BY MIKE MAUER Our colleagues at Montgomery College are in the process of learning, first hand, the value of a modification to their collective bargaining agreement that they won in the last round of negotiations. For decades, the chapter kept winning stronger and stronger protections for faculty at the only unionized college in the two-year…
BY BRIAN C. MITCHELL As reported last week by Ashley A. Smith in Inside Higher Education, one of the most interesting developments in higher education is how the growing concern over high tuition sticker prices is playing out in state and national politics. Much of the discussion is a good-hearted effort to make college more…
POSTED BY KELLY HAND Get ready for Campus Equity Week! During this week, which occurs every other year during the last week of October, groups plan local actions to draw attention to working conditions of faculty in contingent or adjunct positions. Such faculty, who constitute three fourths of the teaching faculty in US higher education,…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN On August 8, the National Labor Relations Board ordered the University of Chicago to schedule a representation vote of its graduate student employees on whether they wish to be represented by the Graduate Students United, a joint affiliate of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and the American Federation of…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH If you voted for Donald Trump, even after the Access Hollywood tape was released, you can have no credibility if you not only claim to be outraged by Harvey Weinstein’s behavior but also feel compelled to denounce Progressives for not denouncing him. Likewise, if you were not outspokenly outraged by the…
BY JOHN K. WILSON At Minding the Campus, Peter Wood’s essay about “The Case for Colonialism” article argues this: “And perhaps we should not forget the names of those thousands who signed the petitions. It might be a good exercise for deans and provosts who have received from academic search committee recommendations to appoint candidates…
BY AARON BARLOW The act of teaching is political. Yet Americans like to pretend that its schools are removed from the public sphere, that they focus on knowledge and skills, nothing more. Rightwing firebrand (though his spark has dimmed against the bright flames of newer agitators like Steve Bannon and Milo Yiannopoulos) David Horowitz has…
BY HANK REICHMAN In January a wide variety of academic and labor organizations, including the California conference of the AAUP and the California Faculty Association (CFA), released a report, “The $48 fix: Reclaiming California’s Master Plan for Higher Education,” which demonstrated that tuition could be eliminated at the University of California (UC) and the California…
BY HANK REICHMAN It has become something of a truism that the Trump administration and the Republican Party more generally have been dismissive of and even hostile to the findings and methods of scientific research. The Union of Concerned Scientists this summer released an exhaustive report, Sidelining Science Since Day One, that documents how in…
BY BRIAN C. MITCHELL Scott Jaschik recently interpreted the findings from the 2017 Survey of Admission Directors, sponsored by Inside Higher Education and Gallup and drawn from a sample of 453 admission directors. While the full discussion of these findings is too complex for this space, the general conclusions, especially those specific to enrollment patterns,…