Kyara Tobias, August 2013– Un-hired Ed: the growing adjunct crisis. How our best and brightest can work tirelessly for 8 years only to receive food stamps, debt, and no career. Click on the image for an extremely eye-opening, informative infographic.
Comments Off on Un-Hired Ed: The growing adjunct crisis #yteubc #occupyeducation
Posted in Accountability, Adjuncts & Sessionals, Advocacy, Budgets & Funding, Employment rights, Job market, Organizing, Protests, Research, Student Movement, Students, Unions, Working conditions
Tagged adjuncts, Budgets & Funding, Contingent labor, Equity, Ethics, Organizing, Students, Working conditions
“Expensive Education” Image from CBC News
Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, September 11, 2013– The average cost of tuition and compulsory fees for Canadian undergraduate students will rise by almost 13% over the next four years, from $6,610 this fall to an estimated $7,437 in 2016-17, says a study released today by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA).
The study looks at trends in tuition and compulsory fees in Canada since 1990, projects fees for each province for the next four years, and ranks the provinces on affordability for median- and low-income families using a Cost of Learning Index.
“Average tuition and compulsory fees in Canada have tripled since 1990, even after inflation is taken into account,” says Erika Shaker, co-author of the study and director of the CCPA’s education project. “No wonder there is growing public concern over student debt loads, economic and employment uncertainty, and the long-term ramifications being felt by students and their families.”
According to the study, Ontario is the province with the highest fees and will see its tuition and other fees climb from $8,403 this fall to an estimated $9,517 in 2016-17. Newfoundland and Labrador remains the province with the lowest compulsory fees of $2,872 this fall, rising to an estimated $2,886 in 2016-17.
The study’s Cost of Learning Index clearly demonstrates that provincial governments play a significant role in ensuring university education is more—or less—affordable for median and low-income families, particularly when household debt is at an all-time high and incomes have been stagnant for over two decades.
“Newfoundland and Labrador is the most affordable province for university education for both median- and low-income families, while New Brunswick is the least affordable for median-income families and Alberta is the least affordable for low-income families,” says David Macdonald, CCPA senior economist and co-author of the study.
Some provincial governments are responding to concerns about affordability with piecemeal, targeted, and non-universal directed assistance measures for in-province students such as tax credits, debt caps, and grants or bursaries. While these measures do impact in-province affordability, it creates a situation where the only students who leave the province to pursue a degree are the ones who can afford to.
“The increasing number of exceptions and qualifiers for financial assistance makes the system far more difficult for students and families to navigate, and makes it harder to compare province-to-province,” says Shaker. “If provinces directed their funds to across-the-board fee reductions instead, it would make the system fairer, more predictable, and easier to navigate.”
Degrees of Uncertainty: Navigating the changing terrain of university finance is available on the CCPA website: http://policyalternatives.ca
Comments Off on Cost of university education in Canada to rise 13% over next four years: CCPA study #bced #bcpoli #yteubc #education
Posted in Accountability, Equity, Government, Research, Student Movement, Students
Tagged Budgets & Funding, Government, Students
CTV Montreal, September 6, 2013– A group of 91 Quebec thinkers – mostly francophone academics – have signed a letter denouncing the PQ’s charter of values that is expected to be debated at the National Assembly as soon as next week.
Although the exact details of the soon-to-be proposed legislation remain unknown, the group is clear in its rejection of the project, as evidenced in its 1,000 word manifesto entitled “Our values exclude exclusion.”
The letter begins emphatically: “We are against any proposed Charter of Quebec Values. We share values such as equality between men and women and the secular nature of the state and public institutions.
The signatories include McGill academics Abby Lippman and Ethel Groffier, writer Norman Nawrocki and activist Will Prosper.
The letter defends what it calls “the rejection of racism,” and calls the bill a “repressive and divisive project.”
Read more: CTV Montreal
Comments Off on Quebec intellectuals denounce Charter of Values
Posted in Academic freedom, Censorship, Ethics, Government, Human Rights, Politics, Protests, Students, Unions, Working conditions
Tagged Academic freedom, Government, Protests, Students, Unions
Arno Rosenfeld, Ubyssey, September 7, 2013– [University of British Columbia] UBC announced Saturday that they will investigate whether Commerce Undergraduate Society (CUS) leaders told volunteers to keep an offensive chant within their orientation groups.
In a statement released by Robert Helsley, dean of UBC’s Sauder School of Business, and UBC’s VP Students Louise Cowin, the university pledged to investigate the chant.
