The Department of Education and Corinthian Colleges have been engaged in extended negotiations over how the for-profit corporation will either shut down or scale down its various entities, including the Everest University, WyoTech, and Heald College chains. The government actions against Corinthian Colleges came after the Harkin Report highlighted Corinthian’s extraordinarily high student-loan default rate,…
Latham, Aaron. Orchids for Mother. New York: Little, Brown, 1977. Aaron Latham has written seven books, only two of them novels. Of the two novels, only one can be categorized in the espionage genre. Nonetheless, Orchids for Mother stands as one of the major American contributions to the genre. The novel focuses on the competition…
The other night I decided to take in some Bergman. I had a few choices, thanks to Amazon’s instant video streaming service. It made it possible for me to avoid my old standby, “The Seventh Seal” (“Det sjunde inseglet”). While it does feature a young, gaunt, and very Nordic looking Max von Sydow, whose hair…
Joe Berry has distributed this message to his extensive contact list and has asked that it be disseminated more widely. Having spent many hours talking to folks about coming to the COCAL conference [www.cocalinternational.org], both this upcoming one in New York City August 4-6, 2014, and previous ones, I am moved to list the most…
Sean Kennedy is a doctoral student at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. The PSC is in the midst of negotiating a new contract with CUNY. Kennedy originally wrote and posted this letter in mid-May. It now has nearly 200 signatories. Dear Barbara— I write as a union member and CUNY contingent…
While enjoying my coffee this morning I caught up on the latest Academe blog posts by Aaron and Marty on the important and continuing theme of the exploitation of adjunct faculty. I then turned to this morning’s San Francisco Chronicle, where I found an absorbing article reporting that today, July 5, marks the 80th anniversary…
The “real problem” behind the exploitation of adjunct faculty is quite obvious: universities have continued to produce a reasonable number of Ph.D.’s but no longer are willing to hire a reasonable number of them into full-time, never mind tenure-track, positions. This situation will change when enrollment in graduate programs starts to contract, and even to…
I don’t know if the world needs another review of Become a Part-Time Professor: Live and teach anywhere you like, but I am now following in the footsteps of my truly esteemed colleagues Aaron Barlow and Hank Reichman, reviewing it after having downloaded this “book” and thumbed my way through the dumb thing on my smartphone…
About a month ago, Hank Reichman posted on Become a Part-Time Professor: Live and Teach Anywhere You Like by Lesa Hammond. At the end, Reichman suggested that Hammond might want to find out a little more about the real situations of adjuncts and suggested a study she might want to take a look at. Today, Hammond responded.…
If one wants to know what to expect after the Supreme Court’s decision on the Hobby Lobby case, one need only to look at what has followed two other recent and controversial decisions by the Roberts Court. In April, the conservative majority on the Supreme Court upheld a Michigan ban on affirmative action. Justice Roberts…