers that I used were from a gift from Ethel to the library that the Regents had formally accepted just two days earlier.  Others were obtained from his home library after his death.  The juxtaposition of his life and career—which were celebrated by his colleagues after those September events—with the event of the death disoriented me.  At the same time, in ways that were smaller and somewhat different than what Bailyn was suggesting, they enlarged and complicated my understanding of human experience.

–Tim Cain

On the investigations at and dismissals from the University of Washington, see Jane Sanders, Cold War on the Campus.  For an introduction to Local 401, see Andrew Knudsen, “Communism, Anti-Communism, and Faculty Unionization.”  Knudsen, now a doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin, is continuing his research on the local and recently presented a paper on it at the History of Education Society’s annual meeting.  On Steinmetz’s difficulty, see “The Cold War and Harry Steinmetz.”  On Preisler and unionization in St. Louis, see Walter Ehrlich, “Birth Pangs of a Teachers Union: The St. Louis Story,” Missouri Historical Review, 79, 1 and 2 (1984).  I have raised issues involving Communism, college faculty and the AFT in a recent article, and some of these issues in a recent book on academic freedom and tenure.

Morrill at 150

On Friday, October 26, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign celebrated the 150^th anniversary of the first Morrill Land Grant Act, a key occurrence in the development of higher education and one that led to the creation of this institution and campus.  At the event, panelists addressed an array of topics that (frequently, though not entirely) intersected with notions at the heart of the land grant ideal: applied research, service, extension, and democratization.  Of particular interest to the readers of the IPRH blog were the several mentions of the role of the humanities in preparing students for the workforce, including LAS dean Ruth Watkins’s linkage of Michael S. Malone’s recent Wall Street Journal op-ed to the Morrill Act’s call for liberal and practical education, rather than just the latter.

The myth of the land-grant college is present on this campus, and the land-grant idea is part of the identity of this institution.  It is part of what leading historian of higher education John Thelin (by way of Burton Clark) would call its institutional saga: The Morrill Act plays a key role in the stories that we tell about ourselves that help bind us together.  This is apparent in the symbolic role of Morrow Plots, in prominent place of Billy Morrow Jacksons “Ag Time” in Funk Library, and in the way the institution publicly positions itself.  And, while Thelin would agree that this saga is important—he specifically uses the plots as an example in when he teaches about institutional saga—he would still encourage us to consider the actual historical evidence.

So what of that history? A few quick notes on the Morrill Act that are sometimes elided from celebratory events:

• As trustee Edward McMillan noted at the conference, land grants for education were not new with the act but date to the colonial era.  Until 1862, they were most famously associated with the Northwest Ordinance’s provision for grants of land for “an academy and other public schools and seminaries of learning” based on the justification that “Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.”
• The Morrill Land Grant Act did lead to the creation of new institutions and provide some additional funding to existing colleges, but it took the Hatch Act in 1887 and the Smith-Lever Act in 1914 to provide for the agricultural research and extension with which they are frequently associated.  The original act itself was insufficient, and continuing funding for the institutions was, at first, left up to the states.
• Yet, as Eldon L. Johnson, a former vice president at Illinois and president of the University of New Hampshire, noted in his 1981 article “Misconceptions About the Early Land-Grant Colleges,” the founding of the land-grant institutions did not lead to immediate state largess.  Not only did states mismanage the funds they received through the sale of the granted lands, states were not forthcoming in supporting their new colleges with their own additional funds.
• Johnson likewise pointed out that these were not immediately the “people’s colleges” of lore; few students enrolled at most land-grant colleges in their early years, and even fewer at the college level.  As Chris Ogren argued in The American State Normal School, normal schools, not land-grant colleges, were the democratizing institutions of the late 19^th century.
• While we might think of large public research universities as the prototypical land-grant institutions in the modern era, this was not only land-grant model.  States could and did use the money from the sale of lands in different ways, including providing it to existing agricultural colleges, giving it to other pubic colleges to add an agricultural or industrial element, creating new colleges, or giving it to existing privately institutions. Yale, for example, was the original land-grant college in Connecticut.
• As was noted at the conference, the 1862 Morrill Act was joined by Morrill II in 1890.  This second Morrill Act lead to the founding of what we now know as Historically Black Colleges and Universities, but celebrating it as an extension of higher education to African Americans is also problematic.  Six years before the Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson decision, Morrill II entrenched ‘separate but equal’ as the legitimate path for educational institutions.
• 1862 colleges might be most associated with introduction of agricultural and technical education but neither was new in the United States.  As Terry S. Reynolds demonstrated, colleges experimented with dozens of engineering programs in the decades before the Morrill Act. And, institutions such as Michigan Agricultural College (now Michigan State University) predated the act but later received funds from the sale of the lands that it provided.
• Dean Watkins was certainly correct in noting that the traditional college curriculum was still present in land-grant colleges.  In many, including the University of Illinois, the traditional curriculum was dominant and preferred by both students and faculty.
• Perhaps a corollary is Thelin’s argument in A History of American Higher Education that while we often emphasize the “A” in A&M, the “M”—the military aspect—was actually more successful than the “A.”
• Finally, as with many of the most significant events in higher education, including the passage of many of the most significant pieces of legislation, the act was not just or even primarily about education; it was about land use.  Nor was it particularly important to Lincoln.  It was just another piece of legislation, signed without comment, during the struggles of the Civil War.

In the essay below, Kevin Zayed picks up on some of these ideas and points to the tensions inherent in the curricular ideas of the act.

Seeds of Learning, Fruits of Labor: A Historical Perspective on the Tension between the “Liberal and Practical” at Land Grant Colleges and Universities

In an address to the Michigan Legislature, geologist Bela Hubbard claimed, “The day has forever gone by when an enlightened liberal education was deemed useless for the farmer. Agriculture has risen into a science, as well as a laborious art; a science, too, the most comprehensive of all others, and which demands not alone strong hands and bodily labor, but active vigorous, cultivated intellect.”[1] These words were spoken in 1850, when the Morrill Land Grant Act of 1862 had yet to be debated or drafted and while the notion of agriculture colleges had but limited traction in the United States and institutional shape in France. However, the sentiment expressed by Hubbard was an attempt to reconcile the tension that would come to beset both the legislation and the colleges themselves. Specifically, it was an attempt to reconcile the tension between liberal education and agricultural (applied and/or practical) “work.”

This posting argues that the tension between the “liberal” and the “practical” permeated the Morrill Land Grant Act of 1862 and every facet of the colleges that the legislation provided the impetus for. First, I provide a brief discussion of the tension itself then trace it through the legislation. Next, I explore how the tension shaped institutional identity through a discussion of local farming interests, early college presidents, faculty, and students. Finally, I provide a brief discussion on the reconciliation of the tension by examining the architecture and services provided by modern land-grant colleges.

