Calgary Herald: U of C faces budget crisis
Tight times at the University of Calgary will get tighter in coming years, as the school will likely have to cut costs to avoid three consecutive years of deficits, starting at $17 million next year and rising each year after.
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Posted in Budgets & Funding
The Chronicle Journal: Faculty group to fight university shutdown
Any financial savings Lakehead University realizes by an “unanticipated” four-day shutdown just before this Christmas will be eaten up in a legal battle at the province‘s labour relations board, warns the association that represents LU‘s 300 instructors.
“I don‘t think they‘ll save that much, because if it goes to a (board) hearing you will have hundreds of thousands of dollars spent by both parties,” Lakehead University Faculty Association chief negotiator Gerald Phillips said Friday.
LUFA is vowing to fight the pre-Christmas shutdown – which will result in a loss of pay for most LU employees – because it says the move violates the collective agreement it has with the university.
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Posted in Unions
Tagged Lakehead University, shutdown
Atlanta Journal-Constitution: Suspect ‘shy, a bit eccentric’
Charles Hofacker recalls George M. Zinkhan III as a prolific academic writer, a poet of unique verse and a low-key personality comfortable in not attracting attention to himself.
But Hofacker cannot associate the peer he speaks to a couple of times a year with the man police say shot to death his estranged wife and two of her acquaintances near the University of Georgia campus Saturday.
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Posted in Safety & Security
Tagged George Zinkan, murder, shooting
Burlington Free Press: Students protest again
Demonstrator arraigned for trespassing
Students upset with budget cuts at the University of Vermont tried — with mixed success — to get faculty and staff workers to back them at a noontime rally Thursday, one day after a sit-in at the Waterman administrative building resulted in 31arrests.
“We demand President (Daniel) Fogel’s resignation,” Cecile Reurge, a 19-year-old freshman from Stony Brook, N.Y., said to the cheers of about 100 people gathered in front of Bailey-Howe Library. “We have no confidence in his leadership anymore.”
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Posted in Budgets & Funding, Protests
Tagged Budgets & Funding, Protests, Students
Columbus Dispatch: Presidential search records destroyed at Hocking College
NELSONVILLE, Ohio — The president of Hocking College’s faculty union was astonished when she received public records she requested from her employer.
It’s what she didn’t receive — faculty and staff evaluations of the finalist who is the union’s apparent choice as the college’s new president — that led her to denounce the selection process as a “fiasco.”
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Posted in Administration
Tagged Job searches, University presidents
CatholicCulture.org: Faculty union at Jesuit university resists move to eliminate abortion coverage
The faculty union at the Jesuit-run University of San Francisco has fought off an effort to eliminate abortion coverage from the health-care benefits offered to instructors. Pointing out that the Jesuit order has formally ceded control of the university to a lay board, the president of the faculty union insisted on adherence to an existing contract, saying that tampering with that contract on any point would be “something like abolishing tenure.”
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Posted in Salary/Economic Benefits
Tagged abortion, benefits, University of San Francisco
Burlington Free Press: UVM unveils revised budget plan, hopes to shrink number of layoffs
The chief financial officer for the University of Vermont says he’s optimistic the school has figured out a way to avoid a second round of layoffs and possibly reinstate some of the part-time lecturers given pink slips earlier this year.
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Posted in Budgets & Funding
socialistworker.org: Parsons faculty fight dismissals
NEW YORK–Some 150 people, most of them teachers, rallied on April 23 in front of the New School administration building to demand the reinstatement of 12 adjunct faculty.
Dozens of students also turned out to support teachers in the Fine Arts department in the School of Art, Media and Technology at Parsons the New School for Design–the teachers were laid off just before spring break began.
New School, which Parsons has been a part of since 1970, essentially has a faculty of part-timers. Parsons faculty is made up of 127 full-time faculty members and 1,056 part-time faculty members. Part-timers make up an overall 89 percent of the New School’s faculty.
