Daily Trust: Nigeria: Parents to Demonstrate Against Teachers’ Strike
Jos — The National Parent Teacher Association of Nigeria (NAPTAN) is to stage a peaceful demonstration August 4, 2009 to show their disapproval of the failure of the state government to end the current indefinite strike by the National Union of Teachers (NUT) in Plateau State.
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Posted in Strikes & Labor Disputes
Tagged K-12 issues, Nigeria, parents, Strikes & Labor Disputes
ABC News: IRC hearings continue in Qld teachers dispute
There has been a hiccup at the start of today’s Industrial Relations Commission (IRC) hearing in Brisbane into the Queensland teachers pay dispute.
Today’s hearing could hold the key to resolving the bitter dispute between the State Government and the Queensland Teachers Union (QTU).
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Posted in Strikes & Labor Disputes
Tagged Australia, Queensland, Strikes & Labor Disputes
examiner.com: Obama and Duncan be warned, teachers’ unions can strike against Democrats too
President Obama has put non-unionized charter schools that cream some of the best kids from neighborhood schools at the top of his education agenda.
He has celebrated the leadership of D.C. schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee, who has fired 1000 educators and farmed kids out to charter schools.
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Posted in Politics
Tagged Democratic Party, Obama, Politics, Teacher unions, Unions
Detroit Free Press: Teachers cling to their benefits because it’s ‘one of our perks’
Teachers in the Wayne-Westland school district went on strike last fall for the first time in 36 years. Health care coverage was a key issue.
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In the end, teachers kept MESSA, the health insurance affiliate of the Michigan Education Association (MEA), as their insurer. The district wanted teachers to join a self-insurance plan officials said would give equal coverage at less cost, a claim the MEA disputed.
Green Left Online: Qld teachers still prepared to strike
The Queensland Teachers Union (QTU) is assessing a new pay offer put forward on July 24 in the Industrial Relations Commission by the Anna Bligh state Labor government.
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Posted in Strikes & Labor Disputes
Tagged Australia, Queensland, Strikes & Labor Disputes
The New York Times: Union Accepts Furloughs at California Universities
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — A union that represents 22,000 faculty members at California State University has agreed to two furlough days a month to help close a huge budget deficit at the 23-campus system, officials said Friday.
Inside Higher Ed: Cal State Faculty Accepts Furloughs
Faced with no good options, a union representing California State University faculty members decided to accept a furlough plan that will reduce compensation by about 10 percent, union leaders announced Friday. The California Faculty Association also questioned Chancellor Charles B. Reed’s leadership, voting “no confidence” in him by a margin of 80 percent. The union represents tenure-track faculty as well as lecturers, who would be most likely to lose jobs if furloughs hadn’t been approved. While the vote indicates some tenured and tenure track faculty essentially voted to preserve other people’s jobs, the measure passed by a significant but not overwhelming margin of 54 percent. The union had criticized Reed for not guaranteeing the furloughs would save jobs, although Reed told Inside Higher Ed he estimated 6,000 positions would be saved if the 23,000 union-represented faculty and other employees took furloughs. The association is affiliated with the National Education Association and the American Association of University Professors, as well as Service Employees International Union.
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Posted in Budgets & Funding
Tagged Budgets & Funding, California State U, furloughs, pay cuts
Avalanche-Journal: Texas Tech professors object to Gonzales hiring
More than 40 Texas Tech professors have objected in a petition to Chancellor Kent Hance’s decision to hire former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, according to the petition’s creator.
Petition creator Walter Schaller, a Tech philosophy professor since 1986, said Friday he decided to take action because “with the emphasis on ethics the university has adopted, a guy that misled Congress is not the kind of person we want to represent Texas Tech.”
Inside Higher Ed: The Press and Morgan State U.
At Morgan State University, the student newspaper’s adviser was respected by the student journalists and went to bat for them in fights with the administration. Now the adviser is out of a job — and a national journalism group is today censuring the university, saying that it got rid of Denise Brown for doing her job.
College Media Advisers, the national group that represents people like Brown, conducted an investigation of why her employment ended on June 30, gathering documents, interviewing some players in the situation, and offering to mediate a settlement (an offer that the university declined), and then today issuing a report with its censure decision on the university. The report calls Morgan State’s policies “legally questionable” and says that they denied student journalists the right of free expression and resulted in the unfair termination of Brown from her position.
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Posted in Free speech
Tagged Free speech, journalism, Morgan State U, Student newspapers, Termination
The New York Times: Do Elite Colleges Produce the Best-Paid Graduates?
Forget U.S. News’s academic rankings and Playboy’s party-school list. For some prospective college freshmen, here’s the important question: Will I make more money if I go to Harvard, or if I go to Harvey Mudd?
PayScale, a site that collects data on salaries for different professions, argues that it can help students answer that question. Today the company is releasing an updated, gigantic data set on the salaries of graduates from hundreds of universities and colleges, as well as salaries and career choices broken down by department/major.
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Posted in Salary/Economic Benefits, Students
Tagged Salary/Economic Benefits
World University News: NEW ZEALAND: Research performance moves worry union
The next assessment of research in New Zealand’s tertiary education sector is three years away but preparations for the event by some institutions already have the country’s university staff union worried.EW ZEALAND: Research performance moves worry union
The next assessment of research in New Zealand’s tertiary education sector is three years away but preparations for the event by some institutions already have the country’s university staff union worried.
