An article published yesterday by Portside in Portland, Maine, opens: “Faculty and students launched an occupation of a Maine university building Friday to demand a halt to mass faculty layoffs and department slashes that they say are part of the austerity cuts devastating public education nation-wide. “Over 100 people launched a late-morning occupation of the…
Guest Blogger Beth Evans is an Associate Professor of Library Science at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. Whether you believe that a library on your campus supports learning and research through print and electronic collections, or that the information literacy skills learned through research are integral to a college education, your…
In a terrific essay explaining “Why We’re On Strike,” University of Illinois-Chicago professors Lennard Davis and Walter Benn Michaels wrote this about their institution’s flawed shared governance system: “To call shared governance real governance is like saying your dog has an equal say in how your household is run because sometimes when he whines he…
It has been some time since I’ve reported on the fight to save City College of San Francisco (CCSF). As readers will recall, last summer the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges (ACCJC) announced that it would terminate CCSF’s accreditation as of July 2014. (See my original post of July 8 and subsequent posts…
Earlier today the PSC received the decision by Judge Anil Singh on CUNY’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit contesting the original Pathways resolution passed by the Board of Trustees in 2011. Judge Singh decided in favor of CUNY’s motion to dismiss. We are disappointed in the decision, but we are fully prepared to appeal. We maintain that…
If American higher education is going to continue to aspire to excellence, its institutions need to address and reverse the growing reliance on adjuncts as teachers. Not only is this exploitative of the adjuncts (to say nothing of the students), but it reduces our colleges and universities to factories, effectively excluding academic freedom and removing…
In a recent op-ed piece on the Chronicle of Higher Ed’s Worldwide blog, Dzulkifli Abdul Razak responded to an article written by Nigel Thrift, vice chancellor of the University of Warwick. Thrift had argued for the creation of an international association of colleges and universities, suggesting that it would not only facilitate efforts to meet…
This is a more detailed version of the invitation to file amicus briefs with the NLRB prior to its consideration of Pacific Lutheran University’s filing to prevent SEIU from organizing the university’s faculty. UNITED STATES OF AMERICA BEFORE THE NATIONAL LABOR RELATIONS BOARD Case 19-RC-102521 PACIFIC LUTHERAN UNIVERSITY Employer and SERVICE EMPLOYEES INTERNATIONAL Union, LOCAL…
So says Richard Vedder in “New Analysis Shows Problematic Boom In Higher Ed Administrators,” an article by Joe Marcus appearing last week on Huffington Post. Marcus writes: Universities have added these administrators and professional employees even as they’ve substantially shifted classroom teaching duties from full-time faculty to less-expensive part-time adjunct faculty and teaching assistants, the figures show.…