“The Sauder School of Business and the Office of the Vice-President, Students will jointly conduct a thorough investigation of these reports. Any disciplinary measures will follow the university’s policy on discipline for non-academic misconduct,” the statement read.
The Ubyssey reported on Friday that group leaders at FROSH, the CUS-organized orientation for Sauder first-years, led their “froshees” in a variation of the Y-O-U-N-G cheer.
Read More: Ubyssey
Brian Haman, Counterpunch, August 30, 2013 — It has become a truism in American higher education: seventy-five percent of undergraduate courses at U.S. colleges and universities are taught by contingent faculty1, most of whom lack health insurance,2carry onerous student debt,3 receive poverty-level compensation, and often rely on public assistance such as food stamps in order to make ends meet.4 This percentage translates into more than 1.3 million highly-educated, qualified, and competent, but poorly-paid, undervalued, and underappreciated American workers. Conversely, administrative costs at colleges have soared in recent years. The academic managerial class (provosts, vice and associate vice provosts, deans, presidents, vice presidents, etc.) routinely earn six-figure salaries, often with generous perks including vacation homes.5
According to U.S. Education Department data, “U.S. universities employed more than 230,000 administrators in 2009, up 60 percent from 1993, or 10 times the rate of growth of the tenured faculty, those with permanent positions and job security”.6 Most new hires on American campuses never even set foot in the classroom simply because they are not teachers but administrators.7 Furthermore, the cost of a college degree in the U.S. has increased by 1,120 percent since 1978.8 The overwhelming majority of the academic labor force (to say nothing of students, who voluntarily submit to indentured servitude in the form of student debt) suffers disproportionately due to enormous concentrations of wealth in the hands of a small and privileged elite.
We find a similar dynamic in other segments of the American labor force, especially in the fast-food industry. Fast-food workers endure low wages (and indeed wage stagnation), few if any benefits, and a scarcity of full-time contracts.9 The marginalized and contingent workforce at places such as McDonald’s, Wendy’s, and KFC share similar concerns and face similar challenges such as starvation wages, reliance on government assistance, and job insecurity that academic workers endure at some of our nation’s leading universities, including Harvard, Yale, and Michigan.10 However, unlike the academy, the difference between CEO compensation and fast-food workers’ pay is truly breathtaking. David C. Novak, CEO of Yum Brands, which includes chains such as KFC and Pizza Hut, received a total annual compensation of $29.67 million in 2012.11
According to the Wall Street Journal, “Last year, McDonald’s gave [Dan] Thompson a compensation package worth $13.8 million, or more than 558 times what McDonald’s expects employees to make — from two jobs”.12 The national minimum wage in the U.S. is $7.25 per hour and the top five largest employers (McDonald’s is among them) pay its workers at or near the minimum wage. We may reiterate the conclusion of the previous paragraph with one minor revision: The overwhelming majority of the fast-food labor force suffers disproportionately due to enormous concentrations of wealth in the hands of a small and privileged elite.
When faced with such systemic and structural inequalities, how have fast-food workers responded? The answer is quite instructive. They have staged local protests and walkouts in cities across the country and are planning a national walkout in order to fight for a higher minimum wage. As Professor Anne Kalleberg has noted, however, the protests are not union-sponsored but socially organized.13 Fast-food workers, just like their academic counterparts, often struggle to unionize due, at times, to explicit efforts by their employers to prevent them from doing so. Nevertheless, despite such grim circumstances, fast-food workers have pushed their plight quite successfully into the national consciousness just as Occupy movements have done.
Their campaign, entitled “Fast Food Forward”, articulates their purpose with self-assured clarity: “Fast Food Forward joins the momentum of the Black Friday strikes and other low-wage worker struggles to build community engagement, hold corporations and their CEOs accountable, and to raise wages so that all Americans can prosper”.14 Despite its origins in New York City, the movement is gaining momentum; many are now calling for a nationwide strike to take place on 29 August and even President Obama has addressed the issue.
How is all of this relevant for the contingent academic workforce? Well, for one thing, there is strength in numbers. Collective action is an especially effective instrument both to challenge and redress structural inequalities. If, as the aforementioned statistics indicate, seventy-five percent of undergraduate courses at U.S. colleges and universities are taught by adjuncts, then a walkout would bring the academy to a grinding halt. If fast-food workers with fewer career opportunities, less educational attainment, more grueling working conditions (e.g. fast-paced environments, high-temperature workplaces, etc.), and far more to lose can risk their only source of income for themselves and their families for the sake of the collective good, then what is preventing adjuncts from doing the same? The short answer is simple: nothing.
