BY CAPRICE LAWLESS Bread-bakers depend on the dough’s rest, during which time the yeast rises. The peasant farmer uses winter to carve wood or nail things together. Pickle-makers know it as the cure; those passing hours as the cucumber mysteriously turns pickle. Whatever. Hallmark-Channel-ey platitudes don’t play on the edgy, 24/7 adjunct reality show no…
BY THE COLORADO AAUP CONFERENCE Fort Lewis College’s AAUP chapter registered a victory in March when President Dene Thomas announced that no faculty no tenured or tenure-track people will be eliminated as part of proposed FLC budget reductions. Her decision followed an FLC-AAUP analysis of the proposed budget that demonstrated cuts could be achieved without sacrificing…
BY HANS-JOERG TIEDE The AAUP today wrote to the governing board of the Maricopa Community College District in Arizona to convey our concern over apparent departures from generally accepted principles of academic governance. The matter stems from a February resolution of the governing board that terminated a “meet-and-confer” provision of the faculty policy manual and…
Our AAUP chapters of the CCCS, now with members at six of the 13 colleges within the Colorado Community College System (CCCS) are celebrating our fifth year of organizing CCCS faculty. We have been advocating for equitable wages, health-care benefits and due process rights through five years of potlucks, pub crawls, Scrabble games, coffee klatches,…
BY HANK REICHMAN In a stunning development that the Faculty Association for the California Community Colleges called a “major win” for the state’s community college faculty, the California Federation of Teachers (CFT) yesterday announced that it had settled its lawsuit against the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges (ACCJC), the embattled agency that accredits…
BY HANK REICHMAN A fifth of the Los Angeles Community College District’s 230,000 students are homeless, and nearly two-thirds can’t afford to eat properly, according to a new survey commissioned by the system’s board of trustees and reported yesterday in the Los Angeles Times: Nearly half the L.A. community college students surveyed reported struggling with…
BY HANK REICHMAN Already reeling from the lengthy and damaging, though ultimately successful, campaign to retain the community college’s accreditation, faculty, students, and community supporters at City College of San Francisco (CCSF) may now face a new challenge. Yesterday, the college’s trustees approved a $310,500 contract for new Chancellor Mark Rocha, despite objections from dozens…
BY BRIAN C. MITCHELL Community colleges are the entry point to higher education for millions of Americans, but, according to Inside Higher Education’s 2017 Survey of Community College Presidents, their leaders report significant enrollment challenges and precarious financial support. Six in 10 of the 236 community college presidents reported a decline in enrollment over the…
BY HANK REICHMAN In 2012 voters in Alameda County (including this blogger), across the bay from San Francisco, approved Measure B, a parcel tax, to provide the Peralta Community College District, which has campuses in Berkeley, Alameda and Oakland, an extra $8 million each year. The funds were designated to “support affordable college education including:…
BY CAPRICE LAWLESS Our work advocating for faculty may seem to be eclipsed, at present, by national events, but the stellar AAUP members in our Colorado Community College System (CCCS) Chapters, befriended now by scores of authors, activists, lawmakers and organizers around the country, tirelessly persist, in this, the Age of Persistence. It looks as…