Land-grant institutions, much like any class of school in American history, cannot be detached from the democratic society within which they operate. Schools are influenced by society and seek to influence society as well. Indeed, as Susan Merrifield argues, “In the 1860s, the young nation was experiencing agricultural and industrial expansion…new populations had to be professionalized, and theories abounded as to how best to provide these new students with a college education that was liberal, yet served practical purposes…the issue at hand was no less than the very nature of schooling in a democracy.”[2] By providing an important clue as to the stakes involved in the debate over the developing land-grant philosophy, Merrifield allows us to see that the tension between the liberal and the practical is an outgrowth of the broader tension between democracy and capitalism that has beset American educators since the earliest schooling considerations. On the one hand, there is a necessity to prepare students equally for citizenship in a participatory democracy, yet on the other hand, there is the problematic desire of society to replicate the unequal division of labor from generation to generation while still adapting to student demands for the social mobility that often accompanies a credential.[3] By adopting this lens, the debate over the liberal and the practical becomes much more than simply the balance over the distribution of course requirements, it becomes the balance between preparing students to be citizens and workers. Given the symbolic nature of the “farmer” in American culture, the land-grant colleges were operating for and with a population that was considered to be the backbone of both American labor and citizenship.[4] How they would choose to reconcile the tension between liberal education and agricultural “work” had not only practical ramifications for students but also symbolic resonance for the nation.

Though these tensions were crucial facets of the American educational experience and would come to saturate every aspect of the land-grant colleges, the tensions, schooling, and education itself were merely afterthoughts in the congressional debates that produced the Morrill Land Grant Act of 1862. Indeed, historian Scott Key implied the following provocative question in his article, “Economics or Education: The Establishment of the American Land-Grant Universities:” Why would the federal government, in the midst of the Civil War, turn its attention to creating colleges, an area which it had never operated in before? His answer: “The Morrill Land Grant Act was not primarily a piece of educational legislation. Rather, it was an important piece of economic policy that solidified the shift from away from selling to donating the public lands to provide the federal government with revenue.”[5] Eldon L. Johnson agrees, noting that “Education was often the legitimizing factor, while the real objective was something else, perhaps pioneer settlement, speculation, or economic development.”[6] Given this fact, it is not surprising that “an imperial domain” of 17,430,000 acres was provided and that the bill was passed by “overwhelming majorities: 32 to 7 in the Senate, 90 to 25 votes in the house.”[7] Further, it is also no surprise that the “act was vague, leaving the actual design of colleges to individual states and institutional entrepreneurs.”[8] That said, Act did decree that “maintenance of at least one college where the leading object shall be, without excluding other scientific and classical studies, and including military tactics, to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts, in such manner as the legislatures of the States may respectively prescribe, in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life” was a requirement.[9] Therefore, the tension between the liberal and the practical was built into the law itself. Once it was passed, “competing local agricultural groups and others sought to secure funds for their particular vision of higher education.”[10] As a result, the tension was less an idea or theory, but rather was commented on and carried forth by every local farmer, president, faculty member, and student that engaged the land-grants.

The local farming interests were perhaps the most vociferous critics of the land-grants. Historian Richard S. Kirkendall argues that “Most farmers…had little interest and some hostility toward the move to establish colleges…Most…did not believe they needed help. Convinced that fathers could teach sons how to farm…[they felt] the new schools did not differ sufficiently from the old; they devoted too much time to the classics and the basic sciences, too little to farming. They seemed to lack respect for farming, did not do a good job of teaching it when they tried, and turned farm boys away from it.”[11] Farming interests were not only held “an indifference, suspicion, or open contempt for the new-fangled method of learning to farm” but were especially hostile to the liberal education being offered at the land-grant colleges.[12] Historian Earle D. Ross cites a contemporary political cartoon that appeared in the Iowa Homestead to demonstrate this point: “A dehorned bull, ‘agriculture,’ stood dejectedly in the corner of a field in front of the agricultural college awaiting the charge of long-horned cattle labeled ‘Civics,’ ‘Astronomy,’ ‘Calculus,’ ‘German,’ ‘Latin,’ ‘Ethics,’ ‘Psychology.’ The caption pointed the moral protest, ‘Dehorned and cornered in its own pasture lot. This is ‘Ethics(?).’”[13] As time went on, extension work and other services convinced many in the farming communities that the land-grants had much to offer. However, the liberal portion of the curriculum always posed a direct threat to the desire of many farmers that the students of the land-grants would return to the farms from whence they came.

Though extension work was crucial in selling the practical portion of curriculums in land-grant colleges, presidents were perhaps the most vocal advocates of selling the liberal portion of the curriculum. For example, the third president of the State Agricultural College of Michigan (now Michigan State University), Theophilius Capen Abbot delivered his speech “Education and Seeing” in the towns of Ionia, Marshall, and Charlotte, Michigan between 1872 and 1874. In it he argued, “A new age has dawned upon the farmer, an age that demands of him, reading, discussion, thought.”[14] His argument was not simply to persuade the farming interests, but was also manifest in his teaching English literature at the college. A former student, Albert John Cook, later a Professor of Botany at the college recalled, “How Tennyson, and Milton, and greatest of all Shakespeare, took on new life as he opened their treasure to our dazed appreciation…Such a president always commands a loyal student support, and his influence will ever be in the ascendancy.”[15] Further, historian Roger L. Williams described meetings of land-grant college presidents and states, “Foremost was the question of balance between technical and general or liberal arts coursework, a burning issue that brought the presidents’ educational philosophies to bear on the subject. Most of them had been educated in the liberal arts tradition and were extremely sensitive to the charges that their institutions were turning out vocationalists.”[16] As presidents were often faculty members in the early land grant colleges, much of their sentiment pervaded the faculty. Certainly professors predisposed to teaching the liberal arts were in favor of keeping their jobs if not expanding them and the scientifically oriented professors “postulated the teaching of fundamental principles and underlying theories as the only adequate basis for application. Such teaching necessitated breadth as well as depth a ‘liberal’ background as a preparation for intensive specialization. They thus stood for adding to rather than subtracting from the content of higher education.”[17]

But, what of the students? In many ways, the lack of established student demand gave the colleges reason to be flexible with the curriculum.[18] Often, presidents and others were surprised to find how favorably students responded to liberal education. Indeed, the students felt, much like their professors and presidents that a strong liberal education preceded specialized scientific work. Further, many students wished to pursue careers in (agri)business or other fields where a liberal education would certainly allow them to flexible. Albert Bamber, a student from the class of 1883 at the State Agricultural College of Michigan wrote in his class history, “We believed it was our duty, to lend a helping hand to the literary art and sciences. And there was instilled into the better part of our nature this great universal truth ‘Knowledge is Power.’ These are the reasons that we members of Class ’83 are joined into a solid phalanx for our common good; that we might closely pursue the studies in the course of the State Agr’l of Michigan and thus obtain the framework of an education that is necessary in this enlightened age, to make us fine scholars, good citizens, and a power in society.”[19] Whether motivated by the desire to earn gainful employment, or the desire to impact American society, students appreciated the broad foundation of a liberal education and the ability to specialize in agriculture.

