News & Observer: Retired profs offer aid
CHAPEL HILL — In February, an association of retired UNC-Chapel Hill professors sought to help ease daunting budget cuts by offering to jump back into teaching, free of charge.
The response from the university, they say, has been underwhelming.
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Posted in Budgets & Funding
Tagged Budgets & Funding, Faculty, North Carolina
The Chronicle: In U. of California Budget Crisis, Some Faculty Members See a Cover-Up
The University of California is dealing with its worst financial crisis in decades and a very uncertain financial future. But its leadership has another problem: convincing many of its employees that the situation really is as bad as it looks.
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Posted in Budgets & Funding
Tagged Budgets & Funding, coverup, U of California
REMINDER CALL FOR PRESENTATIONS – DUE DECEMEBER 14, 2009 FOR CONFERENCE JUNE 3-5, 2010
HOW CLASS WORKS – 2010
A Conference at SUNY Stony Brook
June 3-5, 2010
CALL FOR PRESENTATIONS
The Center for Study of Working Class Life is pleased to announce the How Class Works – 2010 Conference, to be held at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, June 3 – 5, 2010. Proposals for papers, presentations, and sessions are welcome until December 14, 2009 according to the guidelines below.
Purpose and orientation: The conference seeks to explore ways in which an explicit recognition of class helps to understand the social world in which we live, and ways in which analysis of society can deepen our understanding of class as a social relationship. Presentations should take as their point of reference the lived experience of class; proposed theoretical contributions should be rooted in and illuminate social realities. Presentations are welcome from people outside academic life when they sum up social experience in a way that contributes to the themes of the conference. Formal papers will be welcome but are not required. All presentations should be accessible to an interdisciplinary audience.
Conference themes: The conference welcomes proposals for presentations that advance our understanding of any of the following themes.
The mosaic of class, race, and gender. To explore how class shapes racial, gender, and ethnic experience and how different racial, gender, and ethnic experiences within various classes shape the meaning of class.
Class, power, and social structure. To explore the social content of working, middle, and capitalist classes in terms of various aspects of power; to explore ways in which class and structures of power interact, at the workplace and in the broader society.
Class and community. To explore ways in which class operates outside the workplace in the communities where people of various classes live.
Class in a global economy. To explore how class identity and class dynamics are influenced by globalization, including experience of cross-border organizing, capitalist class dynamics, international labor standards.
Middle class? Working class? What’s the difference and why does it matter? To explore the claim that the U.S. is a middle class society and contrast it with the notion that the working class is the majority; to explore the relationships between the middle class and the working class, and between the middle class and the capitalist class.
Class, public policy, and electoral politics. To explore how class affects public policy, with special attention to health care, the criminal justice system, labor law, poverty, tax and other economic policy, housing, and education; to explore the place of electoral politics in the arrangement of class forces on policy matters.
Class and culture: To explore ways in which culture transmits and transforms class dynamics.
Pedagogy of class. To explore techniques and materials useful for teaching about class, at K-12 levels, in college and university courses, and in labor studies and adult education courses.
How to submit proposals for How Class Works – 2010 Conference
Proposals for presentations must include the following information: a) title; b) which of the eight conference themes will be addressed; c) a maximum 250 word summary of the main points, methodology, and slice of experience that will be summed up; d) relevant personal information indicating institutional affiliation (if any) and what training or experience the presenter brings to the proposal; e) presenter’s name, address, telephone, fax, and e-mail address. A person may present in at most two conference sessions. To allow time for discussion, sessions will be limited to three twenty-minute or four fifteen-minute principal presentations. Sessions will not include official discussants. Proposals for poster sessions are welcome. Presentations may be assigned to a poster session.
Proposals for sessions are welcome. A single session proposal must include proposal information for all presentations expected to be part of it, as detailed above, with some indication of willingness to participate from each proposed session member.
