Labor Center Under Attack

In the Nov. 2009 issue of the CxPJ, we briefly covered the events surrounding the controversial audit of the Labor Center. For those who aren’t up to date on what’s been going on, here is a quick run-down of events:

In June 2008, the Landmark Legal Foundation: The Ronald Reagan Center sent a letter to Evergreen, the state auditor, and the Attorney General claiming that the Labor Center was “in violation of Washington’s requirement that public funds must only be used for a valid public purpose.” Landmark is a nonprofit conservative lawyers’ group that nominated Rush Limbaugh (who sits on their Board of Directors) for a Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. According to their website, Landmark is in a “battle for America’s future” against the National Education Association, the largest teacher’s union in the country. Landmark also sees the Environmental Protection Agency as a threat to America. In the past few years, this group has targeted a total of twelve Labor Centers at colleges and universities across the US, calling for audits, public records requests, and investigations in an effort to incriminate them.

The Evergreen administration took an unpopular stance in deciding to comply with Landmark and conducted an audit of the Labor Center. More unpopular were the auditor’s findings, which bear a close resemblance to Landmark’s accusations. From the beginning, this ordeal has brought up questions of the administration’s judgement, their support (or lack thereof) for the school’s public service centers, and whether the letter from Landmark and the administration’s acquiescence constitute a threat to academic freedom. I spoke to several individuals involved: members of the administration, the Labor Center staff, the faculty, and a few other folks, to try to develop a sense of what went wrong and where we are headed from here.

Other universities defend their Labor Centers

Of the eleven other Labor Centers Landmark has attacked, three were actually accused of breaking the law, while the other eight cases didn’t go beyond public records requests. Out of those three, none of the colleges responded by complying with the audits or investigations that Landmark called for.

When Landmark requested an audit of Iowa University’s Labor Center in February 2009, the Board of Regents responded with a letter stating that the center serves an important public purpose and functions within the policies of the school and state law. Jennifer Sherer, the Director of the Iowa Labor Center says that the center collaborated with the regents in drafting the response. “We researched the case law cited in Landmark’s letter and pointed out the numerous fallacies and inaccuracies in Landmark’s strange attempt to make a legal argument.”

In Nov. 2008, Landmark requested that the University of Massachusetts–Amherst administration investigate the practices of their Labor Center. The matter was handed over to the school’s lawyer, who determined that Landmark’s complaint was an ideological attack directed at the Labor Center because of the content of its work and its constituency.

Earlier that year, Landmark sent a letter to the California Attorney General and the State Department of Finance alleging that the University of California–Berkeley Labor Center violated the state’s anti-affirmative action law by hosting the Summer Institute for Union Women and sponsoring African American and Latino Leadership Schools. Landmark also claimed that by working with unions, the Berkeley Labor Center broke a law that prohibits “gifting of public funds,” assuming that the money spent on these kinds of programs benefited only private entities (unions) and not the public.

On the first claim, Berkeley’s legal counsel told Landmark that the Summer Institute and the Leadership schools did not exclude membership based on race, ethnicity, or gender, and therefore did not violate the anti-affirmative action law. On the second charge regarding the gifting of public funds, Berkeley Labor Center Director Ken Jacobs says the administration was “very clear that educational programs directed to skills development for union leaders are no different than executive education programs for business leaders or agricultural extension programs.”

In other words, it is commonplace for public service centers at most universities to develop partnerships with private organizations, whether they are unions or businesses, and extend services to members of those organizations to strengthen the work that they do with the understanding that the public benefits from well-run businesses and unions.

Ken Jacobs says that Berkeley’s attorneys decided that “the complaints from Landmark Legal Foundation were entirely without merit.” He believes that Landmark’s central argument is, “based on a false and dangerous thesis that businesses operate in the public interest and unions do not.” In an e-mail conversation, he quoted Section 1 of the National Labor Relations Act, a federal law that spells out how workers organizing (and therefore efforts to support workers organizing) is integral to the well-being of all members of society:
The inequality of bargaining power between employees who do not possess full freedom of association or actual liberty of contract and employers who are organized in the corporate or other forms of ownership association substantially burdens and affects the flow of commerce, and tends to aggravate recurrent business depressions, by depressing wage rates and the purchasing power of wage earners in industry and by preventing the stabilization of competitive wage rates and working conditions within and between industries.

