One Adjunct’s Reflection on the 11th International Conference of the Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor (COCAL) By Chris Cruz-Boone In a candid moment at the COCAL XI debriefing, organizers admitted that the high cost of travel to the New York City location limited conference access for many adjuncts living on fixed incomes. I was fortunate…
Below is a Sept. 2 letter (read the full letter with footnotes here) from Katherine M. Franke, the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law at Columbia University, to UIUC Chancellor Phyllis Wise. Dear Dr. Wise: Last June several University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign faculty invited me to your campus as part of The Cultures of…
By Joe Berry and Helena Worthen Over 200 people attended the eleventh conference of COCAL (Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor) which took place August 4-6 at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, part of the City University of New York (CUNY) in New York City. The focus was on contingency–the damage it does to faculty,…
By Bill Ayers In mid-August the University of Illinois withdrew its appointment of Steven Salaita, formerly an English professor at Virginia Tech, as a tenured associate professorship at UIUC. Having cut his ties in Virginia (resignation from a tenured job, his spouse quitting her job, and the couple renting a house) Salaita was informed that…
The following letter by Michael Rothberg originally appeared on his website. Rothberg is the Head of the Department of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Director of the Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies. He is the author of Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation (2000) and Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in…
By Nicholas Burbules, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign I want to thank Mr. Wilson for sending us his posting on “Shared Governance and the Salaita Case” and inviting us to respond. Joyce Tolliver and I do call for an honest debate in our editorial. We fully accept that there are serious, principled positions on different…
The following is a statement by the Illinois AAUP Committee A on the case of Steven Salaita at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: The Illinois Conference Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure of the American Association of University Professors supports the honoring of the appointment of Steven G. Salaita in the American Indian…
Guest blogger Phyllis Wentworth is an Associate Professor in the department of Humanities and Social Sciences at Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston, MA. In a couple of weeks, my 18 year old son will be headed off to his first year of college. Ever the optimist, he tells everyone who inquires that he is…
Guest Blogger Seth Kahn is a faculty member (composition and rhetoric; critical pedagogy; qualitative research methods) at West Chester University of PA. He’s a peace activist and serves in several positions for the PASSHE schools’ faculty union (APSCUF). If you’re a Facebook friend or in my G+ network, you’ve seen me post a link to this petition calling for…
Sean Kennedy is a doctoral student at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. The PSC is in the midst of negotiating a new contract with CUNY. Kennedy originally wrote and posted this letter in mid-May. It now has nearly 200 signatories. Dear Barbara— I write as a union member and CUNY contingent…