Submit proposals as hard copy by mail to the How Class Works – 2010 Conference, Center for Study of Working Class Life, Department of Economics, SUNY, Stony Brook, NY 11794-4384 or as an e-mail attachment to
Timetable: Proposals must be received by December 14, 2009. Notifications will be mailed on January 19, 2010. The conference will be at SUNY Stony Brook June 3- 5, 2010. Conference registration and housing reservations will be possible after February 15, 2010. Details and updates will be posted at http://www.workingclass.sunysb.edu.
Conference coordinator:
Michael Zweig
Director, Center for Study of Working Class Life
Department of Economics
State University of New York
Stony Brook, NY 11794-4384
631.632.7536
michael.zweig@stonybrook.edu
Inside Higher Ed: ‘The Trials of Academe’
When in doubt, sue. That philosophy has become an expected part of American society and (to the frustration of many in higher education) academe as well. A new book — The Trials of Academe: The New Era of Campus Litigation (Harvard University Press) — combines humor and history to examine the impact (most of it negative) of academic disputes landing in court. Amy Gajda, the author, is assistant professor of journalism and law at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She responded via e-mail to questions about her book.
The Chronicle: Columbia U. Provost Agrees to Meet With Critics of Palestinian Scholar’s Tenuring
Columbia University’s new provost, Claude M. Steele, has agreed to meet with several Columbia professors critical of the institution’s recent decision to grant tenure to Joseph A. Massad, a Palestinian scholar who has been accused of anti-Israel bias, according to a letter posted online by the Manhattan Institute. In a letter sent to Mr. Steele in July, before he had started his job, 14 professors argued that the university had violated its own procedural rules in granting Mr. Massad tenure after a second review they view as unjustified. In a response sent to the professors this month, Provost Steele said it was important for Columbia’s faculty members to have faith in the integrity of the tenure process.
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Posted in Academic freedom, Academics, Tenure & Promotion
Tagged Academic freedom, Columbia U, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Palestine, Tenure & Promotion
The Chronicle: Professors and Picket Signs: When a Strike Seems Like the Only Choice
On the day before classes were set to begin for the current semester at Oakland University, near Detroit, months of negotiating had yet to yield a new contract for faculty members. So the campus chapter of the American Association of University Professors did what it has typically done when negotiations go down to the wire: The members voted on whether to strike.
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Posted in Strikes & Labor Disputes
Tagged Michigan, Oakland U, Strikes & Labor Disputes
BUDGET CUTS AFFECT US ALL!
600 UA JOBS LOST ALREADY!
Join a group of concerned faculty, students and staff to learn about how budget cuts will affect us and help plan a university-wide day of action to let state law makers and university administration know we won’t stand by as higher education is dismantled.
When: Friday, Sept 18 @ 2:00pm
Where: Old Main Fountain
Goals: (1) Establish a unified voice amongst those concerned about budget cuts to higher education at the UofA. (2) Plan a university-wide day of action in solidarity with the faculty, staff and students of the UC system, who are staging a walkout on September 24th.
more info:
> At the University of Arizona we are facing the most dramatic budget
> cuts and restructuring of the University in a generation. These cuts
> will affect every aspect of the University system – from the quality
> of education available to students, to the conditions of our labor as
> researchers, teachers, administrators and staff.
>
> The administration is pursuing a strategy designed to weaken our
> capacity for collective action, our ability to protect our interests
> and participate in the budget and restructuring process.
>
> In some departments, Graduate Teaching Assistants, already working for
> poverty wages, have seen their salaries slashed. In others, course
> loads have been expanded overnight, with little explanation and no
> accountability. Faculty have been furloughed in a way that minimizes
> disruption to teaching, and maximizes the possibility that they will
> continue working without pay. Hiring freezes and layoffs are
> undermining the integrity and functioning of departments and spreading
> work around to already over-burdened faculty and staff. And the
> decisions about whose budget is cut, by how much and why have been
> anything but transparent and accountable, let alone “participatory”.
> All of this while new fees and “tuition surcharges” reduce access to
> and affordability of higher education, redistributing the burden of
> budget shortfalls onto the backs of students.