However, as time went on, employment shifted from agrarian pursuits to industrial to corporate ones. The land-grants became more comprehensive and grew into some of the largest universities in the United States. This was reflected in the architecture of the campuses themselves. Describing the University of Tennessee, historian Neal O’Steen suggested “The growth of the Knoxville campus in the 186 years…has kept pace with the University’s expanding goals and missions…Throughout the years, buildings have risen and fallen, the older ones being victimized by time and hard usage by the tens of thousands who have sought knowledge promised by the land-grant concept of public service and education. One may regret the loss of ancient landmarks, but perhaps the value of a college building should not be measured by its durability but by what has transpired within its walls, by the lives of the men and women who studied there.”[20]

As one who has spent almost his entire adult life at land-grants (Michigan State University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), I have lived with the tension of the liberal and the practical. As a history major, I took numerous exams in gothic buildings labeled agriculture, driven past herds of cattle nearly every day on my way home, and have enjoyed the finest ice cream from their milk on a weekly basis. As we continue to reflect on the land-grant ideal after 150 years, I believe the liberal and the practical to be compatible. So long as we recall that colleges are groups of individuals and that we should respect the seeds of each other’s learning, and the fruits of each other’s labor.

Kevin S. Zayed is a doctoral student in the department of Educational Policy, Organization and Leadership. His research focuses on undergraduate curricular reform, general education, and liberal education during the mid-twentieth century.

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[1] Quote appears in Herbert Andrew Berg, Financial Support of Michigan Agricultural College During Formative Years with Emphasis on the College Swamp Lands (East Lansing: Privately published by Michigan State University, 1966), title page.

[2] Susan R. Merrifield, Readin’ and Writin’ for the Hard-Hat Crowd: Curriculum Policy at an Urban University (New York: Peter Lang, 2005),9. Italics added for emphasis.

[3] This theory is best explicated by David F. Labaree, “Public Goods, Private Goods: The American Struggle Over Educational Goals,” American Educational Research Journal 34 (1997): 39-81.

[4] Though many of its arguments have been superseded, one cannot deny the eminence of Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform (New York: Vintage, 1955) as having both charted and continuing the symbolism of the farmer in American culture.

[5] Scott Key, “Economics or Education: The Establishment of American Land-Grant Colleges,” Journal of Higher Education 67 (1996): 215.

[6] Eldon L. Johnson, “Misconceptions about the Early Land Grant Colleges,” Journal of Higher Education 52 (1981): 335.

[7] Allan Nevins, The Origins of the Land-Grant Colleges and State Universities: A Brief Account of the Morrill Act of 1862 and Its Results (Washington D.C.:  Civil War Centennial Commission, 1962), 3-4. The best general account of the legal considerations and economic nature of the legislation can be found in Dennis W. Johnson, The Laws That Shaped America: Fifteen Acts of Congress and their Lasting Impact (New York: Routledge, 2009), chapter 3.

[8] Mark R. Nemec, Ivory Towers and Nationalist Minds: Universities, Leadership, and the Development of the American State (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 48.

[9] Morrill Land Grant Act of 1862: www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?doc=33&page=transcript

[10] Nemec, Ivory Towers and Nationalist Minds, 48.

[11] Richard S. Kirkendall, “The Agricultural Colleges: Between Tradition and Modernization,” Agricultural History 60 (1986): 7-8.

[12] Earle D. Ross, Democracy’s College: The Land-Grant Movement in the Formative Stage (Ames: Iowa State College Press, 1942), 42.

[13] Ibid, 120-121.

[14] Theophilius Capen Abbot, “Education and Seeing” Abbot, Theophilius Capen Papers. File 66, Michigan State University Archives, East Lansing.

[15] Albert John Cook, “Members of the Early Faculty,” in Semi-centennial Celebration of Michigan State Agricultural College, 1857–1907 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1908), 76.

[16] Roger L. Williams, The Origins of Federal Support for Higher Education: George W. Atherton and the Land-Grant College Movement (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991), 181.

[17] Ross, Democracy’s College, 87-88.

[18] Johnson, “Misconceptions About the Early,” 336-339.

[19] Albert Bamber, History of MAC Class of 1883, 1883, Folder 3, Bamber Family Papers, Michigan State University Archives, East Lansing.

[20] Neal O’Steen, “The University of Tennessee: Evolution of a Campus,” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 39 (1980): 280-281.

Local 41

The theme of Work* naturally raises issues of labor and unionization, issues that remain contentious in some parts of academe despite the decades of faculty collective bargaining.  According to the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions, 368,000 college faculty are currently covered by collectively bargained contracts, as are almost 65,000 graduate students employees.  The battles over public sector unions in Wisconsin and elsewhere, the on-going organizing efforts at Urbana-Champaign, the successful drive at Chicago, and the current GEO negotiations have brought some of these modern concerns to the campus’s consciousness.  What is perhaps less recognized is this institution’s long history with faculty efforts to unionize.  More than 90 years ago, a small group of faculty led by historian Arthur C. Cole organized an American Federation of Teachers (AFT) local, and campaigned for faculty rights and improved working conditions in Urbana-Champaign.  As with the other early locals, the Federation of Teachers of the University of Illinois (AFT Local 41) expired after only a few years, yet it remains an important part of the story of faculty unionization at Illinois and more broadly.

Local 41’s founding was set against larger shifts within American higher education, including an expansion of institutions (both in size and number) and a push for faculty professionalization.  Elite faculty had organized the professional American Association of University Professors (AAUP) in 1915 and, in The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum on the Conduct of Business Men in America, Thorstein Veblen had famously critiqued the influence of businessmen and business principles in higher education.  A few faculty called for more direct action, including a handful calling for professors to unionize.  In 1916, the affiliation of a handful of existing locals from Chicago, Gary (IN), and elsewhere created the AFT.  Two years later, the union loosened membership requirements and allowed for locals on college campuses.  Just days after the end of World War I, a small group of faculty at Howard University began the first college local in the nation in hopes of counteracting what the local’s secretary termed the “degradation” of the faculty.  Pioneers who linked the fight for educational democracy with the fight for democracy in Europe, they were largely ignored off of their campus.

Two months later, the idea for a faculty local at the University of Illinois was raised by John V. Ross, the Vice President of the Illinois Typographical Union.  He quickly received buy-in from a handful of faculty but he also realized that significant obstacles existed.  He wrote to the AFT president that faculty were “ignorant of the benefits,” concerned about status, and hopeful of improvements in their situation without the need to organize.  In some ways, these concerns were never overcome—membership hovered around 30 for most of the local’s existence—but the local was formed and soon garnered a great deal of local and national attention.  Newspaper reports, letters to the editor, and editorials evinced disagreements over unionization, with some lauding the breaking down of barriers but others arguing that they should remain in place.  Even editorials supporting the faculty played into stereotypes and expressed some surprise at the union of so-called “brain workers” and “hand workers.”

Several issues were identified as important from the local’s beginning.  In a March 28, 1919, article in the Boston-based Christian Science Monitor, Cole noted: “Conditions in the University of Illinois reflect the general situation in the academic world. Unlike the followers of most professions, instructors generally are without democratic voice in determining the conditions under which they perform their services to the public. This has caused a widespread academic unrest.”  The local’s constitution, completed the same month, spoke directly to these issues.  It called for greater faculty input into the institution’s governance, greater security of positions, and the bridging of divides between the university’s faculty and the state’s laborers.  The evidence indicates, however, that the most pressing issues for faculty, both unionized and not, involved salaries and economic distress.

