After 32 years as a professor at ɫƵ, Dreier will return in 2026 as an adjunct—to teach his first-ever class on poverty and inequality and take one more swing at Campaign Semester
Every spring, the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy hands out student awards for community service—and this year the department named a new award after Professor Peter Dreier, who retired in June after 32 years at Occidental. “They wanted to call it the Troublemaker Award,” he says. “I said, ‘Call it the Public Service and Community Organizing Award or something like that.’” (Ultimately, the Peter Dreier Community Organizing and Public Service Award was presented to Emma Galbraith ’25 on April 30.)
“I’ve always believed—and this is what I’ve taught in my courses—that to be an effective change-maker you have to have an inside and an outside strategy,” Dreier explains. “You have to have people organizing on the outside and causing ‘good trouble,’ like John Lewis said. And then you have to have people on the inside who can be your brokers within the government to turn ideas into policy, like Lewis became when he was elected to Congress; or Bernie Sanders, or Pramila Jayapal, or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who were all activists before running for office. And I was one of those ‘insiders’ for about eight years when I was a deputy to the mayor in Boston. But you can only be effective if there’s a pressure group on the outside, influencing the political environment.”
In 1992, Dreier interviewed with Occidental for the newly endowed position of the E.P. Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics—whose benefactor, Norton Clapp, was CEO of the Weyerhaeuser Company, a major lumber and timber provider and Fortune 500 company based in Seattle. (The chair is named for Clapp’s father, who was a doctor in Pasadena.) “The only condition that Mr. Clapp had for the position was that it had to be somebody who had practical experience in politics as well as a Ph.D. and was an academic,” Dreier recalls. “After I got the job, I flew to Seattle to spend a few hours with him, along with President John Slaughter.”
Dreier’s mandate was to start a public policy program inside the Politics Department, which took root and grew into the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy (UEP). “At the time it was just me, so I hired a lot of adjuncts,” he says. One such person was historian and author Richard Rothstein, who later published a best-selling book about racism titled The Color of Law (2017). “He was an amazing teacher. I was lucky that L.A. has so many incredible people you can draw on to teach.”
In 1997, Dreier lured Bob Gottlieb away from UCLA to become the Henry R. Luce Professor of Urban and Environmental Studies, “so now I had a full-time UEP colleague,” Dreier says. In 2005, the College hired Martha Matsuoka ’83 (now executive director of the Urban and Environmental Policy Institute), and today there are six UEP faculty members (including the most recent addition, Instructor Madeline Wander ’08, a UEP major at ɫƵ and Ph.D. graduate of UCLA). “The people we’ve hired in the department have this combination of academic training and a commitment to public service.”
As a student at Syracuse University, Dreier majored in journalism and sociology, graduating in 1970. He took Journalism 101 from Roland Wolseley. At the time, most students didn’t know that Wolseley had been a pacifist and McCarthy-era blacklist victim. “He taught us that journalists should pursue the truth and be objective and even-handed, but it doesn’t mean we give up our rights to engage in the world,” Dreier says. “That sounds silly now, but it was heresy back then.”
Prior to joining the ɫƵ faculty, Dreier had worked as a newspaper reporter, a community organizer, a professor at Tufts University, and as deputy for eight years under Boston Mayor Ray Flynn. Over the course of his ɫƵ career, he taught three primary courses: Intro to American Politics and Policy, Community Organizing and Leadership, and Urban Politics and Policy. He also taught Movements for Social Justice in the Politics Department and a course titled Work and Labor in America. In the late 1990s, he taught a first-year writing seminar about sweatshops, which prompted a student-led campaign to sell sweatshop-free clothing in the ɫƵ Bookstore.
“I still get emails from students who were in my classes,” Dreier says. “One of them, who’s now a union organizer in New York, said ‘I never would have been involved in the labor movement if I hadn’t taken your freshman seminar.’ Those are the things you live for.” Many of his former students have gone to work as community and union organizers, public interest lawyers, researchers for activist organizations, environmental and public health advocates, and similar careers.
