Working Class

When he was 12 years old, Steve Coleman P’27 picked up The New York Times outside his mother’s Long Island home. Splashed across the front page was a photo of a man who looked like his father, John “Jack” R. Coleman, president of Haverford College from 1967 to 1977—except this man was dressed as a garbage collector, a trashcan hoisted on his shoulder.

“I was disbelieving initially,” recalls Steve Coleman, now 64 and executive director of the nonprofit Washington Parks and People in Washington, D.C. But then he realized that this is what his father had been doing on his sabbatical over the previous few months of 1973. For those who knew Jack, it made sense. “He liked to dive into things and try to walk in the shoes of others,” says Steve.

Jack Coleman turned this and other working-class experiences into the 1974 book Blue-Collar Journal: A College President’s Sabbatical, which chronicled his leave from the top spot at Haverford to jobs around America as he explored what he viewed as the troubling divide between academia and manual labor.

Part diary, part memoir, part philosophical musings on the dignity of physical work, class consciousness, and ambivalence toward time off, the book was a sensation. It garnered attention in major newspapers and national notoriety for Coleman, who died in 2016 at the age of 95. In 1976, Blue-Collar Journal was turned into a made-for-television movie, The Secret Life of John Chapman, which starred Ralph Waite, best known as the father on The Waltons.

Fifty years after the book’s publication, the legacy of Coleman’s experiment lives on in profound ways, having impacted both individuals and the Haverford educational experience. Students, including Coleman’s children, took what they considered transformative time off, following his example. Coleman also gave legitimacy—through words, but more importantly, through actions—to experiential learning and its value in the context of a liberal arts education.

“He felt we are a very divided society,” Steve Coleman says, “and that we all have so much to learn from each other.”

Undercover Boss 
Jack Coleman cited an incident that took place on May 8, 1970, when construction workers attacked peace marchers in the Wall Street area in New York City, as inspiring his journey. He wrote that he wanted to “understand more of what both sides were saying and feeling.”

“I wanted to get away from the world of words and politics and parties—the things a president does,” he explained in that 1973 Times story. “As a college president you begin to take yourself very seriously and think you have power you don’t. You forget elementary things about people. I wanted to relearn things I’d forgotten."

In the spring semester of 1973, Coleman, who also chaired the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, labored as a ditch digger in Atlanta, a dishwasher and short-order cook in Boston, and, yes, a trashman in Rockville, Md.—each interrupted after a couple of weeks by Federal Reserve meetings he had to attend. He once switched from his grimy work clothes to a suit and tie in a gas station bathroom.

To maintain authenticity, Coleman had told no one of his experiments other than his eldest son, John Coleman ’75, then a student at the College and now a retired corporate lawyer. None of his colleagues at Haverford or the Reserve knew, and neither did his ex-wife or four other children.

Jack Coleman adopted the style of undercover reportage by the likes of George Orwell, who chronicled poverty after living it firsthand in Down and Out in Paris and London (1933). The record of his experiences laid the groundwork for others, serving as a precursor to Barbara Ehrenreich’s 2001 book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America.

“[Blue-Collar Journal] was a remarkable book,” says Steve Klineberg ’61 P’86, a professor emeritus of sociology at Rice University who served on Haverford’s Board of Managers for two decades. “It really captured the two worlds he moved back and forth in. The work of a garbage collector is just as dignified and meaningful as the work of the chairman of the Board.”

Experience vs. Education
Though Coleman’s fieldwork may seem almost conventional now, it was groundbreaking at the time. “Experiential learning was in the air,” says Linda Gerstein, a professor of history who knew Coleman well, having served on the search committee that hired him in 1967 and then on the Board of Managers when he resigned in 1977 over the body’s refusal to allow full coeducation. (He was awarded an honorary degree from the College in 1980.) “In the mid-’70s, Haverford was introducing the idea that it’s valuable to do hands-on learning. We were talking about being other than academic and theoretical in the classroom. What Jack was doing was exactly that.”

Coleman’s exercise, in fact, predated the College’s Eighth Dimension (8D), an office started in 1978 to integrate experiential learning into the curricula and culture. It was an important addition to Haverford’s education dimensions, made up of natural science, quantitative analysis, social and behavioral sciences, laboratory, history, literature, and field/artistic experience, according to the College. (In 2018, 8D was renamed the Marilou Allen Office of Service and Community Collaboration in honor of the founding director of the Women’s Center and the College’s Serendipity Day Camp. Allen herself was deeply inspired by Coleman’s sabbatical and book, as she reminded him when they last saw each other at Alumni Weekend 2016.)

Coleman wrote that he found manual labor freeing and a way to escape the isolation of the “ivory tower.” He regularly urged students to experience the whole world, to cross lines of class and race and occupation. “Most students who have interrupted the long march from kindergarten to graduate school,” he wrote, “seem to get more out of college than those who go straight through in lockstep.”

