Down-to-Earth Utopians

The Labor Board vets insisted that they were always realistic and had no ideological convictions of any kind. This chapter argues that such a characterization is not accurate. Clark Kerr, John Dunlop, and the other veterans of the board’s staff were in truth utopians—not utopians as that term is usually imagined, but liberal reformers who believed that they could transform the world over time, one step at a time. The famous German sociologist Karl Mannheim termed that mindset “liberal-humanitarian utopian.” The chapter looks back to their youth to explain how they came to that worldview and how unarticulated utopian beliefs pervaded their teaching, writing, and other work. The chapter concludes with the prediction advanced by Clark Kerr, John Dunlop, Charles Myers, and Frederick Harbison that the U.S. and Soviet systems would converge in the future--a conviction that appeared realistic in the latter 1980s and the early 1990s.

The Labor Board Crew

Ronald W. Schatz tells the story of the team of young economists and lawyers recruited to the National War Labor Board to resolve union-management conflicts during the Second World War. The crew (including Clark Kerr, John Dunlop, Jean McKelvey, and Marvin Miller) exerted broad influence on the U.S. economy and society for the next forty years. They handled thousands of grievances and strikes. They founded academic industrial relations programs. When the 1960s student movement erupted, universities appointed them as top administrators charged with quelling the conflicts. In the 1970s, they developed systems that advanced public sector unionization and revolutionized employment conditions in Major League Baseball. Schatz argues that the Labor Board vets, who saw themselves as disinterested technocrats, were in truth utopian reformers aiming to transform the world. Beginning in the 1970s stagflation era, they faced unforeseen opposition, and the cooperative relationships they had fostered withered. Yet their protégé George Shultz used mediation techniques learned from his mentors to assist in the integration of Southern public schools, institute affirmative action in industry, and conduct Cold War negotiations with Mikhail Gorbachev.

Doing the Lord’s Work

Unlike most elderly workers, the Labor Board vets continued to work to the end of their lives. They had a mission in life. This chapter explores their work in their latter years. After briefly discussing Jean McKelvey, Clark Kerr, Ben Aaron, Robben Fleming, and George Shultz, it focuses on John Dunlop’s work with the clerical workers union at Harvard University, his work with the farmworkers union in Ohio and Michigan, and the commission he chaired at the request of President Bill Clinton to improve worker, union, and management relations in the United States. The first two efforts were successful, the latter a complete failure. The world overwhelmed the reformers

“How Can We Avoid a Columbia?”

American universities were unprepared for the explosion of student protests on their campuses in the mid-1960s. Consequently, trustees of many leading universities appointed their industrial relations professors—the National War Labor Board vets and their protégés—as their new presidents, chancellors, and top deans. Clark Kerr botched the job at the University of California at Berkeley, but the Labor Board vets were more successful elsewhere. They not only mediated conflicts on their campuses but designed conflict-resolution systems that remain in place at universities and colleges throughout the nation. Their systems drew on the models they created with unions and management in the 1940s. This chapter explains the development by focusing on Robben Fleming at the University of Michigan, John McConnell at the University of New Hampshire, and John Dunlop at Harvard University.

Clark Kerr

Chapter 2 explores the work of Clark Kerr as a thinker and university leader. It examines the Inter-University Study of Labor Problems in Economic Development directed by Kerr, one of the largest organized research projects in American social science during the postwar years. This study proposed a new theory of industrialism that informed Kerr’s thinking about universities. The Inter-University Study provides a window into its most important institutional contexts: the Institute of Industrial Relations (IIR) at UC Berkeley and the Ford Foundation’s Program in Economic Development and Administration. The chapter describes Kerr’s promotion of ORUs—first at the IIR, which he directed for seven years, and then across the Berkeley campus once he became chancellor. It also shows how his immersion in the administrative science movement shaped his view of the university’s mission. The chapter uncovers the sources of key ideas Kerr set forth in The Uses of the University.