The Chronicle News Blog: North Dakota Campus to Stay Closed for Rest of Spring Semester
Valley City State University officials decided yesterday to keep their campus closed for the rest of the semester, after flooding from the Sheyenne River prompted Valley City, N.D., to urge about half its residents to evacuate until the waters recede, which may not happen for two weeks.
Globe and Mail: PM urged to restore science funds
More than 2,000 scientists galvanized into ‘Don’t leave Canada behind’ campaign
More than 2,000 researchers, including some of the country’s most respected scientists, have signed an open letter to the Prime Minister calling the funding cuts in the January budget “huge steps backward for Canadian science.”
The Chronicle News Blog: Canadian Researchers Protest Budget Cuts in Open Letter to Prime Minister
More than 2,000 Canadian scientists have signed an open letter to Prime Minister Stephen Harper decrying budget cuts in science, especially at a time when President Obama is bolstering research in the United States.
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Posted in Budgets & Funding
Tagged Budgets & Funding, Canada, Research
The Chronicle News Blog: Law Professors Sue Publisher Over ‘Sham’ Book Supplement
Two law professors are suing West Publishing in federal district court for putting their names on a book supplement they did not write, arguing that it is a “sham” that could damage their reputations.
For nearly 20 years, David Rudovsky, a senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and Leonard Sosnov, a professor of law at Widener Law School, have compiled an annual supplement to their 1988 book, Pennsylvania Criminal Procedure: Law, Commentary and Forms.
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Posted in Legal issues
Tagged Legal issues, publishing
Inside Higher Ed: Carolina Chancellor Apologizes for Speech Disruption
Protesters disrupted a speech Tuesday at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill by former Rep. Tom Tancredo, a leader of the movement to limit benefits to those who do not have the legal right to live in the United States. Video posted on YouTube shows the incident, which led Tancredo to stop his talk. Holden Thorp, chancellor at Chapel Hill, called Tancredo to apologize for the incident Friday. Thorp issued a statement Wednesday strongly condemning the protest for blocking the talk, and vowing that the incident would be investigated. “We expect protests about controversial subjects at Carolina. That’s part of our culture,” he said. “But we also pride ourselves on being a place where all points of view can be expressed and heard. There’s a way to protest that respects free speech and allows people with opposing views to be heard. Here that’s often meant that groups protesting a speaker have displayed signs or banners, silently expressing their opinions while the speaker had his or her say. That didn’t happen last night.”
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Posted in Protests
Tagged Free speech, Protests
The Tennessean: Lambuth University can’t make payroll
Lambuth University officials announced Tuesday that the Jackson, Tenn., school will not be able to make its regularly scheduled payroll today.
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The business office was informed Monday that an anticipated line of credit would not be available as previously thought, according to a news release from the university.
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Posted in Budgets & Funding
Tagged Budgets & Funding, economic crisis, payroll
Inside Higher Ed: The Part-Time Satisfaction Gap
SAN DIEGO — If community colleges want to make an impact on the job satisfaction of adjuncts, it’s time to focus on benefits. That was one conclusion of a study of the job satisfaction of part-time faculty members at two-year institutions, presented Wednesday at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association.
The study — by Paul D. Umbach of North Carolina State University and Ryan Wells of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst — was based on a national database of the attitudes of more than 5,700 community college faculty members at nearly 300 institutions. Umbach said it was important to examine adjunct job satisfaction because so many community colleges depend on part timers to teach a large share of courses, and because adjuncts are so diverse. With some part timers not relying on their teaching jobs economically, but others totally relying on colleges as employers, colleges need a better sense of just what adjuncts think about their jobs, Umbach said.
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Posted in Working conditions
Tagged adjuncts, community colleges, Contingent labor, job satisfaction, part-time faculty
Inside Higher Ed: ‘Leave-Proofing’ the Faculty
Tenure-track jobs are harder than ever to find, with the economic mess prompting many colleges to grow even more cautious about hiring anyone on the tenure track. Tenure-track openings are being put on hold. Searches are being called off every day. Many who worry that higher education has created a faculty of two tiers — the privileged tenured class and the overused and abused adjuncts — have been told that this year is simply not the year in which to promote change.
