Serving the Faculty Union in Fighting Austerity Policies

Introduction

Governmental support for higher education in the United States on a “per student” basis has been declining for decades. ¹ And the trend has accelerated following the recession that began in 2007. Higher education academic unions (primarily the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers) have been advocating and lobbying for more public support for education in general and for higher education in particular.

But beyond these public advocacy efforts in the political arena, organized labor in higher education can also defend the interests of higher education employees and students of limited economic resources by engaging in struggles to ensure that the austerity policies being implemented in response to reduced resources do not disadvantage working-class interests. Ideally, student movements fighting tuition increases and decreases in scholarship aid can work in tandem with higher education unions fighting to simultaneously protect the interests of students and employees.

A particularly sharp issue in the past decade is the allocation of resources within the university or college. Administrators have been reallocating resources away from the faculty who directly carry out the institution’s main purpose: production of scholarly knowledge and its dissemination to the students. Instead, “indirect” administrative personnel are absorbing more and more of the budget. Faculty unions can and should engage in campaigns to expose and reverse this trend. In doing so, they have the potential to cement close ties with student organizations and the interests of students. They will be standing “for the public good” while also defending the interests of higher education faculty.

University-based labor education programs can play a particularly important role in such struggles because they are uniquely situated by their expertise and focus. In particular, they can engage in applied research that is highly unlikely to be carried out by other academic departments yet is central to resistance to the use of “austerity” as an excuse for regressive resource allocations.

This paper examines the applied research arm of the Center for Labor Research and Studies at Florida International University (FIU), the Research Institute on Social and Economic Policy (RISEP), and focuses specifically on a set of research reports that RISEP has conducted for FIU’s faculty union, the United Faculty of Florida (UFF). Produced in 2004, 2007, 2009, and 2011, the reports exposed the university’s diversion of resources away from the front-line producers of education (the faculty) and toward the salaries and numbers of administrative personnel.

Studies such as this provide a vital service to higher education unions. They address a larger labor issue in higher education: administrative bloat even in the face of faculty cutbacks, stagnant wages, and increased workload. ² And higher education is a relatively densely unionized sector. According to the 2012 edition of the Directory of U.S. Faculty Contracts and Bargaining Agents in Institutions of Higher Education, 25 percent of all higher education faculty in the United States are unionized. An even higher proportion is unionized in public sector colleges and universities: 29 percent in public four-year institutions and 41 percent in public two-year institutions (National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions 2012, viii).

Most previous studies documenting administrative bloat have been at the national level. But in higher education, collective bargaining happens primarily at the local level, and the ways and extent of administrative self-indulgence are unique at each institution. If local unions are unaware of what their local administrations are doing on the local level, they will always be disadvantaged in dealing with such issues.

Because of the RISEP reports, the faculty union at FIU was able to create a great deal of “buzz” on the campus about this resource shift, putting the administration on the defensive and ultimately having a likely impact on the deceleration of this trend. The paper will first briefly describe RISEP; it will then discuss the reports and their findings, the uses made of those findings by the union, the cementing of ties between the faculty union and the Labor Center, factors affecting the usefulness of these reports to the union in campus agitation and at the bargaining table, varying results with similar reports done for chapters of the same union at other state universities, the issue of potential danger to the Labor Studies program due to possible administrative backlash, and the prerequisites for such research collaborations to be successful. Finally, the paper will conclude with the prospects for other university-based labor education programs to engage in similar activities and what obstacles would preclude such efforts in different circumstances.

The Creation and History of RISEP ³

RISEP was created in 2004; it grew from the type of research that I had been conducting as an individual academic for approximately two decades at the time. I had been a university-based labor educator since 1981 and had achieved tenured status at the Indiana University Labor Studies Program largely on the basis of research that had always been based on the practical labor issues and labor-oriented social activism that occupied much of my spare time during the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. I continued the same type of research when I moved to FIU in 1997. Virtually all of this research focused on real world problems facing workers, unions, or working-class communities and institutions and their attempts to tackle those problems. Issues such as labor-community coalitions, combating plant closures, organizing workers and combating union-busting, living wage campaigns, transforming union culture in a more immigrant-friendly direction, attempts to build international labor solidarity, union revitalization attempts, and the like were typical subjects of my research during those years.

