By Susan Gubernat The following op-ed piece appeared in the July 25 issue of the Sacramento Bee. Susan Gubernat, is Professor of English at California State University, East Bay, and secretary of the California State University system Academic Senate. She is a member of the California Faculty Association and the AAUP. California’s public higher education…
In an article titled “Outsourced in Michigan” written for Inside Higher Ed, Colleen Flaherty chronicles the movement among Michigan’s community colleges to outsource the hiring of adjunct faculty and the management of related “payroll duties” to a corporation called EDUStaff. EDUStaff had previously specialized in providing substitute teachers for K-12 systems. So, if you have…
Bonuses, both for performance and longevity, have become commonplace for higher-ed administrators at both public and private institutions. Indeed, these bonuses have become so commonplace that they now generally go unnoticed and unquestioned. But when such bonuses continue to be given during periods of great budget constraints, while faculty and staff compensation and/or positions are…
Back in 1962, when I was first inhaling huge gulps of pop music, there was a song by Dr. Feelgood and the Interns that would occasionally surface on Atlanta top-40 stations. It contains these lines: You’ve got the right string, baby But the wrong yo-yo Somebody knocking on your door Well, I passed this morning…
An article in the Thursday, July 10, edition of The Wall Street Journal, “Who Is the Sorriest Airline?”, by Scott McCartney, provides beautiful fare for thinking once the amusement factor begins to wear off. An excerpt from a Delta Air Lines letter to one Margery Rothenberg, a passenger who complained about hitting her head while…
The “real problem” behind the exploitation of adjunct faculty is quite obvious: universities have continued to produce a reasonable number of Ph.D.’s but no longer are willing to hire a reasonable number of them into full-time, never mind tenure-track, positions. This situation will change when enrollment in graduate programs starts to contract, and even to…
July 3 and I am minding my own business, just checking email before Independence Day, and I have an email from someone named Ashley Minton, Ashley.Minton@cengage.com, with a cc: to someone named Rachael Pigg-Wisner (Wisner) at rachael.wisner@cengage.com. Yes, the sender’s email contains two caps, and the carbon-copied recipient’s email is all lower-case. The email subject…
While the intellectual in me has always been a bit suspicious or patronizing of persons who read their daily devotional or Bible, I must confess that I have turned to literature in my life in what must be a very similar capacity. I have found comfort, reaffirmation, suffering, joy–I have been a participant and spectator…
Writing for the New York Times (June 24, 2014), in a column titled “The Reality of Student Debt Is Different than the Cliches,” David Leonhardt reviews a recent study released by the Brookings Institute. These are the main assertions: (1) Student debt, on average, has actually not increased significantly. (2) Because the earnings of college…