BY HANK REICHMAN [CORRECTION: Professor Mann has pointed out to me that the damage award was made two years ago. Someone tweeted a link to a story on it this week and I mistakenly thought it was current. Nevertheless, the issue certainly is still alive] The Virginia Supreme Court has [in July 2014] ordered the…
BY HANK REICHMAN In a potentially landmark victory for the free expression rights of student athletes and other student employees, the National Labor Relations Board has declared that Northwestern University must eliminate “unlawful” rules governing football players and allow them greater freedom to express themselves, ESPN reported today. The ruling found that as employees the…
BY HANK REICHMAN Today Harvard University entered the seventh day of its standoff with striking dining hall workers, who have walked out for the first time in over 30 years. The cafeteria staff are demanding affordable health care and base pay of $35,000 for year-round workers. But while low-paid dining hall workers strike, the wealthiest…
BY HANK REICHMAN On Monday, October 10, the ongoing — indeed, seemingly interminable — battle to save the City College of San Francisco (CCSF) from losing its accreditation at the hands of the rogue Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges (ACCJC) will reach yet another critical turning point. On that day an ACCJC visiting…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN Last week I posted excerpts from an op-ed piece about the search for a new UC Berkeley Chancellor published in the Daily Californian, the campus newspaper, by leaders of the Berkeley Faculty Association. They endorsed the Statement of Principles enunciated earlier in the week by the Council of University of California…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN Russian historians of my generation may recall the name of Thomas Riha as the editor of the widely-used three-volume Readings in Russian Civilization, published in 1964 (2nd ed., 1969) by the University of Chicago Press and apparently still in print. The books were important to my own initial education in Russian…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN Graduate employees at the University of Chicago have overwhelmingly re-affirmed their choice to organize for collective bargaining with the AAUP, AFT and IFT. Members of Chicago Graduate Students United voted for continued AAUP-AFT-IFT affiliation in a ballot that concluded Tuesday night. Since 2007, GSU has been working to improve conditions for…
BY HANK REICHMAN The following is based on reports from the Boston Globe and BuzzFeed. Harvard University’s 600 dining hall workers went on strike this morning, calling for the university to pay them a living wage just a month after the elite school’s current fundraising drive hit a record-breaking $7 billion in donations. Harvard has been…
BY HANK REICHMAN Very few academics were much surprised when it turned out that Donald Trump’s highly advertised “Trump University” turned out to be nothing more than a sleazy scam. After all, in some respects Trump’s con was not much different from that engaged in by too many other for-profit “educational” institutions, except, perhaps, that…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following is adapted from an article published yesterday in Labor Notes by Melanie Barron and Jeffrey Lichtenstein. Over the past 17 years, United Campus Workers (Communications Workers Local 3865) has built a non-majority, wall-to-wall union. Anyone working for a public university in Tennessee can join—and over 1,600 have. Members include…