Labor college president challenges the binds of conventional wisdom 

The new president of the National Labor College is a face familiar to AFT Higher Education members. He is William Scheuerman, 14-year president of the United University Professions/AFT at the State University of New York, where he also was a political science professor and author. Scheuerman, 62, brings to his new position the labor insights of serving as an AFT vice president for 12 years (his term ends in July) and as chair of the AFT Higher Education program and policy council for seven years. AFT On Campus editor Barbara McKenna sat down with him at the end of January to learn about his plans for the college.

How does heading up a college compare with being a union president?
As a union president, you go through crisis after crisis after crisis. You learn how to deal with, really, the toughest issues imaginable and nothing intimidates you. You learn how to work with politicians, and you also learn that, when you have a goal, you never get there by a straight line.

From left, AFT president Edward J. McElroy, Scheuerman, AFL-CIO president John Sweeney and AFL-CIO secretary-treasurer Richard Trumka at the welcome reception for the new National Labor College president. Photo by Michael Campbell.

What are your priorities for the college?
The biggest one is fundraising and finding a way to keep the college going and make it prosper. The second one is knowing what we can do to meet the needs of the labor movement. A third is making the National Labor College a central and vital part of the labor movement, so that whether it's a discussion of the issues or whether it's union training or whether it's offering degrees, this becomes the place that people turn to.
How can the college address some of the problems with the labor movement and the labor climate in the United States?

The state of the labor movement is linked to the economic problems in the United States. The increased income disparities and the decline of the middle class coincided with the decline of the labor movement. If the United States is to get back on its feet and have a more egalitarian economy, the labor movement has to come back to life and lead the way. The college has to play a role in that.

How do you do that?
We can give working people the opportunity to advance without leaving the labor movement. For example, we have partnerships with two-year colleges all over the country-places like the City Colleges of Chicago, where we have AFT members. The partnerships let people with an associate's degree transfer their credits to the NLC toward a bachelor's degree program. But we don't charge a whole lot of tuition; it's subsidized by the AFL-CIO.
In terms of worker advancement, we see it as kind of the equivalent of the GI Bill of opportunity, for people who wouldn't ordinarily have the opportunity to go to college or finish their degrees.

You talked about providing a center for the discussion of ideas. Is there a place for average college faculty-On Campus readers-in this discussion?
Oh yes. Our job as educators is not to be hucksters for the labor movement but to expose those ideas that are obfuscating the reality around us. For example, one bit of conventional wisdom that everybody buys into is the whole notion of the marketplace. When Adam Smith was talking about the marketplace, it was a very different marketplace from what exists now in the United States. We use the ideology of the marketplace to veil the growing inequalities in this society. So one of the things we need to do is find a way to use the college to have discussions about a separate view of the economy that is critical of the conventional wisdom.

Thank you, Bill.
You're welcome. I love the AFT!