BY LOUIS HOWARD PORTER If carpenters are needed it is well and good to train men as carpenters. But to train men as carpenters, and then set them to teaching is wasteful and criminal; and to train men as teachers and then refuse them living wages, unless they become carpenters, is rank nonsense. ––W. E.…
BY ALICE FREIFELD After 27 years at the University of Florida, I retired on the first day of class this fall, effective immediately. This despite the fact that I flew back to Gainesville anxious to get back into the classroom. I love teaching. The delta variant was on the upswing, and I was delighted by…
BY MARK DUCHARME AND MELINDA MYRICK For educators in the Colorado Community College System (CCCS), the word “equity” is a familiar buzzword. Though it’s an admirable goal, and one we very much share, the problem is that it can seem like empty rhetoric— or worse, a cynical marketing ploy— in light of actual labor practices…
BY ALICE BROWN Read the first in the series, “Who Cares about Small Colleges?” COVID-19 has reduced the autonomy faculty once had to choose their course content and teaching methods. Colleges across the country have reduced retirement benefits, sabbaticals, and tenure appointments to help balance budgets. Faculty are told whether to teach in person or…
BY STEVE O’KANE Politics and morality are strange bedfellows. The famous sentence from Anna Karenina comes to mind: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Sometimes the night passes in restful harmony, the temperature is just right, the pillows are soft, the lights are out, and not a…
BY ALEX ZUKAS In a recent Academe Blog post, Eva Cherniavsky wrote, “As we enter a fourth decade of life in the neoliberal university, where permanent austerity rules everywhere except in the swelling ranks of upper administration; where the pretense of shared governance has all but collapsed; where tenure lines are vanishing (particularly in the…
BY CAPRICE LAWLESS Note: The Colorado Conference published this press release yesterday. It is another example of how activists can be their own journalists. Research your organization and the larger context for the decision-making destroying the profession. Crunch the numbers and provide memorable images of what those numbers mean. Set the record straight with facts…
BY HANK REICHMAN Over the years that I’ve been writing for this blog I’ve occasionally posted links to music videos that have some resonance for the concerns of our readers (I’m especially proud of my two Trump playlists, here and here–a few of the links have expired, however). The other night my wife and I…
BY AMIT BAISHYA AND JULIE ANN WARD “OU Days of Action” was organized on September 20 and 21 to coincide with the University of Oklahoma Board of Regents Meeting. This action was the culmination of a months-long process of appealing to OU’s upper administration to adopt basic, common-sense policies of COVID-19 mitigation, with little to…
BY HANK REICHMAN In the wake of a week of statewide campus protest against poor COVID-19 practices at Georgia’s state universities and colleges, more than 50 faculty members at the University of Georgia, full and associate professors in the life sciences, have announced that they will require masks in their classrooms, in violation of the…