Introduction

What the paper says

Higher education has been a workplace in turmoil for decades now, with growing numbers of exploited contingent scholars, declining support from government, bloated administrations, and cuts to the funding of teaching while athletic programs prosper—and the crisis has only become worse as crackdowns on freedom of speech and assembly confronted the students and faculty engaging in protest in 2023 and 2024. Since January 2025 the Trump administration’s effort to sanitize, punish, and control educational institutions has made a bad situation much worse. These struggling colleges and universities constitute workplaces for so many of us labor historians, and in this issue we explore the crisis in two very different ways: first with evocative poetry, and then with a roundtable analyzing the historical roots and possible solutions for higher education’s crisis. We begin with a pair of poems, by labor historian Wesley Bishop and filmmaker and educator Anne Lewis, targeting the frustrations of the work we do as teachers in higher education. I’m grateful to them and to Labor poetry editor Susan Eisenberg for soliciting these powerful poems, which serve as a prelude to a roundtable conversation between leading scholar-activists on these same problems. Senior Associate Editor Jessica Wilkerson spearheaded the project’s conception and editorial direction. We invited scholars to reflect on the past and present crises of higher education and share strategies for organizing amid the unprecedented assaults on colleges and universities.The Labor editors first discussed hosting this roundtable in a period of great uncertainty. In the fall of 2023, West Virginia University made national news with program closures and layoffs of hundreds of faculty and staff (more universities would follow with similar slash-and-burn campaigns, using the services of the same consulting firms). In the same period, dozens of states introduced or passed anti-DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) legislation, and college administrators acquiesced. And then, in the spring of 2024, thousands of students across forty-five states and at every kind of college campus organized solidarity encampments to protest Israel’s war on Gaza and the United States’ military aid of the assault on Palestinians. The crackdown on student protesters began in April when Columbia University coordinated with the NYPD to clear encampments. More than three thousand student protesters and their allies would be arrested across the country before the end of the semester, and many continue to face suspensions, expulsions, deportations, protracted court cases and legal fees, and loss of employment. A second Trump administration is now fanning the flames of the many fires in higher education. The scholars we gathered have been on the front lines of researching, organizing, and strategizing around the crises we face—and their conclusions are sobering. Our hope is that this conversation pushes forward proactive strategies for how to reclaim and rebuild our institutions of learning as democratic spaces.In Contemporary Affairs, Eric Blanc draws our attention to organizing by federal workers, an early form of resistance to the administration of President Donald Trump. They form a complex group, spread across the United States, diverse in terms of the institutions where they work, and separated into different unions. Despite these handicaps, activists among the more than two million federal workers created the Federal Unionists Network (FUN) after the 2024 election. While Elon Musk led DOGE on a campaign to destroy the civil service, Blanc shows, FUN generated a wide range of strategies—from simply continuing to work to taking legal action to stop DOGE, and onward to communicating widely with the public to generate support for saving crucial government functions. The essay provides a lesson in how radical and destructive action by DOGE inspired new forms of solidarity and resistance.While all these items focus on frontline battles, the issue also widens its lens to the broader terrain of working-class life. Three articles explore diverse aspects of working-class history. First, Jennifer Frost and Kathy Feeley examine the fascinating career and activism of Hollywood actress Olivia de Havilland (whose image graces our cover). With the Screen Actors Guild’s support, in the 1940s de Havilland brought and won a historic lawsuit against the powerful Warner Bros. Pictures Inc. that finally limited the power of studios over their actors. While others have analyzed the legal consequences of the case on employment relations, Frost and Feeley turn to a less-examined impact: how it empowered actors to “exert control of the property in their own images.” Next, Gavin Moulton’s essay demonstrates the power of the Catholic Worker movement as it played out in depressed Clairton, Pennsylvania, during the 1930s. With help from hundreds of unemployed steelworkers, Joseph Lonergan, the founding pastor of St. Paulinus, not only built a church but also turned to Catholic Worker illustrator Ade Bethune and her friend Alfonso Ossorio, a Filipino American artist, for artwork to communicate radical, proworker messages. By linking Lonergan’s devotional architecture and prolabor visual art to the spiritual and theological goals of St. Paulinus, Moulton demonstrates the potential of religious spaces for empowering workers in times of hardship. Although no direct link can be seen, it is perhaps not coincidental that Clairton workers were the first to win a CIO steel union contract during the 1930s.For our final article, we’re delighted to present the second winner of Labor’s prize for the best article originally published in Spanish or Portuguese—part of our ongoing effort to showcase excellent research and writing in Latin America. A prize committee chaired by Paolo Fontes and including Jocelyn Olcott and Heidi Tinsman awarded the prize to Silvana A. Palermo’s article (translated by Laura Pérez Carrara), “Working-Class Fatherhood: Masculinity, Railroad Work, and the Social Question in Argentina’s Early Twentieth-Century Illustrated Magazines,” which appeared originally in Iberoamericana. Palermo examines the role of the commercial press in constructing modern notions of masculinity. Fatherhood has been a relatively underexplored area in Argentinian labor history, as in the United States, and this article demonstrates the power of illustrated magazines in Argentina and examines the norms regarding fathers’ rights and responsibilities.The reviews section offers a strong cluster on African American history, particularly in the nineteenth century. The books analyzed examine such topics as the failure of American law to support the emancipation amendments, links between labor reform and antislavery, Brazilian slavery, and shipwrecks and reparations before the Civil War, while Joe Trotter offers a thoughtful and sweeping review of Jacqueline Jones’s Pulitzer Prize–winning No Right to an Honest Living: The Struggles of Boston’s Black Workers in the Civil War Era. Our global coverage includes, in addition to Brazil, the history of paid sex work in Belgium from the Middle Ages to the present, and industrial capitalism in Cape Breton. On the newsworthy topic of tariffs, Leslie Butler reviews Marc-William Palen’s Pax Economica: Left-Wing Visions of a Free Trade World. The twentieth century receives attention with Nick Juravich’s analysis of work on New Orleans teacher unionism, and we find a new perspective on the Communist Party in Jim Barrett’s review of Maurice Isserman’s Reds: The Tragedy of American Communism.