President
AFSCME
2020
My life has not changed considerably after attending HTUP.
What impact has the HTUP had on your life/career?
HTUP has made it so I respect ivy league institutions even less, seeing first hand that they are bastions of capital-L Liberalism and ostrich-style head-in-the-sand electoral politics. Very little of the coursework at HTUP addressed anything about building class consciousness, addressing the material conditions of workers, or advancing radical change for the working class. Instead, they focused on the promotion of Democrat politicians and policies, which are woefully unprepared to address the needs of the working class in this nation. It appeared to me that Harvard and the majority of staff and professors attached to HTUP have been infected by malaise as they’ve improved their own station in life, and as such are too afraid to call for the radical changes needed to improve the lives of the working class. Instead, they want to focus on incrementalism and electoral solutions that have almost no chance of instituting any systemic change.
The labor movement was socialist. Harvard is staunchly capitalist. And this is the problem with HTUP. Without socialist politics, the working class will continue to wither and die.
Do you have an interesting/funny story of when you attended the program?
At some of the mixers I met previous HTUP instructors who were not invited back because their political views were viewed as too extreme by director Sharon Block, despite their views being more closely aligned with historical labor movements than the politics served by the current HTUP leadership. It was funny in an ironic sense, though the overall emotion was despair for the future of the labor movement.
CONTACT INFORMATION
Anchorage, AK, United States, 99501
brandon.fifer@gmail.com