In many cases, the research concerned movements in which I was a participant observer. It was this close connection to social movements that led to the creation of RISEP. While I was attending the national conference of Jobs with Justice in Miami Beach in 2003 as a delegate from the Miami Jobs with Justice chapter, a program officer from a social justice–oriented foundation who was also attending approached me and asked me to institutionalize through the creation of a research institute the type of research I had been doing in conjunction with a rapidly growing group of working-class community organizations and campaigns (living wage, anti-gentrification, immigrant rights, etc.). She promised general operating support funding if I did and also volunteered to approach other foundations to request further funding.

By the fall of 2004, FIU colleague Carol Stepick and I had created RISEP with guaranteed foundation support of a little over $100,000 per year for three years to get the institute on its feet. RISEP’s self-description on its webpage explains its orientation:

RISEP is a research institute that studies issues of concern to working people and low-income communities. We provide facts, figures, and information to labor unions, community organizing groups, and the media about things that impact the lives of working people: the economy, wages and benefits, housing cost, healthcare, immigration and the environment are some issues we have studied. (www.risep-fiu.org/about/)

RISEP has an advisory board composed of representatives from the most activist labor unions in south Florida, faith-based social justice organizations such as the South Florida Interfaith Worker Justice chapter, labor-community coalitions such as the South Florida Jobs with Justice chapter, working-class community organizing groups such as the Miami Workers Center and Power U Center for Social Change, immigrant organizations such as the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and the Florida Immigrant Coalition, human services providers like the Miami Coalition for the Homeless and a human services coalition in Miami, and progressive academics who bring university-based insights and resources. The advisory board guides RISEP in the type of research projects undertaken and provides feedback on previous work. It must be emphasized that RISEP is entirely independent regarding its research standards and methodologies, however; it will not “bend” research results to please some constituency. It has maintained such high standards for its social science research that occasional attacks by powerful moneyed interests or their spokespersons have never gained any traction with the media or the public.

Between 2004 and 2012, RISEP produced an average of ten major research reports per year. RISEP reports helped the local Jobs with Justice chapter win a community benefits agreement from the developers building the new Florida Marlins stadium, helped the Miami Workers Center win guarantees (later reneged upon) to provide affordable housing for low-income African-American residents in Miami’s Liberty City area, helped the Coalition of Immokalee Workers discredit a phony “research report” claiming Immokalee tomato pickers were earning fabulous wages, helped a local “wage theft” coalition win one of the country’s first county wage theft ordinances, helped unionized workers at Walt Disney World expose and fight the evils of a “two-tier” wage structure, and bolstered a number of other causes too numerous to mention here.

Over the years, many students (both undergraduate and graduate) have passed through RISEP and have received activist research training—something hard for them to find elsewhere in the university. Former RISEP interns and graduate and undergraduate research assistants who have not become union or community organizers have moved on to become the next generation providing vital research and teaching infrastructure to the social justice and labor movements. ⁴

The focus of this article is a series of research reports RISEP did that were commissioned by the faculty union at FIU, the FIU chapter of the UFF. These reports created quite a stir on campus, and they also produced a number of ancillary effects. They are the subject of the next section of this paper.

RISEP’s Research for the Campus Faculty Union

In the fall of 2004, just after RISEP had been created, the FIU faculty union commissioned the institute to analyze trends in the university’s budget and personnel numbers in terms of relative commitment of resources between faculty and administration. ⁵ In September 2004, RISEP produced a report entitled Florida International University Priorities in the 1997-1998 to 2002-2003 Period: A Budget and Personnel Analysis (Nissen 2004).

