Member Profile
	Mitch Vogel, UPI President, 1986-2002 'I never thought twice about joining a union.'

As Mitch Vogel retired as president of UPI Local 4100 on July 31, 2002, an era is ending.

He’s been involved with union his entire professional life, serving as UPI president for 16 years. Born and raised in Chicago, Vogel graduated from Roosevelt University 1962, with a major in history and minor in political science. After graduation, he married and began teaching in the Chicago Public Schools. He earned a masters in education in 1963 and began doctoral work in educational sociology at the University of Chicago.

He’s seen strikes first hand and helped carve out the University Professionals of Illinois Local 4100 in 1976, serving in many jobs at Northeastern Illinois University’s chapter and UPI Local 4100, finally heading the union from 1986-2002. Boards and presidents have come and gone, but Mitch holds on tight to the belief in the absolute importance of a union and the power of the faculty in higher education.

The future according to Vogel

"I think the problem facing our universities is that presidents have not hired the people to run the schools and haven’t given the faculty the right to do it. I think the faculty will eventually take the right to run the universities back. That’s the future.

"I think the faculty have got to realize that. UPI faculty realize that the same people who mucked up their salaries for 10, 20, 30 years and messed their schools up financially are increasingly taken control over their academic programs. Incompetent administrators can muck academic programs up just as well as they can muck up their salaries. One of the things UPI has been less than successful at is showing that UPI can play a leading role for faculty to make academic decisions. We made some good starts, but I donÕt think we finished it. Until faculty are involved in the academic decision making with the guarantees of the union behind them, weÕre not going to make much headway..

Power in the academy

"I think (organized labor on college campuses) will become more and more important. It’s just a question of time.

"The universities are in such economic peril right now. It’s clear to the rest of the world how incompetent our administrators are in solving those problems. The job of university president is a stressful job. It doesn’t pay enough to attract really skilled people, and yet it pays enough to attract really unskilled people. I was looking at the search and screen committee’s finalists for a provost position recently. And I don’t think any of them would have made a final cut 15 years ago.

"I don’t know why. I don’t think the answer is pay. The president’s job is different than it once was. It might be more stressful. It might not have the psychic rewards that it once had. Presidents used to be academic leaders. Even when the job wouldn’t pay a lot, they were committed to the institution. They would stay there.

"During my undergraduate days at Roosevelt, every Friday the president would come down and talk to students about the affairs of the day. That’s a nice thing for somebody, if they’re academically oriented, if they’re interested in those issues. But by creating a business oriented job, we’re getting people who are not skilled businesspersons. So we’re finding people to serve as presidents who are like fish out of water. They don’t like the academic side of teaching, which would attract them to the psychic rewards at the university. And they’re not getting paid enough to put up with all the stress, to operate in the business world.

"The reason for being a university president is the same reason for being a university faculty member. You like being in a university. You like the psychic rewards of investigating, of meeting with students, discussing issues with a wide variety of different types of people. You like the diversity. I don’t think our presidents are interested in that. I think they’re interested in jobs, and they go from university to university until they get the ultimate paycheck. Or they might be ritualistically oriented and want to have a building named after themselves. They either have an edifice complex or maybe a program complex. That’s why every new technology program is bought up so quickly.

"So we teach these presidents. In my 16 years as UPI President we have been forced to educate over 50 presidents at our Universities. I doubt if thatÕs a good thing for the university.

"There’s a disconnect between the reasons you and I became professors and the reasons our administrators became professors – a lot of them didn’t even come through the ranks. I really enjoyed teaching. I think that motivated me in much of what I have done. Even if I’m not teaching, I see the importance of good teachers. I don’t think that’s true of our presidents. I think they just like the workload, the ability to do research or the cushy jobs. They don’t seem to enjoy doing the intellectual things that professors like to do. That’s why they choose to take a job like that.

"I think you’ll see the ascendancy of faculty power. That’s the major threat with the non-tenure-track faculty issue. As important as savings are to the university in hiring non-tenure track faculty, the universities are expanding non-tenure track faculty to get the right to control the faculty. With this issue, faculty will start realizing that they’re being used.

"Through unions or through senates or just through political power, the universities will start changing. I think the presidents are fighting to maintain control of their arenas.

"It’s very clear that the presidents are meeting regularly. They have their own national organization, and they discuss how to keep the faculty down. They don’t see that as an evil thing. We saw this when we were meeting with the president of the University of Illinois. He made it very clear that it was his perception – I think it is the official line.

"This is the spin: ‘Higher education is a very valuable commodity. Faculty are very bright, capable people in teaching their classes. University presidents have to create an environment that will allow our universities to survive. The only way they can do that is to avoid relying on faculty who are like children because they are not capable of making decisions.

