Cord Weekly: Part-time faculty strike: Day 11
Part-time faculty strike: Day 11After stepping away from the bargaining table since the contract academic staff (CAS) decided to strike March 19 at 6:01 am, representatives from the Wilfrid Laurier University Faculty Association (WLUFA) and the university administration have committed to begin negotiations once again.
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Posted in Strikes & Labor Disputes
Boston Herald: Still no agreement in Nashua teacher dispute
NASHUA, N.H. – There still is no agreement in the Nashua teacher contract dispute.
Negotiations between the teachers union and School Board broke off yesterday for a second time this week. Both sides will return to the table tomorrow.
The teachers union has threatened to strike Monday unless an agreement is reached. The union has said the board of aldermen and mayor must also indicate their willingness to sign on to an agreement before a strike could be called off.
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Posted in Strikes & Labor Disputes
Brantford Expositor: Contract talks to resume in Laurier teachers’ strike
Wilfrid Laurier University and the union representing the university’s Contract Academic Staff have agreed to resume contract talks.
Negotiators for the two sides will meet Thursday April 3.
There have been no contract talks since March 19 when the Wilfrid Laurier University Faculty Association, which represents the Part-time Contract Academic Staff and Part-time Librarians, directed the bargaining unit to go on strike. The university invited the union to meet again, and the union has agreed.
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Posted in Strikes & Labor Disputes
Courier Mail: Teacher strike fears downplayed by Premier Anna Bligh
QUEENSLAND Premier Anna Bligh has moved to quash fears that the nurses dispute in the Torres Strait could soon spread to teachers.
Most of the nurses in the region voted on Thursday to withdraw their services from the outlying islands despite a last ditch attempt by the state government to address their safety concerns at clinics and accommodation.
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Posted in Strikes & Labor Disputes
Digital Chosunilbo: The Fall of a Radical Student Union
The Korea Federation of University Students Council, or Hanchongnyeon, cancelled its presidential election Saturday after no candidate applied for the post. The student council president of one university withdrew his candidacy at the last minute after his parents talked him out of it. It was the first time since the establishment of the group in 1993 that it has been unable to choose a leader.
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Posted in Students
Inside Higher Ed: Office Staff Feeling Overworked
Eighty-four percent of clerical and technical employees say that unrealistic workloads are a concern at their college, and nearly that many report their quality of work suffers as a result, according to a survey from the American Federation of Teachers.
The group’s “Office Employee Workload Survey,” presented Friday at the AFT-National Education Association Higher Education Conference, looked at 638 responses, 155 of which came from college employees, most of whom are from community colleges. (The report notes that the Web-based, self-selecting survey shouldn’t be viewed as scientifically accurate, but rather as illustrating broad workload issues.)
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Posted in Working conditions
Inside Higher Ed: Better Contracts for Full-Time Adjuncts
Many people used to use “part timer” as a synonym for “adjunct.” Increasingly, the two words can’t be assumed to be interchangeable, as one of the fastest growing job categories in higher education is the full-time instructor off the tenure track. With that in mind, faculty unions are talking more about the need to include specific provisions in contracts to help this subset of the professorial work force.
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Posted in Contingent labor
Inside Higher Ed: Tenure as a Tarnished Brass Ring
Claire B. Potter has a level of academic success many young Ph.D.’s these days can only dream about. A professor of history and chair of American studies at Wesleyan University, she has tenure at an elite college. Tenure provides her not only with job security, but with part of her identity as the blogger Tenured Radical, where she shares views on a range of topics, writing with the freedom that tenure is supposed to protect.
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Posted in Tenure & Promotion
The Chronicle: The Public View of Politics in the Classroom
The older Americans are, and the less time they have spent on a college campus, the more likely they are to believe that professors are politically biased.
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Posted in Faculty
The Chronicle: Faculty Groups’ Joint Conference Focuses on Pay Issues and Diversity
At the joint higher-education conference of the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers here over the weekend, about 750 people gathered to talk about the bread-and-butter issues of both unions: job security and equal pay for adjuncts, academic freedom, tenure, and collective bargaining.
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Posted in Salary/Economic Benefits
The Chronicle: Sale of Antioch College to Alumni Group Breaks Down, and Board Seeks New Offers
A deal to sell Antioch College to an independent corporation made up of alumni and former trustees fell apart late last week, leaving the future of the Yellow Springs, Ohio, institution once again in jeopardy.