The immediate post-war period was one of financial struggle for the institution as state funds waned amid a property revaluation.  For faculty, concerns over stagnant salaries and rapid inflation were exacerbated by an on-going building campaign, which raised questions over institutional priorities.  Beginning in November 1919, the local undertook its most significant project, one designed to highlight the toll that the financial strife was taking on faculty.  Led by mathematician Aubrey J. Kempner, a subcommittee surveyed university faculty about their salaries and personal finances.  Released the following April, the report included responses from forty percent of the faculty and demonstrated the significant burdens arising from the financial situation.  Most reported being worse off than they had been before the war and claimed an inability to support their families.  Many identified concerns about maintaining standards of living associated with professional status and some noted that they were unable to afford fulfill the requirements of their jobs.  Almost a quarter of the respondents indicated having to put off medical and dental care, some with dire consequences.

The report dramatically demonstrated the situation at the institution and received significant national coverage, though its effects are unclear.  Union members believed that it kept the issues in the public consciousness and pressed President David Kinley into action.  Kinley did recognize the difficulties and, with the survey in process, began a public relations campaign designed to pressure the state to more fully fund the institution.  He knew that some faculty were dissatisfied with their salaries but denied reports that it was causing them to leave the institution for higher paying positions.  Years later, he admitted that some younger faculty had complained, but he asserted that most were understanding and downplayed the significance of the criticisms.  At the same time, Kinley, who a decade earlier had decried educational unionization, acted against some union leaders, as well as against others thought to be radicals during this era of the First Red Scare.  Many faculty soon left the university, including several who were pushed out by Kinley.  According to historian Robert Feer’s undergraduate thesis, one notable exception was classicist William Abbot Oldfather, who kept his position because the institution needed a token liberal.

With faculty such as Cole departing for more welcoming environments, the local’s difficulties intensified and, in late 1920, members weighed its closing.  It held on, though, until early the following spring as the state legislature considered more than $10 million in appropriations to the university.  As its president Harold N. Hillebrand reported, such an increase would counteract the strongest arguments for the local’s existence and cause it to “quietly disappear.”  Shortly before the appropriations were approved, the local did just that.  In response to reports by former members, the AFT listed the reason as “Official Pressure.”  Faculty apathy and concerns over status were likewise important.

Local 41, though short-lived, was significant for several reasons, including its highlighting of longstanding issues of academic exceptionalism, debates between faculty members of different ranks, and reactions of multiple stakeholders to faculty organizing.  Although not surprising in a hierarchical and discriminatory society, the unionization of faculty at a predominantly white state university attracted much more attention than did a similar act at Howard; it was only after the organization of teachers at Illinois that national publications took notice.  The local’s founding further revealed disagreements within the community and faculty, with some viewing the movement positively but others claiming that it was evidence of radicalism in education and that it would inhibit objective research on economic and social issues.  Financial concern was widespread but many were unwilling to affiliate with labor, some on principle and others because they believed that existing mechanisms such as the Carnegie pension plan would provide for them.  That the local’s membership was drawn primarily from junior faculty and instructors, those who were explicitly excluded from membership in the AAUP is also notable.   In the end, although it underscored economic issues, sought to bridge divides between faculty of different ranks, and sought to bridge divides between faculty and other laborers, Local 41 was unable to overcome institutional resistance, concerns about status, and complacency.  As such, it is a prime example of the earliest efforts to unionize faculty in American higher education.

For more on early unionization at Illinois, including sourcing for this entry, see:   Timothy Reese Cain, “‘Learning and Labor’: Faculty Unionization at the University of Illinois, 1919–1923.” Labor History 51, no. 4 (2010): 543–569.

Work*

As it is Labor Day, I am pleased to introduce Work* as the theme for the IPRH blog during the 2012-2013 academic year.  Over the next two semesters, guest bloggers will contribute pieces that address issues involving work, workers, and working in higher education and beyond.  We will consider what it means to work in the humanities, the value of the work that humanists undertake, the locales in which work is done, how work in the humanities is changing, and how humanists might affect change in their working conditions.  This theme is inspired, in part, by the shifts in the conditions of American higher education in the recent past.  With 70 percent of college and university faculty working off the tenure-track—and the problems associated with contingency especially affecting the humanities and social sciences—it is vital that we collectively consider the affects of these shifts on the current and future of work and workers in the humanities.

And yet, this blog will not just be about the conditions of work in the academy, but about the work that we do—and that is done—more broadly.  Shortly after Dianne Harris invited me to edit the blog, I spent a week visiting family in North Carolina.  Looking for a quiet place to, well, work, I went to the Durham County Library where I was confronted with an exhibit of photographs titled North Carolina at Work: Cedric Chatterley’s Portraits and Landscapes of Traditional Labor.  The show, curated by Liz Lindley and continuing education students in Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies, drew from an archive of 30,000 photographs taken by Chatterley in collaboration with the North Carolina Folklife Institute and the North Carolina Arts Council.  It presented images of North Carolinians at work in their communities and environments, and raised questions of home, identity, labor, and belonging.  The one closest to the table at which I sat was taken in conjunction with folklorist Barbara Lau’s project documenting the lives of several hundred Cambodians living in and around Greensboro, NC.  It centered on Seng Noun, a worker in the Drexel Heritage Furniture and bore a straightforward, if probing, caption: “How does work build community?”  The exhibit (about which more can be learned here and here) helped demonstrate the many layers on which ideas of work can be explored, and the effects that work can have on those who undertake it and those who consider it.  From its being curated as an educational project, to its content, to its public engagement, to its ruminations on work and place, it demonstrated some of the many roles that they humanities play and captured issues that I hope are explored in this blog over the course of the year.

Finally, this year marks the 150^th anniversary of the first Morrill Land Grant Act, an anniversary that the university will commemorate with a symposium on October 26.  The Morrill Act, which is often heralded for expanding educational opportunity, raised important issues of the relationship between education and vocation.  Certainly, tensions between liberal education and practical education were not new in 1862—the idea of liberal education as practical education had been at the heart of famous curricular debates earlier in the century—but the Morrill Act highlighted them.  This institution was among those that struggled with how to fulfill its new mandate and many feared that John Milton Gregory’s appointment as its first regent foretold an emphasis on classical education rather than practical training.  Certainly, the tensions remained in ensuing decades as the statewide controversy over the 1880s name change from Illinois Industrial University to the University of Illinois demonstrates.  In the modern era, amid widespread laments over the vocationalization of American higher education, these issues warrant on-going attention. I hope that this blog provides a space for such consideration.

So, please, share your ideas, suggest topics to consider, and contribute pieces on the theme of Work*.  There is much of it to be done.