The report found that the FIU administration had been rapidly shifting resources away from the university’s faculty and into administrative overhead during that five-year period. Specifically, total administrative salaries had almost doubled (up 93.3 percent) in five years, while total faculty salaries had increased only 14.9 percent during the same period. And the numbers of people in the administrative bureaucracy had increased by 58.6 percent in five years, while the faculty numbers had actually decreased by almost 1 percent.

Combined with a growing student body, this transfer of resources had resulted in a 26 percent increase in the teaching load of faculty (defined as the number of full-time students taught per faculty member) during that period. The faculty were not the only victims of this resource transfer: student tuition and fees had increased 39.9 percent, well over double the growth (14.9 percent) in monetary resource growth paying the salaries of front-line deliverers of education to students, namely, the faculty. In short, faculty and students were being shortchanged by an administration apparently intent on increasing its own compensation and numbers.

The report further showed that the fastest growth in administrative salaries was at the top of the pay scale (president, provosts, vice presidents, deans, etc.), while the rapid growth in administrative numbers was at the lower end of the administrative pay scale (associate directors, assistant directors, associate deans, etc.). Thus the report demonstrated that the university was copying the private sector trend in corporations to “administrative bloat” that was so well documented in David Gordon’s (1996) book Fat and Mean: The Corporate Squeeze of Working Americans and the Myth of Managerial“Downsizing.”

The reaction from faculty on campus was immediate and strong. The findings of the report were among the main topics of conversation during faculty lunches, hallway conversations, and faculty lounge conversations. Faculty directed pointed questions at administrators in public forums. The administration responded with two main arguments: (1) the increase in administrators was mostly a product of reclassifying a number of faculty as “directors” to more fully recognize and compensate them for what they do, and (2) every other university in the Florida university system was doing the same thing because a reorganization of the statewide system had put more responsibilities on individual campuses. These arguments had some credibility with a minority of the faculty, but for the most part they failed to quiet the furor over the resource allocation shift.

The union bargaining team presented the report across the table at negotiations to make the point that administrative cries of poverty were not credible when resources were being diverted to themselves so rapidly. This round of negotiations was lengthy, and it was many months after the expiration of the old contract before a new one was signed. When a settlement was reached, it was the university administration that made major concessions as it moved hurriedly to settle over a December Christmas holiday break period. The administration had tried earlier to pressure the union bargaining team to concede by stating to the rank-and-file that they wanted to grant raises but were prevented from doing so because the union refused to settle a contract. The union successfully resisted these efforts; the research report and the indignation it aroused played a major role in polarizing the issues in such a way that virtually all of the faculty pressure to settle was put on the administration, not on the union bargaining team.

Three years later, RISEP produced another union-commissioned report, Where Does the Money Go? FIU Expenditures on Faculty and Higher Level Administration in the Period from 2002-03 to 2005-06 (Nissen and Zhang 2007). The report found that in the three-year period from the 2002-2003 academic year to the 2005-2006 one, previous trends continued. Faculty decreased by 1.3 percent while the number of administrators grew 12 percent, by 54 positions. Revenue from student tuition and fees and salaries showed a similar trend: revenues were growing 10 percent per year, while faculty salaries were increasing less than 4 percent per year and administrative salaries grew by almost 7 percent per year. Faculty teaching load had also increased almost 14 percent in those three years.

The university administration, which had tried to brush off the embarrassing news from the first report, was again caught off guard. The administrative bargaining team for the next contract had not expected the union to continue ongoing research that would expose its budgetary priorities. The chief negotiator for the union bargaining team, Lorna Veraldi, later noted,

I think it (the research) also helped to establish the union’s stature at the bargaining table—that we were serious about what we were doing and that we came prepared, often with more facts about the university’s spending priorities than the administration’s team. (Veraldi, interview, February 25, 2013)

Equally important, the union once again communicated the contents of the report with faculty on the campus. Unable to continue excusing its hiring and spending trends on university reorganization (which was long over), the administration was reduced to the claim that other universities in the Florida university system were doing the same thing, at an even faster rate. Few in the faculty found this to be an adequate response, and demands for adequate raises and more hiring of new faculty continued to grow.