"Presidents canÕt have division, so you wonÕt see strong provosts. You wonÕt see strong campus heads within a system. The presidents of the University of Illinois, of Southern will not allow the chancellors of those systems to have more power than they will have. With the evil forces on the right out there, whether they be anti-intellectual or right wing yahoos or fiscal conservatives, they need a strong, centralized base of power, and thatÕs going to be the university president. So they donÕt want a union, they donÕt want a strong senate, they donÕt want a strong provost, they donÕt want a strong chancellor. Presidents manipulate the governing boards. When they canÕt manipulate their board, they resign. For example, the board at one of our campuses voted 4-3 on an issue. And that president resigned the next week. The issue had nothing to do with the president.

"At one time the role of board members at public universities was to select a president and supervise his or her activities. ThatÕs changed now. ItÕs very clear. Boards select presidents and then get out of the way. So the president has become more and more powerful. The balance of power is even more distorted since Illinois dissolved the Board of Governors and Board of Regents. The governor went to the university presidents and asked them who should be on each of the individual boards. In fact, the Presidents selected the Boards, their own supervisors. Up until very recently, the president of the universities selected the board.

Vogel’s early union roots

"With most of my part-time jobs, I was involved in unions. I remember once I had a job driving a stagecoach at an amusement park in New York called Gothamland. I joined both the Teamsters and the Actors Union. And I worked at a grocery store that was in the process of unionizing.

"I never thought twice about joining a union. It was part of my upbringing. My parents would have insisted that I join a union. It was part of my life. So I joined because it was the thing to do, not because it would help me.

"I think today we have a lot of people who would join the union because they ask us what we can do for them rather than what they can do for the union or what they can do for society.

In the Chicago public schools

"I started teaching in 1962 as a way of making money. I had no credentials and no plans to enter teaching. I was accepted to the London School of Economics and planned to attend but plans changed and decided to get married and raise funds for the overseas education.

"I had two jobs. I worked for U.S. Senator Paul Douglas and taught in the Chicago Public Schools. After a short while, I realized how much I enjoyed teaching, At the same time the electorate voted Paul Douglas out of office, I decided to enter graduate school in Education. While in Graduate School, I began to work part-time at Northeastern Illinois University. (It was called Illinois Teachers College-North at the time.)

Getting started at Northeastern

"I came to Northeastern as a part-timer in 1966 and began full time in the Fall of 1967. I taught courses in the Division of Teacher Education. Perhaps the most important thing that occurred that first year was the establishment of a new union at Northeastern. Ironically, prior to that year, the faculty was affiliated with the Chicago Teachers Union and represented by a faculty member who in 1967 was the University President. We affiliated with a new AFT local #1600 (the Cook County College Teachers Union), which was having a strong success in the Community Colleges.

The strike of 1968

"Union organizers decided that the time was right to organize at the four-year universities. So we activated the union, and I was an elected Secretary. We voted to go on strike April 1, 1968. It was my first full year at the university, and we were on strike, along with Chicago State. The strike was for recognition.

"We got very little publicity. April 2 we went on strike. That week Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated. Immediately, people started crossing the picket lines. They hoped that their presence in school would calm down feelings and restore some order to a riot-torn city. At best we had maybe 50 to 60 percent of the faculty out. And each day was a little less. But we decided Ñ those of us who were out there Ñ rather than let the strike go on, we would get commitments from some political leaders to do something about getting recognition. We made commitments among ourselves to stay together as a group. I think that was the most pivotal thing in our history. We went out together and we marched into our classes together.

"We decided to end the strike without getting our demands. We got a commitment from a very powerful political leader in the city, the Rev. Joseph Jackson, minister of the largest Baptist church in the country, to bring the two sides together and get something done. We went back in after about two weeks of being on strike. We agreed that we would not get paid for the two weeks we were on strike. We did, however, insist that we be paid for the week we spent giving grades.

Err on the side of the union

"Going on strike was a very heavy act. I was the strike captain at Northeastern. I realized relatively early how some people want to do the right thing and want the union to help them do the right thing. For some folks it becomes a pivotal point in their lives. I remember one member told me much later that the union forced him to make an important life-changing decision. He was forced to put his actions where his rhetoric had always been. He risked his job, he risked some financial security and became an activist. He stayed awake nights before deciding to go on strike. He claimed it was an inappropriate thing for someone whoÕs supposed to see both sides of the issue to take.

"But for me that was never the case. If thereÕs an issue to be taken, err on the side of being with the union.

"In fact, the strike at Northeastern was more successful than I think we expected. It did make a difference. The universities were disrupted and that fact seemed to effect the administrations responses to our later demands for bargaining.

