The following is an excerpt from the forthcoming memoir More Life: From Living in the Tenements of Lowell To Challenging Neoliberal Capitalism by working-class intellectual and university administrator Frederick Sperounis. It is a cliché that children of the working class have to overcome serious obstacles in order to make the kind of public life Sperounis made for himself. We recommend the book for those interested in the quite extraordinary path that led Sperounis to occupy the situation he came to occupy and confront the challenges he had to confront in order to defend the interests of people from similar backgrounds, but also people from very different backgrounds, like the East Asian immigrants to a Rust Belt community. This is a story of immigration, and toxic chemicals, and fishermen, as well as university administration. This excerpt gives a taste of what a principled and determined administrator is capable of accomplishing while doing his job. It is especially timely in a moment when so many administrators seem to be choosing the path of least resistance instead of standing up for their institutions and their communities.
–Bruce Robbins
A Foreword to More Life: From Living in the Tenements of Lowell
To Challenging Neoliberal Capitalism
–Liza Featherstone
We have told ourselves a story, in the United States. The story goes something like this: higher education is key to success, and that success is an exit ramp out of working-class neighborhoods into middle-class prosperity, or even something more.
We don’t support this belief, as some countries do, through universal free college tuition or stipends, nor by robust and consistent investment in all public colleges. Nonetheless, this belief informs our life choices, and increasingly so, despite the obstacles: the percentage of adults with some kind of post-high-school degree or credential reached 54.9 percent in 2023, the highest it’s ever been.
Given all that, Fred Sperounis’s story, in which a child of Greek immigrants from a poor neighborhood in Lowell, Massachusetts, struggles, gets a Ph.D. and becomes a higher education power broker advocating for the working-class community of his birth, shouldn’t be that unusual. And yet it is.
Very few people who make their careers in higher education come from the working class, as Sperounis did. It is true that in the decades since Sperounis struggled through multiple advanced degrees, many more working-class Americans have joined the ranks of the college educated. Higher education remains a powerful engine of social mobility. But the sector isn’t shaped by and for the working-class Americans it increasingly serves. A multidisciplinary study of full-time faculty members found that, compared to the general population, they are twenty-five times more likely to have parents with Ph.D.s. At prestigious universities, that number is nearly doubled. They’re also more likely than the general population to have two parents, and to have grown up in a home owned by their parents, among other markers of the comfortable middle-class upbringing that eludes so many.
No doubt this disparity has contributed to the pervasive feeling that these institutions are rarefied, removed from the experiences, thoughts and feelings of working-class Americans. As many have noted, the disconnect between those educated into the language and cultural mores of the cultural elite, and those who are not., nourishes rightwing resentment and probably helped elect Donald Trump, both in 2016 and 2024. At this writing, President Trump has been gleefully exploiting those feelings of resentment in his attack on American higher education. As Trump seeks to force universities to rescind all efforts at racial inclusion and crack down on protest, he is also waging a fake class war against the academy.
That kind of faux populism is widespread and not even original to Trump. What’s less common is to have tirelessly championed working-class interests within the university, as Fred Sperounis has done, creating, among other things, a program that foreshadowed values that have become fundamental to the American left.
Sperounis and his UMass Lowell colleagues were way ahead of their time in linking working class opportunity to a greening economy. But since Sperounis’s time at Lowell, the idea of solving environmental problems in ways that create opportunity and power for the working class has become mainstream.
Though we certainly haven’t yet built the green economy and solved the climate crisis, the demand to do so has become central to left politics, which has itself become part of the mainstream, to a much greater extent than it has been in years. In year 2018, a young woman named Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a democratic socialist who remains a tribune of the working class, was elected to Congress; the following year she and Senator Ed Markey – from Massachusetts, like Sperounis – authored a Congressional resolution laying out briefly the idea of a “Green New Deal.” Though mocked by guardians of the status quo – House Speaker Nancy Pelosi famously called it “the Green Dream or whatever” – the idea that green technologies and energy sources could create better and more dignified jobs for American workers caught on, and became central to the organizing of the Sunrise movement, the Democratic Socialists of America and many others. Educator-turned Congressman-Jamaal Bowman championed some of these ideas in a Green New Deal for Public Schools. Many became part of Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and New York State’s much more radical Build Public Renewables Act (BPRA).
At the same time, since Fred’s time at Lowell, Bernie Sanders’ call for free college has also gone mainstream. While all over the country, horrifically, public higher ed is facing violent disinvestment, the free college demand now enjoys widespread support. It’s also had a policy impact: in Massachusetts, Rhode Island and elsewhere, community college is now free, while many other states have taken steps toward making college more affordable to all.
There are of course good “human capital” reasons for this but affordability holds the promise of democratizing intellectual experience itself, another important theme in More Life. In Massachusetts, my niece takes a full load of classes on top of running her business as a massage therapist; she got an A in chemistry but is taking it again next semester because she wants “to understand it better,” a rationale that – I’m sorry to say — I have never heard at the expensive private universities where I presently teach.
As I write this, we have the most reactionary government possible, as disinterested in any of these ideals implicit in More Life as a regime could possibly be. Trump, at odds with many of his fellow capitalists, has an open vendetta against renewable energy and is rolling back the green investment Biden accomplished, in what amounts to a war on working class opportunities: thousands of jobs in wind energy have been already lost during this administration. We have also universities complying in advance with fascism, as well as austerity. The administration is openly targeting immigrant students, especially those active in politics, as Sperounis was. And many universities are choosing to ignore our environmental crisis, rather than asking, as University of Massachusetts -Lowell did, what opportunities it offers for students, professionally and civically. Last year, the University of Connecticut eliminated a whopping 70 majors. Even more incredibly, amidst unprecedented environmental change, one of those was environmental science.
