BBC: At least 12,000 schools hit by teachers’ pension strike
Teachers and lecturers make up the bulk of those protesting
Continue reading the main story
Hundreds of thousands of pupils across England and Wales have missed lessons as teachers staged a one-day strike over changes to their pensions.
At least 12,000 schools are known to have been closed or partly closed. Unions say the total is even higher.
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Posted in Unions
Tagged Neoliberalism, Strikes & Labor Disputes, UK
UK teachers strike over attacks on pensions.
Details at:
http://www.ucu.org.uk/index.cfm?articleid=5616
Strikes will take place in schools, further education colleges and universities. This is action across the UK education sector on an unprecedented scale.
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Posted in Strikes & Labor Disputes, Unions
Tagged pensions, Strikes & Labor Disputes, teachers, UK
The Chronicle: NLRB Proposes Speeding Up Unionization Votes at Private Colleges
Employees of private colleges would find it easier to vote on forming unions under rules changes proposed by the National Labor Relations Board and scheduled for publication in Wednesday’s Federal Register. Among other changes, the proposals would allow for the electronic filing of election petitions, establish standardized time frames for the resolution or litigation of election-related disputes, defer litigation over most voter-eligibility issues until after elections, and consolidate all election-related appeals to the board into a single post-election appeals process, according to an NLRB news release. The proposed revisions are expected to meet opposition from many private-sector employers that fall under the board’s purview and have complained that speeding up elections would leave them too little time to mount effective anti-unionization campaigns and would otherwise stack the deck against them.
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Posted in Organizing, Unions
Tagged NLRB, Organizing, Private colleges, Unions
Boston Globe: UMass gets $364,000 penalty in bias case
The University of Massachusetts Dartmouth has been fined $10,000 and ordered to pay one of its English professors $154,000 in lost wages and $200,000 in damages for emotional distress as part of a decision issued by the state’s antidiscrimination agency.
According to the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination, its June 1 decision in favor of LuLu Sun, associate professor of English, also includes the “unprecedented step’’ of ordering the university to promote Sun to full professor. Sun’s complaint to MCAD alleged discrimination based on her gender, race, and Chinese ancestry.
Posted in Employment rights, Equity, Legal issues
Tagged discrimination, Employment rights, Equity, Gender discrimination, race discrimination, UMass
Orlando Sentinel: 4 Former Professors Sue Bethune-Cookman U. Over Their Dismissal
Four former professors are suing Bethune-Cookman University, claiming they were fired because they confronted the college president about a host of problems on campus, including embezzlement.
They say university president Trudie Kibbe Reed didn’t want them to embarrass her or undermine her authority so she began a course of retaliation that ended with their dismissal.
Reed, however, said the lawsuit is an effort to divert attention away from the real reason the men were let go in 2009 — allegations of sexual misconduct with students.
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Posted in Faculty, Legal issues
Tagged AAUP, Bethune-Cookman U, Legal issues, Termination
The New York Times: Ex-Spy Alleges Bush White House Sought to Discredit Critic
A former senior C.I.A. official says that officials in the Bush White House sought damaging personal information on a prominent American critic of the Iraq war in order to discredit him.
Glenn L. Carle, a former Central Intelligence Agency officer who was a top counterterrorism official during the administration of President George W. Bush, said the White House at least twice asked intelligence officials to gather sensitive information on Juan Cole, a University of Michigan professor who writes an influential blog that criticized the war.
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Posted in Faculty
Tagged CIA, Juan Cole, U of Michigan
Journal Sentinel: Supreme Court reinstates collective bargaining law
Madison – Acting with unusual speed, the state Supreme Court on Tuesday ordered the reinstatement of Gov. Scott Walker’s controversial plan to end most collective bargaining for tens of thousands of public workers.
The court found that a committee of lawmakers was not subject to the state’s open meetings law, and so did not violate that law when it hastily approved the collective bargaining measure in March and made it possible for the Senate to take it up. In doing so, the Supreme Court overruled a Dane County judge who had halted the legislation, ending one challenge to the law even as new challenges are likely to emerge.
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Posted in Unions
Tagged Collective bargaining, Legal issues, Wisconsin
Boston Globe: UMass official demands inquiry
Amherst leader assails leaking of negative report
The UMass Amherst chancellor, who is probably facing termination after a negative evaluation report, is demanding an attorney general’s investigation into leaks from a university committee.
