center reveals the ambiguous relationship of the university to the American political economy. Union density is higher in Washington state than in the nation as a whole: about 17 percent as compared with 11 percent. High-profile companies like Boeing employ tens of thousands of union members, and the ILWU represents workers at the Port of Seattle. Nevertheless, even there, a commitment to collective bargaining can be construed as the improper use of public resources. The state’s commitment to labor centers like the one in Seattle is fickle. In states where unions are weak, little remains for labor’s opponents to take away.

Labor education provided the training and the vision for reform movements that shaped generations of American politics, and they can do so again. Brookwood Labor College, a schoolthat operated for nearly two decades outside of New York City, gave the trade-union movement access to the skills of professional economists and lawyers; the historian Steve Fraser described it as the “cadre school” for the “embryonic CIO.” The Highlander Folk School, the “Brookwood of the South” in Grundy County, Tennessee, was a coordinating center for the nascent Civil Rights movement. Eleanor Roosevelt first publically protested for the end of Jim Crow at the school in 1939, and both Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr., underwent training there. These are just two among the many workers’ schools that spread across the pre–New Deal landscape. University labor schools today offer a similar promise. “The vision of the labor centers is to . . . transform the labor movement,”