BY HANK REICHMAN In his essential and devastating critique of the privatization of public higher education, The Great Mistake, Christopher Newfield concludes a chapter on the student debt problem with the observation that “the current financial aid system is structured to translate either flat tuition or higher tuition into higher debt.” Here’s how this works:…
BY HANK REICHMAN Non-disclosure and confidentiality agreements are much in the news these days. Most notably, the “aggressive and unconventional” use of such agreements by the Trump White House has attracted attention because, as the Washington Post pointed out, “most legal experts believe such agreements are not legally enforceable for public employees.” In this context…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN Earlier this week I posted an item about how contract negotiators for the University of California have refused to acknowledge the faculty status and academic freedom of the system’s librarians. Yesterday, the Council of University of California Faculty Associations (CUCFA) and the California Conference of the AAUP (CA-AAUP) issued the following…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The announcement this week that the University of Akron will eliminate 19 percent of its degree programs, has received considerable national publicity (see here and here). The following is the text of a statement responding to the cuts issued jointly by the Akron AAUP and the executive committee of the university’s…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN Like many academics, I am a devotee of crime fiction, especially of the noirish and hard-boiled varieties. On a plane trip earlier this summer I was enjoying a collection of stories, Jewish Noir, edited by Kenneth Wishnia (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2015), when one tale leaped out as unique. “Living Underwater,”…
ДBY HANK REICHMAN A new survey of 63,000 scientific experts across 16 federal agencies, conducted by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) in cooperation with the Center for Survey Statistics and Methodology at Iowa State University, shows that the Trump administration continues to “sideline science.” According to the survey, government scientists report iissues including “censorship…
BY HANK REICHMAN Librarians in the University of California system are represented by the American Federation of Teachers. They are currently engaged in bargaining a new contract. In the course of that process the UC-AFT proposed that the following underlined language be added to Article 1, Recognition, in the new contract: The University recognizes librarians…
BY HANK REICHMAN The following is from the Tampa Bay Times: The only mental health counselor at Florida Polytechnic University got laid off in June. She suspects she was too loud about the ways the troubled university was, in her eyes, failing its students. Her departure left some 1,400 of them with no on-campus counselor.…
BY HANK REICHMAN “The educational reform landscape is littered with theories about what’s needed to improve low-performing schools. The Finnish model. The South Korean model. More money with more restrictions. More money with fewer restrictions. The answers are seldom so simple.” Those wise words come from a January 2017 Los Angeles Times editorial responding to…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The other day I posted an item reporting efforts by the government of Hungary to ban programs in gender studies. Yesterday the following letter was sent to Jozsef Bodis, Hungarian Minister of Education: Minister of Education Hungary jozsef.bodis@emmi.gov.hu Dear Minister of Education, We write to protest the Hungarian government’s proposed law…