But we also have a growing social movement that has precisely put working class lives – and the green economy – at its center. Socialists in New York City – first in state government, but now, as we write this – poised to win the mayoralty of New York City – have been fighting for a statewide Green New Deal, as well as full funding for the City University of New York. We may have new opportunities to reinvent the green economy, and higher education itself. It seems an auspicious time for More Life.
The Making of a Collaborative Faculty Culture
–Fred Sperounis
THE UNIVERSITY OF Lowell was very lightly staffed administratively. Partly, of course, this was due to budget constraints, but it was also in keeping with our vision that the overwhelming share of the university’s resources should be applied to teaching, research, and community engagement. Also, though spartan with the number of staff, Bill was generous with salary. And yet, at the same time, that good pay went along with a certain understanding that he was free to work us hard. Still, he was a fair man through and through, and he worked every bit as hard as he expected us to. Thus, he commanded the respect of everyone in his administration.
In addition to his role as University of Lowell President and Chancellor of the University of Massachusetts Lowell, he was also chair of the New England Association of Schools and Colleges (NEASC) the accrediting agency for all New England’s colleges and universities from 1986-1991. Through this position, he came to know all New England’s colleges and universities firsthand and garnered regional as well as local respect.
From the outset, my job was shaped around Bill’s needs and personality. An intensely private person with a somewhat closed-off personality, he needed someone warm and good at human connection. And used to being at the service of my mother, I always felt an intense need to be helpful, which I think was part of what made him comfortable with me in a way he seemed to feel with no one else. Of course, such dynamics were not discussed at the time, and we were only barely conscious of them.
Bill used me to fill gaps in his own understanding, which enabled him to govern the campus more effectively, though he was savvy politically and thus, never acknowledged any such gaps publicly. He would present problems for me to solve, many of which were large and vexing. He would give me all the time I needed to report back to him with a workable solution. Then we would consider the solution mercilessly until it became something he could own and take credit for. He was our public face, and given my own upbringing, that sometimes made me feel marginalized and taken for granted. All the same, it was a working relationship that allowed for creative problem-solving and effective community building both within and outside the university. It was also one in which I demonstrated my practical value. Perhaps best of all, the relationship allowed me to bring real vision to our initiatives.
In my early conversations with Bill, I had pitched myself largely by pointing out that he didn’t have anyone on the staff with my expertise in politics. Soon, I became the link to the State legislature, the governor’s educational affairs office, and the Division of Capital Planning and Operations (DCPO), which oversaw all state property and planning. DCPO, a recently formed agency, had been born out of the state’s history of inefficiency and corruption in the building process and management of state property. Such corruption was certainly not over—and I would soon have to navigate it in my dealings with Gerard Indelicato, Governor Dukakis’s educational advisor. But for the moment, Tunney Lee, a professor of Planning and Architecture at MIT, had just been appointed commissioner of DCPO. He and I had worked together at Urban Planning Aid, and I arranged for him to visit the UL campus in my first week on the job, a small coup for our campus, which enhanced my standing right away. Tunney was eager to demonstrate the agency’s openness and desire to advance the property needs of state institutions.
Like all public colleges and universities at the time, Lowell was bursting at the seams with the post-war baby boomer generation coming out of high school in record numbers. So, the need for maintenance on an old and crumbling campus as well as the building of new research labs, classrooms, and basic amenities was pressing. My getting Tunney to come to Lowell so quickly and Tunney’s irrepressible energy and enthusiasm for his new charge was exciting for Bill, and we could both see horizons opening in our shared vision for the university. I felt I had delivered on an early promise, and my relationship with Bill was off to a healthy start.
My other charge was to bring the historic underfunding of our campus in comparison to the UMASS campuses of Amherst, Worcester, Boston, and Dartmouth to the attention of Governor Dukakis. During those years as Bill’s assistant, I shepherded through DCPO a master plan for the physical expansion of our university through the acquisition of the Wannalancit Mills, a historic textile mill complex where my mother had worked in the Synthetic Yarns division during World War II. Most of the mill’s operations had closed over the years, with only a small part still in use. I also negotiated with the Board of Regents to grant us an additional million dollars to make up for our having been historically underfunded. This grant was helped along by a feature story which I obtained in the Boston Globe, the Boston paper of record, with the headline “University of Lowell has bold plan to be best.” It was the first time we’d ever been featured in the Globe.
AND YET, in many ways, all these accomplishments were only preamble. In June 1985, Bill and I were driving back to campus together from an Industry Appreciation dinner at UMASS Amherst, when I told him I felt we needed to do something to counter the growing might of the Massachusetts High Technology Council. Theirs was the industry we had just been invited to appreciate that night. High tech was a fast-growing sector of the economy in the state, the engine of the Massachusetts Miracle, and a growing presence on the national scene. Massachusetts had the giants of the minicomputer industry such as Digital, Wang, Data General, Prime, Apollo, as well as Lucent Technologies and Raytheon. Medical technology was also growing rapidly, largely because of medical devices spun out of campus labs. But all this rapid growth in technology had also left it relatively free from any social, environmental, or worker health and safety regulations.
The mood at the dinner had been highly self-congratulatory and full of boosterism. It felt like a political rally. White men in bland business suits talked power and profit as they downed bourbon on the rocks. No mention was ever made of the environment or the worker. Very few women were present and, almost no people of color apart from the waitstaff.
In many ways, Bill was an insider. He had been deeply involved in the making of the so-called Massachusetts Miracle and commanded the respect and admiration of the CEOs of the high-tech companies that led it. His own expertise in science and engineering—he was a physical chemist and a mechanical engineer with a Ph.D. from MIT—gave him prominent standing with the Council and industry CEOs unmatched by other higher education leaders outside Harvard and MIT. They admired his ability to run a university so efficiently on a minimal budget. And he served their interests by training a significant portion of their computer science and engineering workforce. Also, he looked like them and was well-able to schmooze like them.