Tim Cain (tcain@illinois.edu); assistant professor; Education Policy, Organization & Leadership

The History of Prison Contract Labor

While we wait for an IPRH  blogger to update us on the spring of the Occupy Movement, here is a fascinating piece on the history of convict labor.  From TomDispatch.com, the blog by Tom Engelhardt,  historians Steve Fraser and Josh Freeman explore the history of convict labor in the United States  –in the 19th and 20th century — in the North, as well as the South.  Do you know where your office furniture and blue books come from?  Read Fraser and Freeman, and find out.

Locking Down an American Workforce
Prison Labor as the Past — and Future — of American “Free-Market” Capitalism
By Steve Fraser and Joshua B. Freeman

Sweatshop labor is back with a vengeance. It can be found across broad stretches of the American economy and around the world.  Penitentiaries have become a niche market for such work.  The privatization of prisons in recent years has meant the creation of a small army of workers too coerced and right-less to complain.

Prisoners, whose ranks increasingly consist of those for whom the legitimate economy has found no use, now make up a virtual brigade within the reserve army of the unemployed whose ranks have ballooned along with the U.S. incarceration rate.  The Corrections Corporation of America and GEO, two prison privatizers, along with a third smaller operator, G4S (formerly Wackenhut), sell inmate labor at subminimum wages to Fortune 500 corporations like Chevron, Bank of America, AT&T, and IBM.

These companies can, in most states, lease factories in prisons or prisoners to work on the outside.  All told, nearly a million prisoners are now making office furniture, working in call centers, fabricating body armor, taking hotel reservations, working in slaughterhouses, or manufacturing textiles, shoes, and clothing, while getting paid somewhere between 93 cents and $4.73 per day. 

Rarely can you find workers so pliable, easy to control, stripped of political rights, and subject to martial discipline at the first sign of recalcitrance — unless, that is, you traveled back to the nineteenth century when convict labor was commonplace nationwide.  Indeed, a sentence of “confinement at hard labor” was then the essence of the American penal system.  More than that, it was one vital way the United States became a modern industrial capitalist economy — at a moment, eerily like our own, when the mechanisms of capital accumulation were in crisis.

A Yankee Invention

What some historians call “the long Depression” of the nineteenth century, which lasted from the mid-1870s through the mid-1890s, was marked by frequent panics and slumps, mass bankruptcies, deflation, and self-destructive competition among businesses designed to depress costs, especially labor costs.  So, too, we are living through a twenty-first century age of panics and austerity with similar pressures to shrink the social wage. 

Convict labor has been and once again is an appealing way for business to address these dilemmas.  Penal servitude now strikes us as a barbaric throwback to some long-lost moment that preceded the industrial revolution, but in that we’re wrong.  From its first appearance in this country, it has been associated with modern capitalist industry and large-scale agriculture. 

And that is only the first of many misconceptions about this peculiar institution.  Infamous for the brutality with which prison laborers were once treated, indelibly linked in popular memory (and popular culture) with images of the black chain gang in the American South, it is usually assumed to be a Southern invention.  So apparently atavistic, it seems to fit naturally with the retrograde nature of Southern life and labor, its economic and cultural underdevelopment, its racial caste system, and its desperate attachment to the “lost cause.” 

As it happens, penal servitude — the leasing out of prisoners to private enterprise, either within prison walls or in outside workshops, factories, and fields — was originally known as a “Yankee invention.”

First used at Auburn prison in New York State in the 1820s, the system spread widely and quickly throughout the North, the Midwest, and later the West.  It developed alongside state-run prison workshops that produced goods for the public sector and sometimes the open market. 

A few Southern states also used it.  Prisoners there, as elsewhere, however, were mainly white men, since slave masters, with a free hand to deal with the “infractions” of their chattel, had little need for prison.  The Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery would, in fact, make an exception for penal servitude precisely because it had become the dominant form of punishment throughout the free states. 

Nor were those sentenced to “confinement at hard labor” restricted to digging ditches or other unskilled work; nor were they only men.  Prisoners were employed at an enormous range of tasks from rope- and wagon-making to carpet, hat, and clothing manufacturing (where women prisoners were sometimes put to work), as well coal mining, carpentry, barrel-making, shoe production, house-building, and even the manufacture of rifles.  The range of petty and larger workshops into which the felons were integrated made up the heart of the new American economy. 

Observing a free-labor textile mill and a convict-labor one on a visit to the United States, novelist Charles Dickens couldn’t tell the difference.  State governments used the rental revenue garnered from their prisoners to meet budget needs, while entrepreneurs made outsized profits either by working the prisoners themselves or subleasing them to other businessmen. 

Convict Labor in the ‘New South’

After the Civil War, the convict-lease system metamorphosed.  In the South, it became ubiquitous, one of several grim methods — including the black codes, debt peonage, the crop-lien system, lifetime labor contracts, and vigilante terror — used to control and fix in place the newly emancipated slave.  Those “freedmen” were eager to pursue their new liberty either by setting up as small farmers or by exercising the right to move out of the region at will or from job to job as “free wage labor” was supposed to be able to do.

If you assumed, however, that the convict-lease system was solely the brainchild of the apartheid all-white “Redeemer” governments that overthrew the Radical Republican regimes (which first ran the defeated Confederacy during Reconstruction) and used their power to introduce Jim Crow to Dixie, you would be wrong again.  In Georgia, for instance, the Radical Republican state government took the initiative soon after the war ended.  And this was because the convict-lease system was tied to the modernizing sectors of the post-war economy, no matter where in Dixie it was introduced or by whom.

So convicts were leased to coal-mining, iron-forging, steel-making, and railroad companies, including Tennessee Coal and Iron (TC&I), a major producer across the South, especially in the booming region around Birmingham, Alabama.  More than a quarter of the coal coming out of Birmingham’s pits was then mined by prisoners.  By the turn of the century, TC&I had been folded into J.P. Morgan’s United States Steel complex, which also relied heavily on prison laborers.

All the main extractive industries of the South were, in fact, wedded to the system.  Turpentine and lumber camps deep in the fetid swamps and forest vastnesses of Georgia, Florida, and Louisiana commonly worked their convicts until they dropped dead from overwork or disease.  The region’s plantation monocultures in cotton and sugar made regular use of imprisoned former slaves, including women.  Among the leading families of Atlanta, Birmingham, and other “New South” metropolises were businessmen whose fortunes originated in the dank coal pits, malarial marshes, isolated forests, and squalid barracks in which their unfree peons worked, lived, and died.

Because it tended to grant absolute authority to private commercial interests and because its racial make-up in the post-slavery era was overwhelmingly African-American, the South’s convict-lease system was distinctive.  Its caste nature is not only impossible to forget, but should remind us of the unbalanced racial profile of America’s bloated prison population today. 

Moreover, this totalitarian-style control invited appalling brutalities in response to any sign of resistance: whippings, water torture, isolation in “dark cells,” dehydration, starvation, ice-baths, shackling with metal spurs riveted to the feet, and “tricing” (an excruciatingly painful process in which recalcitrant prisoners were strung up by the thumbs with fishing line attached to overhead pulleys).  Even women in a hosiery mill in Tennessee were flogged, hung by the wrists, and placed in solitary confinement.

