Institute for Research on Labor and Employment

This essay traces the development of University of California workers’ education programming, with an emphasis on the Pacific Coast School for Workers and its rocky relationship with university administrators. I then examine the University of California’s response to legislative efforts to fund worker education and industrial relations programs, and the ultimate development of the Institute for Industrial Relations. I conclude with some thoughts about implications of this history for present-day labor programming within the university, and for the labor movement. Outreach to organized workers, and efforts to bring working class students into the university, reflected a contest over knowledge about work, unions, and political economy. With the development of Industrial Relations programs, American universities positioned themselves as neutral arbiters able to stand above the dirty work of industrial conflict. But the university purchased this neutrality by foreclosing a deeper connection to workers-as-students and students-as-workers. For administrators, it was an easy choice. “Industrial Relations” sanctioned legitimate university interactions with unions and managers separate from the core liberal arts curriculum and the on-campus community. In the postwar expansion of higher education, working class youth would encounter the university asstudentsrather thanworkers. But the development of Industrial Relations was also a boon to labor educators who gained new legitimacy and funding stability. In the years after 1945, outreach programs to labor expanded significantly, particularly at UCLA.