But what they never seemed to have bothered to understand was that Bill well knew the limitations of class. His father had been a bus driver, and he the fifth child. He’d been admitted to MIT as an undergraduate but couldn’t afford to attend and thus received his undergraduate degree from Northeastern University, one of many schools in the U.S. established by the YMCA so working-class people could attend school and work at the same time.
Bill also knew that, like his wife Mary, I had grown up poor and marginalized, and that these experiences were the source of my social and political commitments. As I’ve noted, Bill didn’t give any credence to suggestions from others that I was dangerous or untrustworthy. If anything, he encouraged my natural fearlessness at getting to the core of a problem, at seeing through the difficulties of uncomfortable realities that were facing us.
Bill tended to hold his cards close. So, for instance, he drank, but never socially, because he didn’t want to lose his edge. Still, I knew him well by then and sensed that the Industry Appreciation dinner had provided an uneasy evening for both of us, so felt he might be open to my ideas. At the time it was common practice for industry to essentially pay off academics to cherry-pick evidence that supported the findings they wanted about worker safety, the environment and so on. And it felt to me that we needed better, firmer research to consider the consequences of what these firms were doing and even help them operate in a way that better served the whole.
My suggestion to Bill was that we explore a way to work on these issues as we sought to position ourselves as a public research university. I told Bill I thought I could bring in top-performing researchers and teachers who could raise significant amounts of grant money. The first person I had in mind first was Chuck Levenstein, my old SDS organizing partner at Salem State and later my colleague at Urban Planning Aid. Chuck was now a professor of economics at the University of Connecticut, having recently completed a second degree in public health. At UPA, we had worked together on establishing the health and safety project to help workers take advantage of the then-new Occupational Health and Safety Act passed in 1970. Chuck had collaborated as a researcher with several unions including those representing garment, maritime, and chemical workers.
Bill was interested, and he gave me the green light to invite Chuck up. I got on the phone with Chuck right away. He agreed to come up to Lowell to meet with Bill and me and talk about my idea. By the end of our meeting, Bill offered him a visiting professorship at Lowell in the school of management. That’s how quickly it got started.
My next target soon became David Wegman, with whom I had also worked on industrial health and safety at UPA. He and Peggy had left the Boston area when David was denied tenure at Harvard School of Public Health, probably for his pro-labor views. He was currently chairing the department of Industrial Hygiene at UCLA for the staggering and unmatchable salary of $125,000 a year, the equivalent of $350,000 in 2024. Still, I knew David was not particularly happy in this new job, and Peggy was miserable living in LA. She and Jane talked regularly on the phone, and on one evening, after one of their conversations, Jane asked if there was any way I could help create a position for David at Lowell. She reasoned that since Lowell was the first planned industrial city in the U.S., and as it evolved its factories became ever more dangerous places for workers, it seemed fitting to find a place in the university where David could bring industrial hygiene to Lowell.
I took this as my cue to pursue the idea of a new graduate program to be housed in a new department with David and Chuck as our first hires. I contacted David in the fall of 1985. He was intrigued. For Chuck and David, these discussions pointed to new possibilities in their careers and an opportunity to work together again in their shared field of expertise and interest. For Bill and me, these discussions were deeply generative. They enabled us to expand our vision for the university, imagining signature programs which would generate substantial research funding and raise our visibility as a dynamic public research institution. Of course, we know that pulling a professor from UCLA would amount to a coup, particularly since we were only able to offer $67,000. It was a severe cut to David’s salary, but made him the highest paid professor at UML.
The reelection of Ronald Reagan in 1984 made it painfully clear to those of us on the Left harboring ambitions for a progressive turn that we were on the defensive and losing ground. As Marx wrote in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte “[people] make their own history, but they do not make it as they please…” This became a recurring refrain for me as we sought to focus our attention on the creation of new paths upon which we could make our way forward. I made the political calculation that the best way for me to counteract the depredations of neoliberal capitalism’s savaging of the working class was to commit my energies to sustainable production and regional development. The goal was to make public higher education part of a wider national effort to shift the political terrain leftward in favor of unions and the environment—and ultimately to point the way out of a neoliberalist worldview toward something more humane and less relentlessly driven by capital. But we also knew that we’d need to tread very carefully, very strategically, with a close eye on the opposition. And I think it was that close eye that prevented Bill and me from ever giving our work an overarching name, identity, or mission statement. Though we never talked about it as such, we both seemed to feel that anything quite so formal would give the opposition too big a target. They could take issue with departments, centers, institutes, projects, and so on, but that felt like a very different situation.
We wanted to shape a department that would focus on areas not already covered by other universities in the region. Based on our four-way collaboration with David serving as chair, the Department of Work Environment (DWE) was established in the fall of 1987 with degree tracks in industrial hygiene, ergonomics, epidemiology, and work environment policy. The DWE was innovative in that we located it in the College of Engineering, unlike more traditional such programs which tended to be in the college of public health. The department was also less tightly siloed than the others, and over the first ten years of its existence the DWE brought together a faculty from the disciplines of medicine, economics, architecture, toxicology, urban planning, ecology, epidemiology, occupational hygiene, ergonomics, and bioengineering. Because many of the problems of worker health and safety stemmed from poor workplace design contributing directly to injuries, illness, and fatalities, the idea was to bring together the engineers who design industrial processes with people responsible for developing health and safety protocols.
In that first year, we also brought on Barry Commoner as a consultant to the new department to help us think through the matter of sustainable production and its connection to worker and community health and safety. No one had done more scientific work and political activism to advance the cause of sustainable production and clarify its parameters than Barry.