Ours doesn’t...

or The case of the missing paragraph

The Universities of Iowa, UMass–Amherst, and UC Berkeley were capable of seeing Landmark’s complaints for what they were—unfounded, even dangerous, ideological attacks—and dismissing them. Even the colleges and universities that only received public records requests from Landmark evaded them by responding that Landmark would have to pay the expensive photocopying bills. So why did Evergreen’s administration decide to audit the Labor Center?

The answer to this question is muddied by the contradictory explanations I received from Maryam Jacobs, Evergreen’s auditor, and Don Bantz, the soon-departing provost. I also attempted to interview President Les Purce, but he was unavailable for comment.
The most defining thing about my conversations with Jacobs and Bantz, which took place separately, was the strong emphasis they placed on the idea that the audit of the Labor Center would have happened no matter what. This claim took the form of two different statements.
The first was that once the letter from Landmark was received, an audit was inevitable. Both Bantz and Jacobs told me that when they first discussed the matter with the state auditor, who also received the letter from Landmark, they were given the option of doing the audit themselves or being audited by the state. Of course anyone would prefer to do an internal audit.

Bantz was particularly animated during this part of our conversation. He told me that the claims made by Labor Center Director Peter Kardas and the Counter Point Journal that Evergreen had a choice whether or not to do the audit were a complete misrepresentation of the truth.

However, Mindy Chambers, the spokesperson for the state auditor’s office told me that when they received Landmark’s accusations against the Labor Center, they “gave it over to the college and said, ‘This is your audit to do or not do.’ We didn’t even make a recommendation.” She assured me that they would not have conducted an audit, no matter what Evergreen decided to do. “We have very broad discretion in deciding what to look into or not look into.” They decided Landmark wasn’t worth it.

The second statement that portrayed the audit as inevitable was: an audit of the Labor Center would have happened around this time anyway. Again, both Bantz and Jacobs explained that all of the departments at Evergreen get audited at some point and the Labor Center’s time was nigh. Sure, there happened to be a letter from Landmark floating around, but this version of the story doesn’t place significance on that. In fact, when I asked Bantz if he was essentially saying that receiving the letter from Landmark and commencing the audit were two events independent of one another, he agreed with my interpretation of his stance.

Later in our conversation, though, he said the opposite. “The college is always under scrutiny for its political activism...we took initiative to thwart that, so we wouldn’t be under attack...that bumps up against what the [public service] centers do.” His comment negates the idea that the letter from Landmark and the audit were not directly related.

The next most defining thing about my interactions with Bantz and Jacobs concerns the disappearance of a certain paragraph from a certain Audit Plan. According to Kardas and the rest of the Labor Center crew, the administration had promised that the audit would only deal with the center’s finances—not their mission statement or any other area in which ethics would come into question. This agreement was set forth in an Audit Plan Jacobs wrote in July, 2008. Later that month, Jacobs created a list of “possible ethical violations,” and presented it to the administration. Several of these were later included in the audit.

Jacobs contends that no such agreement ever existed. Bantz called it a “complete framing on [Kardas’] part.” Kardas gave me a copy of the document, which included a paragraph that read, “The audit will not include a review of the ethical concerns related by the concerned party. A list of issues noted in the complaint and any other concerns noted during the audit will be submitted to an authority outside the College (A.G. or Ethics Board) for an impartial opinion.”

When I asked Jacobs for her copy of the Audit Plan, she e-mailed me a document that looked very similar to the one Kardas gave me. The only difference was the absence of the aforementioned paragraph. Very strange. (see below).

An e-mail from Jacobs to John Hurley, the Vice President of Finance and Administration dated July 17, presents the list of possible ethical violations that she created while working on the audit. In the message, Jacobs says that she wants to send the list to the Ethics Board or the Attorney General, depending on what Les Purce thinks, and also asks Hurley for his opinion. However, throughout our interview, Jacobs insisted that she operates with complete autonomy. Indeed, this was part of her explanation as to why there was supposedly never an agreement to only audit the center’s finances. “Les doesn’t—Les or none of the vice presidents can tell me what to audit. Because if they did that they’d just steer me to what they wanted me to, and there wouldn’t be any oversight or independent process.”

It seems like the administration thought that the most politically astute thing to do in the face of the Landmark attack was to audit the Labor Center and show that there was nothing to hide. Perhaps they were banking on the auditor finding only minor financial discrepancies. Instead she rigidly interpreted state law in a way that criminalizes the basic principles on which the Labor Center functions.

