The radical Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) led the effort resulting in a recent requirement by Chicago officials that large stores such as Wal-Mart pay new employees at least $10 an hour. ACORN, closely allied with public-sector unions, and whose goals align with those of the left wing of the Democratic Party, mobilizes urban dwellers nationwide to demand such laws as well as unlimited welfare benefits and similar measures. In an op ed titled “Acorn Squash” in The Wall Street Journal, Steven Malanga tells of the ill effects of ACORN’s agenda: harming the poor by forcing businesses to eliminate low-wage positions, narrowing shopping choices and raising prices for inner-city residents, swelling the numbers of welfare recipients so as to strain local budgets. Malanga also mentions in passing that ACORN has joined with Wayne State University’s publicly funded labor-studies program to create a national living-wage center to aid in coordinating campaigns. Such programs, which make use of student “interns,” are ensconced on scores of campuses across the country. Of course the labor-studies proponents on campuses will invoke “academic freedom” to obscure their abandonment of content-rich standards and scientifically detached scholarship in favor of politically loaded agendas and legislative advocacy. Such an agenda – organized by the left or right – suborns the mission of universities, which is to impart knowledge and culture. Leftist academics have, in effect, made this activism part of campuses’ institutional mission. Too few parents and taxpayers, or public officials, know about this hijacking of mission, for which campuses should be held to account by the nation’s higher education governing boards. Trustees should take a stand: They should either de-fund pseudo-educational programs (such as labor studies) used to push partisan political outcomes or come out in the open for such “studies” by amending colleges’ mission statements to correct the dissonance between actual (pseudo-educational) course offerings and the disinterested education campuses now falsely profess to deliver. Such “truth-in-advertising” would at least give the public a chance to weigh in on whether it wishes to subsidize activist, union-dominated “education.”