Next Chuck and David recommended that we bring on Tony Mazzocchi, then vice president of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union, (OCAW), considered by many as the father of the 1970 OSHA law. A long-time, highly respected environmental activist, Tony had worked politically with Barry Commoner to create greater union member and public awareness about industry’s impact on the environment. In the 1970s, Tony had developed the practice of bringing environmental public health researchers and professionals to local union meetings, where they, along with workers, would figure out what changes were needed to create healthy work environments. He further established summer internship programs through which medical, industrial hygiene, and public health students would learn about occupational health and safety by working on these issues at worksites with union members. Many of the most progressive leaders of occupational medicine in the U.S. came through these projects in the 1970s and early 1980s. This work was part of the ideological framing of the philosophy and practice that enabled us to shape the DWE into a transformative program unique in its mission.
Mazzocchi had long been frustrated by employers paying off scientists to get cherry-picked results. To counter that corrupt practice, he wanted to get a journal started to publish peer-reviewed research addressing scientific and policy issues ranging from environmental and occupational public health, energy transition, and the impacts of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and other similar agreements. The journal would publish evidence and analysis that would identify and prevent hazardous workplace and community exposures. To this end and others, we also hired Rafael Moure-Eraso, who had worked at OCAW and had a good relationship with Mazzocchi.
The discussion included a thorough consideration of how the journal could help facilitate an alliance between labor and environmentalists, who often found themselves at odds. Far too often, people in power were able to exploit this division and frame it as mutually exclusive to the detriment of both parties. But we felt that this was only one of many problems that could be solved through creative thinking, intensive research, and open communication. Thus, we created the journal New Solutions as a vehicle for activists and scientists to talk with one another. Levenstein would be the editor and OCAW the publisher. Levenstein and the faculty had the credibility and network relationships to quickly recruit authors from academia and research institutes, as well as the public health, labor, and environmental movements. One of the goals was for researchers to see the journal as a publication open to consideration of science and analysis that more mainstream academic journals often rejected for being too unusual or politically risky. We hoped it could build a basis for greater solidarity across social justice movements and establish a forum for a discussion of what might be preventing that solidarity to begin with. Mazzocchi saw New Solutions as a way for researchers to get their studies into the hands of workers and environmentalists and for researchers to learn from workers and concerned community members.
The sustainability focus of DWE at UML was grounded in the struggles of working people for health, safety, a protected environment, and democratic processes that would provide them with access to information, research, and education. So, for instance, Mazzocchi had long argued for a Superfund for Workers – a program like the GI Bill that would support workers and their families when industries shut down or transitioned to other operations such as shifting from fossil fuels to renewable energy. By the late 1980s, this concept came to be called a ‘Just Transition.’ In the 1990s, it became a key component of the Labor Party platform in response to Clinton’s infamous Third Way.
Further, we promoted the idea that workers needed to be included in debates about production, consumption, and decision-making, not only because they had insights others lacked, but also because their livelihoods depended on it. In 1989, less than two years after establishing the DWE, we acquired degree-granting authority at the master’s and doctoral levels. By state standards, these accomplishments occurred at the speed of light thanks to Bill’s skillful navigation of the state education apparatus.
In the first year, we also laid the foundation for a hazardous waste worker training program for the New England region. Chuck served as the project leader and had secured a multi-million-dollar, multi-year federal grant. The program trained workers in a variety of industries and unions to clean up hazardous materials and set the table for several other projects. For instance, the department worked with building trade unions to protect workers on Boston’s massive “Big Dig” underground expressway and harbor tunnel project (1991-2006). We also worked nationally with hospital, nursing home, and hotel workers, as well as with unions and employers to integrate workplace safety with health promotion.
Also, of course, the master’s and doctoral programs helped train a new generation of environmental and workplace-safety scholar-activists—primarily working- and middle-class students from the U.S., and medical and other professionals from abroad. The very first Work Environment doctoral candidate was Thurman Wenzel, a longshoreman from Baltimore who had completed a master’s degree in industrial hygiene at Johns Hopkins University and came to the program after developing an interest in the science of exposure to workplace hazards. He’d met people from his days as a longshoreman who would later become staff at DWE. In his course work with faculty member Ellen Eisen, he focused on the scientific basis for setting exposure standards in auto plants, which became his dissertation topic. The second doctoral student, Margaret Quinn, went on to teach in the department and became a leading international authority on assessing exposures in the workplace, as well as on “prevention through design” in the health and home-care industries, “designing out” hazards before they could reach health centers and homes.
OF COURSE, THE best answer for dealing with hazardous materials was for such materials not to be produced in the first place. In 1989, I worked with then-Massachusetts State Representative Geoffrey (Geoff) Beckwith who led the effort in the state legislature to pass the Toxics Use Reduction Act (TURA). Geoff and I had gotten to know one another in the late 1970s when he had been a student of mine before transferring to Boston College. He later won election to the legislature from his hometown of Reading in 1984, where he immediately emerged as a leader on environmental issues. Out of the TURA legislation came the Toxics Use Reduction Institute (TURI), which, thanks to Geoff’s leadership, was housed at Lowell on the strength of our having created the DWE.
It had taken three tries to get TURA through the legislature. The principal author of the bill and organizer of the coalition that pushed for its passage was Ken Geiser, who taught planning and environmental management at Tufts, and whom I had known from my time at UPA. Industry lobbyists tried hard to weaken the bill. And toward the end of our negotiations when push came to shove, Ken would often point to the door outside of which a small army of student activists were gathered and say to the lobbyists, “It’s talk to them or talk to us.” Ken was being considered for tenure at Tufts at this time, but he was also under fire from some of members of the university’s Board of Trustees because of his work to uncover the contamination of wells by W.R. Grace in the town of Woburn in the early 1980s. So it seemed likely to me that he would be denied tenure, and I soon approached him to find out if he would consider joining our newly created department and direct TURI.