Living quarters for prisoner-workers were usually rat-infested and disease-ridden.  Work lasted at least from sunup to sundown and well past the point of exhaustion.  Death came often enough and bodies were cast off in unmarked graves by the side of the road or by incineration in coke ovens.  Injury rates averaged one per worker per month, including respiratory failure, burnings, disfigurement, and the loss of limbs.  Prison mines were called “nurseries of death.”  Among Southern convict laborers, the mortality rate (not even including high levels of suicides) was eight times that among similar workers in the North — and it was extraordinarily high there.

The Southern system also stood out for the intimate collusion among industrial, commercial, and agricultural enterprises and every level of Southern law enforcement as well as the judicial system.  Sheriffs, local justices of the peace, state police, judges, and state governments conspired to keep the convict-lease business humming.  Indeed, local law officers depended on the leasing system for a substantial part of their income.  (They pocketed the fines and fees associated with the “convictions,” a repayable sum that would be added on to the amount of time at “hard labor” demanded of the prisoner.) 

The arrest cycle was synchronized with the business cycle, timed to the rise and fall of the demand for fresh labor.  County and state treasuries similarly counted on such revenues, since the post-war South was so capital-starved that only renting out convicts assured that prisons could be built and maintained.

There was, then, every incentive to concoct charges or send people to jail for the most trivial offenses: vagrancy, gambling, drinking, partying, hopping a freight car, tarrying too long in town.  A “pig law” in Mississippi assured you of five years as a prison laborer if you stole a farm animal worth more than $10. Theft of a fence rail could result in the same. 

Penal Servitude in the Gilded Age North

All of this was only different in degree from prevailing practices everywhere else: the sale of prison labor power to private interests, corporal punishment, and the absence of all rights including civil liberties, the vote, and the right to protest or organize against terrible conditions.

In the North, where 80% of all U.S. prison labor was employed after the Civil War and which accounted for over $35 billion in output (in current dollars), the system was reconfigured to meet the needs of modern industry and the pressures of “the long Depression.”  Convict labor was increasingly leased out only to a handful of major manufacturers in each state.  These textile mills, oven makers, mining operations, hat and shoe factories — one in Wisconsin leased that state’s entire population of convicted felons — were then installing the kind of mass production methods becoming standard in much of American industry.  As organized markets for prison labor grew increasingly oligopolistic (like the rest of the economy), the Depression of 1873 and subsequent depressions in the following decades wiped out many smaller businesses that had once gone trawling for convicts.

Today, we talk about a newly “flexible economy,” often a euphemism for the geometric growth of a precariously positioned, insecure workforce.  The convict labor system of the nineteenth century offered an original specimen of perfect flexibility.

Companies leasing convicts enjoyed authority to dispose of their rented labor power as they saw fit.  Workers were compelled to labor in total silence.  Even hand gestures and eye contact were prohibited for the purpose of creating “silent and insulated working machines.”

Supervision of prison labor was ostensibly shared by employers and the prison authorities.  In fact, many businesses did continue to conduct their operations within prison walls where they supplied the materials, power, and machinery, while the state provided guards, workshops, food, clothing, and what passed for medical care.  As a matter of practice though, the foremen of the businesses called the shots.  And there were certain states, including Nebraska, Washington, and New Mexico, that, like their Southern counterparts, ceded complete control to the lessee.  As one observer put it, “Felons are mere machines held to labor by the dark cell and the scourge.”

Free market industrial capitalism, then and now, invariably draws on the aid of the state.  In that system’s formative phases, the state has regularly used its coercive powers of taxation, expropriation, and in this case incarceration to free up natural and human resources lying outside the orbit of capitalism proper.

In both the North and the South, the contracting out of convict labor was one way in which that state-assisted mechanism of capital accumulation arose.  Contracts with the government assured employers that their labor force would be replenished anytime a worker got sick, was disabled, died, or simply became too worn out to continue.

The Kansas Wagon Company, for example, signed a five-year contract in 1877 that prevented the state from raising the rental price of labor or renting to other employers.  The company also got an option to renew the lease for 10 more years, while the government was obliged to pay for new machinery, larger workshops, a power supply, and even the building of a switching track that connected to the trunk line of the Pacific Railway and so ensured that the product could be moved effectively to market. 

Penal institutions all over the country became auxiliary arms of capitalist industry and commerce.  Two-thirds of all prisoners worked for private enterprise.

Today, strikingly enough, government is again providing subsidies and tax incentives as well as facilities, utilities, and free space for corporations making use of this same category of abjectly dependent labor.

The New Abolitionism

Dependency and flexibility naturally assumed no resistance, but there was plenty of that all through the nineteenth century from workers, farmers, and even prisoners.  Indeed, a principal objective in using prison labor was to undermine efforts to unionize, but from the standpoint of mobilized working people far more was at stake.

Opposition to convict labor arose from workingmen’s associations, labor-oriented political parties, journeymen unions, and other groups which considered the system an insult to the moral codes of egalitarian republicanism nurtured by the American Revolution.  The specter of proletarian dependency haunted the lives of the country’s self-reliant handicraftsmen who watched apprehensively as shops employing wage labor began popping up across the country.  Much of the earliest of this agitation was aimed at the use of prisoners to replace skilled workers (while unskilled prison labor was initially largely ignored).

It was bad enough for craftsmen to see their own livelihoods and standards of living put in jeopardy by “free” wage labor.  Worse still was to watch unfree labor do the same thing.  At the time, employers were turning to that captive prison population to combat attempts by aggrieved workers to organize and defend themselves.  On the eve of the Civil War, for example, an iron-molding contractor in Spuyten Duyvil, north of Manhattan in the Bronx, locked out his unionized workers and then moved his operation to Sing Sing penitentiary, where a laborer cost 40 cents, $2.60 less than the going day rate.  It worked, and Local 11 of the Union of Iron Workers quickly died away.

Worst of all was to imagine this debased form of work as a model for the proletarian future to come.  The workingman’s movement of the Jacksonian era was deeply alarmed by the prospect of “wage slavery,” a condition inimical to their sense of themselves as citizens of a republic of independent producers.  Prison labor was a sub-species of that dreaded “slavery,” a caricature of it perhaps, and intolerable to a movement often as much about emancipation as unionization.

All the way through the Gilded Age of the 1890s, convict labor continued to serve as a magnet for emancipatory desires.  In addition, prisoners’ rebellions became ever more common — in the North particularly, where many prisoners turned out to be Civil War veterans and dispossessed working people who already knew something about fighting for freedom and fighting back.  Major penitentiaries like Sing Sing became sites of repeated strikes and riots; a strike in 1877 even took on the transplanted Spuyten Duyvil iron-molding company.

Above and below the Mason Dixon line, political platforms, protest rallies, petition campaigns, legislative investigations, union strikes, and boycotts by farm organizations like the Farmers Alliance and Grange cried out for the abolition of the convict-lease system, or at least for its rigorous regulation.  Over the century’s last two decades, more than 20 coal-mine strikes broke out because of the use of convict miners.