In 2008, the union and the administration agreed on a new three-year contract that contained faculty pay increases of 3½ percent. While this was hardly adequate to even keep up with the increase in the cost of living, it was much better than many other state employees and university employees were getting in times of falling revenues and growing austerity. Union negotiator Lorna Veraldi attributes much of the union’s relative success to the cumulative impact of the RISEP reports. She states,

Because we commissioned these reports with regularity … they became increasingly effective over time. The administration sort of brushed off the first one, but I think came to understand that these reports … showed an inefficient or skewed set of spending priorities at best and, more surprisingly, an apparent lack of awareness on the part of the administration and the Board of Trustees about how the money was being spent. I believe it became harder for the administration to take a no raise approach to bargaining, because they understood we knew they had found the money for their own raises and the administrative layers that made their own jobs easier, but did little to improve student learning. Over the years I was involved in bargaining, while faculty raises were never more than adequate to keep up with the rate of inflation, I believe there was a change in tone as the administration came to approach salary negotiations with proposals for some level of across-the-board increases even in years when many state employees were seeing no raises at all. (Veraldi, interview, February 25, 2013)

Although the research reports had already had an impact, they were to play a more important role in future campus events. In 2009, the union commissioned another report. How Does FIU Spend Its Money? Part II. FIU Expenditures on Faculty and Higher Level Administration in the Period from 2002-03 to 2008-09 came out in April 2009, with a revised version issued in June when the administration corrected errors in an earlier database that had been supplied to RISEP (Nissen and Zhang 2009).

According to the final version of the report, old patterns continued. For the period between the 2002-2003 and 2008-2009 academic years administrative numbers grew almost 50 percent while faculty growth was only 3 percent. Administrative salaries grew over 66 percent while faculty salaries grew by only 10.7 percent. If the ratio of faculty salaries to administrative salaries could be changed to the same in 2008-2009 as it was in 2002-2003, there would be an additional $17.23 million ($17,231,421) available for faculty salaries. At the average faculty salary ($67,483.76), this $17.23 million is enough to hire an additional 255 faculty members. Alternatively, it would be enough to provide each existing faculty member a 27.37 percent pay increase if no new faculty were added.

By this time the union leadership was so outraged at the continued diversion or resources away from the faculty that they decided to sponsor a “teach-in” on the results. Faculty members unable to attend were also able to view a video that was made and put on the web. The faculty members were particularly unhappy at this time because falling state support to the university had resulted in a major set of layoffs a year before.

At this point, the university administration decided to axe an entire academic department, the religious studies department, as well as several programs within the College of Education. Utilizing the RISEP report, the union convinced the university faculty senate to pass a resolution in opposition to the cuts. It also sent a copy of the report to all members of the university’s Board of Trustees, who had to vote on the departmental and program terminations at a June 2009 board meeting.

The clash between the union and the university administration peaked at that board meeting. The union mobilized approximately one-fifth of the faculty (175 out of approximately 900 faculty) to attend that meeting; many spoke out in opposition to the cuts, with not one faculty member speaking in favor. Citing data from the research report, the UFF spokesperson at that meeting demanded that the university cease all program closures until it got its administrative costs under control. The only faculty representative on the Board of Trustees likewise cited the results of the RISEP report in an impassioned statement opposing the cuts.