Alas, many adjuncts enable and perpetuate the “system” through their deferential subservience simply by participating in it (recent unionization efforts at Georgetown and elsewhere duly noted). As universities and departments downsize and the numbers of Ph.D. graduates outpace available jobs, many adjuncts accept grossly underpaid positions with long working hours and virtually no benefits with the expectation that a foot in the door will somehow lead to the promised land of a tenure-track position. Supply and demand dictates otherwise and the vast battalions of well-paid academic administrators are more than happy to continue to exploit such naïve and misguided expectations in the name of efficiency.
Surely, too, graduate programs inculcate (and indeed indoctrinate) students in the ways of the academy: publish or perish and do not rock the proverbial boat. On the one hand, academics are expected to challenge scholarly orthodoxies in their respective fields through creative, innovative, interdisciplinary scholarship. And yet in other aspects of their lives, namely those that deal with the contractual conditions under which they labor, they must conform and remain obedient in order to secure employment. It becomes an insidious and corrosive form of selection in which independent thought is filtered out of a system that was designed to protect it. Contradictions become self-evident: the imposition of an authorial canon in the humanities is anathema, whereas wage slavery becomes institutionalized.
Read more: Counterpunch
Posted in Academics, Accountability, Adjuncts & Sessionals, Administration, Advocacy, Equity, Ethics, Faculty, Government, Job market, Organizing, Politics, Protests, Solidarity, Strikes, Strikes & Labor Disputes, Student Movement, Students, Unions
Tagged adjuncts, Equity, Faculty, Organizing, Protests, Students, Unions, Working conditions
(AP Photo/Richard Drew)
The walkout by service workers in the US on August 29 marked a number of efforts over the past year to organize and make a statement on cost of living ground lost amidst inflation and a tanking economy. Economic reports in Canada and the US for August merely indicate the long trend toward part-time McJobs as youth are more and more often finding that their competition is their grandmothers or seniors unable to make it without additional income. Requests by the workers is an increase in the federal minimum wage from the current $7.25/hr to $15/hr and the right to unionize without interference from employers. Obama democrats are proposing a modest increase to $9/hr.
Like the McJob trend, the large balance of college and university jobs are now part-time and low wage. Many with the McAdemic job, defined by low pay and limited prospects, work just above minimum wage when it’s all said and done. Although among the most exploited of part-time workers given their expertise and education debt-load, adjunct, contingent, or sessional faculty members in Canada and the US retain an element of autonomy for their job. Whether with a modicum of a wage per course or a piecemeal per student wage for online instructors, many by and large take home a pay that hovers just above minimum wage after hours in are calculated. Unlike the basic McJob, which has a definitive beginning and end to the workday, the academic job has no limits to the amount of time expended to prepare, teach, counsel, and assess. And given that, like for most with a McJob, there is a dignity to a McAdemic job and most put in long hours (e.g., 10x contact hours required) that knowingly reduce their wages to something just above the minimum.
In BC, the minimum wage is merely $10.25, which today after exchange and purchasing power parity is about $7.25/hr USD. At UBC, the step 1 salary for contingent or sessional faculty is $5,970 per 3 credit course (about $4,305 USD after exchange and PPP). Comparisons of McAdemic job with McJob and of stratification within the two sectors are not exaggerated, as Postdoctoral Fellow Brian Haman wrote in “What Contingent Faculty Can Learn From Fast-Food Workers:”
As universities and departments downsize and the numbers of Ph.D. graduates outpace available jobs, many adjuncts accept grossly underpaid positions with long working hours and virtually no benefits with the expectation that a foot in the door will somehow lead to the promised land of a tenure-track position. Supply and demand dictates otherwise and the vast battalions of well-paid academic administrators are more than happy to continue to exploit such naïve and misguided expectations in the name of efficiency…. Clearly, something must change. It seems, therefore, sensible, entirely feasible, and just to stand in solidarity with fast-food workers, many of whom earn as much as adjuncts. Their struggles are our struggles. Moreover, their lessons can be our lessons. The efficacy and consequences of collective action are unambiguous.
Comments Off on From McJob to McAdemic: Labor activism and unrest as economy tanks #bced #yteubc
Posted in Academics, Accountability, Administration, Advocacy, Contingent labor, Equity, Ethics, Job market, Organizing, Politics, Protests, Solidarity, Strikes, Student Movement, Students, Unions
Tagged adjuncts, Equity, Organizing, Protests, Strikes & Labor Disputes, Students, Working conditions
Even in the face of 14,000 activists urging Sallie Mae to break up with ALEC, more news articles exposing their relationship, and my personal phone call this week to Sallie Mae executive Martha Holler asking the company directly to end ties with the powerful “Stand Your Ground,” anti-democratic, pay-to-play front group for right-wing corporate interests… Sallie Mae just won’t quit ALEC.
