Inequality: A Broad Middle Class Requires Empowering Workers

This post was written by Robert Borsage for the blog of the Campaign for America’s Future [http://ourfuture.org/] which has become a driving force behind the New Populist Movement. The group’s report, Organizing to Take Back America: The New Populist Movement, is available at: http://y.ourfuture.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/New-Populist-Movement-Organizing.pdf. Prepared by Riger Hickey, the co-director of the Campaign for America’s Future, the…

Mills College Becomes the First Single-Gender College to Admit Transgender Students

There are currently 119 single-gender colleges and universities in the United States. Mills College in Oakland, California, has become the first of those institutions to admit transgender students. The college’s undergraduate admission policy on “transgender or gender questioning- applicants” now permits “applicants whose gender identity does not match their legally assigned sex” as of the…

When Congressional Staff Become Wikipedia Contributors

The following passage is excerpted from a news report from The Hill: “For days, someone in the House had been editing multiple pages related to transgender issues that critics called ‘transphobic.’ The situation came to a head this week when the person changed the description of Orange Is the New Black actor Laverne Cox from…

National (In-)Security: Fifty Notable American Espionage Novels: 46-48.

  Sinclair, Upton.  World’s End.  New York: Viking, 1940. Now known primarily for his muckraking fiction and journalism, in particular for his novel The Jungle, Upton Sinclair also produced a series of eleven espionage novels featuring an operative named Lanny Budd.  What is most unusual about the series is that Sinclair sought to chronicle systematically…

PBS NewsHour Series on “Rethinking College”

Lil Taiz, President of the California Faculty Association, has shared the following information which should be of broad interest. The PBS NewsHour contacted the CFHE leadership about CFHE’s take on MOOCs and online higher education. The producers had seen CFHE’s video on the topic on the CFHE website and wanted to have “another perspective” about…

Bill Ayers: The University of Illinois Attacks Free Speech

By Bill Ayers In mid-August the University of Illinois withdrew its appointment of Steven Salaita, formerly an English professor at Virginia Tech, as a tenured associate professorship at UIUC. Having cut his ties in Virginia (resignation from a tenured job, his spouse quitting her job, and the couple renting a house) Salaita was informed that…

Fiftieth Anniversary of Berkeley Free Speech Movement

This fall will mark a half-century since the Free Speech Movement (FSM) erupted on the University of California, Berkeley campus.  “After decades of ambivalence, UC Berkeley is finally embracing this important part of its history,” writes longtime Bay Area newspaper columnist Martin Snapp in the summer issue of California, Berkeley’s alumni magazine. The FSM began…

The Dismissal of Ned Balbo

The Maryland AAUP conference sent us this piece by Ned Balbo, who taught for twenty-four years in the writing department at Loyola University Maryland. In it, Balbo recounts  how he lost his position because of new enforcement of a Loyola rule barring full-time non-tenure-track faculty members from reappointment to their existing position after six consecutive…