In a highly unusual three-page letter to the University of Massachusetts president, Robert Holub uses strong language to denounce the evaluation committee’s failure to keep its work confidential, according to two people who have seen the letter. In the letter, he argues that he has become a victim of a poisonous political atmosphere that plagues the university system.
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Posted in Administration
Tagged UMass
The Chronicle: Union Arm of AAUP Blasts Its Handling of Key Executive Changes
The American Association of University Professors’ umbrella organization for unionized local affiliates has adopted a resolution condemning how the group’s leadership went about ousting the AAUP’s general secretary, Gary Rhoades, and protesting that the AAUP’s executive committee and its president, Cary Nelson, are usurping the powers of its national leadership council.
The resolution, overwhelmingly passed by the AAUP’s Collective Bargaining Congress late Thursday during the organization’s annual conference here, also condemns how Mr. Nelson has gone about handling the process of replacing the director of the AAUP’s department of organizing and services following a decision by the staff member in that position, Mike Mauer, to step down. Mr. Nelson defied the wishes of the leadership of the Collective Bargaining Congress in appointing a staff member to the search committee that he established to fill the position.
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Posted in Unions
Tagged AAUP, Cary Nelson, Gary Rhoads, Unions
The Chronicle: AAUP President Urges Faculty to Join Battle Against Unwarranted Cuts
Washington
The president of the American Association of University Professors painted a bleak picture of higher education in his remarks that opened the association’s annual meeting here on Wednesday.
“The last eight to 10 months has been like nothing that I’ve ever experienced before,” said Cary Nelson, the association’s president, who has been a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign since 1970.
In a speech that highlighted recent attacks on collective-bargaining rights, academic freedom, and tenure, Mr. Nelson chastised faculty members who refuse to acknowledge that the nation’s higher-education system is broken. He said his own predictions over the years about the shifting higher-education landscape turned out not to be bleak enough.
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Posted in Budgets & Funding, Unions
Tagged AAUP, Budgets & Funding, Unions
The New York Times: Under Scrutiny, Official at State University Resigns
A top official at the State University of New York accused of giving a no-show job to the daughter of the former Senate majority leader, Joseph L. Bruno, has resigned amid mounting scrutiny of his conduct.
The university’s board of trustees voted unanimously at a meeting on Friday to accept the resignation of the official, John J. O’Connor, the secretary and a senior vice chancellor of the university system and the president of its research foundation.
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Posted in Administration
Tagged Administration, Investigations, no-show job, SUNY
The Chronicle: Labor Board Rejects Religious Exemption for Saint Xavier U. and Says Adjuncts Can Unionize
A regional official of the National Labor Relations Board has ruled that Saint Xavier University, a Roman Catholic institution in Illinois, is not sufficiently religious to fall outside that agency’s jurisdiction, and has cleared the way for the institution’s roughly 240 adjunct faculty members to hold a unionization vote.
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Posted in Legal issues, Organizing, Unions
Tagged adjuncts, NLRB, Organizing, Saint Xavier U, Unions
Defend Labor Education and Academic Freedom at University of Missouri-St. Louis
Target: University of Missouri-St. Louis Administration
Sponsored by: United Association for Labor Education
Recently, videotape excerpts of a labor education class taught by our colleague, Judy Ancel, director of The Institute for Labor Studies at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, and union leader Don Giljum, have been circulating on the Internet.
The dissemination of highly edited, false, and deceptive tapes that take remarks out of context and distort their true meaning has become a familiar tactic used by anti-union forces to discredit those whose views they oppose. The use of this disgraceful tactic against Judy Ancel and Don Giljum is only the latest in a series of efforts to intimidate and silence teachers, scholars, and activists who have spoken out against legislative initiatives to curtail collective bargaining rights for workers and undermine the effectiveness of labor unions.
As labor educators, we are committed to enhancing the ability of workers to participate effectively in workplace and community affairs. We also believe that the presence of a strong union movement not only provides workers with vital protections but also is essential to maintaining a just and democratic society. Accordingly, we view attempts to impede or prevent labor educators from performing their vital mission as antithetical to democratic values and unacceptable.
We denounce in the strongest possible terms this blatant attempt to suppress academic freedom, impugn the character of our colleagues, and circumscribe the boundaries of political discussion. We urge administrators at the University of Missouri to do likewise and affirm the principles of academic freedom, critical inquiry, and fair play that are essential to effective education and a functional democracy.
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Posted in Academic freedom
Tagged Academic freedom, d, petition, U of Missouri-St Louis
New York Magazine: The University Has No Clothes
The notion that a college degree is essentially worthless has become one of the year’s most fashionable ideas, with two prominent venture capitalists (Cornell ’89 and Stanford ’89, by the way) leading the charge.
