UW Colleges Join "No Confidence" Movement

The Faculty Council of the University of Wisconsin Colleges — the 13-campus community college segment of the UW system — today became the latest UW faculty to vote “no confidence” in the administration of UW System President Ray Cross and the Board of Trustees.  The colleges join a growing bandwagon of colleagues at Madison, Milwaukee,…

CFT Files Amended Lawsuit Against ACCJC

In the latest development in the ongoing struggle of faculty, students, and community members at City College of San Francisco (CCSF) and throughout the California community college system against the rogue accreditor, the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges (ACCJC), the California Federation of Teachers (CFT) yesterday (May 19) filed an amended complaint against…

The Commencement Speaker Racket

BY HANK REICHMAN It’s that time of year again, as colleges and universities celebrate their graduates at commencement ceremonies, often by providing a celebrity speaker.  And, of course, that means it’s also the time of year when complaints are raised about whether some  speakers are appropriate (or, as some would have it, “politically correct”) and…

New York Evaluations Lose in Court

This piece by Seton Hall professor Daniel Katz provides a thorough and devastating take on the bogus teacher evaluation program dismissed as “arbitrary and capricious” by a New York court, about which I blogged yesterday (https://academeblog.org/2016/05/12/an-important-decision-on-teacher-evaluation/)

More Nonsense Numbers from Gov. Walker

Add the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay to the growing list of UW faculties that have approved resolutions of no-confidence in UW System President Ray Cross and the Board of Regents.  Previously, just before the Milwaukee faculty voted unanimously to approve the no-confidence resolution, Governor Scott Walker issued a press release chock full of cherry-picked and…

An Important Decision on Teacher Evaluation

BY HANK REICHMAN I grew up in the New York suburb of Great Neck, where last week a fourth-grade teacher won a landmark case against New York State’s “value-added modeling” (VAM) formula for teacher evaluation, an assessment system that was developed when John King, the current U.S. Secretary of Education, was the New York State…

Brakemen, Professors, and a "Job for Life"

Among other things, I am (or have been) an historian of railroad labor, so I was especially thrilled to learn that University of Wisconsin-Madison labor historian William P. Jones had joined the conversation around the assault on tenure in the Wisconsin system.  Professor Jones, by the way, will be the plenary banquet speaker at AAUP’s…

UWM Faculty Sets the Record Straight

Yesterday in my post reporting on the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee faculty’s unanimous vote of no-confidence in UW system President Ray Cross and the UW Board of Regents I noted that the vote came less than two hours after Gov. Scott Walker issued a statement — titled “University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee faculty fuss leaves out important facts”…