>
> The UA budget has been cut as much as possible under the current
> stimulus
 package. If it is cut any more, we will lose our
> stimulus funding. The 2010 state budget will not include any stimulus
> money, and state
 revenues are already coming in under
> projection. We will have no protection from further dramatic cuts after
this fiscal year.
>
> By subjecting the budgetary restructuring to an arbitrary and
> subjective process whose impact is felt differentially, we remain
> divided and pitted against each other, rather than capable of uniting
> around our common interests. As long as we remain divided in our
> individual colleges and departments we will have no power or voice as
> our colleagues lose their jobs, as the conditions of our labor and the
> quality of our institution deteriorates, and as the legislature and
> administration continue to pull the rug out from under our feet.
>
> For these reasons, we invite graduate assistants, faculty and staff to
> a meeting on Friday September 18 at 2pm on the fountain in front of
> Old Main organize an action in solidarity with the faculty, staff and
> students of the UC system.
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Posted in Strikes & Labor Disputes
Tagged Job cuts, Strikes & Labor Disputes, U of Arizona, U of California
Inside Higher Ed: Protecting Grad Student Employees
Graduate student employees would have expanded due process and informational rights, under a draft plan released Tuesday by the American Association of University Professors to amend its recommended policies for colleges and universities on academic freedom and tenure.
The AAUP’s statement on academic freedom has long included provisions about the work done by graduate students as teaching or research assistants. But the association decided to revise the statement to reflect changes in higher education.
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Tagged AAUP, Grad Student Employees, Unions
San Francisco Chronicle: Walkout called over UC budget cuts
The protest is intended to disrupt classes to call attention to the deep impact of millions of dollars of budget cuts on the quality of education throughout the UC system.
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/09/15/BAKV19N5S5.DTL#ixzz0RktcbDLy
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Posted in Strikes & Labor Disputes
Express-News: Alamo Colleges faculty vote no confidence in chancellor
Faculty at four of the five Alamo Colleges voted Monday to declare no confidence in Bruce Leslie, the district’s embattled chancellor, and delivered the news to trustees at a packed board meeting Tuesday night.
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Posted in Administration
Tagged Alamo Colleges, no confidence vote, University presidents
The Chronicle: North Carolina Community Colleges to Resume Enrolling Illegal Immigrants
Undocumented immigrants can begin enrolling again next year at North Carolina’s 58 community colleges after the State Board of Community Colleges today reversed a ban on illegal immigrants on those campuses.
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Posted in Uncategorized
Miami Herald: Florida Keys Community College president’s job on the line
The president of the Florida Keys Community College has shaken the cobwebs out of the sleepy institution, but she could be fired due to allegations of creating a hostile workplace.
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Posted in Administration
Tagged Florida Keys CC, University presidents, Working conditions
Joplin Globe: MSSU board instructs president to improve relations with faculty
Missouri Southern State University’s board of governors is directing university President Bruce Speck to “renew efforts to improve relations with the faculty and to address faculty concerns in terms of leadership, management and judgment without retaliation,” according to a press release issued Friday night.
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Posted in Administration
Tagged Administration, Misouri Southern, Missouri, University presidents
To the UC Faculty:
We at the Rouge Forum applaud, admire, and support your efforts to respond to tuition hikes, enrollment cuts, layoffs, furloughs, and increased class sizes, which are indeed, complicit with the privatization of public education.
The Rouge Forum is a group of 4500 educators, students, and parents seeking a democratic society. We are concerned with questions like: How can we teach against racism, nationalism and sexism in an increasingly authoritarian and undemocratic society? How can we gain enough real power to keep our ideals AND teach? Whose interests do schools serve in a society that is ever more unequal? We want to learn about equality, democracy and social justice as we simultaneously struggle to bring those into practice. (http://www.rougeforum.org/, http://www.therougeforum.blogspot.com/, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rouge_Forum).
In the German Ideology, Marx submits, “The class which has the means of material production at its disposal has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas.”