When the administration found themselves in the difficult position of rejecting an audit that affirmed the accusations they were trying to disprove, rather than admitting that it would have been better not to have done the audit, making amends with the Labor Center, and presenting a united front in saying to Landmark, “You are wrong, the Labor Center provides an important public service,” the administration instead chose to eschew responsibility, claiming that the audit was out of their hands.

They quietly sent the financial part of the audit to Landmark, shelved the rest, perhaps deleted a paragraph from the audit plan, and have since been up in arms as the campus community has demanded to know who else they will allow organizations like Landmark to bully, what the deal with their auditor is, and how exactly they define academic freedom.

The auditor

Jacobs didn’t consider judgement to be part of her job. She told me that every complaint the school receives has to be investigated, no matter the source or what sort of context it exists within.

When asked whether she cared that Landmark nominated Rush Limbaugh for the Nobel Peace prize, or if she was aware that they had complained to eleven other universities about their respective Labor Centers and were ignored, she said, “You know, I don’t care if they were right-wing. That would mean that we would decide on the virtue of what our personal opinion is whether we’re gonna listen to people’s complaints...I don’t think even the contents of the letter meant anything, because I don’t even remember, it was the fact that they were saying, ‘You have a Labor Center. We want some accountability on what they’re doing.’” This statement requires some unpacking.
Jacobs started by insisting that opinion doesn’t play a role in her work as an auditor. Later in our conversation, though, she talked about her reluctance to meet with Kardas to discuss the results of the audit report. “I’m not going to meet and argue the academic points of the ethics law because, ya know, you have your opinion, I have my opinion. This is my opinion.” In this instance, Jacobs’s opinion does factor into the audit; she is in fact stating that the results of the audit are her opinions. So why did she refuse to acknowledge that opinion has a role in determining the credibility of an accusation in the first place? In speaking about Landmark, she portrayed opinion as political bias rather than an informed judgement based on an investigation into the context of a situation.

Jacobs said she didn’t remember the content of the letter from Landmark and that she thinks it’s irrelevant, but it’s hard to read this polemical attack and only see a taxpayer asking for accountability. The letter states that, “the [Labor] Center’s focus appears to be increasingly directed toward thwarting federal and state law enforcement efforts to combat illegal immigration.” As evidence, Landmark includes quotes like this one from the Labor Center’s website: “How can we overcome stereotypes and myths about each others’ communities to create a stronger power base and solidarity?” In what bizarre world does overcoming stereotypes constitute resisting law enforcement?

According to Jacobs, none of this stuck out to her. However her audit report found that the Labor Center may be in violation of the State Ethics in Service Act for, among other things, offering “training and classes pertaining to resisting work of federal agencies.”
Landmark’s conclusion was that the Labor Center was not using public funds for a valid public purpose. Jacobs’ report corroborated this argument as well, by stating that the Labor Center is guilty of gifting of public funds. This is the same law that Landmark accused the Berkeley Labor Center of violating, saying that the center served private interests with public money. But whereas the Berkeley administration recognized that working with unions is putting public funds to use in the public interest, Jacobs didn’t think so.
In her opinion, when the Evergreen Labor Center offers free childcare for the people who participate in their programs, they are giving to some people at the expense of others, or “gifting of public funds.” She doesn’t see the benefit to society when parents are able to attend trainings that educate them about their rights and empower them as workers.

There are more points for debate in Jacobs’ interpretation of the law, and Kardas has distributed his objections to her findings based on his understanding of the RCWs she cites. I examine these issues not to argue what’s already been argued, but to demonstrate that though the administration decided not to act on Jacobs’ recommendations, her report remains a problem for the Evergreen community.

When the auditor, who has the power to decide whether or not the work of Evergreen staff and faculty is in accordance with the law, refuses to interpret the credibility of an accusation based on the identity and history of the accuser, doesn’t see a point in looking at other cases that may have set a precedent in how to deal with such accusations, can look at a racist tirade and only see a taxpayer’s desire for accountability, and worst of all produces a report that reinforces that racist tirade, nobody can feel sure that their work won’t get them in trouble. I’m not letting the administration off the hook here. The letter never should have made it to Jacobs. But it did, and the results have dealt a blow to academic freedom on campus, sparking an ongoing dialogue between faculty, staff, and sort of the administration too.
Academic freedom: a faculty privilege?

