‘It took a long time, and that’s part of what I want to teach’: Professor Peter Dreier on his career of advocacy and service

After 32 years at Occidental, E.P. Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics and Professor of Urban & Environmental Policy Peter Dreier boasts a unique accomplishment: the creation of three institutions. These include the academic Urban & Environmental Policy Department (UEP), the research- and internship-based Urban & Environmental Policy Institute (UEPI) and the Campaign Semester program.

Occidental President Tom Stritikus praised Dreier’s commitment to the connections that have been fostered through the programs he has started and to their focus on giving students real-world experience and connections.

“At [Dreier’s] celebration dinner, I joked that I am the fifth president who has worked for Peter Dreier,” Stritikus said. “It was a dinner full of people who had worked for him or alumni who were placed in jobs because of him, and he really did an incredible job connecting Oxy to the broader community.”

Dreier keeps a list of former students he has kept in touch with that spans decades and countries and includes campaign staff, labor alliance workers, lawyers and government officials. Amongst the technical information — the classes they took at Occidental, their placements in the Campaign Semester program, their comprehensive projects and work after Occidental— are their backstories and the messages they have sent to Dreier post-graduation.

“In so many ways, the legacy of these programs are the students who he has worked with over the years who are doing great work in the community, great work in politics, great work in organizing,” Stritikus said.

Dreier’s work in politics includes his extensive campaign experience, particularly in city council elections.

“My cousin was on the city council in the little city I was from in New Jersey, and I worked in his campaign,” Dreier said. “When I was a student, I worked on a campaign for a school board member.”

Dreier, passionate about labor and housing rights, said he looked to work for local candidates who supported initiatives that would improve these aspects of lives for everyday people.

“There was this guy who was on the city council who had been one of the strongest allies of tenants, Ray Flynn,” Dreier said. “I worked on his campaign, and he won by a landslide. Two years later, he decided to run for mayor.”

Dreier continued working for Flynn, knocking on doors and helping to host rallies. After his victory, he offered Dreier a job as Deputy Mayor of Housing in Boston. Dreier said that Flynn encouraged him to push boundaries and create positive change for tenants.

“He was such a popular mayor, so he had the flexibility and the popularity to try more than just civic housekeeping,” Dreier said.

Additionally, Dreier campaigned for presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Sr., who was then running to win the Democratic nomination in 1968. At the time, Dreier was a student at Syracuse University, and he was inspired to campaign for Kennedy because of his advocacy for working-class Americans.

“I went to Pennsylvania, I knocked on doors, I did grunt work,” Dreier said.

His time in the political sphere led to a connection to Occidental’s Stuart Chevalier Professor of Diplomacy & World Affairs, Ambassador Derek Shearer, whose wife was then the mayor of Santa Monica.

“I used to go to the U.S. Conference of Mayors, and I met her,” Dreier said. “I’ve known about Derek for a long time because we both wrote for The Nation Magazine and Mother Jones and places like that.”

In 1993, Shearer contacted him and encouraged him to apply for a newly endowed chair in the politics department. Occidental was looking for a professor with both academic experience and extensive practical appearance in politics, making Dreier a perfect fit.

“What [Occidental] wanted me to do was start a public policy program,” Dreier said. “A lot of students were interested in the real world of politics.”

Dreier said he began teaching courses in public policy analysis and statistics, urban politics and immigration politics. He said he also hired adjunct professors to teach additional public policy courses, and the idea for the UEP Department came from a collaboration between him and one of his colleagues, Professor Emeritus Robert Gottlieb.

“What the students were most interested in was some combination of environmental studies and urban studies,” Dreier said. “LA is the perfect place for that because there’s a lot of environmental problems — we’re among the most polluted cities in the country. But there’s also a lot of poverty, a lot of housing problems.”

Dreier’s goal with the program was to get students out of the classroom and into real experiences that could teach them important lessons about working in politics and open their eyes to possible careers within politics and activism.

“We decided early that the goal of the UEP program was to train students to be what I call practical idealists,” Dreier said. “You want to change the world, but you need tools, you need to learn. Some of these are policy tools, and some of them are political skills: how do you organize people? How do you maneuver inside a political world?”

