I write to add my voice to those voices across the nation protesting the deep and debilitating cuts to the budget of the Labor Center at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
The widespread reaction to the cuts is easy to understand. The center is one of only 30 such programs in the nation, and known to be one of the best of its kind. I experienced its quality firsthand because I taught (U.S. and then global labor history) there for over 30 years starting in 1971 until my retirement in 2008.
Our students came to the center from a variety of backgrounds but few of them applied for admission with the resources of graduate students from better-off families. Most were from working-class and poor backgrounds driven not by careerism or prospects of riches but the idealism of making life better for working people in the capacity of researchers and organizers.
Very few actors have done more to fight the social inequality that bedevils this nation. The right to organize trade unions became national public policy in 1935. The university’s action casts a public institution in the troubling role of defeating public policy.
The dean of the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences should rescind his budget cuts forthwith and resume support for a program that does an awful lot of good.
Bruce Laurie
Pelham
The writer is a professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.