Five years ago, a tractor trailer carrying 1.3 million signatures on petitions for a referendum on Senate Bill 5 made its way through downtown Columbus, Ohio, to the Ohio Statehouse. Officials at the Statehouse were not sure that the lobby of the building could structurally support the weight of the petitions, adding to the…
With contract talks stalled, the Association of Pennsylvania State College and University Faculties, which represents more than 6,000 faculty members at Pennsylvania’s 14 state universities, has scheduled an emergency legislative assembly in August to determine whether a strike authorization vote will be taken by its members. The faculty have been working without a new…
BY PETER N. KIRSTEIN I realise this post may not endear me to the leadership of my university, but I will approach this with the knowledge it appears on an A.A.U.P. blog! Catholic universities such as Saint Xavier, Duquesne, and Manhattan have fiercely resisted the right of part-time faculty to organise into a collective bargaining unit.…
BY PETER N. KIRSTEIN A spectre is haunting Chicago–the spectre is academic unionism. Both the University of Chicago and Loyola University Chicago have witnessed the rise of contingent faculty organising success. Now at Northwestern University, a placid campus in Evanston, part-time faculty and non-tenure track full time faculty are moving rapidly in that direction. According…
After a successful two-day walkout of faculty across the United Kingdom led by the University and College Union, more than 1,000 scholars have resigned from their roles as external examiners, who are contracted to sit on exam boards at other universities to review students’ work and sign off final grades. A UCU spokesperson told The…
BY HANK REICHMAN College and university faculty in the United Kingdom began a two-day strike today against the Universities and Colleges Employers Association (UCEA). Members of the University and College Union (UCU) are taking action after talks to resolve a dispute over a 1.1% pay offer collapsed last week. The UCU said the value…
In the spring of 2014, the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law faculty voted to form a union–as a distinct collective-bargaining unit within the existing AAUP chapter at Cleveland State University. Faculty in every other CSU college have been unionized for more than 20 years. Indeed, nationally Cleveland-Marshall has been one of a very few law schools…
This post was written by Dave Johnson for the daily Progressive Breakfast newsletter of the Campaign for America’s Future [http://ourfuture.org/], which has become a driving force behind the New Populist Movement. The group’s report, Organizing to Take Back America: The New Populist Movement, is available at: http://y.ourfuture.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/New-Populist-Movement-Organizing.pdf. Prepared by Roger Hickey, the co-director of the Campaign for…
BY MARTIN KICH Our AAUP chapter at Adelphi University has a long history. The faculty unionized in 1973 and negotiated their first contract in 1974. They have successfully negotiated contracts ever since. That is not to suggest that some of the negotiations have not been contentious, but the faculty at Adelphi does have a history of taking…
For nearly two years I have been blogging about the efforts of faculty members at the City College of San Francisco (CCSF) to resist efforts by the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges (ACCJC) to revoke the school’s accreditation. As ACCJC has lost credibility and its own status as an authorized accrediting agency grows…