Education: Academic Labor

Not content with having resigned his Presbyterian pastorate and gone to jail in the 1919 steel strike, the late William Mann Fincke* in 1921 gave his 53-acre estate in Katonah, N. Y., with its big colonial farmhouse, to found Brookwood Labor College, first labor college in the U. S. Miss Evelyn Preston, a tall, dimpled, onetime Junior Leaguer, now president of the League of Women Shoppers (a labor auxiliary) gave the college a $50,000 women.’s dormitory. Among its other liberal and wealthy angels was the Garland Fund.

Apparently possessing nine lives, Brookwood survived Labor’s lean years. When Depression cut off its subsidy from liberal philanthropists, labor unions kept Brookwood going by providing scholarships for its students. Even when the American Federation of Labor disowned it in 1928 as too “radical” and when five years later Director Abraham J. Muste left it because it was too ‘”conservative,” Brookwood kept on. Young, broad-beamed Tucker P. Smith, a socialist and former executive secretary of the pacifist Committee on Militarism in Education, was brought in as director to restore harmony. He succeeded.By last year he was able to boast that Brookwood had some 30 students, had graduated 420 union executives, of whom, ”as you may well have guessed, three-fourths have been in jail.”

But last week Tucker Smith was not in Katonah but Detroit, where since last summer he has been helping educate members of the United Automobile Workers Union. With U. S. labor unions enjoying their greatest prosperity, Chairman Julius Hochman of Brookwood’s board of directors announced last week that Brookwood’s doors had been closed, perhaps permanently. Not only was the college unable to raise its $30,000 budget for the coming year, but it had unpaid debts. Having survived Labor’s poverty, Brookwood was killed by Labor’s prosperity.

Chairman Hochman, a Brookwood alumnus and now vice president of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union, explained that although a few A. F. of L. as well as C. I. O. unions supported Brookwood, these unions, conducting their own classes in industrial centres, had decidedto abandon Brookwood until Labor united, made it Labor’s “official” college. Meanwhile, no move will be made to sell the $115,000 Katonah estate.

On two other fronts last week, labor in education also made news: ¶ In Manhattan the Association of Catholic Trade Unionists, newly formed to promote the Catholic point of view in C. I. O. and A. F. of L. unions, quietly opened a free experimental school for workers in Fordham University’s Woolworth Building quarters. To the press rushed Rev. Ignatius Wiley Cox, Fordham professor of ethics and loud foe of birth control and the press, to announce that Fordham was starting “the first attempt to interpret workers’ problems by other than Marxian theories.” Text for the courses, in which 100 unionists had enrolled last week, will be the encyclicals on labor by Pope Leo XIII and Pope Pius XI. The school will uphold the right to strike, condemn violence and class warfare, have as instructors Rev. John P. Boland, chairman of New York State’s Labor Relations Board. Rev. John Monaghan of Cathedral College, and Bernard J. O’Connell, Manhattan attorney.

¶ In St. Louis two months ago, Washington University offered a course in collective bargaining. That its course did not give all the answers, however, was evidenced the same day when 39 university janitors and maintenance workers went on strike, demanding union recognition, higher pay, shorter hours. Fuming professors dusted their own desks until strikebreakers were brought in. Strikers picketed the university and its football games. Fortnight ago the St. Louis Central Trades and Labor Union placed the university on its ”unfair” list. Teachers Union members, who belong to the American Federation of Labor, continued to walk past the picket lines because their local rules forbid them to strike. But to all A. F. of L. members of the nation last week went a request that they refrain from enrolling or keeping their children in the university.

*Half brother of Explorer Lincoln Ellsworth.