In the mid-1970s, when I was young and even more ignorant of the ways of the world than I am today, I learned that it was becoming necessary to have completed an MFA to get a paid position in the arts world. This struck me as ridiculous, a sheepskin standing in for actual work created.…

Please do this tonight! The bill that would stabilize State funding for CUNY and SUNY is on Governor Cuomo’s desk right now. The signals we have received from Albany are that he will NOT sign it. The Governor has until December 11–eight days from now-to act, but he could act on the bill any day…

From a press release from the Professional Staff Congress of the City University of New York: Bill Would Improve Quality of Public Higher Education New York—The State Assembly delivered to Governor Cuomo today legislation that overwhelmingly passed the Assembly and Senate to protect educational quality at New York’s two public university systems, the City University…

The following is a Professional Staff Congress press release: Bill Passed with Huge Bipartisan Vote Would Improve Quality of Public Higher Education Albany—More than 35,000 students are urging Governor Cuomo to sign legislation to protect educational quality at New York’s two public university systems, the City University of New York (CUNY) and the State University…

The closest I’ve been to Bamako in Mali is a truckstop town called San, about 200 miles to the east. I was travelling to Bobo-Dioulasso after a trip on the Niger River from Gao to Mopti just a couple of months more than twenty-six years ago. My first attempt to visit Mali, three years earlier,…

Press Release from the Professional Staff Congress: New York—Hundreds of faculty and staff from the City University of New York called on the Governor tonight to end his refusal to invest adequately in quality education for CUNY students and a fair contract for CUNY workers who have been without a contract for five years. The…

The current turmoil on a few college campuses has, of course, led many of us to generalize, to maintain that there’s a new student radicalism in the air, that the chickens of neoliberal disruption are coming home to roost, that coddled and ‘trigger warned’ youths are finally seeing the ‘real’ world and are retreating to…

I’ve been watching with dismay the coverage of the incident yesterday where University of Missouri professor Melissa Click asked, “Who wants to help me get this reporter out of here? I need some muscle over here.” To me, she seems to have moved from supporting the student protesters (which I applaud) who had created a tent…