Ken was a planner by training but with a deep understanding of chemistry. As a scientist/engineer himself, Bill Hogan knew that Ken would be enormously valuable to us in a cross-disciplinary venture at toxics reduction that had never been attempted before. “He really is a chemist,” Bill said to me when we made the offer. And he was right.
David, Chuck, and Ken comprised the leadership of the department in the early years. David shaped and staffed it, bringing in graduates of elite doctoral programs. Many of them had already done work with unions or, in one case, with the women’s health movement. TURI was responsible for identifying the science, research, and training necessary for the implementation of the Toxics Use Reduction Act. As its first director, Ken was eager to address the technological and business practices that led to human and environmental risk. Under his leadership, TURI was able to create a research program that quickly developed a following among university faculty in chemistry, plastics engineering, and environmental science. The implementation of the Toxics Use Reduction Act beat the legislation’s goal of cutting the state’s hazardous waste generation in half in the first ten years, a measure of TURI’s effectiveness.
IN THE LATER 1980s and early 1990s, the environmental movement was focused on controlling pollution from production to achieve clean air, water, soil, etc. Certainly, this was a good goal, but it led to “end-of-the-pipe” strategies. Essentially, environmental protection measures were aimed outside the factory or workplace, often, literally, by involving some kind of pollution control technology at the end of a smokestack or water effluent pipe. Occupational health efforts were similarly focused, taking the production processes that generated workplace health and safety hazards as a given and focusing on protecting workers with safety gear or else placing minor safety controls over the top of the production. But no real thought was given to making the process itself any safer or environmentally sustainable. Moreover, this limited approach tended to pit the workers against the environment, the businesses against the communities in which they existed. Sustainable production meant shifting what had been thought of as two separate frames into one and placing the production process in the middle, as the fundamental unit from which both “good” and “harm” are generated.
Our premise was that production is the common source of economic development, climate impact, and workplace and community health. This perspective removed the either/or conflict by placing “work” and “environment” within the same frame, thus making it possible to conceptualize problems and solutions in concert. What if production processes could be designed so that they were not harmful either to the workers or the environment? The developers of sustainable production sought to eliminate pollution at its source by redesigning the production processes, materials, practices, and policies. They sought to do this by engaging industry, labor, community, and environmental groups as stakeholders in the process.
Only multiple disciplines working together could possibly address such a complex problem. Transformative changes needed to come from both top-level policies and on-the-ground practices that really worked. Thus, all faculty members engaged in the sustainable production framework had to educate themselves well-beyond the disciplines of their degrees. They then developed real-world projects to learn what aspects of sustainable production could facilitate positive change. They had to study and apply approaches based on other disciplines and try new solutions. They needed a high degree of cooperation and to understand that failure and lessons learned were part of the process.
A major challenge to our work was that UML, like universities across the US, was in a log jam of siloed disciplines, so the interdisciplinary departments, centers, and institutes we created looked strange and, in some cases, threatening to the status quo. Additionally, federal research funds from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Health Institute (NIHs) were mostly discipline-based and doled out only to those who were successful. “Success” was narrowly defined as identifying problems in small, incremental steps sure to point to the next increment of research that needed more funding to study the same problem.
But our approach extended beyond this reductive, heavily siloed approach to problem solving. And increasingly, we came to believe that any real solutions for the complex problems facing the world would have to do just that. Thus, the structural norms within academia were part of what was holding the culture back and keeping us stuck in a neoliberal worldview. In this, too, we were attempting to point the way forward.
Our teams took big risks by trying out new solutions in the crucible of the real world and piloting them with industry, labor, community groups and government in a democratic participatory process. It turned out that this solutions-oriented, multidisciplinary, horizontal team-based approach resonated well with new start-up industries, and many were quite interested in working with us. It was the old-school industries struggling in 1990s economy, the top-down, hierarchical, and administratively heavy organizations that weren’t interested in participating.
The flexibility of the sustainable production and regional development model allowed us to study worker health and safety in traditional and advanced manufacturing workplaces, extractive industries, emerging technologies, office work, construction, and hazardous waste work. We had scarce resources and needed to keep our focus tight, but in keeping with our core principles, we wanted to lead in the area of work environment broadly defined, including an ambitious effort at regional economic and social development. We looked to areas in which we could complement the work done at MIT and Harvard; their schools had created new technologies and applications in the areas of radar, microwave, and computerization prior, during and shortly after WW2 that had transformed the American economy. We, in turn, decided to focus on the totality of these technologies and the industries they gave rise to. We were determined to make this focus our niche in an ambitious project of remaking of the American economy.
[…]
Departments, Centers and Institutes
ON THE HEELS of the creation of Department of Work Environment in the late 1980s and amid a severe recession, Bill and I also conceived of a department of Regional Economic and Social Development (RESD). One of the roles of RESD was to help publish books containing quality research. A quick review of the first of many books faculty and graduate students produced demonstrates how the creation of cross-department research centers and institutes fostered new ways of organizing UML’s agenda and mission. Approaches to Sustainable Development, for instance, included research and writing from senior and junior level faculty, two deans, several graduate students; the book spanned work from ten different departments ranging from the humanities, the social sciences, education, the sciences, and engineering. Unusual for its richness and complexity, the book offered a new way of thinking about how a public university could engage in meaningful problem-identification and problem-solving.
The chapters in Approaches to Sustainable Development represented a rich collaboration across academic fields of study including history, economics, environmental sciences, work design, and public policy, focused on how we define what the equitable economic and social development of a geographic region might look like and how a public university can play a role in bringing it to fruition. The book argued that a healthy economy redounds to the benefit of the university, and that a thriving university can play a dynamic role in the wider world it inhabits. The volume summarized the results of this institution-wide intellectual labor.
