Writing for Nation of Change, Paul Buchheit has provided a very succinct but comprehensive overview of how corporatization has had a very damaging impact on higher education. In his article “Higher Education: Capitalism at Its Most Despicable,” Buchheit focuses on five inter-linked phenomena that are undermining the value of higher education because they undermine the…
As part of Campus Equity Week, Brave New Films has released this terrific short film about the very real poverty of many faculty in contingent positions: Contains some illuminating stats comparing presidential salaries to adjunct wages, and personal stories from adjuncts–mostly women, which reflects the reality that contingent labor issues are also women’s issues. It’s…
Today launches Campus Equity Week, during which groups plan local actions to draw attention to working conditions of faculty. Campus Equity Week is an annual event started by the Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor, a grassroots coalition of activists in North America working for contingent faculty: adjunct, part-time, non-tenured, and graduate teaching faculty working to bring greater awareness…
Being antagonistic to corporatization should not necessarily be conflated with being broadly antagonistic to corporations. Universities and corporations have long had mutually beneficial relationships that have caused relatively infrequent controversies. And, just to be clear, although some faculty with more progressive political values have been very skeptical of those relationships between their universities and corporate…
By Robin Meade I won! On September 17, the Illinois Education Labor Relations Board (IELRB) made its final ruling in my case against Moraine Valley Community College (MVCC). It all started in August of 2013, when I was fired by the administration at Moraine Valley Community College for writing a letter to the League of Innovation in…
The American professoriate once ranged from professionals who taught a course as an adjunct—a contribution to their professions, the compensation being almost nothing—to the regular (but generally poorly paid, often relying on family fortune to sustain them) faculty who generally assumed lifetime security at institutions whose operation their colleagues dominated. That changed over the decades starting…
One of the most disheartening events of this past summer on the Academe blog was the rise of invective in the comments that started with our posting of a guest commentary by a group of scholars with particular connections to–or interests in–India. The vituperation exhibited astonished me, and it came in the dozens and then hundreds (to…
In the late afternoon on Thursday, September 24, between 80 and 100 faculty and students at Miami University attended a presentation by CBC Chair Howard Bunsis on the university’s finances. The event was hosted by the relatively new but quickly growing AAUP advocacy chapter at the university. The presentation received fairly detailed coverage in the…
Michael Behrent, the president of the Appalachian State University chapter of the AAUP, and John Steen, Program Coordinator of Scholars for North Carolina’s Future (with contribution from Jim Carmichael, professor at UNC Greensboro and president of the AAUP’s North Carolina Conference) have an op-ed today in The News & Observer or Raleigh, NC entitled “Outrageous move to foster runaway…
::SIGN THE PETITION:: The plight of contingent faculty has been getting a lot of attention in the past couple years, and not just in academic journals with a focus on higher education issues. Mainstream media are catching on and publishing stories about the increased proportion of adjunct positions to total faculty numbers, the pitiful wages paid…