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A
Celebration of
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Israel Kugler, 1917-2007
Pioneer of unionism in higher education
By Irwin Yellowitz
PSC Retirees Chapter
From the November-December 2007 Clarion
Israel Kugler, who died on October 1, was a pioneer, a visionary and an activist. Iz, as he was known to everyone, believed in academic unionism when few others did. He argued that faculty and Professional staff should be in one union to maximize their bargaining power. He believed that this union should be affiliated with the labor movement and should not only serve the needs and interests of its members through collective bargaining, but also work to achieve social justice in the nation at large.
Iz was always an active leader who could rally support from many sources, and he had the intelligence and drive to carry through on his program. You could disagree with Iz, but not ignore him.
Iz Kugler’s parents were immigrants from Russia who strongly supported the Jewish labor movement, including the fraternal group the Workmen’s Circle. It was a personal fulfillment for Iz to be elected president of the Workmen’s Circle from 1980 to 1984. As a child, Iz accepted the democratic socialism of the Jewish labor movement, but he also drew from the larger society. By the time he was a teenager, Iz had joined the Young People’s Socialist League, an affiliate of the American Socialist Party.
CCNY GRAD
Iz entered City College in the midst of the Great Depression of the 1930s and graduated in 1938. His parents sacrificed to keep him in college – even a free one – despite the privations wrought by the Depression. During his years at City College, Iz participated actively in the vibrant political debates of the day, often carried on from the alcoves of the college cafeteria. Despite the bitter disputes Iz had with students who supported the Communist Party, he joined with other activists from the Young People’s Socialist League in a sit-down demonstration demanding the reinstatement of Morris Schappes, who had been fired from the faculty at City College because of his support of the Communist Party. Thus Iz’s life-long defense of academic freedom began in his student days.
The political views developed in his youth also undergirded Iz’s commitment to social justice. One example was his support of the civil rights movement, both within the labor movement and in the larger community. In the mid-1950s, after he became a leader in the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), Iz demanded that the union suspend southern locals that did not allow African Americans to join – and the AFT adopted this policy.
ORGANIZER
After serving in the Navy for four years during World War II, Iz began teaching in 1948 at a predecessor of the New York City College of Technology. He immediately began to organize a union to combat the poor salaries and working conditions, and the president’s operation of the college with scant consultation from the faculty and professional staff. The common wisdom was that educators would not join a union, considered suitable only for blue-collar workers. Iz absolutely rejected this contention, and he was to prove the conventional wisdom wrong for higher education just as the United Federation of Teachers debunked it in the public schools.
By 1956, Iz not only had organized a union at his college, but achieved notable gains in salaries and teaching load as well as achieving statutory tenure for its faculty. In the process, the union broke the paternalistic, top-down culture of the college. Faculty and staff now were participants in their professional lives through their union.
To gain strength, Iz’s union moved into the Teachers’ Guild, a predecessor of the United Federation of Teachers. In 1963, the American Federation of Teachers granted a charter for a separate union that would organize in higher education. Iz led United Federation of College Teachers (UFCT), which became active in both public and private sectors. During the 1960s, Iz organized unions and negotiated Contracts at the Fashion Institute of Technology, the Merchant Marine Academy, Pratt Institute and Westchester Community College. Clearly the naysayers about unionism in higher education had to reconsider.
In 1966, Iz and the UFCT also led a strike at St. John’s University over the firing of 31 faculty who wanted to form a union. He mounted a vigorous campaign in support of the strikers, including picket lines at the campus, rallies and national publicity. Although the strike was lost in l967, the widespread attention it gained aided organizing elsewhere in higher education.
After the Taylor Law of 1967 allowed for collective bargaining in public institutions in New York, Iz made an even more determined bid to organize at CUNY. His efforts met strong opposition from management and competition from another faculty organization, the Legislative Conference, headed by Belle Zeller.
The rivalry between the organizations led to two collective bargaining units and contracts in 1969. In 1972, the UFCT and Legislative Conference merged to form the Professional Staff Congress. Belle Zeller became president and Iz was the deputy president. The major difference between the two groups had been Iz’s insistence that an academic union had to be part of the larger labor movement. Iz achieved this objective, as the new PSC rapidly became an influential local in the AFT.
CONTINUED ACTIVISM
This power sharing arrangement between Kugler and Zeller never worked, and in 1973 Iz challenged Belle Zeller for the presidency. He lost in a very close election. In 1976, Iz once more ran for president of the PSC against Irwin Polishook, and again he was unsuccessful. He
then disbanded his caucus, and despite his personal disappointment at not achieving the presidency of the PSC, urged his supporters to join the majority caucus to strengthen the union. The merger of the two caucuses was a success, and it created a unified leadership for the PSC that helped win several excellent contracts in the 1980s.
Iz retired in 1980, but continued to support the PSC up to his last day.He wrote forceful letters to Clarion, made major contributions to the Retirees Chapter’s Program Committee, and as late as 2004 took part in a union protest at CUNY Central. Iz was one of the founders of unionism in American higher education, and today’s academic unions serve as a living memorial to the work of Iz Kugler.
Irwin Yellowitz, who had been a member of the UFCT, served as PSC Vice President for Senior Colleges from 1973 to 1984 and as PSC Treasurer from 1984 to 1997.
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