The model insisted that healthy communities and work environments are integral to the practices of sustainable production and fundamental to a region’s well-being. Further, we argued that the university must develop relationships with firms in order to help generate innovations that promote sustainable development leading to competitive advantage. We needed to redesign the production processes in ways that overcame the seemingly contradictory goals of economic viability and sustainability. This commitment to sustainable production enabled the university to engage comprehensively in the process of continuous regional renewal. Finally, we held that any form of assessment based purely on the bottom line of profit was short-sited and destructive.
Over the years RESD research and publications focused on phenomena related to a wide variety of concerns that included:
• high-tech and biotech employment (regionally, nationally, globally),
• women’s roles in various sectors of the workforce,
• emerging industries (biotech) in the MA/New England economy,
• globalization, deindustrialization, shareholder capitalism, corporate governance, the influence of the stock market on the real economy,
• poverty, immigration, migration, low-paid work,
The DWE and the RESD were soon followed by several key institutes, and centers:
• The Toxics Use Reduction Institute (TURI)
• The Lowell Center for Sustainable Production (LCSP)
• A new Center for Environmentally Appropriate Materials (CEAM)
• An interdisciplinary Committee of Federated Centers and Institutes (CFCI)
• The Center for Family, Work, and Community (CFWC)
To illustrate the kinds of activities these new department, institutes, and centers engaged in, I will focus on two projects out of many: the River Ambassadors and the Malden Mills textile plant redesign.
NEWER IMMIGRANTS, MOSTLY from Cambodia, were drawn to the Lowell area by the presence of three Buddhist monks, and they became a large segment of the workforce at Wang Laboratories in the 1980s and early 1990s. By the turn of the century, Lowell ranked second to Long Beach, CA for the city with the greatest number of Cambodians. They confronted environmental hazards not only in the workplace but also in the toxic residues of old industrial sites when they attempted to fish or swim in the city’s rivers and canals, do urban farming, or rehabilitate old buildings for housing or community centers. One of the community programs that faculty member and social psychologist Linda Silka helped organize was the River Ambassadors, a self-named group of teenage environmental activist-educators.
For the older generation of Southeast Asian immigrants, rivers had been a central aspect of life for food, transportation, beauty, and religious festivals. In Lowell, these immigrants fished in the Merrimack for carp, but the carp were contaminated with heavy metals and dangerous chemicals. The UML team led by Linda worked intensively with a group of young people from this community who named themselves the River Ambassadors. Through theater, TV production, curriculum development and other means, these youth brought information both to their elders and to the next wave of young people and helped launch several decades of research into health and the environment with public funding while creating partnerships with community organizations like the Lowell Community Health Center and the Cambodian Mutual Assistance Association.
UML’s work with the River Ambassadors embodied not only an alternative, organizing-based approach to community environmental education, but also an alternative, two-way-street approach to university-community relations drawing on the expertise of each partner. When the Environmental Protection Agency learned that the university was working with new immigrant communities, especially youth, they directed Linda and her team at the Center for Family, Work, and Community to “inform” them neither to fish in the Merrimack nor eat the fish from the river. The EPA gave the team advisory materials to make available to newcomer families they saw fishing. But we knew that such a top-down approach to the problem simply wouldn’t work. Fishing the Merrimack was one of the ways the newcomer families were becoming part of the Lowell community, likening the Merrimack to the historically significant of the Mekong River in Cambodia. In addition, fishing was done in family groupings (moms, dads, aunts uncles, children) and thus, a vital way of maintaining a sense of family.
“We did not hand out the advisories,” Linda recalls. “Instead, we spent time with the families who were fishing to learn more about them.” Working with students throughout the university from a variety of immigrant backgrounds, the team created a vivid, one-page handout underscoring the importance of fish, including favorite fish recipes; to this the team attached advisory materials about the pollution to send a different message: “Let’s work together so we can continue to eat fish.” The team obtained permission to spend time at one of the Buddhist temples observing the Buddhist nuns preparing the Merrimack River fish so that they could see what happened to the fatty parts where heavy metals tend to concentrate and thus, they discovered that these fatty parts were not being used in food preparation.
The team also worked with the state Department of Fisheries, which had the capability to test the fish for pollutants. In collecting samples, both the university team and the River Ambassadors discovered just how hard these fish were to catch. As Linda was fond of telling people, “We had lots of fun trying, and eventually caught fish to test, but it turned out to be a lot more difficult than we imagined. That experience gave us more respect for the fish, for the people fishing, and for the river.” The team also began talking with newcomer families about where they obtained their news and information. Cable television turned out to be a principal source. That led the River Ambassadors, with assistance from the university, to create a television show on the local cable channel. In every episode, the teens interviewed both a Southeast Asian elder and an environmental leader who could share information about both local hazards and opportunities to combat them.
Another key aspect of the relationship involved opening the university to the youth. Through the Fisheries Department sample testing, the Ambassadors learned that this kind of work was something they might consider as careers. In turn, the team created a scavenger hunt that occurred when the River Ambassadors were on spring break, but UML faculty were in their labs. The faculty committed to making themselves available to discuss lab work and science related to water, water quality, and pollution. The scavenger form listed not only places for the young people to collect water samples, but also a campus map and list of various labs. Participants brought the samples, found the labs, and heard stories about the work done at each. Not only was the experience great fun for the River Ambassadors, but it also deepened their connection to the university and its offerings.