For the first time in memory, it was apparent that the Board of Trustees would not simply go along with the administration’s plans on a major issue. Sensing resistance to his carefully laid plans, FIU president Modesto “Mitch” Maidique protested that if these cuts were not made, the administration would only be forced to come back to the Board with a new set of academic programs to axe. A board spokesman from its financial committee sharply told him to look into administrative costs for savings before cutting into academic programs. The result was a clear victory for the union and a humiliating public defeat for the university administration as the Board of Trustees overwhelmingly voted against the proposed program terminations. In an email message to the FIU faculty afterwards, UFF-FIU president Leslie Frazier wrote, “THE MESSAGE WAS LOUD AND CLEAR! The voice of the faculty of Florida International University was heard by the FIU administration, and perhaps equally important, by the FIU Board of Trustees!” (Leslie Frazier, personal communication, June 16, 2009).

She went on to thank RISEP for the reports exposing the diversion of resources and added, “These reports were the ‘game changers’ that allowed the Faculty Senate and the university community to rise up against more program closures” (Leslie Frazier, personal communication, June 16, 2009).

The university never eliminated the religious studies program, and the union was able to claim a total victory in this instance. Looking back on this point in time from 2013, UFF chief negotiator Lorna Veraldi saw this event as a major turning point that loosened university governance from complete administration dominance. The Board of Trustees had asserted its independence:

When it came to the Religious Studies Program terminations that the administration proposed to the Board of Trustees in the second wave of layoffs, I think the UFF’s presentation to the Board of Trustees, based on the RISEP report, made a critical difference in the Board’s response to the President and Provost. Instead of passively accepting the administration’s proposal, the Board refused to vote to close the program. When the President suggested that the administration would just have to come back with a proposal to close other academic programs instead, one member of the Board parroted the demand just made in the UFF presentation and instructed the President and Provost to look more broadly at administrative overhead before recommending more academic program cuts. This, in my opinion, was a tipping point in the relationship between the Board of Trustees and the President—brought about in part by a more activist BOT [Board of Trustees] financial committee, but also by UFF’s supplying data that neither the BOT nor the administration had ever thought to assemble on its own. (Veraldi, interview, February 25, 2013)

Two years later, the union commissioned RISEP to produce another report, entitled How FIU Spends Its Money: FIU Expenditures on Faculty and Higher Level Administration with Special Emphasis on the Two Years between 2008-09 and 2010-11 (Nissen and Zhang 2011). Unlike the dramatic outrages unearthed in previous reports, this one showed a decided moderation in the administration’s previous headlong rush to enrich itself at faculty expense, perhaps because of the events described in the previous paragraph. In the two years between 2008-2009 and 2010-2011, the number of administrators had grown only at a rate commensurate to the growth in the numbers of students, between 10 percent and 11 percent in both cases. But the number of faculty grew only 4.2 percent in the same period, leading to a further 7 percent increase in faculty teaching workload. And total faculty compensation grew at a slower rate than did administration compensation, 9 percent and 11.8 percent, respectively.

While the results showed that faculty (and therefore the students they serve) were still being shortchanged compared to administrative overhead, the dramatic shift in resources that had put the university at the head of this “spending priorities” trend nationwide had ended. The union publicized the report and used it in collective bargaining negotiations to win minor increases in faculty salaries at a time when other state employees had seen a wage freeze for four years. While this fourth report was useful, the major battle that had changed the entire terms of the power relationship between union and administration on this issue had ended two years earlier. The union plans to continue commissioning future research reports, to keep the administration accountable in the future.

Analysis of this Case

This case raises a number of issues that deserve analysis. One set of issues concerns the circumstances and factors that give research of this nature more or less of an impact. Several factors made this particular set of reports unusually powerful. A second set of issues concerns the effect that research of this nature has on a university-based labor education program, for good or for ill. Particularly strong potential benefits include developing strong ties with other sectors of the university and with the faculty union; potential negatives include potential backlash from the administration, which may attempt to destroy or harm the labor program out of anger. A final set of issues concern the generalizability of this case: would many other university-based labor education programs be able to duplicate this experience, and what obstacles may prevent that from happening?

