How Fair Is Your Job?

POSTED BY MARTIN KICH The Economic Policy Institute has prepared a quiz to answer the question that is the title of this post. To be honest, once you have taken the quiz, I am guessing that you will not find the assessment of the fairness of your own job to be especially enlightening. I asked…

Some Labor Day Reading

BY HANK REICHMAN Lacking any special insights or ideas that I wish to share in recognition of this first Labor Day since the infamous Janus decision, I thought I would instead call attention to some useful analyses of labor’s state published elsewhere today.  So what follows are excerpts from a number of different pieces from…

Putting Labor Back in Labor Day

POSTED BY MARTIN KICH For the Labor Day newsletter distributed by the L.A. Progressive, W. J. Astore has contributed a very succinct article on labor and democratic socialism. It makes the very important point that voters have to look beyond the ideological catchphrases that focus exclusively on the supposed implications of political labels. Instead, voters…

CAUT Opposes Ontario’s Campus “Free Speech” Diktat

BY HANK REICHMAN Ontario Conservative Premier Doug Ford has warned the province’s public universities and colleges they will face funding cuts if they fail to adopt free-speech policies that defend controversial speakers on campus. The government announced yesterday that it will give schools four months to design, implement and enforce wide-ranging free-speech policies.  Ford had promised…

Victory at Rutgers

BY HANK REICHMAN On Tuesday of this week the national AAUP delivered a letter to the leaders of the Rutgers University AAUP-AFT chapter expressing concern that any discipline stemming from a report by that university’s Office of Employment Equity, which concluded that history professor James Livingston’s Facebook posts on gentrification “were not protected by the…

Academic Freedom Conference at Berkeley City College, September 28

POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN On Friday, September 28 the AAUP Foundation and the Faculty Association of California Community Colleges Education Institute (FACCC EI) are sponsoring a day-long conference on academic freedom at Berkeley City College in downtown Berkeley, California.  UC Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky will deliver the keynote address on “Free Speech on Campus.”…

A Tale of Two Campuses

BY HANK REICHMAN A well-known feature of American higher education, especially among large privates and public “flagships,” is the regional rivalry, mostly athletics-based.  You know, Ohio State-Michigan, Harvard-Yale, Alabama-Auburn, or UCLA-USC.  Here in the San Francisco Bay Area there’s Cal-Stanford (for anyone who may not be aware, Cal — short for California — is the…

Employers Embrace Liberal Education

BY HANK REICHMAN Yesterday, August 28, the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AACU) released the results of extensive surveys of 501 business executives at private sector and nonprofit organizations and another of 500 hiring managers, which revealed that both groups “express a higher degree of confidence in colleges and universities than does the American…