ILR at 80: An Audacious Idea, Humble Beginnings, Worldwide Legacy
In the 1930s, New York State Assembly Member Irving Ives from rural Chenango County started advocating for a first-of-its-kind college that would ease a growing number of labor-management standoffs.
His vision received early support from Cornell President Edmund Ezra Day, politically savvy Queens lawyer William Groat and others, as tensions brought production to a halt in many factories across New York state and the nation.
The concept for a land-grant institution where men and women would learn to balance equity for workers and efficiency for business gained traction in the New York State Legislature, which passed a law in 1944 creating the school. Eighty years ago this fall, a core faculty of two – Jean McKelvey and Morris Neufeld, fresh off four years of military duty in Italy – cobbled together a curriculum in a matter of hours and welcomed the first class to the New York State School of Industrial and Labor Relations.
Today, nearly 17,000 living alumni have ILR degrees that equip them to advance the school’s mandate – to generate and share workplace knowledge, manage and resolve conflict, establish best practices and inform government policy. Additionally, hundreds of thousands of people from New York state, the U.S. and around the world have been trained since 1945 through ILR’s public outreach programs on how to improve the workplace through applied research, best practices and community partnerships.
“From its origins addressing the great industrial relations conflicts of the 1940s to its modern role as a world-leading school studying labor, management and the economy, ILR has stayed true to its mission of providing outstanding education to its students, research that addresses cutting edge issues in the world of work, and outreach serving unions, employers, and the public of New York State and the nation,” said Alexander Colvin, Ph.D. ’99, ILR’s Kenneth F. Kahn ’69 Dean and Martin F. Scheinman ’75, M.S. ’76, Professor of Conflict Resolution.
A school of 1,025 undergraduates and 175 graduate students within a university of nearly 27,000 students, and an academic and Outreach faculty of more than 150 experts, ILR has had an outsized impact on unions, corporations, governments and nonprofit organizations in New York state and around the world. Scrappy and entrepreneurial from its earliest days, ILR applies its research and innovative practices to a span of topics, from artificial intelligence in the workplace to home health care.
While its research, teaching and outreach mission remains consistent, ILR continually adapts to the rapidly shifting world of work priorities.
