POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN Before the COVID-19 pandemic absorbed everyone’s attention, brought much of the country to a halt, and pushed higher education, what continues of it, online, the higher ed community was focused on the remarkable wildcat strike of graduate student employees that began at the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC) and…
BY HANK REICHMAN City College of San Francisco (CCSF) has placed Chancellor Mark Rocha on paid administrative leave effective immediately, the college board’s president announced on Monday. Board of Trustees President Shanell Williams declined to provide a reason for the move. However, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that An internal auditor told the trustees in…
BY HANK REICHMAN Yesterday the University of Wisconsin at Madison began instruction online, a move that the great majority of colleges and universities have made or are making in response to the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic. Here’s what English professor Caroline Gottschalk Druschke told the Wisconsin State Journal about the move: “None of us are going…
BY HANK REICHMAN Confined to home by the COVID-19 pandemic, my wife and I last night were looking for entertainment and stumbled upon a 1921 silent film classic, The Blot, on Turner Classic Movies. Almost totally by chance we watched a few moments of TCM’s intro and soon were hooked. The Blot was directed by…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following call to action is being distributed by an ad hoc national faculty group, Ad Hoc Committee of Scholars 4 COLA. The Ad Hoc Committee of Scholars 4 COLA Presents: WEEK OF ACTION FOR UC STRIKERS AND PUBLIC EDUCATION EVERYWHERE! March 9-13, 2020 SUPPORT THE STRIKERS, FROM UC TO UCU!…
BY HANK REICHMAN The situation at the University of California at Santa Cruz has escalated. On Friday the university administration announced that 54 graduate students who are withholding fall grades were fired from their spring appointments. This number may in fact be as high as 80, as some students did not get dismissal letters but…
BY HANK REICHMAN The right-wing’s embrace of campus free speech has always seemed, well, more than a little hypocritical. The outrage machine kicks into high gear when invited speakers like Milo Yiannopoulos, Ann Coulter, Ben Shapiro, or Charles Murray are protested or disinvited. But what about when the speaker is someone these vocal free speech…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN In December graduate student employees at the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC) began a wildcat grading strike, refusing to submit fall quarter grades until they get a salary increase. The university administration said that as many as 12,000 students had their grades withheld. Today the strike expanded as student…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following is the text of a statement in support of the union representing non-tenure-track faculty members, or lecturers, in the University of California issued today by the Berkeley Faculty Association (BFA), which includes tenured and tenure-track professors (so-called “senate faculty”) at the University of California, Berkeley. BFA is affiliated with…