BY HANK REICHMAN A well-known feature of American higher education, especially among large privates and public “flagships,” is the regional rivalry, mostly athletics-based. You know, Ohio State-Michigan, Harvard-Yale, Alabama-Auburn, or UCLA-USC. Here in the San Francisco Bay Area there’s Cal-Stanford (for anyone who may not be aware, Cal — short for California — is the…
BY HANK REICHMAN Yesterday, August 28, the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AACU) released the results of extensive surveys of 501 business executives at private sector and nonprofit organizations and another of 500 hiring managers, which revealed that both groups “express a higher degree of confidence in colleges and universities than does the American…
BY HANK REICHMAN In the wake of the AAUP’s recent disclosure that Purdue University Global — the totally online entity created when Purdue, ignoring protests by faculty and community leaders, acquired for-profit Kaplan University (see my previous post here)— is requiring its instructional faculty to accept a restrictive non-disclosure agreement, the Century Foundation,a progressive, nonpartisan…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following is the text of a letter sent by AAUP Associate Secretary Hans-Joerg Tiede to professors Deepa Kumar and David Hughes, President and Vice-President of the Rutgers University AAUP-AFT. The letter is followed by a statement issued by the AAUP-AFT Rutgers Executive Council. For additional background on this case see…
BY HANK REICHMAN “Union Maid,” written in 1940 by the great folk singer Woody Guthrie, is one of the classic anthems of the American labor movement. Pete Seeger, who would help make the song famous as a member of the Almanac Singers, wrote of its creation: I’m proud to say I was present when ‘Union…
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,”…