A representative community organizing project was an annual Southeast Asian Water Festival, beginning in 1997, modeled after those that took place along the Mekong but attended by thousands of people from all over New England including many Southeast Asian teens. As an early step, the planning group made up of Cambodian and Laotian community leaders and staff from the university went to a community meeting in the French-Canadian neighborhood adjacent to a park along the river where the festival could be held. The neighborhood leaders seemed distressed at the thought of unfamiliar newer immigrants “invading” their neighborhood. Rather than paraphrase, I’ll quote Linda Silka’s vivid memory of the process and the result:
“A seemingly angry-looking French-Canadian elder stood up and said, ‘Okay, do I understand that you have favorite secret fishing spots along the Merrimack?’ The Cambodian and Laotian leaders hesitantly said yes. The elder then said, ‘Okay, we have secret spots, and you have secret spots, we all like to fish the river, we all care about the river, I say let’s do it. This festival should happen.’ And it did! The first festival in 1997 was a reverberation of old and new, East and West, a fascinating study in contrasts. The festival grounds were on a bank opposite old industrial sites and just upstream from a dam that, at one time, channeled water into canals to power cotton mills. Following the tradition on the Mekong, multigenerational families spread out their woven mats on the riverbanks. Festival goers were able to watch traditional Cambodian and Laotian dances but also view contemporary exhibits on water quality. They took part in historical long-boat races of vessels especially commissioned in Southeast Asia yet also learned from Khmer and Lao-translated displays about environmental issues. Children participated in Khmer games that have been played for centuries, and visited environmental booths designed for them, having “passports” stamped at each. And water specialists of all sorts worked with translators to call attention to river cleanups. The festival was a way of responding creatively to everyday environmental dilemmas.”
The only drawback was that, by mid-afternoon, the police decided to shut down the festival because of concern about gang violence, considering the large number of Southeast Asian teens. “The leadership team tried unsuccessfully to reason with them,” Linda explains, and so, “we learned the hard way the necessity of involving all key groups in the planning.”
OUR FIRST REAL-WORLD project to pilot and evaluate sustainable production methods was led by Margaret Quinn from DWE and Bob Forrant from RESD. It’s no accident that both professors had firsthand experience working in industrial factories and grew up working class. Margaret, the lead scientist/design specialist on the project, had worked in textile mills while attending Brown University and wrote her undergraduate thesis on the costume jewelry industry centered in Providence, RI. Bob, prior to returning to UMass Amherst to complete his Ph.D. in history, worked for fourteen years as a precision tool machinist at the American Bosch factory in Springfield, Massachusetts; two of those years were spent as the business agent elected by the members of his local union. Margaret and Bob, then, were ideally suited to be the leaders of the project at Malden Mills, which aimed to combine regional economic development and sustainable production.
Malden Mills manufactured Polartec polyester fleece. And the project resulted from a catastrophic fire that had destroyed a substantial portion of their textile complex in December 1995, causing over $500 million dollars in damage and putting nearly 3,000 people out of work. Coincidentally, Margaret and DWE students had just begun assisting the Malden Mills management with an industrial hygiene assessment when the fire occurred. So given all that damage, Margaret and Bob saw the opportunity for an extensive makeover of the production process. Of course, the ownership and the union were open to new ideas in a way they might not have been had the damage not been so extensive.
Still, though we were fairly certain we would have union support for innovation, we were particularly fortunate in just how open the owner of Malden Mills, Aaron Feuerstein, was. To the astonishment of all, Feuerstein insisted on keeping nearly 3,000 mostly immigrant workers on the payroll with health insurance for the duration of the rebuilding process. His openness and generosity were perfectly suited to UML’s challenge to create sustainable production, enhancing democratic participation with a workforce made up largely of brown and Black Spanish-speaking Dominican people, most of who lived in Lawrence, MA.
Polyester fleece is made largely out of plastic. So, essentially, that means transforming something highly disposable and potentially damaging to the environment into something high-end and desirable to environmentally conscious consumers. It also meant that, according to Margaret, the underlying truth about Malden Mills was that it was as much a chemical plant as a textile plant—the coating was made of chemicals that had to go through a drying process to bind with the fiber.
The groups met in a Motel 6 off Route 93 to discuss past practices and how they could be improved upon. As Bob later recalled, “We spent a lot of time talking about what a rebuild might look like. How state-of-the-art technology might very well lead to downsizing of the I workforce and how the union might deal with this issue.” Out of these conversations would grow new forms of democratic decision-making between management and the union. Margaret recalls, “We spent days with the production managers and the frontline production workers reviewing the processes that would be re-built and incorporating health, safety, and environmental sustainability into the new designs.” These discussions allowed the UML team to play a mediating role with management and the union. In this capacity, the UML team was careful not to demonize ownership about exposures and instead talked about dust, which everyone agreed there was too much of. The UML team worked with Malden Mills to reduce the toxicity of those chemicals and remained with them until they were well into rebuilding.
The new design was far from perfect. For instance, management felt that some changes were just too expensive. Still, it did reduce dust and was a significant advance not only in worker and environmental health and safety but also in product quality and efficiency. Also, even before the team was done with redesign, Patagonia, a major buyer of Polartec, which accounted for half of Malden Mills’ sales, heard about it and, as a result, stepped up their request for the use of more recycled material because of their market niche.
Aaron Feuerstein and Bill Hogan’s commitment to and receptiveness of sustainable production innovation, as well as their commitment to regional economic and social development enabled the plant to continue functioning in the region for another twenty years. In 2016, private equity interests moved it South against Aaron Feuerstein’s wishes. (He called the move “disgusting,” but by then was only one of seven votes on the board of the company, and thus was powerless to stop it.) Essentially, the sustainable production model built by Feuerstein, the labor union, and UML was undone by the drive to maximize short-term profit, a classic example of shareholder capitalism in action.
AS THESE TWO examples demonstrate, what I would later think of as the Sustainable Production Project was a collection of interrelated, yet singular projects, having to do with work, the workplace, gender, race, family, community, and the environment. The political context within which each project was conceived well within the liberal democratic tradition of 20th century American politics. Most of the people who made up the faculty and staff of the projects thought of themselves as on the Left in one way or another, but the work was largely determined by the research interests within each group, the personalities of their leadership, and the needs of the community. There was no overarching political direction, and some projects were more explicitly politically oriented than others. Implicitly, at least to my mind, there was a shared purpose distinctly directed toward shaping a big tent progressive coalition around sustainable production, work, and the environment.
