The Union-Busting University
By 
Universities have always been centers of union-busting. In the early 20th century, when a company looked for strikebreakers or militia to commit violence against workers, the university was a great place to find it. What was more fun for a fraternity than beating up workers? Most of them were the sons of the rich anyway. This was about as true in public schools and privates. Students from Harvard and from the University of Washington, for example, were involved in this type of thing.
Well, in the present, universities are also centers of union organizing, to the horror of the administrations and the real power–the political and financial appointees to the Board of Trustees. Whether Democrats or Republicans, one thing that usually unites these bodies is that they are rich people who don’t like unions. So it’s an area of significant contemporary conflict. Cristina Viviana Groeger provides a good history of the connections between higher education and union busting. A lot of this I didn’t really know.
Many institutions of higher learning originated as efforts to bust unions. A wave of technical institutes and private trade schools across the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century were backed by employers as an alternative to the expensive, craft union-regulated apprenticeship process. As one supporter put it, a trade school could avoid the “poisonous” atmosphere of union rules and “teach a boy, not only the art of molding, but also good morals, and the art of the ‘open shop.’”[1] One such example in Boston was the “avowedly antiunion” private trade school, Wentworth Institute (which now offers bachelors and masters programs). Funded by a real estate and marble industry millionaire, the institute opened in 1911, offering workshop-based courses in specific craft skills: machine work, carpentry, electrical wiring, foundry work, plumbing, machine tool and design, and electrical construction. Most of these courses took one year or less to complete, explicitly so that students could avoid having “to spend two or three years as apprentices.” Organized labor, not surprisingly, opposed these types of schools. As Peter W. Collins of the Boston Electrical Workers Union put it, trade school instruction “makes an indolent worker, a novice without thorough knowledge and practice . . . [and] their graduates are willing members of the strike-breaking craft, whose influence is to lower the life of the community.”[2]
Engineering schools were also deeply imbricated in the anti-union project of new corporate managers. The professional identity of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), founded in 1880, was linked to its members’ position as businessmen and their opposition to trade unionism. By 1900, scientific management had emerged from the field of mechanical engineering, led by Frederick Taylor, president of ASME in 1906. Firms hired engineers to help with technical troubleshooting, sales and distribution, as well as mediating employee grievances with the goal of preventing labor disturbances. Beginning in 1895, Westinghouse recruited “executives and technical experts from among those who . . . enter the organization directly from engineering schools.” Among the nation’s leading technical institutes was the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, whose graduates, since the school’s founding, overwhelmingly entered supervisory positions in industry as engineers, foreman, and managers, and aligned themselves against organized labor.[3]
The leadership of private universities was broadly unified in their hostility to organized labor at the turn of the twentieth century. As a sector, private higher education was materially dependent on enormous donations from major industrialists (Leland Stanford to Stanford University, John D. Rockefeller to University of Chicago, Andrew Carnegie to Carnegie Mellon, George Eastman to MIT, to name a few). In 1904, Charles Eliot, President of Harvard, infamously praised the scab as “a fair type of hero” and criticized unions for “destroy[ing] free competition” and “rotting the individual man’s moral fibre.”[4] O. M. Wentworth, one of the trustees of the Wentworth Institute, was known for his numerous antilabor columns in The Boston Globe.
University students in the early twentieth century nearly always took the side of capital over labor. Undergraduates across the country, with the encouragement of their administration, regularly served as strikebreakers. UC Berkeley students replaced San Francisco dock workers in 1901; athletes from the University of Minnesota broke through a picket line of Minneapolis flour mill workers in 1903; during the Boston police strike of 1919, the administrations of Wentworth, MIT, Harvard, and Boston University allied with the state government to oppose the strike, and hundreds of their students served as strikebreakers. Before a threatened railroad strike in 1921, Princeton gave academic credit for strikebreaking, Stevens Institute suspended classes, and Harvard and MIT developed short courses to train student strikebreakers to operate railcars.[5]
As the college degree became a coveted credential in the world of business, universities increasingly trained the managers and business executives responsible for anti-union practices. According to one national survey, in 1900 fewer than one-fifth of American business leaders were college graduates. Of those who assumed leadership positions between 1921 and 1940, over half had secured this credential. The marriage between elite universities and business was an active and mutually beneficial arrangement. The changing composition of the upper class, the influx of women and immigrant populations into the workforce, and the expansion of high school and collegiate education provoked a reaction among traditional elites and university leaders. Business leaders saw the benefit of aligning with the prestige of universities to buttress their own authority, while leading colleges and universities hoped to attract the children of the nouveau riche. Through alumni networks and university placement offices, universities helped channel their students into the top firms. At Harvard, for example, the minority of college graduates who entered business grew into a majority with remarkable speed: in 1897, under 20 percent of college graduates obtained positions in business; by 1908, a full 50 percent did. After 1920, a quarter of Harvard graduates entering business went into finance and banking jobs; at Harvard Business School, over 40 percent of the 1929 graduating class entered positions in banking and finance, the majority as investment bankers.[6]