In this environment, Denison University might seem an unlikely institution to bolster the ranks of its tenure-track faculty. A liberal arts college in Ohio, Denison has never abandoned the centrality of tenure-track lines — and typically uses adjuncts only to replace those professors who are on leave. But now Denison is embarking a plan that will replace many of those adjunct hires with permanent, tenure-track lines, and as a result will soon be conducting searches for 12 tenure-track jobs in liberal arts disciplines — hiring that will lead to real faculty growth beyond the 200 tenure-track and tenured faculty members at the university today.
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Posted in Tenure & Promotion
Tagged adjuncts, Contingent labor, Denison University, job security, Tenure & Promotion
News & Observer: Protest stops Tancredo’s UNC speech
CHAPEL HILL — UNC-CH police released pepper spray and threatened to use a Taser on student protesters Tuesday evening when a crowd disrupted a speech by former Colorado congressman Tom Tancredo opposing in-state tuition benefits to unauthorized immigrants.
Hundreds of protesters converged on Bingham Hall, shouting profanities and accusations of racism while Tancredo and the student who introduced him tried to speak. Minutes into the speech, a protester pounded a window of the classroom until the glass shattered, prompting Tancredo to flee and campus police to shut down the event.
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Posted in Protests
Tagged free, immigration, Protests, Tuition, University of North Carolina
Yale U OPR: Yale and UNITE HERE Agree on Three-year Contracts Nine Months Early
UNITE HERE President John Wilhelm, Yale President Richard C. Levin, Local 34 President Laura Smith and Local 35 President Robert Proto announce tentative agreement on new labor contracts.
New Haven, Conn. — Yale University and UNITE HERE Locals 34 and 35, the two major unions representing Yale employees, have agreed on new three-year contracts more than nine months before the expiration of their current contracts. The new agreements will take effect January 2010 and cover 3,400 clerical and technical employees in Local 34 and more than 1,200 service and maintenance employees in Local 35.
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Posted in Unions
Tagged Contracts, Unions, UNITE HERE, Yale
FACE: Clean Sweep in Montana
The votes have been counted and the Montana State University-Bozeman faculty, tenure-track and adjunct, have made it clear that they want a union. With this vote, MEA-MFT, the state affiliate of the AFT and the National Education Association, now represents all faculty in the public colleges and universities of Montana. That’s what we call “union density”!
Bozeman Daily Chronicle: MSU faculty votes to join union
The faculty at Montana State University voted Tuesday for the first time in history to join a union.
The vote was close among tenured and tenure-track faculty n 168 to 156 in favor of unionization, or 52 to 48 percent.
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Posted in Unions
Tagged Montana State U, Organizing, Unions
The Chronicle: Virginia Tech Drops Diversity Requirement From Tenure Policy
The president of Virginia Tech has asked the provost to remove from the university’s new guidelines on tenure and promotion a requirement that professors show an “active involvement in diversity,” which some conservative groups had criticized as a violation of academic freedom.
The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and other groups had complained that the condition amounted to a political litmus test and that it had nothing to do with professors’ academic accomplishments. It did not belong, they said, in guidelines on tenure and promotion.
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Posted in Tenure & Promotion
Tagged Diversity, Tenure & Promotion, Virginia Tech
Greenville News: Clemson faculty passes resolution citing concern over administrators’ pay
CLEMSON — In a unanimous vote, the Clemson University Faculty Senate approved a resolution today expressing concern over what its members called disproportionately higher administrators’ pay.
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The resolution cited lost trust in the area of administrative salaries.
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Posted in Salary/Economic Benefits
Tagged Clemson U, Equity, Salary/Economic Benefits, South Carolina
Inside Higher Ed: Patterns in Academic Persecution
The Scholar Rescue Fund drew applications from oppressed academics in 101 different countries in its first five years of operations, suggesting “at least a low level of scholar persecution in a surprisingly wide range of countries and regions” — although it’s most prevalent in the Middle East/North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa. Scholars from the two regions accounted for 61 percent of all applicants from 2002-7 and 73 percent of grantees.