Dreier said Occidental is one of few colleges across the country to offer a curriculum in community organizing, which he has worked in throughout his life. The curriculum is made up of two classes, one being an academic course focused on history and skill-building.

“How do you write a press release, how do you figure out who has the power or the authority to fix the problem?” Dreier said. “What institution has the authority and the responsibility to address it?”

The other is a practical course where students gain hands-on experiences collaborating with the local community.

“There’s one exercise where students knock on doors, and people tell them the things that are bothering them,” Dreier said. “There [are] lots of drugs in the local park, the foods in the local grocery stores are wilting, the milk is too old, the car prices are too high.”

Dreier helped students put organizing into action with the college’s student worker union, Rising Employees of Occidental (ROSE), which was created last year.

Emma Galbraith (senior) serves as a ROSE Bargaining Representative and said that Dreier has provided lasting support for the union since its start in the Fall 2023 semester.

“He attended our most recent bargaining session, and it was lovely to see him there,” Galbraith said. “We have been hoping that more faculty can make it to our lunchtime bargaining sessions to support us, and he’s continued to be a really consistent ally and [a] friendly and supporting presence at the sessions.”

Galbraith said Dreier’s strong knowledge of Occidental as a long-time staff member has also been tremendously helpful as the union works to make deals with Occidental staff.

“He’s been at Oxy for so long, and he knows Oxy so well,” Galbraith said. “He’s provided a lot of insight into how the college works and student movements that have happened in the past and how those succeeded or failed.”

According to Galbraith, Dreier’s connections with local union representatives have allowed ROSE students to connect with these members of the community.

“He’s like an encyclopedia of people,” Galbraith said. “He knows everybody in Los Angeles, and we’ve made a lot of friends in the union with his help.”

Dreier’s commitment to helping students gain practical organizing experience is also shown through his work starting the UEPI. Dreier and Gottlieb co-founded the institution to grant research funds to students and faculty, splitting their work between the UEPI and the academic UEP department.

“[Gottlieb] ran the research institute, and I ran the academic department,” Dreier said. “When [Gottlieb] retired about six years ago, Professor [Martha] Matsuoka became head of the institute.”

Now, the UEPI has expanded to include summer internship offerings, where students can work with partner community organizing groups in LA. The program began by offering internships focused on housing rights.

“Students work full time and then meet with me once a week to talk about their experiences and we’d read stuff about [urban and environmental issues] in LA,” Dreier said.

Dreier worked alone to fundraise for the program’s first year. After the initial push, the program was able to expand further, and additional staff members helped Dreier secure funding.

“It kept growing [because] we’d raise more money, and we started diversifying the groups and the issues for students to work on,” Dreier said. “Now students can work on housing justice, immigration issues, public health issues and food issues.”

In addition to his work bringing public policy studies to Occidental, Dreier began Occidental’s Campaign Semester in 2008. To this day, it is the only program in the nation where students can receive credit for work on a political campaign.

Dreier said the idea was born from student interest in working on Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. With a long history of working on political campaigns himself, Dreier was highly receptive to the idea.

Originally, Dreier suggested that students take a semester off to work on the campaign — something he did for Kennedy. However, he saw the opportunity to create a college-integrated program that allowed students to pursue this dream without taking time off school.

“We got it approved by the dean at the time, maybe a month after we proposed it,” Dreier said. “It was on time for the election, so we had like 30 students working all over the country that year.”

Dreier said Campaign Semester has inspired students to work in government and oftentimes provided them with connections for future jobs.

“One student is now a state legislator in Minnesota because she got the bug [for government],” Dreier said. “She first worked in the legislature and then decided she was going to run [for the legislature] herself. Others kept working on campaigns, and if their candidate wins, they often offer them a job.”

Dreier said an essential skill he aims to foster in Campaign Semester is teaching students to connect with people who they are different from or who they disagree with.

“For a lot of [students], it’s an experience of getting outside the Oxy bubble because they all have to work in swing states,” Dreier said. “They have to learn to talk to people who they don’t agree with […] and figure out how to do that and not get defensive and argue. Is there a way for them to vote for your candidate?”

Dreier hopes students who worked on losing campaigns will stay encouraged and take away practical lessons from the experience.

“Not all the groups they intern for win their campaigns,” Dreier said. “But you can learn as much from losing as you can from winning. If you’re trying to learn about how American politics works, you can learn about what they did wrong. So how do we fix that?”

