BY HANK REICHMAN The situation at the University of California at Santa Cruz has escalated. On Friday the university administration announced that 54 graduate students who are withholding fall grades were fired from their spring appointments. This number may in fact be as high as 80, as some students did not get dismissal letters but…
BY HANK REICHMAN Two years ago state auditors rebuked the University of California (UC) for not following its own policy for outsourcing jobs. Now the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) Local 3299, which represents some 26,000 university employees, has filed six charges with the California Public Employment Relations Board against UC’s…
BY HANK REICHMAN Today was a big day for University of California librarians. Regular readers of this blog will be aware that the system’s librarians have been negotiating a new contract and that one of the contentious issues was academic freedom, which UC negotiators initially claimed did not apply to librarians. (For previous coverage see…
BY HANK REICHMAN Scholars in the humanities and social sciences are painfully familiar with the widespread and baneful trend of converting teaching positions into contingent non-tenure-track, often part-time, “adjunct” jobs. But some may not realize that a similar trend on the research side, especially in the physical and natural sciences, has emerged through the abuse…
BY HANK REICHMAN This afternoon I had the pleasure of joining a demonstration of University of California librarians and their supporters outside the Berkeley campus’s Doe Library where the latest bargaining session between the UC-AFT Librarians and the UC administration was taking place. As I previously reported, academic freedom is a central topic of negotiation. …
BY MICHAEL MERANZE The following is reposted with permission from the Remaking the University blog. Michael Meranze is Professor of History at UCLA and a member of AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. For previous posts on this topic go here and here. As part of their negotiations with the university, University of…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN Earlier this week I posted an item about how contract negotiators for the University of California have refused to acknowledge the faculty status and academic freedom of the system’s librarians. Yesterday, the Council of University of California Faculty Associations (CUCFA) and the California Conference of the AAUP (CA-AAUP) issued the following…
BY HANK REICHMAN Librarians in the University of California system are represented by the American Federation of Teachers. They are currently engaged in bargaining a new contract. In the course of that process the UC-AFT proposed that the following underlined language be added to Article 1, Recognition, in the new contract: The University recognizes librarians…
BY HANK REICHMAN University of California President and former Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has been a leader among university administrators in opposing the Trump administration’s attacks on immigrants, most recently speaking forcefully to denounce the administration’s hideous policy of separating children from their parents at the border. Now UC faculty are calling on Napolitano…
BY CHRISTOPHER NEWFIELD Christopher Newfield is Professor of English at the University of California at Santa Barbara. He is the author of several books and many articles on higher education, including most recently The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them. He serves on the advisory board for Academe. The…