ACT-UAW and Bob Kerrey's new New School.

In 1919, a group of leading intellectuals launched an experiment in American higher education. Although they weren't "radicals" in the nomenclature of their day, the founding members of The New School for Social Research held some radical ideas about education and its role in a functioning democracy. As envisioned by Thorstein Veblen, Charles Beard and John Dewey, this New School would tolerate and encourage dissent, liberate debate and inquiry from the strictures found in New York's traditional universities (specifically Columbia, from which some founding New School professors were fleeing) and teach theory with an eye toward its application to the machinery of civic life. More than 80 years later, the New School still asserts its allegiance to this progressive vision. With evident pride, the university's official website states "[here] education is seen as a tool to produce positive changes in society."

"The University excels at providing transformative ideas and skills to its students," the official literature continues. "[Here] education and research?are guided by a linkage of theory and practice, and members of the University community are committed to working toward a more equitable, peaceful world."

This is the language of John Dewey's pragmatism intact, but it's not a commitment today's New School faculty and student body have much faith in. The overwhelmingly part-time teaching staff is currently awaiting a decision by the New York branch of the National Labor Relations Board on a union vote that organizers allege the university has been stonewalling since last spring. Union organizers and their student supporters call the administration's anti-union stance a betrayal of the New School's traditional mission as embodied by Dewey, who, besides being a university cofounder, was also the first member of the American Federation of Teachers. The faculty union's slogan is "NSU, Step Up! Honor Your Progressive Roots."

This sentiment is echoed in a letter signed by four local politicians sent to president Bob Kerrey this December. "The New School has historically provided progressive leadership in our society," write the signatories, including Congressman Jerry Nadler and City Council speaker Gifford Miller. "It now has the opportunity to do so again."

Of course, many would claim that any reference to the New School's progressive roots became black humor when university trustees decided not to fire President Bob Kerrey in the spring of 2001, when reports broke that Kerrey had led a slaughter of more than 20 Vietnamese women and children in 1969. When the story was leaked to Kerrey on the eve of its publication, he preempted the headlines with a public admission, thus breaking 32 years of highly successful silence. Within hours of his statement, apologists for Kerrey were clawing at one another for time on rostrums and op-ed pages across the country, ultimately producing a mountain of commentary praising the former senator's courage for stepping forward and confronting his "painful past" in Vietnam. The national convulsion of sympathy and respect for Kerrey soon reached New School's divided campus, where a contrite but combative Kerrey admitted regret amid student and faculty anger that a war criminal was representing their school.

Kerrey kept his job and the story passed. One of the reasons it disappeared was that the media by and large declined to look into what Kerrey's Navy SEAL team was doing in the village of Thanh Phong. Although the incident was dismissed as the unfortunate result of patriotic young men cracking under the stress of war, the slaughter was part of a CIA operation called the Phoenix Program?the expressed purpose of which was to murder, torture and intimidate Vietcong leaders and their families. According to investigative reporter Douglas Valentine, author of a book on the Phoenix Program, "Kerrey and his crew admittedly went to Thanh Phong to kill the District Party Secretary, and anyone else who got in his way, including his family and all their friends." The rural enemy in those days had a nasty habit of surrounding themselves with loved ones at night.

Instead of being forced to answer these charges head on, Kerrey was at turns lauded, consoled and excused, as if he had tried valiantly to stop the slaughter but failed, losing his entire family in the process. After America wept another giant tear for itself, the episode was down the memory hole, including charges by another Navy SEAL present at Thanh Phong, Gerhard Klann, that Kerrey was the officer who personally ordered the executions. Here's how the New School's official biography of Kerrey today addresses the mass murder: "Educated in pharmacy at the University of Nebraska, Bob Kerrey served three years in the United States Navy. After his military service, he started a chain of restaurants and health clubs in Nebraska, Iowa and Kansas."