The campus dialogue about academic freedom has taken two main forms. The first is the question of how the administration interprets the state ethics laws. Alan Parker, faculty member and director of the Northwest Indian Applied Research Institute said, “I am concerned that my ability to exercise my rights of academic freedom to serve as an advocate on behalf of Northwest Tribal issues continue to exist “under a cloud” due to the standard that the auditor uses in her work.” Les Purce has announced that he will form a committee to examine the standards the college uses in determining whether the work of faculty and staff members adheres to state ethics laws.

The larger question at hand concerns how the administration defines academic freedom versus how the Evergreen community defines it. Last October, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) issued a statement denouncing Landmark for, “seeking to interfere with work in the academy, on ideological grounds.” The statement asserted that Landmark’s attempts to incriminate eleven Labor Centers constitutes a threat to academic freedom, and directly referenced Landmark’s attack on the Evergreen Labor Center. “The claim, as applied to the Labor Center’s activities, appears to suggest that any effort to educate workers and immigrants about their constitutional rights would be counter to the public interest. Such interpretations not only lack face validity, they run counter to the concept of academic freedom.” The statement emphasized the importance of protecting the academic freedom of public service centers, “Administrations will best serve the public interest by supporting that freedom, including by supporting the freedom of college and university Labor Centers to do their work.”

Jacobs didn’t think academic freedom extends to the centers. “Labor Center, they are not faculty...academic freedom is for your teaching and for your academic work. It’s not for your governance work, its not when you start getting politically involved in things.” Bantz’s comment on the matter was more blunt: “Academic freedom is a faculty privilege.”

The faculty do not agree. In November, the Evergreen Faculty Union (UFE) issued a statement endorsing AAUP’s perspective and voicing their support for the Labor Center. Anne Fischel, professor of media and community studies, explains her understanding of the relationship between academic freedom and public service this way, “Community service is one of the critical ways in which we enact our responsibility and sense of connectedness to public life. From this perspective academic freedom is a right—not a privilege—which enables us here at the college to contribute to the public good by extending the important educational work we are doing to the community.”

Bantz made it seem like a few faculty members are just trying to push the limits. “There are some strong political activists who don’t want any boundaries...maybe a state institution isn’t the best place to be a radical political activist.”

If supporting the Labor Center is too radical for a state school, then Evergreen can say goodbye to all of it’s faculty. At the January 20 faculty meeting, the UFE presented their statement to the rest of the Evergreen faculty, who voted to endorse it 54–0, with only four abstentions. The faculty statement declares, “our role as faculty confers upon us a special responsibility to uphold academic freedom for every member of the college community” and maintains that “The Labor Center contributes to the development of an educated citizenry...we challenge the audit’s implications that educational projects in the broader community are a misuse of public funds.”

What now?

While the administration would like to consider this case closed, there are more things keeping it open than just the conversation about academic freedom. For one, the State Executive Ethics Board is reviewing the mission statements of all of Evergreen’s public service centers. Their decisions could still affect the work these centers do.

There are other issues this audit has brought up as well, such as how the administration handles criticism from Evergreen employees. Kardas says that when he went public with his objections to the audit and the administration’s handling of the situation, Les Purce made it clear that his actions were “political suicide.” Bantz said Peter made the college “look bad” and even ventured to say that at any other school he would be fired. At one point he used the word “insubordination” to describe Kardas’ actions.

What Bantz didn’t acknowledge in his attempt to silence dissent is that the problems hardly started with Kardas. Landmark set out to make trouble for Evergreen and the administration took the bait. It was the administration’s poor judgement of the situation to begin with, and their many blunders along the way that have necessarily put the Labor Center on the defensive. What Kardas has done is to bring these issues forward for the community to examine, as these events have the potential to affect all of us.

Bantz’s concern with image is important because it points to one of the main reasons that we are in this mess. Evergreen’s “image” as a leftist school does attract censure fairly often (see sidebar, right). What’s ironic is that this motivates the administration to act more conservatively than less progressive schools in response to outside criticism.

Hopefully what the administration learns from the audit debacle is that when under attack, they don’t need to engage in a bunch of bureaucratic hula-hooping; they can easily point out the amazing work that goes on here and let that speak for itself. We don’t need to bend over backwards to convince the complainers. Doing so only divides us against each other, and makes Evergreen more vulnerable to attack in the long run.