The Strike at the University of California

BY MICHAEL MERANZE The strike continues with no end in sight. Although there have been tentative agreements concerning post-docs and academic researchers, in the academic student employee (ASE) and student researcher units, the parties appear to remain well apart on the fundamental economic issues. This distance is most easily seen in the ASE category: although…

CUCFA Statement on Possible Strike by UC Student Employees

BY THE COUNCIL OF UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA FACULTY ASSOCIATIONS (CUCFA) The following statement was released on October 30.  Graduate students, postdocs, and other academic student employees are essential to the teaching and research mission of the University of California, especially as undergraduate enrollments rise. Given the escalating costs of living in California, 48,000 people in…

Newfield on Newsom

BY HANK REICHMAN The indispensable Chris Newfield has a new post up at his blog Remaking the University, “Newsom’s *Big Funding* Budget for UC and CSU is Flat.”  In it he picks apart the false promises in California governor Gavin Newsom’s initial budget proposal for higher education, although the focus is mostly on the University…

How We Got Here: California Edition

BY HANK REICHMAN “The University of California could not function without the labor of lecturers.  In a given year, UC employs more than 6,000 of these educators, who are hired on short-term contracts and lack the stability of tenure.  All told, they teach roughly a third of courses offered across the system.  Since 2011, the…

small red light on a metal base with the word DANGER above it

Academic Freedom: Dangers and Distractions

POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN On November 1, Brian Soucek, Professor of Law and Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of California at Davis, spoke as part of the UC Davis Forums on the Public University and the Social Good on “Academic Freedom: Dangers and Distractions.”  Professor Soucek is the outgoing chair of the University of California’s…

How to Institutionalize Academic Freedom

BY JOHN K. WILSON Tom Ginsburg, a professor at the University of Chicago, proposes institutionalizing academic freedom in an opinion essay for the Chronicle of Higher Education this past week: “Colleges must institutionalize the protection of academic freedom by devoting resources to training, establishing standards, and hearing complaints when norms are threatened.” According to Ginsburg,…