John Bambenek has been appointed to the Illinois Board of Higher Education (IBHE) by Gov. Bruce Rauner (but must still be approved by the Illinois Senate). Bambenek (an adjunct who teaches classes on cybersecurity at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) is listed as the sole “representative of faculty” on the IBHE. Rauner wanted someone…
Canada—University of British Columbia [Part 1] After Arvind Gupta suddenly resigned as the president of the University of British Columbia, Jennifer Berdahl, a faculty member at the university, wrote a blog post in which she discussed the possibility that the president’s sudden departure had been linked to an entrenched lack of diversity at the university.…
For nearly two years I have been blogging about the efforts of faculty members at the City College of San Francisco (CCSF) to resist efforts by the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges (ACCJC) to revoke the school’s accreditation. As ACCJC has lost credibility and its own status as an authorized accrediting agency grows…
The American Studies Association is being sued by some of its members for a resolution supporting the Boycott, Divest, Sanctions (BDS) movement. Kenneth L. Marcus, the president of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law which is organizing the lawsuit, said: “People who join an academic association have a right to rely…
Here are video clips of Howard from the UIUC NTT strike: The student paper, The Daily Illini also posted this article on the strike and national trends: AAUP: Problems the Non Tenure Faculty Coalition is fighting are similar to problems in higher ed across nation
Although the universities in the state’s flagship system have not yet been impacted as severely as other institutions by the ongoing state budget impasse, some significant issues are clearly surfacing. The following is from an article by Charles Thomas and Ben Bradley on the WLS-TV website: “On the University of Illinois-Chicago campus, the state promised…
The following paragraphs are taken from an article by Leah Nicolini written for the Northern Star, the student-produced newspaper at Northern Illinois University: “Due to a lack of state appropriated funds, NIU plans to cut $30 million from its budget, by the end of the semester, to keep the school out of deficit for the…
These are the opening paragraphs of the news story “Illinois Risks Brain Drain as University Students Look Elsewhere” written by Elizabeth Campbell for Bloomberg News: “As a May 1 deadline looms for high school seniors deciding where to attend college, students are thinking twice about universities in Illinois, where the worst budget crisis in state…
One of the more detailed overviews of the immediate impact of the budget mess in Illinois on the state’s college and university campuses has been provided by George Gallanis in a March 29 article for the World Socialist Web Site: “Earlier this month Southern Illinois University, located in Carbondale, announced the potential layoffs of 180…
These are the opening paragraphs of a news story by Mike Riopell in the Chicago Daily Record: “A suburban Republican lawmaker wants to send Illinois universities four months’ worth of state funding to try to ensure they open their doors for the next school year. “The ‘stopgap’ proposal from state Rep. Mike Fortner, a West…