It’s an idea that echoes the concept of “the invisible college,” a term that historian and Quaker scholar Rufus Jones used in his 1933 book Haverford College: A History and an Interpretation to explain the influence of learning outside books and classrooms. “Throughout its history,” Jones wrote, “the invisible college has always outrun the visible one.”

As a political science sophomore at Haverford, David Hackett ’76 was one of the students who heeded Coleman’s advice. He was eager to take time off from his education to broaden his horizons and challenge himself. When he told his parents, they were taken aback and uneasy. Coleman called them and reassured them, and Hackett spent the year in Washington, interning with a member of Congress and at the Environmental Protection Agency. “It was life-changing,” he says. The experience led him to pursue environmental law, and today he is a senior counsel at the Chicago-based firm Baker McKenzie.

Steve Coleman also took his father’s advice to heart, taking time to volunteer at the American Friends Service Committee in New York and leading a statewide effort to pass a resolution calling for a bilateral freeze on the nuclear arms race. He started out studying American history at Haverford and transferred to New York University, but eventually left school to pursue a job as a Washington lobbyist opposing the arms race.

Although Steve Coleman didn’t complete his degree at Haverford, he credits the College with helping him find his path. “Haverford is not just passing on information,” he says. “Haverford is doing something much deeper in lifting up models and possibilities of how we can live in this world.” Today, Steve Colman’s organization leads greening initiatives across Washington, D.C., while supporting marginalized communities. He says he feels that he carries on some of the work his father started.

“To use the Quaker expression,” he says, “let the light within shine out and be the change you want to be.”

Living His Values
Jack Coleman’s tenure at Haverford was a time of social unrest. But he was a students’ president, through and through, insisting he be called “Jack” and opening the President’s House for teas and classes. He also famously shut down the College for a day in 1970 to take the Haverford community, some 700 students, professors, board members, and alumni, to Washington to speak out about the Vietnam War.

His decisions were not always popular. Some faculty thought his sabbatical should have been spent on deep economic study. “Some professors thought they should get more attention,” says Joe Quinlan ’75, who briefly served as Coleman’s assistant before becoming a journalist and then producer for PBS’s MacNeil/Lehrer Report and NewsHour. Coleman, he says, preferred paying attention to the grounds crew and kitchen staff. “He knew them by their first names.”

Post-Haverford, Coleman continued to dip into the work-a-day lives of others, including as a street sweeper in New York. “He wasn’t doing it for show,” Quinlan, who lives in Manhattan, says, remembering the time he went to a cocktail party at Coleman’s apartment and met his sanitation worker buddies. “There are jobs that make the world happen—and we don’t hold up enough. [Blue-Collar Journal] opened my eyes, and they continue to be open.”

Others who knew Coleman also saw firsthand his authenticity. “Jack had empathy,” says Ghebre S. Mehreteab ’72 of West Chester, Pa., who was awarded an honorary degree from Haverford in 2007. “The word is overused. But Jack had it. It was not fake.”

That quality, Mehreteab says, allowed Coleman to move seamlessly between the worlds of academia and labor. It also reflected the way he treated students. In 1971, Mehreteab led the Black Students’ League in protesting the administration for what it argued was lack of support for Black Fords. Mehreteab remembers meeting with Coleman over the group’s demands and pointing out that the College lacked a Black house, Black counselors, and Black professors.

“He was not defensive,” says Mehreteab, who currently advises the Ford Foundation and previously ran an affordable housing nonprofit. “Others were saying, ‘What do you want? We’re not racist. We’re Quakers, after all.’ Jack seemed to get it. Jack seemed to put the burden on the College.”

After Coleman stepped down from Haverford, he continued to practice what he preached. While working on prison reform, he insisted on stints as a prison guard and even spent time incarcerated to experience living conditions firsthand. He lived on the streets of New York for 10 days one cold winter when his foundation was seeking to respond to skyrocketing homelessness, and served for years as an Auxiliary New York City Police captain and emergency medical technician, patrolling the neighborhood just below Harlem as he sought ways to tackle crime and violence. Later, he was an innkeeper in Vermont, published a newspaper, and became a justice of the peace, presiding over some of the nation’s first same-sex civil unions.

All these years later, Coleman’s deeply held belief that blue-collar work should be held up as full of dignity, just like any other work, may remain elusive, but is nevertheless a worthwhile goal. Though his father pursued many different occupations, ultimately, Steve Coleman says, he was doing the same work throughout his life: “Trying to have ideals be something you can actually live.”

— Lini S. Kadaba

This story originally ran in the fall 2024 issue of Haverford magazine. Read more.