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…
BY HANK REICHMAN The horrific Labor Day lockout at Long Island University’s Brooklyn campus has emerged, for the moment, as a front-line battleground in the fight for the future of higher education. If you haven’t yet joined the letters campaign in support of the LIU faculty initiated by the American Federation of Teachers, please do…
BY HANK REICHMAN The Labor Day lockout of faculty at Long Island University’s Brooklyn campus has placed that institution on the front lines of the battle for higher education’s future. It’s a big national story — the first time ever that a college or university administration in the U.S. has locked out its faculty —…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN “We need a chancellor who will not be engaged in the doublespeak of proclaiming UC Berkeley’s preeminence as a public university while simultaneously insisting on marketizing every aspect of its existence. We need a chancellor who does not believe that the negative impact on educational access and the quality of our…
BY MICHAEL MERANZE The following is reposted with the author’s permission from the Remaking the University blog. Michael Meranze is Professor of History at UCLA. As you may know, a 3-1 majority of the National Labor Relations Board ruled that Columbia University’s Teaching Assistants (known at Columbia as Instructional Officers) are to be considered “employees” under…