Lessons from the strike

"The strike did teach us lessons. The most important lesson was that if we stay together, we would persevere. That was a real strong turning point for all of us. We did a number of things right after that strike was over. One, we reached out to Eastern and Western and Northern and created a statewide council of unions at that time. Another thing, which was controversial, was the creation of our own union. We severed our ties with the community college union, which led us during the strike. It was clear in talking to faculty that a separate union would be more successful. We were fortunate to attract a new faculty member Margaret Schmid to serve as President and eventually all four campuses in the Board of Governors joined us in forming the Faculty Federation 3500.

"We got commitments from the AFT and the IFT of money and staff support.

UPI is born

"UPI is the only union ever to win an election of our size without an affiliation with the AAUP or without a law. Probably the only one that ever will. We did a good grass roots program, made sure we had departmental reps and mounted a long-term, six-year campaign, which got hot and heavy in 1974-75. We went to every board meeting demanding collective bargaining. We had trial votes. We turned cards in to anybody. And we also met with an upstart gubernatorial candidate Dan Walker, who promised to give us collective bargaining. We got help to get Walker elected. We were the first union to endorse him. And he appointed people to the Board of Higher Education. When the board started waffling on the issue, Walker replaced them with two union executives who sat on the board for the key vote, voting to give us the right to have an election. As soon as the vote was over, Walker replaced them with the people he had originally appointed.

"One of the old timers'

"The most pivotal thing was that we stayed together.

"The second thing was that we really made a point of remembering that a union is inclusive not exclusive. And that we stop doing things that would alienate people like picketing graduations.

"And then the other thing was that we decided to be careful in what we do. The only thing that the news media covered about our 1968 strike was the fact that we misspelled ÔcurriculumÕ. We did it. It was a mistake. It was bad. We got chastised for it. And people didnÕt take us as seriously.

"But the most important point was that we stayed together. We really didnÕt get anything substantive out of that strike Ñ we were ignored, not just because of the King assassination, but we had a liberal governor at the time in Otto Kerner. The chairman of our board, David Nelson, was a radical. He was the head of the Eugene McCarthy campaign in Illinois. We had a president of the university who was a former union president, and weÕre picketing him. It wasnÕt a well-planned strike.

"When we had the election, we elected Margaret president of the Faculty Federation and the rest is history. We got our first contract after almost a year. We had contract conventions. We negotiated a salary raise in September. And then we negotiated the rest of the contract for the next year.

"Margaret was president when we solidified the five chapters, developing really strong web structures and created a position for ourselves in organized labor and the IFT.

Failures and successes

"When I assumed the Presidency, in 1986, we were in the midst of a campaign with the Board of Regents. It was a crisis for us. We decided back in Õ82 or Õ83 that we would merge with unions in the Board of Regents system. We decided that we would bargain for both the Board of Governors (EIU, WIU, CSU, NEIU, and GSU) and the Board of Regents (NIU, ISU and Sangamon State).

"We won a 200-member unit at Sangamon State and were the largest vote-getter at Northern, but we didnÕt have a majority. The university started stalling, and our support trickled off, so we lost an election by 14 votes at Northern. It could have gone any way. We came in first. "No agent" came in second. And the AAUP came in third. And again we offered the AAUP a merger, and it walked away from us. It said it wouldnÕt do anything. The reason they donÕt have bargaining at Northern is very clear. The AAUP chose to have no bargaining rather than to merge with us. Even though we gave it equal rights at the bargaining table. We offered it total parity, and it chose not to take it. It was a bitter pill.

"So that was crisis Number 1.

"The other crisis was that our membership was way down on a lot of campuses. After bargaining, both our downstate campuses had less than 50 percent membership. So I had as a goal to get our membership up. And we did.

"And another goal was to increase rather dramatically our voice in Springfield. It became clear to me that we needed that to be successful.

"We have been successful with our membership and half successful with the Board of Regents. I think that the record will show that we have been successful in Springfield on a number of issues. We have been able for the first time to get more money in our universitiesÕ budgets than what the universities were requesting or at least the Board of Higher Education was requesting. That was because we had a presence there. Our membership is probably stronger in terms of percentages in our downstate campuses today than it is upstate. I donÕt take all the credit for that. But it was a goal of mine.

"Another goal was to get ourselves on more financially firm footing so we didnÕt have to be as dependent on the AFT and the IFT for support. And we are. UPI was deeply in arrears or we relied on them for money when we took over. We no longer are.

"So since IÕve been president, we were able to double our salaries and our membership. The connection is not an accident.

"The new crises, which will be dealt with very effectively by the new leadership, deals with the academic integrity of our institutions. I am confident the groundwork done by the previous leadership will allow them to meet these challenges."