Clara Wheatley-Schaller ’13, a former student of Dreier’s who now works for the labor rights organization SEIU in New York City, said Dreier’s Community Organizing and Social Movements courses opened her eyes to the labor movement, encouraging her to pursue a career in the field.

“[Dreier’s] teaching encouraged me to focus on understanding who holds power, who doesn’t and how organizing and social movements can shift that balance,” Wheatley-Schaller said. “Before taking his classes, I had no idea that supporting workers in standing up to their bosses, organizing, taking action and securing better contracts could become a career. Now, I can’t imagine doing anything else.”

Wheatley-Schaller said Dreier also provided immense insights for her senior comprehensive project, which focused on how organized labor and its allies defeated a ballot proposition designed to weaken unions in California.

“After I graduated, he suggested I write an article based on my comps topic,” Wheatley-Schaller said. “He not only helped me write the article but also connected me with editors to get it published.”

Kayla Nolan ’11, another former student of Dreier’s, said he was extremely supportive of her research studying the culture of female long-distance runners in Ethiopia. She said Dreier was her advisor for the application process to the Richter Scholarship, a national award for supply management research, which she was awarded.

“[Dreier] really helped me navigate deepening the research and making it more robust,” Nolan said. “He was an amazing advocate. He wasn’t even my major advisor, he just really took the time to mentor me.”

Nolan credits Dreier’s extensive mentorship on her research with helping her turn her research into a career. After graduating from Occidental, she worked at the non-profit Girls Gotta Run, which supports female runners in Ethiopia.

“I used that research to help build a new approach for how they worked with women and girls that was more holistic and reflected the needs that were outlined in that research,” Nolan said. “[Dreier] was really supportive the whole time.”

Outside of his work with students, Dreier enjoys watching baseball, a sport that he played as a student and remained involved in by coaching his daughter’s team. He also recently co-wrote an LA Times article with Kelly Candaele, published March 13, titled “Should the Dodgers balk at a White House invitation?” discussing whether the team should agree to meet with President Donald Trump when they travel to Washington D.C. for an upcoming game.

Dreier said he helped start two organizing groups in Pasadena — since disbanded Invest in Kids, which worked to improve public schools and Pasadenans Organizing for Progress, which pushed the city to adopt a minimum wage law. After retiring from Occidental, Dreier plans to continue his advocacy work, which includes serving on the Pasadena Rental Housing Board and on the board of the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy.

“My wife and I bought a house in Pasadena, and we have twin daughters,” Dreier said. “They went to public schools and the Pasadena schools were always in trouble one way or another, they didn’t have enough money. A lot of mostly white middle-class people were leaving to go to private school. We didn’t want to do that.”

Dreier said he worked with the group to create a tax that would benefit public schools. Recently, Dreier worked with the group United to House LA to pass a ballot measure that created a similar measure called the Mansion Tax.

“I helped to write [the measure],” Dreier said. “I got a couple of other people to work with me to write a report, and one of them was a former student who worked here, who’s much smarter than me now about how to use research for housing.”

Dreier said the bill was met with stark pushback from real estate groups, landlords, housing developers and banks. Nonetheless, the bill ultimately passed with 57% of the vote.

“I’ve worked on campaigns where we lost, or it took 10 years,” Dreier said. “If you were a student in my class and you were working on [a campaign] that started 10 years ago, you might think this will never happen, right? It took a long time, and that’s part of what I want to teach.”

The core belief Dreier aims to share with his students, as they prepare for their own careers in activism, is that the work can take years, if not decades. He hopes that students see these timeframes not as discouraging, but as a way for them to see the big picture and be motivated to take action.

“If you want to be an activist for social justice, I used to say, you can’t be a sprinter, you have to be a long-distance runner,” Dreier said. “Now I see it a little differently: you have to be a relay racer. You hand the baton to somebody else.”

Contact Diana Trutia at trutia@oxy.edu

This article was updated March 26 at 6 p.m. to reflect that Dreier worked at The Nation Magazine not The Venetian, the Rental Housing Board is called the Pasadena Rental Housing Board, Invest in Kids has since disbanded, he co-created Pasadenans Organizing for Progress and will continue to serve on the board of the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy after retiring.