Kheel Center Digital Collections Guide: ILR School Digital Collections

The Kheel Center is the main repository for documents pertaining to the history of the ILR School, founded in 1945 as the New York State School of Industrial and Labor Relations. These digital collections pertaining to the history of the ILR School include Milton Konvitz American Ideals Lectures; For Our Information ILR faculty publication; ILR Memory Book Series; The ILR School at Fifty: Voices of the Faculty, Alumni and Friends; Vernon M. Briggs Jr. Collection; and Rights, Liberties, and Ideals: The Contributions of Milton R. Konvitz.

Milton Konvitz American Ideals Lectures, 1973 - Milton Konvitz was a professor in Cornell's Law School and a founding faculty member of the ILR School from 1946 until his retirement in 1973. He was an authority on constitutional and labor law and civil and human rights. He was renowned for teaching the American Ideals class at ILR, blending philosophy and law. Ruth Bader, later Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, was one of the many students who attended his class.

For Our Information, 1948-1966 - For Our Information is one of early news bulletins issued by the ILR School at Cornell University. Published bi-weekly, it includes information on faculty, students, staff, alumni, resident teaching, extension programs, conferences, and publications.

ILR Memory Book Series – Memory books have been used as a way for students, colleagues, and friends to post their recollections of distinguished faculty and staff members. The occasion for the memory book may be the person's passing or their retirement from active service to the school. This series collects the comments left by visitors in these memory books.

The ILR School at Fifty: Voices of the Faculty, Alumni and Friends - This collection of reflections on the first fifty years of the ILR School was compiled by Robert B. McKersie, J. Gormly Miller, Robert L. Aronson, and Robert R. Julian, and edited by Elaine Gruenfeld Goldberg. It was hoped the reflections in this book would kindle alumni memories of the school and stimulate interest on the part of future generations of "ILRies".

Vernon M. Briggs Jr. Collection - Professor Vernon M. Briggs Jr. is a member of the faculty of the ILR School; he specializes in human resource economics and public policy. Over the years Professor Briggs' research has embraced such subjects as minority participation in apprenticeship training, southern rural labor market analysis, direct job creation strategies, Chicano employment issues, and immigration policy and the American labor force. In addition to the extensive publications of his research, he has served as a member of the National Council on Employment Policy as well as on the Board of Directors of the Corporation for Public and Private Ventures (Philadelphia) and the Center for Immigration Studies (Washington D.C.). He has also served on the editorial boards of such professional journals as the Industrial and Labor Relations Review, the Journal of Human Resources, The Texas Business Review, and the Journal of Economic Issues.

Rights, Liberties, and Ideals: The Contributions of Milton R. Konvitz by David J. Danelski, Fred B. Rothman and Co., Littleton, Colorado 1983 - Milton Konvitz embodied the spirit of Cornell University. An authority on civil and human rights and constitutional and labor law, he served on the Cornell faculty for 27 years, holding dual appointments at the Law School and the ILR School. Konvitz immigrated to the U.S. from Safed, Palestine (now Israel) in 1915. He received a bachelor's degree in 1929 and a law degree in 1930, both from New York University, and a Ph.D. in philosophy from Cornell in 1933. He spent three years at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund as an assistant general counsel to Thurgood Marshall and taught at NYU and the New School for Social Research before accepting a professorship at the newly created ILR School. Active as a scholar and writer until his death, his books and articles on American constitutional law won him wide recognition and have been cited in U.S. Supreme Court opinions.