When will research like this have a major impact on the university, and when will it likely not? Several answers are apparent. First, the problem being unearthed by the research should be clear and deeply felt as egregious by the faculty. In this case, that prerequisite was clearly present. Second, the faculty must have an effective instrument or means to address the problem, which in most cases means that the faculty must have a union as its “collective voice.” (Prestigious “Ivy League” universities with highly influential faculty senates may be exceptions to the need for a completely “independent” faculty voice such as a union.) In the FIU case, the faculty had such an independent voice, the union.

Third, the union (or perhaps other agent of faculty voice) must be entirely independent of administrative coercive influence, and it must be competent, broadly representative, respected, and proactive. The importance of this third factor is underscored by the comparative experience of the union at different universities in the Florida public university system. Hearing about the UFF-FIU chapter’s success with these reports, two union chapters in other state universities commissioned similar reports from RISEP for their own campuses.

Both chapters had very low membership—union density percentages in this “right-to-work” state in the low 30s or high 20s. One had endured passive leadership for years as union density sank, and the other had a culturally dysfunctional leadership that did nothing to build intermediate or broader leadership structures while ignoring recruitment and instead engaging in vicious intra-leadership personality battles. Both were hoping to become more powerful on the basis of the research report they commissioned and thus to win a better union contract (which in both cases was decidedly inferior to the one at FIU).

In both cases, the effect of the report on either the university administration or the university faculty was minimal. On both campuses, the union lacked widespread credibility and was seen as ineffective. At both universities the report was unveiled and quickly fizzled out as an issue worthy of attention, largely because the union was unable to use (or in one case, was uninterested in using) it to carry out a campaign to agitate with the faculty around the issue and build forms of pressure on the administration. Research turned out to be no substitute for competent leadership and effective union organization. (It must be emphasized that the union chapter at one of these two universities had newly elected leadership that was trying to rebuild the chapter, but it had only been elected a couple of months prior and had not yet succeeded in building up a functioning executive committee or leadership body. Over time it did develop into a more effective organization; it has built up its union density somewhat and is currently commissioning another report that will likely have more impact than the last one did because of the greater competence of the union chapter.) ⁶

So the organization (union) commissioning the research must be competent, or the research is likely to be of limited effectiveness in actually changing conditions on the university campus. This third condition was met at FIU, but it was not at other universities, and hence reports done for those campuses had much less impact.

A second issue for analysis is how such research affects the university-based labor education program. In this instance, on the positive side it cemented extremely close ties between the FIU Center for Labor Research and Studies (i.e., the Labor Center) and the faculty union. The union is highly supportive of the FIU Labor Center; when budget cuts threatened the Labor Center with extinction in 2008 the union fought hard to preserve it. The research reports also made the FIU Labor Center very widely known throughout the campus in a primarily positive light (at least among faculty). Such positive high visibility is a valuable asset, particularly for a program considered as peripheral to traditional academia as labor studies is viewed on U.S. campuses.

One example of the positive feelings toward the Labor Center is the remarkable cooperation it received from the faculty when RISEP sought faculty participation in a union-commissioned survey and follow-up focus groups on the quality of work life at the university. In contrast to this, the university’s provost could not even get enough faculty participation to be meaningful or usable in his own survey on the same topic.

The obverse of the positive feelings is of course the potential danger of backlash and retaliation from the university administration. A university-based labor education program in a highly vulnerable situation with few community or university allies might well think twice before undertaking research of this nature. In this case, the research was conducted in a decade of massive state budget austerity, major cuts to higher education funding, and consequent cutbacks at Florida’s public universities. At FIU, the administration in 2008 moved to eliminate the budgets of the vast majority of the centers and institutes at the university, including the Labor Center. It demanded that all centers and institutes be self-supporting (except for in-kind office space and telephone service) unless they were raising $1 million or more per year from outside sources. (At the time, the FIU Labor Center was taking in about $300,000 per year in outside “soft” money.)

