BY HANK REICHMAN Yesterday, September 19, the Council of University of California Faculty Associations (CUCFA) filed an unfair labor practice (ULP) complaint charging the university with violations of legally protected faculty employee expression surrounding the war in Gaza. I posted a summary of the complaint to this blog yesterday. To access the full 581-page (including…
BY HANK REICHMAN Today, as the UC Regents were completing their meeting at the UCLA campus, the Council of University of California Faculty Associations (CUCFA), a partner of the AAUP, and the faculty associations at UC Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Santa Cruz filed an amended unfair labor practice (ULP) complaint against…
BY CAROLE H. BROWNER ET AL. A group of senior professors at the University of California was denied free speech and academic freedom by the administration and its nine student newspapers during the COVID-19 pandemic in furtherance of the university’s abominable policy of silencing all dissent, questioning, and criticisms of its draconian COVID policies. The…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN During the recent landmark strike by some 48,000 graduate student employees in the University of California system, many Senate (tenure-track) faculty members chose to honor picket lines in various ways. Such sympathy actions are legal, but employers are entitled under the law to dock the pay of anyone who does not…
BY MICHAEL MERANZE The strike continues with no end in sight. Although there have been tentative agreements concerning post-docs and academic researchers, in the academic student employee (ASE) and student researcher units, the parties appear to remain well apart on the fundamental economic issues. This distance is most easily seen in the ASE category: although…
BY THE COUNCIL OF UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA FACULTY ASSOCIATIONS (CUCFA) The following statement was released on October 30. Graduate students, postdocs, and other academic student employees are essential to the teaching and research mission of the University of California, especially as undergraduate enrollments rise. Given the escalating costs of living in California, 48,000 people in…
BY HANK REICHMAN The indispensable Chris Newfield has a new post up at his blog Remaking the University, “Newsom’s *Big Funding* Budget for UC and CSU is Flat.” In it he picks apart the false promises in California governor Gavin Newsom’s initial budget proposal for higher education, although the focus is mostly on the University…
BY HANK REICHMAN “The University of California could not function without the labor of lecturers. In a given year, UC employs more than 6,000 of these educators, who are hired on short-term contracts and lack the stability of tenure. All told, they teach roughly a third of courses offered across the system. Since 2011, the…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN On November 1, Brian Soucek, Professor of Law and Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of California at Davis, spoke as part of the UC Davis Forums on the Public University and the Social Good on “Academic Freedom: Dangers and Distractions.” Professor Soucek is the outgoing chair of the University of California’s…
BY HANK REICHMAN A week after non-tenure-track lecturers at the University of California held rallies at UC campuses statewide in support of their union, the University Council-American Federation of Teachers (UC-AFT), there are signs that at long last the university’s negotiators are being forced to respond to these colleagues’ demands. Thanks to pressure from faculty,…