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Posted in Budgets & Funding
Inside Higher Ed: Negotiators Report Progress on Antioch College
“Major progress” has been made in negotiations for Antioch University to transfer Antioch College to its own board, clearing the way for the revival of the college, the Great Lakes Colleges Association announced Sunday night. The association has been mediating negotiations between the university, which suspended the college’s operations, and alumni who want the college — the residential liberal arts college in Yellow Springs, Ohio — to operate on its own. According to a statement from the association, a “preliminary draft of a set of definitive agreements” has been completed, although some issues remain unclear. Some of those issues, involving control of endowment funds and tax status, require approval of groups such as the Internal Revenue Service and the Ohio attorney general’s office. The statement said that both sides are working to have board votes on the transfer plan take place by June 30.
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Posted in Budgets & Funding
Tagged Antioch, Legal issues
Worcester Telegram: Gaza talk rescheduled at Clark U.
WORCESTER — Acknowledging “the process could have been better,” Clark University President John Bassett has approved rescheduling the appearance of a controversial scholar and author whose talk he had canceled two weeks ago.
After learning earlier this month that the Students for Palestinian Rights planned to bring Norman Finkelstein to campus Thursday, the first night of a university-sponsored Holocaust and genocide studies conference, Mr. Bassett nixed the student organization’s plans.
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Posted in Free speech
Tagged Clark University, Free speech, Gaza, Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Norman Finkelstein
The Gazette: Classes back at Montreal university after strike vote
MONTREAL — Classes will resume on Monday at the Universite du Quebec a Montreal after striking professors approved new contracts Friday.
Nearly 1,000 professors and full-time language instructors had been on strike since March 16.
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Posted in Strikes & Labor Disputes
Tagged Campaigns & Contracts, Montreal, QUAM, Salary/Economic Benefits, Strikes & Labor Disputes
Inside Higher Ed: ‘Standing Still’ as Associate Profs
English and foreign language departments promote male associate professors to full professors on average at least a year — and in some cases, depending on type of institutions, several years — more speedily than they promote women, according to a study being released today by the Modern Language Association. Over all, the average time for women as associate professor prior to promotion is 8.2 years, compared to 6.6 years for men.
The Chronicle: Not Moving On Up: Why Women Get Stuck at Associate Professor
Message to deans, department chairs, and other administrators in higher education: Pay more attention to associate professors— particularly women, for whom the path to promotion is often murky and less traveled.
That’s one of several recommendations from a panel of the Modern Language Association, whose new report, released today, describes how male associate professors in English and foreign languages are routinely promoted to full professor quicker than women are. To help reverse that trend, the MLA’s Committee on the Status of Women in the Profession suggested several moves, such as backing away from the monograph as the dominant form of scholarship that counts toward advancement, attaching bigger salary increases to the jump from associate to full professor, and creating mentor programs that focus specifically on preparing associate professors for promotion. The report, “Standing Still: The Associate Professor Survey,” is available on the association’s Web site.
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Posted in Tenure & Promotion
Tagged associate professors, Equity, Gender, Tenure & Promotion
The Chronicle: Public Colleges Consider Privatization as a Cure for the Common Recession
As state tax revenues plummet, some lawmakers and higher-education leaders are once again looking at loosening the bonds between state governments and public colleges to save money and give colleges the freedom to bolster their bottom lines in new ways.
Over the past two decades, college officials have often lamented the growing need to secure money outside of appropriations. But the continuing economic crisis has led to a new urgency on the part of some public colleges to shed more of their ties to states, despite the mixed results of previous such efforts.
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Posted in Budgets & Funding
Tagged Budgets & Funding, Corporate University, Privatization
The Chronicle News Blog: U. of Michigan’s Online Teaching-Evaluation System Fails
Class bombed?
Good news! So did the course-evaluation system.
The University of Michigan is investigating an end-of-semester technology mystery: the failure Monday night of its new system for evaluating professors online.
The tool remained broken as of Friday afternoon, but university spokeswoman Kelly Cunningham was unable to shed any light on what brought it down.
