Guild Education Board Member Johny C. Taylor Jr. Short-Listed for Secretary of Labor

Johny C. Taylor Jr, President of the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), has been short-listed for the position of US Secretary of Labor. 

HEI is covering this story because Mr. Taylor is also a board member of Guild, an edtech company we have been covering since 2021. Moving forward, we are also interested in following any decisions he could make affecting labor in higher education. American labor itself is under attack as Amazon and SpaceX are challenging the constitutionality of the National Labor Relations Board.

According to his bio at SHRM, Johny C. Taylor Jr. has held senior and chief executive roles at IAC/InteractiveCorp, Viacom's Paramount Pictures, Blockbuster Entertainment Group, the McGuireWoods law firm, and Compass Group USA. Most recently, Mr. Taylor was President and Chief Executive Officer of the Thurgood Marshall College Fund. He previously served on the White House American Workforce Policy Advisory Board and as chairman of the President's Advisory Board on Historically Black Colleges and Universities during the Trump Administration.

An African American man whose salary at SHRM is greater than $1.3 million a year, Taylor has been a proponent of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in the workplace. But as the chief executive of SHRM, he would be an opponent of unions.

Guild, formerly known as Guild Education, works for Fortune 500 companies like Walmart, Disney, JP Morgan Chase, and Chipotle to train and retrain workers as the workforce is systematically reduced through technology. Guild has been in financial decline after being lauded by Forbes and other business media.

If he is selected for the Department of Labor or any other government post, we'll have to see if Mr. Taylor's work at SHRM, Guild, or his other board seats affects management decisions, especially if the organization he manages is forced to downsize.  

Questioning the Higher Education Establishment

"So that's how it is," sighed Yakov. "Behind the world lies another world." Bernard Malamud

The Higher Education Inquirer has published a number of articles about how US higher education works and the institutions, organizations, and individuals it serves. 

We have written about US higher education in a number of ways, discussing the history, economics, and underlying ideologies (e.g. neoliberalism, white supremacy) and theories making it what it is--an industry that reinforces a larger (and environmentally unsustainable) economic system and an industry that produces too many unneeded credentials--and soul crushing student loan debt. 

We have listed the myths that US higher education perpetuates and the methods it uses to disseminate them. We have examined a number of higher education institutions and their categories (including university hospitals, state universities, private colleges, community colleges, and online robocolleges). We have investigated several businesses associated with higher education, some nefarious, many profit driven, and a few (like TuitionFit and College Viability App) driven by integrity and values. And we have followed the struggle of labor and consumers. HEI has even created an outline for a People's History of US Higher Education.

But we haven't examined higher education as part of the establishment. Like the establishment that students of the 1960s talked about as something not to trust. The trustees, endowment managers, trustees, foundation presidents, accreditors, bankers, bond raters, CEOs and CFOs who make the decisions that affect how higher ed operates and who at the same time work to make consumers, workers, and activists invisible. 

To say we cannot trust US higher education administrators and business leaders may sound passe, or something that only extremists of the Left or Right might say, but it isn't, and more folks are seeing that. 

Examining US higher education needs to be assessed more deeply (like Craig Steven Wilder, Davarian Baldwin, and Gary Roth have done) and more comprehensively (like Marc Bousquet), and it needs to be explained to the People. It's something few have endeavored, because it isn't profitable, not even for tenure in some cases. 

Without our own sustainable business model, the Higher Education Inquirer will continue writing (and prompt others to write) stories significant to workers and consumers, the folks who deserve to be enlightened and who deserve to tell their stories. 

And as long as we can, the Higher Education Inquirer will ask the Establishment for answers that only they know, something few others are willing to do. 

Ramogi Huma, Bringing Justice to Big-Time College Sports (ASU Humanities Institute)

Related links:

National College Players Association (NCPA)

What we know and what we don't about a historic settlement to pay college athletes (Becky Sullivan, NPR).