By DEBORAH MUTNICK Week 2 of the LIU Brooklyn lockout. I imagine her holed up in her office in Nassau County on Long Island, far from the Brooklyn campus she seems to be destroying, yelling at administrators to do a better job of pretending to be professors or dictating orders to a secretary sitting at…
BY TIFFANY KRAFT Guest blogger Tiffany Kraft is a former adjunct and present higher education activist and organizer with Faculty Forward Network. For all special snowflakes who aren’t on the front lines with students and contingent faculty fighting for racial and economic justice in our nation’s colleges, universities, and communities, you may want to stop…
BY DEBORAH MUTNICK Day 7 of the LIU Brooklyn faculty lockout. Those of us in the maelstrom of organizing are exhilarated and very tired. We are caught up in the nitty-gritty of producing fliers, contacting press, and participating in the actions that we call students and supporters to attend. The entire LIU Brooklyn faculty has…
BY GAIL STYGALL Guest blogger Gail Stygall is a Professor of English at the University of Washington-Seattle. This is crossposted on Daily Kos. What is a university? What is a college? Fundamentally, a university is its faculty and students. At its heart, a university’s fundamental task is for its faculty to provide an education, as they…
BY DEBORAH MUTNICK Day 3 of the LIU lockout. Labor Day. I have been locked out of Long Island University’s Brooklyn campus by an administration that makes my colleagues and me feel like poster children for the neoliberal corporatization of higher education. We have lost our health care and other benefits, our pay, and our…
BY DEBORAH MUTNICK Guest blogger Deborah Mutnick is a long-time professor at Long Island University’s Brooklyn, NY campus. As of 12:00 a.m., Saturday, September 3, my colleagues and I were locked out of our University in the midst of contract negotiations between our faculty union and management. The letter I got from the administration told…
BY GEFEN BAR-ON SANTOR Guest blogger Gefen Bar-On Santor teaches English at the University of Ottawa. I often feel in competition with the Internet as I search for materials to make my lectures more stimulating—a word many students use to describe what they want. No matter how engaging I try to become, there is still…
BY MICHAEL A. OLIVAS This is a guest post by Michael A. Olivas, the William B. Bates Distinguished Chair in Law at the University of Houston Law Center. The most recent of his fifteen books is Suing Alma Mater: Higher Education and the Courts (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013). He hosts a weekly NPR radio show,…
BY JOHANN N. NEEM Guest blogger Johann N. Neem is Professor of History at Western Washington University and a Visiting Faculty Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. At the Democratic National Convention, Bernie Sanders argued that the Democrats came together to support debt-free higher education for all students…
BY JEFF BAKER The word overload can have more than one meaning to higher education faculty. It can mean increasing class size or adding additional course sections to the faculty member’s required minimum teaching load. While many full-time faculty welcome overloads as an opportunity to increase income, they are usually a bad deal. Adjunct…