Between 1933 and 1945, the University of California worked with California Department of Education and the California Federation of Labor to offer workers' education course through the University Extension. Known first as the Western Summer School for Workers, then as the Pacific Coast School for Workers, and finally as the Pacific Coast Labor School, the program trained hundreds of rank-and-file union members. Following World War II the school became part of the new Institute of Industrial Relations.
In this 1938 letter to the head of the University of Wisconsin School for Workers, the Director of the Pacific Coast Labor School describes the fraught relationship between the school and the University of California. That would change during World War II when UC President Robert Sproul began to see labor programs as a way to expand the university's role in the state.
How to cite this document: George Hedley to Ernest Schwartztrauber, May 2, 1938, School for Workers Records, 18/5/37-3 box 9, University of Wisconsin Archives.
Mr E. E. Schwartztrauber, Director
The School for Workers in Industry
The University of Wisconsin
1214 West Johnson Street
Madison, Wisconsin
My dear Mr Schwarztrauber:
Thank you for yours of 26th ult.
It is a bit difficult to reply to your enquiry. Kerchen, the W.E.B. representative at the University of California, is a grand old chap. The School itself could not have come into being without his cooperation with Mrs. Adams, the co-founder; and he has given wise counsel and active teaching service from year to year.
So far as I can find out, however, he is unable to accomplish much else. He used to conduct a few evening classes himself, but for the past two years he has been in poor health and has done almost nothing in that field. The Labor Institutes have been, for better or for worse, almost completely taken over by the School organization; that is not unnatural, in view of the fact that the School personnel are the labor people interested in education, and in view of the additional fact that most of the progressives are pretty impatient with what they regard as the extreme caution (most of them would put it more sharply) of Spencer Miller.
An added complication re the University is the tension existing between a President who wants to be liberal and a Board of Regents which is almost violently reactionary. We are happy off the University campus — in fact, I personally suggested the move in 1936; but it was an obvious relief to Sproul when I did so! Kerchen never has suggested any possibility of further financial aid from the University (I say further, because we provide only his board and room for his teaching services), and I think he is wise in saving his breath.
In the long run the situation is not hopeless. Sproul, as I said, really wants to be liberal; but he has a job to keep — and Heaven pity us if he were jammed out and the Regents put in the sort of man their present mood would select. This week the wife of the retiring Director of the Extension Division is giving a tea in the School’s interests, and is deliberately inviting the campus people who have been most skeptical about our right to exist. Incidentally, I have taught on the Extension myself throughout the year, and with apparently happy results.
But the sum total at present is that we are lucky to have the formal blessing of the institution and the personal participation of Kerchen. To ask for more, with things as they are, would be seriously to jeopardize what we have…. And do you know that our Governor cut the budget for the University something like half a million, with the remark that we are actually spending more than does the University of Kansas?
We look forward to the coming of the two ladies from Green Bay, and hope that they will contribute largely to a strengthening of the relationship between your School and ours.
Thanking you for your kindness, and hoping that you will have time to inform and to advise us frequently, I am
Very truly yours
George P. Hedley
Director