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Posted in Academics
Tagged IT, student evaluations, University of Michigan
Atlanta Journal-Constitution: Heavily armed police patrol UGA in wake of shooting
Professor sought in murders remains on loose, and his passport is missing
ATHENS — University of Georgia police patrolled the campus Monday with semiautomatic weapons as part of a stepped-up security effort in the wake of Saturday’s triple slaying at an Athens theater, chief Jimmy Williamson said.
Williamson said campus police are using two-officer foot patrols, with one of the two officers carrying an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle.
Banner-Herald: Police searching for UGA professor in shooting that killed three at theater
University of Georgia SWAT team members ride in the back of a pickup as they search for Professor George Zinkhan after he allegedly shot and killed three people at a community theater picnic on
A nationwide search is underway for a University of Georgia professor who police say shot and killed his wife and two men early this afternoon at an Athens theater gathering.
George Zinkhan, 56, is still at large, Athens-Clarke police said.
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Posted in Safety & Security
Tagged crime, Faculty, George Zinkan, murder, shooting, University of Georgia
The New York Time: End the University as We Know It
By MARK C. TAYLOR
GRADUATE education is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans).
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Posted in Commentary
Tagged Academics, Commentary, Contingent labor, Graduate student labor, Research
The Chronicle News Blog: Court Filings in Kentucky Give a Vivid Glimpse of a Dean’s Interrogation
“Dean, I can help you. I can work with you. Okay? But you need to know upfront that lying to a federal agent potentially could have … some criminal ramifications.”
It’s not every day that a campus police detective interrogates a dean. But a brief filed yesterday in a federal court in Kentucky offers a vivid portrait of the scene that unfolded last June, when Jeffrey G. Jewell, an investigator with the University of Louisville’s police department, spent more than six hours grilling Robert Felner, dean of the university’s College of Education and Human Development. Four months later, Mr. Felner was indicted on charges of embezzling more than $2-million from a federal research grant and from contracts with three urban school districts.
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Posted in Legal issues
Tagged Legal issues, Robert Felner, University of Louisville
AP: Michigan State gets $10 million from mystery donor
LANSING, Mich. – A donor who wishes to remain anonymous has given Michigan State University a $10 million gift.
While it’s not guaranteed the donation announced Thursday is connected to a string of at least a dozen others given anonymously to universities and colleges in recent weeks, it sure seems likely. All the institutions are led by women. The universities don’t know who is donating the money and aren’t supposed to try and find out, which is a fairly unusual request.
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Posted in Philanthropy
Tagged gifts, Michigan State U, Mystery donor
Inside Higher Ed: Bowdoin Punishes Professor who provoked
The president of Bowdoin College has endorsed a faculty committee’s finding that an economist engaged in misconduct in research — research that he continues to maintain the college examined only because it made Bowdoin look bad.
The complicated and contested history of Jonathan P. Goldstein’s dispute with Bowdoin was examined in an article on Inside Higher Ed two weeks ago. The gist of it is that Goldstein wrote a scholarly article that, he said, showed that Bowdoin overemphasized athletics; ran afoul of the college’s dean and other administrators when he sought to distribute it to parents and prospective students (interrupting college tours and intimidating a student employee, Bowdoin officials charged); and became the subject of a series of accusations and campus investigations.
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Posted in Faculty
Tagged Bowdoin College, Research misconduct
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More Drivel From the New York Times
howtheuniversityworks.com: More Drivel From the New York Times
Today the Grey Lady lent the op-ed page to yet another Columbia prof with the same old faux “analysis” of graduate education.
Why golly, the problem with the university is that there aren’t enough teaching positions out there to employ all of our excess doctorates Mark C. Taylor says: “Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist).” Because there are just too many folks with Ph.D.’s out there, “there will always be too many candidates for too few openings.”
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Posted in Commentary
Tagged Academics, adjuncts, Contingent labor, Job market, Working conditions