British scholar Sara Ahmed writes in The New Inquiry (with a slightly earlier and very little different version on her own blog, feministkilljoys) an essay entitled “Against Students.” She starts out: What do I mean by “against students”? By using this expression I am trying to describe a series of speech acts which consistently position…
Earlier this month a student at Crafton Hills College, a community college in the Los Angeles area, and her parents urged the institution to ban several graphic novels. They complained about four works: Fun Home, by Alison Bechdel; YY: The Last Man, Vol. 1, by Brian Vaughan; The Sandman, Vol. 2: The Doll’s House, by…
What follows is a news release disseminated this week by the Department of Labor. _________________________ Federal enforcement effort finds more than 3,000 Gulf Coast workers owed nearly $3.5 million in back wages by staffing agencies. US Labor Department determines agencies illegally paid wages as per diem reimbursement. NEW ORLEANS — Six Gulf Coast staffing agencies have…
Education, Inc., is a forthcoming documentary film about how money and politics are changing our schools. It will premiere on Friday, August 14, 2015. Here is the promotional description from the website for the documentary: “American public education is in controversy. As public schools across the country struggle for funding, complicated by the impact of…
The AAUP focuses on academic freedom issues within the United States. Scholars at Risk, an organization based at New York University, focuses on attacks on academic freedom elsewhere in the world—most of which involve actual physical attacks. According to Free to Think, a new report issued by Scholars at Risk as part of its Academic…
The News-Gazette of Champaign, Illinois published yesterday in its Sunday edition an op-ed I wrote on my interpretation of the American Association of University Professors censure of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The censure resulted from the summary dismissal of Associate Professor Steven Salaita for his tweets on the war in Gaza last summer. The paper supplied the…
The two great parts of American higher education are the students and the faculty. The administrators are only around to facilitate the learning of the former and the teaching and research of the latter. Or that’s the way we imagine it. Over the past fifty years, the students have become customers instead of learners and…
Majority Rules, the reborn blog of the New Faculty Majority, has a call for contributors: We’re looking for contributions from contingent faculty and allies across the country and anywhere else contingency is a problem for faculty, covering a large number of issues and topics that will help us make and enforce those new rules. This…
Some time ago, the authors of several posts to this blog, including me, took issue with several reports that asserted either that a very large percentage of adjunct faculty are quite satisfied with the conditions of their employment or, at the opposite extreme, that the main cause of their economic exploitation has been their own…