In 2004, Dreier started a summer program to provide students with stipends and campus housing to work full-time with community-based nonprofit groups that address the housing crisis. In the last decade, Matsuoka has expanded the program to include groups that focus on public health, environmental justice, food, and immigrant rights.
Dreier suggests that even though colleges like Occidental are considered private institutions, they couldn’t exist without government funding. “About 20 percent of our students are on federal Pell Grants and other government financial aid. Faculty members get government grants to do research. The College borrows money to construct new buildings with government support.” As a result, Dreier says, “We’re a quasi-public institution and we owe it to the broader public to serve public needs. That means that the work we do ought to be about what’s going on in society.”
In 2018, Dreier co-authored a study titled Working for the Mouse: A Survey of Disneyland Resort Employees, that resulted in helping Disneyland workers get better contracts and led to a grassroots campaign to win a living wage law in Anaheim. Several other of his studies produced similar outcomes for food-insecure University of California employees and Kroger grocery workers. “I’ve tried to use my academic skills for a public purpose and for social justice,” Dreier says.
Dreier was co-chair of the 2015 campaign to adopt a minimum wage in Pasadena and an architect of a successful ballot measure campaign in 2022 to adopt a “mansion tax” in Los Angeles, which last year alone raised $400 million for affordable housing. He serves on the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy board of directors and on Pasadena’s Rental Housing Board, which oversees the city’s new rent control law.
Ever the journalist, Dreier has published more 1,000 articles in newspapers and magazines and an additional 100 or so in academic journals. The author of eight books (the most recent of which, Baseball Rebels and Major League Rebels, were published in 2022), he’s currently finishing up a fourth edition of Place Matters: Metropolitics for the Twenty-first Century (last revised in 2014). His latest research combines two of his favorite topics— about professional baseball players who became elected officials. “I don’t know if that’ll be a book or not,” he says, “but it’s been a lot of fun.
“America’s celebrity culture—actors, singers, and athletes using their fame to run for office—is nothing new,” Dreier notes. In his initial research, he found over 100 baseball players who won public office after their time on the diamond—a wide spectrum of mayors, city council members, school board officials, state legislators, and county sheriffs.
A handful of them reached the federal level, including southpaw Wilmer "Vinegar Ben" Mizell, who served three terms in the U.S. House of Representatives representing North Carolina, and right-handed hurler Jim Bunning, who served six terms in Congress and 12 years in the Senate representing Kentucky.
“The players who ran for office include both liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, but most of those who won elections were average players, not big stars,” Dreier notes. Most of the nine Baseball Hall of Famers who ran for office, including Honus Wagner and Ernie Banks, actually lost their campaigns. One of them was Adrian Constantine “Cap” Anson. “He was a great player and manager for the Chicago White Stockings in the 1890s but also the leader of the effort to ban African Americans from the major leagues, which didn’t end until Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947.” Anson briefly served as city clerk of Chicago before an unsuccessful bid for Cook County sheriff in 1906.
After a semester away from the classroom, Dreier will be back on campus next year to teach two classes close to his heart. “As a freshman at Syracuse, I took a course about poverty with Michael Sawyer, an inspiring political science professor. I’m going to teach a class titled Poverty and Inequality next spring, coming full circle.”
Why now? “Poverty is a persistent problem. A lot of our students come from low-income backgrounds,” Dreier explained. “Among all the wealthy countries in the world, we have the highest poverty rate and the most inequality. I think that’s a foundational, fundamental problem about our society and we have to come to grips with it.”
Times have changed over the last half-century, he adds, when “the poor were considered the unemployed and the marginal. Now, most adults that are poor are working—and that’s a broken promise of America. The class will focus on the causes, consequences, and solutions—not just how bad poverty is, but what we can do about it.”