“Scholar Rescue in the Modern World,” a report being released today by the Institute of International Education (home of the Scholar Rescue Fund), identifies such trends in reported persecution across 847 grant applications. The Scholar Rescue Fund awards fellowships for scholars to hold temporary academic posts abroad on the basis of the urgency of threats they face at home and the quality of their academic work. The report’s authors acknowledge the limitations of a small data set and of the fund’s reach — North Korea, for instance, is not represented in the application pool — but also assert the importance of gleaning what trends one can.
The Chronicle: For ‘Rescued’ Scholars, Persecution Came in Many Forms and Many Lands
A marine biologist in Ukraine was fired from his university position for studying mollusks in the bay near his institution, despite warnings from the government to focus his academic inquiries elsewhere.
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Posted in Working conditions
Tagged Academic freedom, Free speech, Government, Persecution
Inside Higher Ed: Can’t We All Just Get Along?
SAN DIEGO — You know the stereotypes — perhaps even believe them. College administrators these days care only for the bottom line. Professors can’t decide anything or ever endorse change. When professors become department chairs or deans, they cross over to the “dark side,” and forget their old values and friends.
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Posted in Working conditions
Tagged Administration, Department chairs, working
Austin American-Statesman: UT System, faculty association settle lawsuit
Laid-off UTMB employees will get first consideration for openings.
The Texas Faculty Association and the University of Texas System settled a lawsuit Monday in which the association had charged that the system’s governing board violated the state Open Meetings Act by discussing layoffs behind closed doors.
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Posted in Legal issues
Tagged Legal issues, University of Texas
This Day: Invigilation Resumes as Oyo Teachers Call-off Strike
Parents in Oyo State heaved a sigh of relief as the 37-day strike, by members of the state chapter of the Nigeria Union of Teachers (NUT) was suspended at the weekend. With the call-off, the teachers have resumed the invigilation of the Senior School Certificate Examination (SSCE), which they avoided while the strike lingered.
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Posted in Strikes & Labor Disputes
Tagged K-12 issues, Nigeria, Strikes & Labor Disputes, testing
AllAfrica.com: Nigeria: Teachers Suspend Strike in Delta
Asaba — Delta State wing of the Nigeria Union of Teachers (NUT) has suspended the four-week industrial action it called to press for improvement of the welfare of its members.
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Posted in Strikes & Labor Disputes
Tagged Nigeria, Strikes & Labor Disputes
Daily Express: TEACHERS MAY STRIKE IN FIGHT TO AXE THE SATS
TEACHERS moved a step closer to strike action yesterday when union bosses revealed it is “extremely likely” they will vote to boycott Sats testing.
The National Union of Teachers wants the tests for children aged seven and 11 scrapped because they say they are damaging to pupils and demean staff.
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Posted in Strikes & Labor Disputes
Tagged K-12 issues, Strikes & Labor Disputes, testing
Ma’an News Agency: Nablus teachers strike after colleague arrested for beating pupil
Nablus – Ma’an – Following the arrest of a Nablus teacher for beating one of his pupils, teachers at the Al-Kendi school have announced a strike starting Sunday as an act of protest.
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Posted in Strikes & Labor Disputes
Tagged Palestine, Strikes & Labor Disputes
Spokesman-Review: Budget cuts rekindle faculty group
AAUP advocates shared governance, protection of rights for members
Concern about budget cuts at Washington State University has prompted a resurgence of a national faculty rights organization on campus.
The American Association of University Professors, active in Pullman in the 1950s and 1970s, is recruiting members from among WSU faculty fearful of how the administration will respond to state spending cuts, according to applied statistics professor Rich Alldredge, president of the local chapter of the AAUP.
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Posted in Organizing, Unions
Tagged AAUP, Unions, Washington State U
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