Michael Patrick Leahy
Breitbart.com
Big Government
12 Aug 2012
UCLA continues to back away from National Dream University,the partnership announced last week by the UCLA Center for Labor Research and Education and the National Labor College that will offer college courses to illegal aliens around the country.
The partnership is the brain child of two left wing activists, Kent Wong, Director of the UCLA Center for Labor Research and Education, and his superior, Professor Chris Tilly, Director of the UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment (IRLE). Together, Wong and Tilly have turned the UCLA Center for Labor Research and Education into a virtually independent rogue operation that engages in partisan political advocacy with little institutional control provided by UCLA…
…The majority of the funding for the IRLE’s UCLA Center for Labor Research and Education–$2.6 million in the academic year 2010-2011–comes from a handful of unions and left wing think tanks, according to the 2010-2011 Annual Report of UCLA’s Institute for Research on Labor and Employment.
The Ford Foundation was the largest single donor, providing $1.2 million. The George Soros funded Open Society Institute donated $176, 443. Other significant donors included the California Construction Industry Labor Management Cooperation Trust ($450, 000), the United Auto Workers ($156,500), the United Way of Greater Los Angeles, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, the left wing Tides Advocacy Fund, and the City of Los Angeles (all gave approximately $50,000 each). The Liberty Hill Foundation, New World Foundation, the Surdna Foundation, and SEIU all donated between $10,000 and $30,000.
These donations from left wing organizations and unions have enabled the IRLE to act with little concern for directives from UCLA. This independence appears to have been abused with National Dream University, which has set commitment to a left wing pro-union political ideology as a condition for acceptance to its program…
…Both Tilly and Wong have long records of left wing political activism. Wong, a graduate of the unaccredited People’s College of Law, served as an attorney for the Los Angeles area SEIU until he was named head of the Center in 1991.
Tilly, the son of famed Columbia University sociologist Charles Tilly, has an equally long record. A 1976 graduate of Harvard, his web site states that “[b]efore becoming an academic, he spent eight years doing community and labor organizing.” After earning a Ph.D. in Urban Economics at MIT in 1989, Tilly launched his academic career at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell where he focused on “social justice,” redistributionism, and anti-capitalist studies…
Read the entire article at Big Government.
