BY BRIAN C. MITCHELL For thousands of high school students, October marks the start of the college application season. Application deadlines approach, standardized tests and essays are finalized, and this year, an earlier deadline for the FAFSA financial aid application. In a series of reports last month, seasoned higher education journalist Scott Jaschik presented some…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN Graduate employees at the University of Chicago have overwhelmingly re-affirmed their choice to organize for collective bargaining with the AAUP, AFT and IFT. Members of Chicago Graduate Students United voted for continued AAUP-AFT-IFT affiliation in a ballot that concluded Tuesday night. Since 2007, GSU has been working to improve conditions for…
BY HANK REICHMAN The following is based on reports from the Boston Globe and BuzzFeed. Harvard University’s 600 dining hall workers went on strike this morning, calling for the university to pay them a living wage just a month after the elite school’s current fundraising drive hit a record-breaking $7 billion in donations. Harvard has been…
BY HANK REICHMAN Very few academics were much surprised when it turned out that Donald Trump’s highly advertised “Trump University” turned out to be nothing more than a sleazy scam. After all, in some respects Trump’s con was not much different from that engaged in by too many other for-profit “educational” institutions, except, perhaps, that…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following is adapted from an article published yesterday in Labor Notes by Melanie Barron and Jeffrey Lichtenstein. Over the past 17 years, United Campus Workers (Communications Workers Local 3865) has built a non-majority, wall-to-wall union. Anyone working for a public university in Tennessee can join—and over 1,600 have. Members include…
BY HANK REICHMAN Last week I posted to this blog “A Statement of Principles for Choosing New University of California Chancellors,” issued by the Council of University of California Faculty Associations (CUCFA), an AAUP partner organization. Yesterday, at UC Berkeley, where more than a dozen students, faculty, staff, alumni and foundation representatives serving on the…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH According to an article written by Evan Comen, Thomas C. Frolich, and Michael B. Sauter for 24/7 Wall St., the highest paid public employee in 39 of the 50 states is either a football coach or a men’s basketball coach. Alabama > Highest paid employee: Nick Saban > Position:College football coach…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle DaVinci Galileo Newton Shakespeare Franklin Lincoln Edison Tesla Freud Einstein Hawking Trump _________________________ If you have not been following the news, here are the opening paragraphs of an article written by David A. Graham…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Here are excerpts from two articles written by Becky Johnson for the Smoky Mountain News [http://www.smokymountainnews.com/], passed on to me by Connor Gibson of UnKoch My Campus: WCU Faculty Closely Monitoring $2 Million Koch Gift Faculty members have lauded administration for giving them a seat at the table. That wouldn’t happen…
BY HANK REICHMAN Recently the New York Times published an article entitled “Hillary Clinton’s College Plan Appeals to the Left, but Educators Have Doubts.” The thrust of the article was that while Clinton’s proposal to let students with families earning less than $125,000 a year attend public universities free has considerable appeal (and not just…