The FIU Labor Center conducted a major battle to preserve its funding. Approximately fifteen working-class community and labor organizations held a one-day “fair” on campus to demonstrate to the FIU administration how valuable the Labor Center was by providing community connections and outreach that no other branch of the university undertook. Labor education programs and union labor education departments around the country wrote emails and letters of protest to the FIU administration. Student groups and some local political figures like a sympathetic county commissioner held private meetings with the university provost to demand that the Labor Center be spared the cuts.

All these efforts got special consideration for the Labor Center, but they did not prevent its budget from being zeroed out at some point. Some centers had their budgets (and existence) erased immediately at the end of the spring 2008 semester, some got half funding for the 2008-2009 academic year, followed by a complete elimination of funding, and the Labor Center alone among those slated for extinction got its budget cut to three-quarters for the 2008-2009 year, followed by a budget of half normal for the 2009-2010 year, followed by a budget of zero for the 2010-2011 academic year. Coupled with a reserve fund the Labor Center had built up from auxiliary funds from previous years, this ensured that it would survive through 2010 at least. Trimmed personnel through retirement, internal realignment within the university that provides the center about 75 percent of tuition fees as a rebate, positioning a key labor studies course within the university’s core curriculum and its global studies initiative, and strategic “joint appointments” with other units and departments that absorb half of salaries have all combined to ensure that the FIU Labor Center survives, albeit in considerably shrunken form. To the best of my knowledge, the Labor Center is the only center or institute slated for complete defunding that survived beyond 2010.

Was the administration’s move against the Labor Center a result of animus due to the research reports that had caused administrators so many problems? A few within the university community thought so. But it is highly unlikely that this was the case; we will never know because of lack of access to the thought processes of administrative decision-makers. The criteria used to determine whether a center deserved any general operating support was applied consistently, not in a discriminatory manner against the Labor Center. And the higher levels of university administration have not prevented a sympathetic Dean from arranging “joint appointments” for Labor Center personnel so that half their salary is born by other academic departments.

One case does not generalize to all cases, of course. Other university administrations might take more vindictive actions. But the general approach taken by the FIU Labor Center seems to me to be the best to take toward risks of this nature: build strong alliances with community groups and the local labor movement, cultivate close ties with the (usually rare) local politicians who are labor oriented, build a close relationship with the faculty union on one’s campus if one exists, nurture student dedication to the labor education program, and then fearlessly conduct sound social science research into issues of importance to working people (including on campus) even if it may ruffle the feathers of some campus administrators. While it is important to be prudent and sensible, the ultimate determinant of the fate within universities of areas of study not considered traditional academic disciplines depends on the power they have accumulated, not their timidity in exposing wrongs being committed by the powerful in our hierarchical society.

Conclusion: Generalizability of This Case

Does this case provide a viable avenue of anti-austerity activity for other university-based labor education programs? Much depends on their circumstances, of course. Labor education programs on campuses without a faculty union are in a much weaker position to conduct research close to home (on campus) that can be acted upon collectively by the faculty. Those with less “social capital” in the form of close ties with groups, individuals, and constituencies with influence over university policy may have to be less upfront and outspoken in exposing university administration wrongs. And the labor education staff must be comfortable doing the type of research described in this paper, which does not require enormous technical sophistication but does demand the ability to handle and most importantly categorize and “frame” data from relatively large quantitative databases. ⁷

However, the main lessons to be drawn from this case may not concern strictly replicating the research it relates. Few university-based labor education programs are likely to find themselves in an identical or almost identical situation to the one recounted here. Instead, the most valuable lesson is that university-based labor education professionals can and should apply their expertise and labor-related knowledge to situations “close to home”—right on their own campuses. If they do so, they are likely to find it a rewarding experience, for academia has become one of the major sites of labor union practice in the United States today.