On Wednesday night, the Board of Trustees of Antioch University, the college’s parent institution, voted unanimously to reject an offer of $12.2-million from the Antioch College Continuation Corporation. That group, which is known as ACC or AC3, asked for time to reconfigure its offer. “But on Friday we were notified by the AC3 that the deal was off,” Lynda Sirk, a spokeswoman for the university, said on Sunday. “The board really thought that we were on the brink of a deal.”
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Posted in Corporate University
The Chronicle News Blog: Defense Department Finalizes Rule Barring Restricted Campus Recruiting
The U.S. Department of Defense today issued a final rule in the Federal Register outlining steps the department can take to withhold federal funds from colleges and universities that place restrictions on military recruiters and the Reserve Officer Training Corps program. The rule arises from a defense authorization bill passed in 2004, which was upheld by the Supreme Court two years ago.
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Posted in Government
The Guardian: Union committee to reconsider Israeli academics boycott
The University and College Union (UCU)’s national executive committee (NEC) has agreed to reconsider a boycott of Israeli academics at its annual congress in May.
An internal motion to discuss the possibility of a boycott of Israeli academics was put to the NEC meeting on March 14.
It notes the “apparent complicity of the Israeli academy” in Israeli government policies towards the Palestinians, and states the UCU should “promote a wide discussion by colleagues of the appropriateness of continued education links with Israeli academic institutions”.
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Posted in International, Politics, Protests, Unions
Inside Higher Ed: New Impacts Seen for Faculty Unions
Faculties that are unionized have significantly higher percentages of courses taught by tenured or tenure-track faculty members, as opposed to adjuncts, according to research presented this week at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association. At the same time, colleges that are unionized tend to spend less per student on academic support services, the analysis found.
Officials of the national faculty unions said they did not know of similar research findings. Much of the previous research on faculty unions has focused on the most direct bread and butter issues: wages and benefits. But the authors of the new research — two doctoral students at Vanderbilt University — said that it was important to explore as well questions of how faculty unions affect college issues that relate to the student experience.
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Posted in Unions
Inside Higher Ed: Late Grades? Pay Up, Professor
Many professors hate grading, and like most human beings, they often put off what they don’t like. So at many colleges, the end of a term results in some proportion of the faculty turning their grades in late, much to the dismay of the registrars whose job it is to process the grades and make them available to students. The outcome can be more than just annoying to the registrars; late grades can delay diplomas, disrupt the awarding of financial aid, or get students into academic trouble.
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Posted in Faculty
The New York Times: U. of California Board Picks President
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — The University of California’s governing board has named Mark Yudof, the University of Texas chancellor, as the next president of the 10-campus system.
Mr. Yudof’s appointment was approved by the Board of Regents on Thursday, a week after a search committee recommended him to succeed Robert Dynes, who has said he plans to leave before June.
A lawyer and expert in free speech, education and constitutional law, Mr. Yudof, 63, spent five years as president of the University of Minnesota before assuming the chancellorship in Texas in 2002.
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Posted in Administration
The Chronicle: Credit-Card Marketing Has Gone Too Far, College Students Say
A majority of students say colleges shouldn’t give their personal information to credit-card companies or allow cards with unfair terms to be marketed on their campuses, says a new survey by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group.
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Posted in Corporate University, Students
The Chronicle News Blog: In California, Yudof Gets the Nod — and an $828,000 Compensation Package
As expected, the University of California’s Board of Regents today voted unanimously to appoint Mark G. Yudof as the system’s next president. Mr. Yudof’s total annual compensation will be $828,000 in his first year on the job, including a $591,084 base salary, supplemental pension payments, and a car allowance, according to a university news release.
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Posted in Administration
The Chronicle: Pardoned Felon and Former Regent Gets Another Look at Texas A&M U.
The governing board for Texas A&M University at Galveston may soon be joined by a fund raiser with a felonious past — one earned while he was serving on the university system’s Board of Regents.
Ross Margraves Jr., a Houston-based lawyer, was convicted in 1996 on a charge of official misconduct. The felony charge stemmed from his use of a state-owned plane for a round-trip flight with his wife to Baton Rouge, La., at the time of his son’s graduation from Louisiana State University. He billed the state $1,435 for the trip.
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Posted in Administration
The Chronicle: Israeli College in West Bank, Stripped of University Status, Cries Foul
Jerusalem — An Israeli college in the occupied West Bank that began upgrading to university status last year is being stripped of its university title, and the head of the fledgling institution is criticizing the move as mistaken and “politically motivated.”
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Posted in International