Pity the American parent! Already beleaguered by depleted 401(k)s and gutted real-estate values, Ponzi schemes and toxic paper, burst bubbles and bear markets, he is now being asked to contend with a new specter: that college, the perennial hope for the next generation, may not be worth the price of the sheepskin on which it prints its degrees.
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Posted in Academics, Corporate University
FACE: Faculty at the University of Illinois-Chicago Say “Union Yes!”
HUNDREDS OF FACULTY DEMAND RIGHTS, AUTHORIZATION CARDS BEING DELIVERED TO ILLINOIS EDUCATIONAL LABOR RELATIONS BOARD TODAY
Chicago, IL – Representatives from the UIC United Faculty campaign today will deliver hundreds of signed authorization cards to the Illinois Educational Labor Relations Board (IELRB,) marking the first time in Illinois history that a large public research university’s faculty have organized a union. The broad and diverse coalition of faculty from across various academic spectrums formed and led the UIC United Faculty campaign in partnership with the American Federation of Teachers (AFT,) the Illinois Federation of Teachers (IFT) and the American Association of University Professors (AAUP).
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Posted in Organizing, Unions
The Chronicle: After 42 Years, Columbia U. Will Reinstate Naval ROTC
April 22, 2011, 5:35 pm
The Naval ROTC program will return to Columbia University this year, after a 42-year absence, university officials said this afternoon. The announcement, seven weeks after a similar move at Harvard, followed the Columbia University Senate’s approval of a measure to enter talks with the Defense Department about reinstating the program, which the university had prevented from returning because of the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, which many in academe considered discriminatory toward gay service members. The program will officially return to Columbia when the repeal of the policy, signed into law in December, is officially carried out this year, officials said. The university originally banned ROTC in 1969, at the height of the antiwar movement, over concerns about new program rules that faculty members said hindered academic freedom.
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Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged Columbia U, militarization, ROTC
The Chronicle: Connecticut Measure Would Strip Many Faculty Members of Collective-Bargaining Rights
A budget bill working its way through Connecticut’s House of Representatives would have the effect of stripping many college faculty members of their rights to engage in collective bargaining, by reclassifying them as “managerial employees” if they are heads of academic departments or hold certain other decision-making roles.
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Posted in Unions
Tagged Collective bargaining, Connecticut, Unions
The Georgia Straight: UBC education prof files complaint of racial discrimination
An associate professor of education at UBC believes that the university discriminated against her because of her race.
Jennifer Chan, a Canadian of Chinese descent, claims that the denial of her application for the prestigious David Lam Chair in Multicultural Education in the faculty of education forms part of a pattern of discrimination against her.
“There was systemic racism all throughout my career,” Chan told the Straight in a phone interview today
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Posted in Diversity, Legal issues
Tagged discrimination, Diversity, Legal issues, racial bias, U of British Columbia
Globe and Mail: Professor files complaint against UBC for ‘racial bias’
An associate professor at the University of British Columbia has accused the institution of “racial bias” because she was denied a promotion and her complaint about unfair treatment was later rejected by an internal review.
Jennifer Chan, an associate professor in the department of educational studies, said in a statement released Tuesday that she has now filed a complaint with the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal.
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Posted in Diversity, Legal issues
Tagged discrimination, Legal issues, race discrimination, racial bias, U of British Columbia
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Some Union Members Are More Equal Than Others
Commentary
The Chronicle: Some Union Members Are More Equal Than Others
By Keith Hoeller and Jack Longmate
Do tenure-track and adjunct faculty belong in the same union? A 1980 U.S. Supreme Court decision ruled that tenure-track faculty are “managerial employees” and not entitled to unions in the private sector. But in public-sector unions, tenured professors are often combined with contingent faculty, who are certainly not “managerial.” Tenure-stream faculty supervise the adjuncts, determining workload, interviewing, hiring, evaluating, and deciding whether to rehire them. Gregory Saltzman observed in the National Education Association’s “2000 Almanac of Higher Education” that combined units may not be ideal because of the “conflicts of interests between these two groups.”
In fact, the unequal treatment of professors by their unions has come to resemble the plot of George Orwell’s dystopian novel Animal Farm.
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Posted in Unions
Tagged adjuncts, AFT, Commentary, Contingent labor, NEA, tenure-stream faculty, Unions, Vancouver, Vancouver Community College, Washington