BY JOHN T. MCNAY The growing obsession on the part of college and university administrations with secrecy, which I address in my recent Academe article, “Ohio AAUP Chapters Contend with Secretive Searches,” is indicative of a larger issue. The continual adoption of corporate models is undermining the academic mission at our institutions. Even corporations, when…
BY MONICA OWENS Privatization of online higher education is on the rise. For-profit online education corporations like Academic Partnerships, Kaplan, Wiley, Pearson, and Blackboard contract with public and private nonprofit institutions to provide digital platforms for educational content, recruit students, manage enrollment, facilitate the development of course materials, and more. While the use of digital…
BY HANK REICHMAN On April 27, Queen Elizabeth II formally assented to the Higher Education and Research Act 2017, approved by Britain’s Conservative Parliament earlier in the year. The act accelerated the privatization of Britain’s higher education system, a process begun decades earlier and which in key respects mirrors American developments. The following comments on…
BY THE NORTH CAROLINA AAUP CONFERENCE The following is, first, a press release from the North Carolina AAUP followed by the vision statement itself: Boone, NC/Chapel Hill, NC March 9, 2017 The state conference of the leading professional organization of American college professors has released a vision statement entitled “Reclaiming Higher Education for All North Carolinians”…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following is adapted from an article published yesterday in Labor Notes by Melanie Barron and Jeffrey Lichtenstein. Over the past 17 years, United Campus Workers (Communications Workers Local 3865) has built a non-majority, wall-to-wall union. Anyone working for a public university in Tennessee can join—and over 1,600 have. Members include…
The following is an op-ed piece by Susan Gubernat, Professor of English at California State University, East Bay and a member of the CSU Academic Senate. It was published in the Sacramento Bee on September 7. Tuition dollars have overtaken state funding in supporting public higher education in California, as is true throughout the country.…
In a recent article for the Washington Post, Lisa Rein has reported the following troubling details about the way in which VA hospitals have been purchasing prosthetics for veterans: “Employees in the purchasing department of a VA hospital in the Bronx had used government purchase cards like credit cards at least 2,000 times to buy prosthetic…
Almost a year ago, the following brief item, written by Daniel Wilco, appeared in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution: “Two men have been indicted on charges they defrauded Delta and Northwest Airlines of $22 million between 2004 and 2013. “Michael Yedor and Paul Anderson have been charged with conspiracy to commit mail fraud and 96 counts of…
—and in the Process Puts the Lie to the GOP Truisms about Cutting Spending and Conducting the People’s Business in the Open Predictably, Progressives across the nation are expressing outrage at the Farm Bill just passed by only eight votes in the House of Representatives (every Democrat and 12 Republicans voted against the bill’s passage).…
Central to the current controversy about Edward Snowden’s NSA leaks is the fact that Snowden was a “private contractor.” In fact, over this past weekend, various commentators have asserted that 30% to 70% of the national security personnel are now “private contractors”: that is, employees of corporations—and typically multinational corporations—and not of the federal government.…