The Knights of Labor, that era’s most audacious labor movement, was particularly exercised.  During the Coal Creek Wars in eastern Tennessee in the early 1890s, for instance, TC&I tried to use prisoners to break a miners’ strike.  The company’s vice president noted that it was “an effective club to hold over the heads of free laborers.” 

Strikers and their allies affiliated with the Knights, the United Mine Workers, and the Farmers Alliance launched guerilla attacks on the prisoner stockade, sending the convicts they freed to Knoxville.  When the governor insisted on shipping them back, the workers released them into the surrounding hills and countryside.  Gun battles followed.

The Death of Convict Leasing

In the North, the prison abolition movement went viral, embracing not only workers’ organizations, sympathetic rural insurgents, and prisoners, but also widening circles of middle-class reformers.  The newly created American Federation of Labor denounced the system as “contract slavery.”  It also demanded the banning of any imports from abroad made with convict labor and the exclusion from the open market of goods produced domestically by prisoners, whether in state-run or private workshops.  In Chicago, the construction unions refused to work with materials made by prisoners.

By the latter part of the century, in state after state penal servitude was on its way to extinction.  New York, where the “industry” was born and was largest, killed it by the late 1880s.  The tariff of 1890 prohibited the sale of convict-made wares from abroad.  Private leasing continued in the North, but under increasingly restrictive conditions, including Federal legislation passed during the New Deal.  By World War II, it was virtually extinct (although government-run prison workshops continued as they always had).

At least officially, even in the South it was at an end by the turn of the century in Tennessee, Louisiana, Georgia, and Mississippi.  Higher political calculations were at work in these states.  Established elites were eager to break the inter-racial alliances that had formed over abolishing convict leasing by abolishing the hated system itself.  Often enough, however, it ended in name only.

What replaced it was the state-run chain gang (although some Southern states like Alabama and Florida continued private leasing well into the 1920s). Inmates were set to work building roads and other infrastructure projects vital to the flourishing of a mature market economy and so to the continuing process of capital accumulation.  In the North, the system of “hard labor” was replaced by a system of “hard time,” that numbing, brutalizing idleness where masses of people extruded from the mainstream economy are pooled into mass penal colonies.  The historic link between labor, punishment, and economic development was severed, and remained so… until now.

Convict Leasing Rises Again

“Now,” means our second Gilded Age and its aftermath.  In these years, the system of leasing out convicts to private enterprise was reborn.  This was a perverse triumph for the law of supply and demand in an era infatuated with the charms of the free market.  On the supply side, the U.S. holds captive 25% of all the prisoners on the planet: 2.3 million people.  It has the highest incarceration rate in the world as well, a figure that began skyrocketing in 1980 as Ronald Reagan became president.  As for the demand for labor, since the 1970s American industrial corporations have found it increasingly unprofitable to invest in domestic production.  Instead, they have sought out the hundreds of millions of people abroad who are willing to, or can be pressed into, working for far less than American workers.

As a consequence, those back home — disproportionately African-American workers — who found themselves living in economic exile, scrabbling to get by,  began showing up in similarly disproportionate numbers in the country’s rapidly expanding prison archipelago. It didn’t take long for corporate America to come to view this as another potential foreign country, full of cheap and subservient labor — and better yet, close by. 

What began in the 1970s as an end run around the laws prohibiting convict leasing by private interests has now become an industrial sector in its own right, employing more people than any Fortune 500 corporation and operating in 37 states.  And here’s the ultimate irony: our ancestors found convict labor obnoxious in part because it seemed to prefigure a new and more universal form of enslavement.  Could its rebirth foreshadow a future ever more unnervingly like those past nightmares?

Today, we are being reassured by the president, the mainstream media, and economic experts that the Great Recession is over, that we are in “recovery” even though most of the recovering patients haven’t actually noticed significant improvement in their condition.  For those announcing its arrival, “recovery” means that the mega-banks are no longer on the brink of bankruptcy, the stock market has made up lost ground, corporate profits are improving, and notoriously unreliable employment numbers have improved by several tenths of a percent.

What accounts for that peculiarly narrow view of recovery, however, is that the general costs of doing business are falling off a cliff as the economy eats itself alive.  The recovery being celebrated owes thanks to local, state, and Federal austerity budgets, the starving of the social welfare system and public services, rampant anti-union campaigns in the public and private sector, the spread of sweatshop labor, the coercion of desperate unemployed or underemployed workers to accept lower wages, part-time work, and temporary work, as well as the relinquishing of healthcare benefits and a financially secure retirement — in short, to surrender the hope that is supposed to come with the American franchise.

Such a recovery, resting on the stripping away of the hard won material and cultural achievements of the past century, suggests a new world in which the prison-labor archipelago could indeed become a vast gulag of the downwardly mobile. 

Steve Fraser is Editor-at-Large of New Labor Forum, co-founder of the American Empire Project (Metropolitan Books), and a TomDispatch regular.  He is, most recently, the author of Wall Street: America’s Dream Palace. He teaches history at Columbia University.

Joshua B. Freeman, a TomDispatch regular, teaches history at Queens College and at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and is affiliated with its Joseph S. Murphy Labor Institute. His forthcoming book, American Empire, will be the final volume of the Penguin History of the United States.

This piece is an adaptation of an “In the Rearview Mirror” column that will be published in a forthcoming issue of the magazine New Labor Forum.

Copyright 2012 Steve Fraser and Joshua B. Freeman

What I’ve Learned from Teaching in a Prison Agnieszka Tuszynska

The Education Justice Project brings UI faculty and graduate students together with  inmates at the Danville Correctional Facility, a state prison in Danville, Illinois in for-credit courses in a broad range of the humanities.  In just a few years,  the EJP prison classroom has become known on the UIUC campus as an inspiring and transformative place to teach.  In our latest “Humanities and Crisis”  post, Agnieska Tuszynska  considers her classroom experience there. 

Agnieszka Tuszynska is a Ph.D. Candidate in English. Her dissertation, “Strangers from Within, Strangers from Without: Negotiations And Uses of Space in African American and Immigrant Literatures and Cultures, 1900s-1950s,” presents a comparative study of American prose that poses spatiality as the main tool used by black and immigrant writers to represent the ethnic experience in the United States from the twenties to the fifties.

Last spring, I taught a course at the prison in Danville, Illinois,  titled “Race and Place in Twentieth-century American Fiction.”  During our last meeting of the semester, I asked each student to answer the question: “What have you learned from this class?” After giving me their answers, my students proceeded to turn the questioner into the questioned: “What have you learned?” they asked. I should have anticipated that and I should have prepared for it. But I hadn’t. And so I gave them the best answer I could master at the moment. I said: I regained the ability to be excited  about what I do as a teacher and a student. It was hardly an exhaustive response, or an answer that did justice to everything that the class and the students had taught me.  I should have told them that thanks to them I’d remembered that which the stress and pressure of writing a dissertation and looking for a job have caused me partially to forget: that the study of literature and culture matters and that it is thrilling.

This blog entry contains all the things I should have told my students that day—and didn’t.

