Dean Susan J. Schurman

Dean Schurman joined SMLR in 2007 after serving, since 1997, as president of the National Labor College, which she founded. This fully accredited college is one of the few institutions of higher education in the world founded and sponsored by a labor movement (the A.F.L.-C.I.O.).

During her tenure at the National Labor College, Dean Schurman secured a $1 million grant from the Kellogg Foundation to create a system of partnerships among the NLC, community colleges, and apprentice programs so that workers would not encounter obstacles in their pursuit of higher education. She originated one of the most extensive distance-education degree programs in the nation.

Dean Schurman serves as president of the International Federation of Workers' Education Associations (IFWEA), which brings together national and international trade unions, workers' education associations, NGOs and foundations engaged in the provision of adult education opportunities for workers and the communities in which they live throughout the world. Dean Schurman is chair of the Academic and Student Services Committee of the Board of Trustees at Morris Brown College, a historically black college in Atlanta. She is also a member of the Labor Working Group of Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s Strategic Dialogue With Civil Society. 

A bus driver early in her career, Dean Schurman became the head of her local union and director of driver training. She subsequently gained her doctoral degree in higher, adult, and continuing education from the University of Michigan. Dean Schurman gives special attention to the adult non-traditional students and, in her work with Rutgers' Division of Continuous Education, to the ways in which Rutgers may better serve students whose schedules allow them little time to come to campus.

In 2012, Dean Schurman earned high praise from both sides for mediating the merger of the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, Hollywood’s two largest actors unions. She has also received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the United Association of Labor Education and earned an election to the Board of Directors of the Labor and Employment Research Association.

For additional profiles of Dean Susan J. Schurman, please read the February 2012 article in the L.A. Times and the February 2008 issue of Rutgers Focus.