The connection and simultaneous control of this material and mental production comes into ever-sharper relief anytime we are confronted by our corporate media. The level of discourse is less than satisfying. And, frankly, frightening. Pick the issue: health care, immigration, worker’s rights, war, education. While all of the issues are truly critical, the last is particularly problematic since control of schools is a final domino to fall in the imperial quest to completely (re)fashion our reality. Remove critical thinking, make children compete against each other for perceived scarce resources (standardized tests), use the results to reify hierarchies based on social constructions like race and gender and class status, make teachers compete against one another for perceived scarce resources (merit pay), boil dissent down to participation in (mostly) corrupt unions, excuse and/or cover-up the school to military and prison pipelines, monitor and make impotent our schools of education through if-it-wasn’t-so-sinister-it-would-be-comical accrediting bodies like NCATE, and regulate truth. This has been the agenda. And, it has already buried itself deep into our educational psyche.
Your willingness to confront this reality on September 24 is an illustration of the work we will all have to do to protect public education toward the creation of a more whole and healthy society. Where Rouge Forum members are affiliated with the UC system, we have encouraged them to join you. Where Rouge Forum members are unaffiliated with the UC system, we have encouraged them to take part in campus wide discussions relative to the status of higher education, academic freedom, and the importance of public education.
We stand in solidarity with you and offer the graphic, created by Rouge Forum member, Bryan Reinholdt, an elementary performing arts teacher in Louisville, Ky.
Sincerely,
the Rouge Forum Steering Committee
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Posted in Uncategorized
Bill Fletcher and Michael Zweig are scheduled to appear on the Bill Moyers Journal on PBS stations this weekend in a conversation about the crisis facing organized labor, and its relationship to the Obama administration and the broader working class. Check local listings for the times of broadcast in your area. In NYC, the program airs on Channel 13 Friday September 18 at 9 p.m. and is rebroadcast Sunday September 20 at 7 p.m. It will also be available on the Bill Moyers Journal pages of pbs.org.
Daily Illini: U-C Senate approves admissions resolution
he Urbana-Champaign Senate voted in favor of resolution SC.10.01B Monday, which called for the removal of President B. Joseph White and Chancellor Richard Herman.
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Posted in Administration
Tagged no confidence vote, Scandal, U of Illinois
Inside Higher Ed: Breakthrough on Open Access
For years, as more academics have embraced “open access” publishing — in which journals are published online and free — a constant refrain from many publishers has been that the model would deprive them of the revenue they need for high quality editing and peer review. That argument was at the center of a recent report on the economics of journal publishing commissioned by the National Humanities Alliance. That argument was also cited by the Association of American University Presses to oppose federal open access requirements — over the objections of some of its members.
On Monday, five leading universities announced a new “Compact for Open Access Publishing Equity” in which they have pledged to develop systems to pay open access journals for the articles they publish by the institutions’ scholars. In doing so, the institutions are attempting to put to rest the idea that only older publication models (paid and/or print) can support rigorous peer review and quality assurance.
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Posted in Open access
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Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged Rouge Forum, Solidarity, Strikes & Labor Disputes, U of California
Under the cover of the summer months, UC administration has pushed through a program of tuition hikes, enrollment cuts, layoffs, furloughs, and increased class sizes that harms students and jeopardizes the livelihoods of the most vulnerable university employees. These decisions fundamentally compromise the mission of the University of California. They are complicit with the privatization of public education, and they have been made in a manner that flouts the principle of shared governance at the core of the UC faculty’s capacity to guide the future of the University in accordance with its mission.
On September 24, in solidarity with UC staff and students, faculty throughout the University of California system will walk out in defense of public education.
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Posted in Strikes & Labor Disputes
The New York Times: Class Size Brings Strike by Teachers
KENT, Wash. (AP) — On what was scheduled to be the first day of school, students and teachers at Mill Creek Middle School here never made it through the front door. They stood or sat outside by the flagpole, waving signs and yelling at passing motorists.
The teachers have just ended a second week on strike, keeping more than 26,000 students at 40 schools out of the classroom.
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Posted in Strikes & Labor Disputes
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