Pharmacy? Health-club chains? Even if it weren't caked in blood, Kerrey's resume makes one wistful for the days when universities actually hired intellectuals for top administrative posts. It must have been difficult for NSU trustees to find a more grotesque candidate to run a school that has housed many of the greatest left-leaning intellects of the 20th century and still touts its pacifist roots.

Kerrey wasn't done pouring salt into the wounds of those who had bought into the New School "values" shtick (in some cases for upwards of $30,000 a year). An unrepentant hawk on Vietnam, Kerrey sparked fresh protests last year when he came out strongly in favor of the Iraq war. Student outrage led to another failed petition calling for Kerrey's resignation and culminated in protestors occupying the president's office, an act reminiscent of the era Kerrey spent killing people in Indochina. When spring-semester finals rolled around, this episode, too, was forgotten.

Around the time of Kerrey's Iraq war endorsement, New School part-time faculty members were moving forward with a plan to unionize. Since 2001, the New School faculty group Academics Come Together (ACT) had been working closely with the United Autoworkers of America (UAW), a union with a long history of helping "intellectual workers" organize. (Along with New School's ACT, the UAW represents workers at the Village Voice, MoMA, the National Writers Union and NYU's teaching and research assistants.) After a majority of the faculty indicated support for a union earlier this year, ACT-UAW presented their papers to the National Labor Relations Board, the legal requirement before holding an election.

The Kerrey administration then quickly stepped in and forced a lengthy set of hearings to delay the vote. Kerrey administration lawyers argued that professors who sit on various academic boards should be classified as "managers" and thus disqualified from participating in a future union. (Another group Kerrey is attempting to exclude is professors with fewer than two years of experience at the school.) If upheld by the Labor Board, this creatively broad definition of "manager" would reduce the total number of faculty union members from 2000 to 500. The administration move was a bizarre but legal strategy to retard momentum toward a broad-based and representative union. After hearings that lasted all summer, both sides are currently awaiting the Labor Board's decision. As represented by the letter sent by Nadler, et. al., there is some concern as to how the Kerrey administration will proceed following the imminent decision.

At a November union reach-out meeting held at New School's Graduate Faculty Building, ACT-UAW supporter and New School professor Adolph Reed Jr. framed the faculty's situation within the national trend toward the corporatization of higher education. In today's university, presidents of large universities routinely earn CEO salaries, while adjunct faculty scrape by semester to semester without benefits or security. Calling the New School administration's approach to labor relations "industrial," Reed invoked the corporate structure and philosophy of Tyson Chicken and Wal-Mart. In fighting this trend, the New School struggle is one among many. But the point being made by ACT-UAW and its supporters, if it is still a point worth making, is that New School University is supposed to be different.

"It's a disappointment and a shame that the administration has been putting up obstacles and delay tactics," says Joel Schlemowitz, a filmmaking professor who has taught part-time at the university for seven years. "The faculty should be able to decide for itself, especially at the New School."

Schlemowitz points out that more than 90 percent of faculty at the New School is part-time, and cites benefits, wages and job security as pressing issues. More generally, he says, ACT-UAW will help restore dignity to part-timers, many of whom claim they are treated like disposable parts.

"We want the minimal requirements needed to serve the students," says Creative Writing part-timer Jan Clausen. "A lot of us don't even have office space."

There probably wasn't much faculty office space when the New School set up shop in a few rented classrooms in a brownstone on 23rd St. in 1919, either. But the nascent institution had more to boast about than just infrastructure. Back then, the New School had a conscience and a soul?and it was famous around the world for both. If New School trustees want to regain either one, they will throw Bob Kerrey like a live grenade and support the faculty's union drive.

As for Kerrey, he'll be okay out on the range in Nebraska with his demons. It's a fine state to retire in, with few antiwar protestors and plenty of exciting college sports programs. Should he grow bored or find memoir writing nettlesome, there will always be a place for him in the local health-club industry. Who knows? If he plays his cards right, he might even get a token Democrat slot in the next Bush administration.