I have come to see the lessons I took away from my class on the Danville campus,  as the prison is known among the members of Education Justice Project, as falling into two general categories. The first category involves what my students have taught me about the role of the humanities in higher education; the second category refers to the ways my Danville class has transformed my methodology as a teacher and a scholar.

The Role of the Humanities.

In recent years, much has been said and written about the jeopardized status of the humanities within the increasingly profit-oriented system of higher education. Many of us in the humanities departments have found ourselves bracing against budget cuts, an unfavorable academic job market, and other ominous signs of what some have called the death of the humanities. Additionally, and often more painfully, we often find it necessary to defend the relevance of what we do to our friends and family who question the wisdom of our career choices, and to our students who sometimes resent having to take English or philosophy classes that, they feel, have nothing to do with their business or engineering majors. On a few occasions, I have found myself explaining, even justifying, to various people—students and others—the humanities’ reason for being.

My involvement with EJP and especially the class I taught in the spring have given me a new level of assertiveness and self-confidence as a scholar and a teacher in the humanities. Here’s why: I have seen the study of literature, cultural artifacts, and historical documents bring the best intellectual and spiritual qualities out of a group of students in an environment many would consider actively hostile to the human spirit. In a place where daily life has dehumanizing effects,  I have seen rigorous textual study and meticulous critical analysis lead not just to insightful conclusions but to conclusions based on compassion and empathy for the human condition of others. Let me share a couple of illustrative examples.

One of the novels we read for our class is Nelson Algren’s Never Come Morning (1942),     a story of urban violence and street life. Featuring a male protagonist and written in what I’ve heard described as “masculine language,” the novel—I thought— was likely to stir my students’ identification with the tough existence that it depicted and that many of them would find all too familiar. For that reason, I considered my decision to teach the book a bit daring.  What I did not expect was that, apart from turning into a heated Foucauldian analysis of the novel’s urban geography, our discussion would focus to a large extent on the struggles of the story’s female character. I did not foresee that within the hyper-masculine culture of the prison, my students would make room for an extensive analysis of the social conditions that women faced during the Great Depression, or for relevant and deeply stirring personal narratives in which they compared the women in their own lives, and in their own neighborhoods, to the struggling female character of Algren’s novel. While I was right to expect my students would identify with the problems the novel highlights, I didn’t imagine I would witness them performing a feminist analysis of the text.

Another example I want to share here remains in my memory one of the highlights of my teaching experience. In preparation for  reading Pietro DiDonato’s  Christ in Concrete (1939)  a novel about immigrant experience in America, the students first read the United States Immigration Act of 1924.  During our discussion of the nativist views and discriminatory language of the act, one of the students—to everybody’s surprise—expressed his agreement with the rhetoric of the document and the exclusions it imposed. In subsequent class meetings, we focused on the ways DiDonato’s experimental writing style rendered the emotional and material impact that discrimination had on the lives of immigrants. At some point in the discussion, that same student spoke to make what he called a “confession.” He told us about the new understanding of the immigrant condition he had gained while reading the novel, dwelling on its language, and participating in class discussion. He spoke to me and his classmates of being alternatively moved to laughter and tears by the novel’s imagery and stream-of-consciousness. Given what some of our Danville students have called “their emotional hang-ups,” that couldn’t have been an easy confession to make. I was deeply moved by it.

This is how I know the humanities matter. The humanities matter because through the critical study of the human condition we discover what we have in common with one another despite our differences. They matter because they can not only make us learn something new about figurative language and the stream-of-consciousness technique, but also invite us to confront our prejudices and make an effort to interrogate them. They matter because a literature class can make prisoners feel—and I quote from one of my students–”that we are human beings, after all.”

New Methodology

My other lesson from the prison has made me rethink not just what it is that I as a teacher and student in the humanities do, but also how I do it.  Within the walls of the prison, I have gained a new understanding of and appreciation for the notion of intellectual freedom. I have learned that disciplinary conventions and formal requirements, while important and often necessary to know, can and should be bent, stretched, and transgressed when they stop being conducive to our passionate learning and  when our freedom to grow as thinkers is at stake.

To be sure, my students performed a number of tasks that one would expect to perform in a  literary fiction course: they wrote formal literary analysis papers, did close readings of the text orally and in writing, learned to identify the elements of fiction and the characteristics of literary realism and naturalism. Following my advice, they un-learned to read fast and instead acquired the habit of dwelling on words and delighting in them. They surprised me with their nuanced use of the figures of speech. For example, after a short lecture on the role of different kinds of spaces in human experience, I asked them to tell me of those spaces that had played a significant role in their lives. Painting one of the most beautiful images we’d encounter that whole semester,  one student contrasted the rough physical space of his “hood” with the safety of his mother’s arms. All this goes to show that the men in my class were very much on top of things when it came to tackling the literary.

But in their approaches to the novels, they also relied on varieties of experience and knowledge  that couldn’t be found in most literature textbooks. In their questions, written assignments, and discussions, they spontaneously and gracefully jumped over disciplinary fences, drawing on what they’d previously learned from courses in such fields as Islamic architecture, history of madness, or radical social and political movements. In listening to the different appointed student  discussion leaders each week, I heard them approach our class readings from a wide range of perspectives, including that of a preacher, an existential philosopher, and a political analyst. Although our class focused on fiction, in their explorations of the novels, my students roamed freely across literary genres. Once, one student greeted us all at the beginning of the class with a two page poem he’d written in response to one of the novels. Another student summarized our whole class in his final paper in the form of a 30-page play based on the semester’s readings and discussions.

My students’ commitment was not so much to the cultivation of the discipline or the field but to the cultivation of the thinker inside them. The enthusiasm with which they fostered their freedom to think and to share their thoughts –enthusiasm that couldn’t be contained within the boundaries of one field—brings to mind the German thinker, Max Weber, who —when once criticized by a fellow academic for writing outside his field, responded: “I’m not a donkey. And I don’t have a field.”

With so few of their liberties left to them, my students on the Danville campus hungrily exercised their intellectual freedom, within and outside the field specified by our course listing. Since the spring, I have made a promise to myself to encourage and carve out more room for such free intellectual exploration in my future classes. After Danville, I’ll never teach literature the same way again.

My Danville students also transformed me as a student. They made me consider the notion that perhaps I’m not a donkey either. The freshness of their perspectives rekindled the passion I had partially lost for my own dissertation research. Since the spring, that research has taken me on journeys I didn’t even fathom before. My methodology has expanded to encompass an exploration of Cook County Illinois Jail’s archives from the 1940s, and field trips to Chicago’s ethnic neighborhoods and cemeteries. What I find in those unlikely places uncovers whole new layers of meaning in the works of literature I study. I owe much of the joy and satisfaction it’s given me to my Danville students.

Having read my own words above, I’m surprised to discover what a self-centered narrative it is. “What I’ve learned” has somehow turned into “what I’ve gained/what I’ve taken away/ in what ways I have become a more confident and fulfilled scholar and person.” But perhaps this best illustrates the experience of teaching for EJP. When teaching on the Danville campus, you will give—and give your best—but that part will be expected. It’s what you’ll receive that will surprise you.