News-Press: FGCU professor’s second penalty is firing
Deposited school’s checks, FGCU says
The same FGCU associate professor suspended for touching a mannequin in a sexual manner has been fired for depositing university checks into his personal bank account.
David Lounsbury, 56, was terminated July 14 after an internal audit found he collected cash and checks worth $15,210.
Lounsbury is accused of asking students to issue checks directly to him, or pay in cash, instead of FGCU for an interview and interrogation course.
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Posted in Faculty
Tagged Faculty, firing, Florida Gulf Coast U, Termination
Inside Higher Ed: Outsourcing Teaching, Overseas
In Utah State degree program in Asia, “lead professors” (from Utah) design the course work and assign the grade, but “local facilitators” (from partner universities) deliver much of the course content.
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Posted in Academic freedom, Academics, Corporate University
Tagged Academic freedom, Contingent labor, Corporate University, outsourcing, Utah State U
Denver Post: Churchill appeal says judge erred
An accompanying affidavit states the jury wanted CU to rehire the ex-professor.
Ward Churchill continues fighting to get his job back in a new legal motion that says a Denver District Court judge erred when he ruled against reinstating the fired University of Colorado professor.
A juror who sat through Churchill’s civil case against the university submitted an affidavit to Chief Judge Larry Naves on Tuesday that said the jury wanted him to reinstate Churchill.
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Posted in Legal issues
Tagged Add new tag, Legal issues, U of Colorado, Ward Churchill
The Chronicle: Singaporean Scholar, a Foe of Gay Rights, Cancels Plans to Teach at NYU
A law professor from Singapore has canceled plans to teach at New York University this fall following an uproar on the campus over her statements in opposition to homosexuality.
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Posted in Faculty
Tagged gay rights, NYU, Singapore
The Chronicle News Blog: Cal State Faculty Approves Furlough but Votes No Confidence in Chancellor
The main faculty union at California State University today narrowly approved an unpaid furlough of two days per month, avoiding a new round of layoffs of thousands of part-time faculty members and cementing the system’s plan to close a $584-million budget deficit.
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Posted in Administration, Budgets & Funding
The Chronicle News Blog: Charges Against Henry Louis Gates Jr. to Be Dropped
Authorities in Cambridge, Mass., announced today that prosecutors there would not pursue disorderly-conduct charges brought against the prominent black-studies scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. last week after he exchanged words with police officers investigating a falsely reported burglary at his home.
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Posted in Faculty, Legal issues
Tagged Harvard U, Henry Louis Gates, racial profiling, racism
As I’m sure many readers of the Workplace Blog know, Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor has new home, new outlook, new publishing system. Co-editors Stephen Petrina, Steven Wexler, and I encourage you to read or browse the new Workplace journal.
The co-editors also express our deep appreciation to all past members of the Workplace Collective and in particular the founding and previous editors and special section editors of Workplace. Your contributions to the journal have made it an important and dynamic site for the analysis of higher education.
We are in the process of reconstituting the Workplace Collective and invite interested persons to consider making a commitment to the work of the journal. In particular, we request that members of the new Workplace Collective make a commitment that goes beyond reviewing manuscript submissions and includes submitting articles, reviews, and other forms of scholarship to Workplace for consideration.
We also encourage you to consider making an even deeper commitment to the journal by proposing to guest edit a special section of Workplace. (You can find the guidelines for special section proposals and two current CFPs here.
If you are interested in renewing your commitment to the journal as a member of the Workplace Collective or have questions about the direction the journal is going please email E. Wayne Ross.
In addition, we request that everyone go the Workplace website and become a “Registered user”.
On the new site you will find a number of new articles and reviews, which have been published in advance of the official launch of Issue No. 16. You will also find several archived issues of the journal on the new site. Please note that we are in the process of migrating all back issues of Workplace to the OJS platform.
We are looking forward to continuing our collective work and taking Workplace to the next level as the site for committed activist scholars in higher education.
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Posted in Uncategorized
Boston Globe: Racial talk swirls with Gates arrest
Harvard scholar taken from home
His front door refused to budge, which is why Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., just home from a trip to China filming a PBS documentary, set his luggage down and beckoned his driver for help.
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Tagged Harvard U, Henry Louis Gates, racial profiling, racism
Chicago Tribune: Trustee requested job help at U. of I.
University gave future son-in-law tailor-made, $115,000-a-year position
University of Illinois board chair Niranjan Shah used his connection with the chancellor in 2007 to get a high-paying university job for his future son-in-law, a Dutch citizen seeking work in the United States.
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Posted in Ethics, Governance
Tagged insider influcence, Scandal, trustees, U of Illinois
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Detroit’s Schools Are Going Bankrupt, Too
Wall Street Journal: Detroit’s Schools Are Going Bankrupt, Too
Now’s the time to cast off collective bargaining agreements and introduce school choice.
‘Am I optimistic that they can avoid it . . . ? I am not.” That’s what retired judge Ray Graves said this week when asked whether the Detroit public schools, which he is advising, would be forced into bankruptcy. Facing violence, a shrinking student body, and graduating just one out of every four students who enter the ninth grade on time, the city’s schools have been stumbling for years. Now they face a seemingly insurmountable deficit and are expected to file for bankruptcy protection at about the time that students should be settling down in a new school year.
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Posted in Campaigns & Contracts, Unions, Working conditions
Tagged Collective bargaining, Commentary, Detroit, school choice