Day to day, I had very little first-hand involvement with the specific projects our faculty took on. No one issued me reports or updates, which was by design. I trusted the participants as individuals and as heads of departments, centers, and institutes to make their own decisions. The faculty worked out conflicts and differences within a collaborative framework in the various interdepartmental faculty councils. It was the collaborative nature of the councils, coupled with my life experiences and political outlook, that informed and shaped my vision and actions on their behalf.
I essentially imagined connections across disciplines and encouraged the recruitment of top researchers who would help us advance the interdisciplinary and research-funded work of the project. It was our creativity in defining what we thought was essential in the remaking of the public university of the late 20th and early 21st century that defined our work and shaped our mission.
At the end of my three-year contract as Assistant to the Chancellor, I was promoted to the position of Vice President for University Relations and Development, still working with, and reporting directly to Bill Hogan. Friends of mine who observed us at work often wondered how two such different people could achieve the synergy we did. Neither of us could have predicted the ease of our relationship, either. He was a mechanical engineer and physical chemist, while I was trained in political sociology and social theory. He was task-oriented and linear in his thinking. I approached problems intuitively, and my thinking was always discursive. He expected deference to his leadership. I brought an enthusiasm for ground-up democratic engagement. Where his mind was more apt to see malicious intent, mine was more apt to see hapless incompetence.
Despite or because of these contrasts, we maintained a comfortable balance rooted in mutual respect, willingness to learn from each other, and a shared pleasure in each other’s company. And, in truth, knowing Bill would always maintain a kind of sovereignty in major decisions gave me a lot of freedom to work creatively. This arrangement suited Bill’s need to retain full control, and he understood that I wasn’t likely to challenge that as I preferred my secondary role as a one-man think tank, strategist, and all-purpose problem solver.
In a particularly memorable exchange, when I asked to be furnished with a computer in my office, he said no. He did not want me to be spending time on a computer, nor did he want people to have easy access to me. I was furnished with a home lap-top, but never an office computer. Of course, these days, computers have become so common and so handy for nearly any task that readers who aren’t familiar with the shape they took in the 80s and 90s are likely to think this decision as beyond barbaric. But computers were far more limited back then. As he explained it, “You are here to help me solve the most difficult problems in the university. You don’t need a computer for that.” And, I think, at the time, he was right. More than most people, Bill knew the limits of artificial intelligence and the generative power of the unencumbered human imagination.
In an average work week, I spent about half my time with Bill: talking in his office, at daily lunches off campus in his favorite diners and downscale restaurants, in the car or, walking around campus, and participating in meetings. I was happy with this arrangement, since I was included in addressing all kinds of problems that reached the upper levels of university administration. We were creating a purposeful work environment in which other people could thrive, an environment which supported an innovative faculty, who pushed themselves hard to expand funded research and the excellence of their teaching.
Our focus on recruiting faculty who had a track record of applying for and receiving multimillion dollar multiyear grants in the areas of sustainable production brought the university research funding and prestige immediately. We also created one of the most generous overhead splits on these grants in the country. In our model, money that was typically pocketed solely by the principal investigator was instead used to provide support staff to the department, seed money for junior faculty, and incentives for interdisciplinary collaborative work with researchers from across the disciplines. In brief, our funding allowed for the creation of numerous interdisciplinary centers and institutes that all fed back to this one idea of sustainable production and regional development.
Our very first grant, which Chuck Levenstein received from the National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences for training hazardous waste workers and emergency health responders, was for three million dollars over three years. Before that time, the university had typically been bringing in one to two million dollars in grant funding annually across all departments. The Department of Work Environment would become a premier department nationally, and the highest grossing department per capita in research funding in the UMASS system in the 1990s and 2000s. Later, The Center for Environmentally Appropriate Materials (CEAM) would, over a decade in operation, fund twenty-six research projects and sponsor symposia and conferences at each of the five UMASS campuses, including a conference on advanced materials for the military, one on biodegradable polymers, and another on green chemistry. In 1995-96, an internal university study found that $329,500 in seed-grant funding from one of our interdepartmental councils, made available to faculty who applied over a three-year period, had yielded $5,671,400 in external funding. This money was meant to engage faculty across all the disciplines and colleges—and it certainly did that. The work of the project also generated other sorts of funds that could, in turn, be funneled to community projects. When, in 1995, a state court fined the Bay State Smelting Company in Somerville, Mass, $500,000 for environmental and occupational health violations affecting its largely Latinx immigrant workforce, the judge ordered the money to be paid into a Work Environment Justice Fund to support grants to community and labor action groups. (This arrangement was brokered by someone in the Attorney General’s office who knew about us and pointed the judge our way; coincidentally, the judge’s husband had been a mentor of mine at Salem State in the 1960s.)
All these examples demonstrate how successful such collaborative, cross-disciplinary work can be at justifying itself even within the neoliberal paradigm of the bottom line. As Chuck Levenstein observed recently, “Bringing money in was a kind of protective armor that kept us in business. If we hadn’t done that, it wouldn’t have held up for so many years. The Right is so good at playing inside baseball, and the Left isn’t.” These examples also indicate the kind of role that public universities can play within dynamic federal, state, and municipal legislation. If Green New Deal-type legislation were to mandate that research, development and training funds go to public colleges and universities that must spend it on sustainable chemicals and production, regional development, renewables, and other sustainable climate-friendly initiatives, it would go a long way in addressing the climate crisis, while also helping undo some of the current neoliberal practices in society and the public university that have little if any effect in these areas. Though success created new space for our expansion, it also fed the resolve of the opposition, who thought we were privileging this work over the expansion of traditional departments—something we were careful not to do.