In addition, in fall 2026 Dreier will co-teach (with Politics Professor Regina Freer) the 10th iteration of Campaign Semester, the signature ɫƵ program they started in 2008 that offers students the opportunity to immerse themselves in a political campaign in a battleground state, earning a full semester of class credit for their time in the field and then in a seminar back on campus. “I think we’re going to get a big turnout,” he predicts. “The 2026 midterm election will be a real test about the health of our democracy.”
“A lot of the work that goes into Campaign Semester is recruiting the students, helping them identify what campaigns they want to work on, and then using our connections to help them find placements,” he adds. “It’s a lot of work, but it’s a labor of love.”
After Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne published a extolling the virtues of Campaign Semester in May 2024, Dreier fielded calls from academicians all over the country as well as the president of a foundation devoted to civic engagement. Consequently, “I might spend part of the next year trying to get other colleges and universities to do some version of Campaign Semester,” he says. “It would be great if thousands, even tens of thousands, of students around the country had this kind of opportunity to get their hands dirty in the real world of politics.”
Dreier has often said that his goal is to train students to become “practical idealists.” One of his role models was nationally renowned author, activist, and socialist Michael Harrington, whose 1962 best-seller, The Other America, inspired the war on poverty. “The words socialism or capitalism don’t appear in the book because it was still the Cold War and he wanted the book to be widely read,” Dreier says. “I was 15 years old when I heard him speak at my synagogue. My parents told me that he was a socialist—and I agreed with everything he said. So, I told my parents, ‘I guess I’m a socialist, too.’”
In Harrington’s 1988 memoir The Long Distance Runner—written as he was battling cancer—“He basically said, if you’re going to be for social change, you have to be in it for the long haul—that in order to be an effective activist, you have to be a long distance runner,” Dreier says. “But now, when I talk about what it means to be an activist, I say it differently. You have to be a relay racer. You have to hand off the baton. What I love about ɫƵ is that there's a lot of students who participated in Campaign Semester and other courses who have mentored other ɫƵ students. So, I see myself as handing off the baton.”
Sunari Weaver-Anderson ’24: It’s hard to overstate the influence Professor Peter Dreier has had on my academic and professional trajectory. I knew Occidental was the place for me when I discovered Campaign Semester—a program that allows students to work full-time on a swing-state campaign. I was sold on an ɫƵ education upon learning that hands-on engagement in social justice wasn’t the exception, but the norm in departments like Politics and Urban and Environmental Policy. Little did I know at the time, as an applicant, that this ethos was largely pioneered by Peter Dreier.
I became one of Professor Dreier’s students in my junior year, during Campaign Semester. With his encouragement, I became the first student to spend my semester on a union-sponsored electoral campaign, canvassing with UNITE HERE members in Philadelphia for pro-union candidates. It’s this experience that I credit with finding my place in the labor movement, and it continues to drive my work in organizing and research to this day.
In Professor Dreier’s classes, there were no “easy A’s:” He’s known for challenging students in discussions. But by the end of my ɫƵ education, I began to recognize the value of being held to a higher standard. When we student workers began to unionize ourselves, his classes weren’t just informative—they were imperative. His Community Organizing course became a training ground for our union campaign and other student-led actions on campus. As students, we took the week’s readings and brought them to our weekend organizing meetings, attempting to replicate what we’d learned in class.
Perhaps most inspiring is that Peter Dreier walks the walk. Wherever there are community organizations or unions making real change in the city, chances are he’s not too far removed. Whether hopping on a call with a recent graduate to talk about career prospects, or turning a Dodgers game into an educational opportunity, Professor Dreier’s support of his students is unrelenting. While he may have retired from his tenured position, I know that his dedication to public service will continue to reach far beyond the classroom.
Thank you, Professor Dreier. I plan to carry your lessons with me for the rest of my life. I hope that in all of us former students, you see your teachings alive and well.
A political science major and Obama Scholar at ɫƵ, Sunari Weaver-Anderson ’24 is a strategic researcher and organizer in labor, political, community, and student spaces.
