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…
BY HANK REICHMAN Last week I posted to this blog “A Statement of Principles for Choosing New University of California Chancellors,” issued by the Council of University of California Faculty Associations (CUCFA), an AAUP partner organization. Yesterday, at UC Berkeley, where more than a dozen students, faculty, staff, alumni and foundation representatives serving on the…
BY HANK REICHMAN Recently the New York Times published an article entitled “Hillary Clinton’s College Plan Appeals to the Left, but Educators Have Doubts.” The thrust of the article was that while Clinton’s proposal to let students with families earning less than $125,000 a year attend public universities free has considerable appeal (and not just…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The recent resignations of University of California at Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks and UC Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi have focused concern among UC faculty members about the criteria and procedures for selecting campus leaders. Yesterday the Council of University of California Faculty Associations (CUCFA), a partner organization of the AAUP representing…
BY HANK REICHMAN Today negotiations resumed between the Long Island University (LIU) administration and the LIU Faculty Federation, representing the 400+ full- and part-time faculty members now locked out by the administration. Well, sorta. At the session the faculty proposed a 30-day extension of the old contract, retroactive to September 1, which would have ended…
BY HANK REICHMAN The latest work by celebrated gonzo journalist and novelist Tom Wolfe, The Kingdom of Speech, is a book-length essay that tries to pillory the academic study of language, targeting along the way for special vitriol none other than Charles Darwin and Noam Chomsky. I have zero expertise in this field and have…