This is a guest post by Ron Bramhall, a contributor to the recent September-October issue of Academe. Bramhall is a senior instructor in the Charles H. Lundquist College of Business at the University of Oregon. He teaches business leadership and communication, and the legal environment of business. He represents the interests of approximately 950 contingent faculty as…
One Adjunct’s Reflection on the 11th International Conference of the Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor (COCAL) By Chris Cruz-Boone In a candid moment at the COCAL XI debriefing, organizers admitted that the high cost of travel to the New York City location limited conference access for many adjuncts living on fixed incomes. I was fortunate…
The Oakland College Has Been Very Progressive on the Rights of Transgender Students but Not on Collective-Bargaining Rights or Adjunct-Faculty Rights In a very recent post, I commented on Mills College’s becoming the first single-gender institution to admit transgender students [https://academeblog.org/2014/08/26/mills-college-becomes-the-first-single-gender-college-to-admit-transgender-students/]. The college’s progressivism on that issue, however, seems to stand in fairly stark…
Some time ago, Aaron Barlow wrote a post titled “To My Tenured Colleagues” in which he asked those with tenure to treat the adjunct faculty at their institutions as full and genuine colleagues. It was a great post, one which I fully endorsed. But it occasioned a veritable flood of complaints from adjunct faculty about…
By Joe Berry and Helena Worthen Over 200 people attended the eleventh conference of COCAL (Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor) which took place August 4-6 at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, part of the City University of New York (CUNY) in New York City. The focus was on contingency–the damage it does to faculty,…
Lil Taiz, President of the California Faculty Association, has shared the following information which should be of broad interest. The PBS NewsHour contacted the CFHE leadership about CFHE’s take on MOOCs and online higher education. The producers had seen CFHE’s video on the topic on the CFHE website and wanted to have “another perspective” about…
The Maryland AAUP conference sent us this piece by Ned Balbo, who taught for twenty-four years in the writing department at Loyola University Maryland. In it, Balbo recounts how he lost his position because of new enforcement of a Loyola rule barring full-time non-tenure-track faculty members from reappointment to their existing position after six consecutive…
I don’t know anything about Lakeland Community College in Ohio, much less about the issues that may be provoking faculty there to go on strike (but I can guess they are similar to those faced by faculty everywhere). However, when I chanced across this inspiring post from this morning on the website of the Ohio…
SEIU has been pursuing a regional strategy to organize adjunct faculty in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area. The campaign is called Adjunct Action. Thus far, the results have been mixed. In mid-June, adjunct faculty at Hamline University became the first adjuncts in Minnesota to form a collective bargaining unit, voting to unionize by a 72%-28%…