BY JONATHAN REES I spent much of last weekend with two of my colleagues from the Colorado Conference of the AAUP at Adams State University in Alamosa, CO, helping to form a brand spanking new AAUP chapter. Hello everybody in the Paris of the Valley! [JR waves enthusiastically.] Turns out their chapter will be helpful…
BY JOYA JOHN, ANNE PASEK, AND ABHISHEK BHATTACHARYYA Joya and Abhishek are members of Graduate Students United at the University of Chicago (AFT/AAUP), and Anne is a member of GSOC-Local 2110-UAW and Academic Workers for a Democratic Union at NYU. They wish to thank members of fellow unions across the country for the conversations over…
BY HANK REICHMAN For those who don’t yet understand what academics mean when we talk about the “corporatization” of the university, a good way to begin learning might be to take a look at recent events surrounding the University of California (UC) at Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi, previously notorious for presiding over the pepper-spraying of…
BY MARTIN KICH In the face of opposition from the Democrats and the Republicans in the state legislature, not to mention Governor Malloy, the Connecticut state senate’s vote on the contract between UConn and UCPEA was postponed on a technicality: “‘There was an inadvertent error in the supercedence appendix attached to the collective bargaining agreement…
BY AARON BARLOW In a column for Inside Higher Ed this week, Philip Nel of Kansas State University creates a list of the reasons so many academics work so much. It’s an essay worth reading, not only because it flies in the face of the myth that professors lead lives of ease but because of…
BY MARTIN KICH The editors of and contributors to the books section of the Independent, one of the United Kingdom’s largest newspapers, have published a list of “43 Books to Read before You Die” in honor of World Book Day, which in case you missed it was yesterday. The list includes the following titles, with annotations…
BY MARTIN KICH The first is not so much a parody as a political re-adaptation of The Producers featuring Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OemqVWi_R0k&sns=em The second is the new film by Sacha Baron Cohen, The Brothers Grimsby. Here is a thoughtful commentary by Huffington Post’s Ryan Grim on the film’s strange pre-release buzz: “Audiences…
A Report on the Graduate Worker Day of Action, 15th October, 2015 by Abhishek Bhattacharyya (University of Chicago), Anthony Levenda (Portland State University), and Matthew Canfield (New York University) In the September-October 2015 issue of Academe, Prof. David Schultz wrote about the fertile conditions for faculty unionization, and the “The Rise and the Coming Demise…
BY JOHN HINSHAW To paraphrase Tolstoy, all happy colleges are alike; all unhappy universities are unhappy in their own way. This is the story of an unhappy place: Marywood University. There, the faculty, with help from their colleagues throughout the state and region, are fighting against despair to make the institution true to AAUP principles…