But that membership has its price. By not formally disclosing its role in ALEC to the Department of Education, Sallie Mae is in breach of its contract with the government.
Since 2009 Sallie Mae has had a contract with the Department of Education to administer federal student loans. Sallie Mae has netted over $300 million in taxpayer money through this lucrative contract while simultaneously lobbying against affordable higher education.1
Join us in demanding that the Department of Education enforce the “conflict of interest” disclosure clause in the contract. Tell U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan to drop Sallie Mae!
Beyond its membership in ALEC, Sallie Mae is also likely in breach of its Department of Education contract because of two major legal violations. This month, public disclosure reports revealed that Sallie Mae has been accused of overcharging active duty service members on their student loan interest rates.2 News reports confirm that federal regulators will file a formal complaint against Sallie Mae for these violations within weeks, and a Department of Justice investigation of Sallie Mae is underway. As if that weren’t enough, Sallie Mae has already faced numerous class action lawsuits alleging predatory and racially discriminatory lending and was issued a cease-and-desist letter from the FDIC for redlining.3
We think the government shouldn’t be in business with a company whose lending practices are shameful and illegal. And even the Secretary of Education agrees. During a meeting earlier this year where students were raising concerns about Sallie Mae, Secretary Duncan personally told us, “We don’t want to do business with people who violate the law.”4
Tell Arne Duncan to live up to his words and terminate the department’s contract with Sallie Mae NOW!
Our urgency is real. In two weeks, students around the country will be arriving on campuses, and soon after they’ll receive information on who will be managing their loans. That means the Department of Education has a narrow window to end its contract with Sallie Mae and reallocate loan administration and collection duties to another bank before the school year begins.
Sallie Mae is supposed to be in the business of making education a reality. Instead the company profiteers off its student borrowers by granting risky loans with high interest rates. Last year, U.S. student debt hit $1 trillion – meanwhile, Sallie Mae cleared $1 billion in profits. So to recap: Sallie Mae is taking advantage of taxpayers, students, members of the military, and people of color.
The government shouldn’t be outsourcing loan administration jobs to a big bank in the first place, and it definitely shouldn’t be awarding contracts worth hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to a shady company like Sallie Mae.
Even though its own policies dictate that it should drop Sallie Mae, the Department of Education won’t end this contract without public pressure. So we’re pulling out all the stops. We’re mobilizing a coalition of consumer watchdogs, military and veterans’ advocates, student activists, and labor groups to join us. We’re reaching out to Members of Congress and have put even more journalists on their trail. Can we count on you to encourage the Department of Education to do the right thing and stop doing business with Sallie Mae?
Send your message today to ensure Sallie Mae will be held accountable.
Sophia Zaman
USSA President
1 http://www.usaspending.gov
2 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/10/us/sallie-mae-to-be-accused-of-overcharging-military-personnel-on-loans.html?_r=0
3 http://www.fdic.gov/bank/individual/enforcement/2008-08-10.pdf
4 http://www.aft.org/newspubs/news/2013/051413studentdebt.cfm
Comments Off on Tell the Dept. of Ed to Drop Sallie Mae!
Posted in Accountability, Advocacy, Economics, Ethics, Government, Organizing, Politics, Protests, Solidarity, Student Movement, Students
Tagged Government, Organizing, Protests, Students
Michael A. Peters, TruthOut, August 17, 2013– The New York Times dubbed 2012 the year of the MOOCs – massive open online courses. Suddenly the discourse of MOOCs and the future of the university hit the headlines with influential reports using the language of “the revolution to come.” Most of these reports hailed the changes and predicted a transformation of the delivery of teaching and higher education competition from private venture for-profit and not-for-profit partnerships. Rarely did the media focus on questions of pedagogy or academic labor. This article suggests that MOOCs should be seen within the framework of postindustrial education and cognitive capitalism where social media has become the dominant culture.
Ernst & Young’s Universities of the Future carries the line, “A thousand year old industry on the cusp of profound change.” The report suggests that the current Australian university model “will prove unviable in all but a few cases.” It identifies five major “drivers of change”: democratization of knowledge and access, contestability of markets and funding, digital technologies, global mobility and integration with industry.
With the driver “digital technologies,” the report mentions MOOCs specifically as transformative of the way education is delivered and accessed and how “value” is created by higher-education providers. Clearly, this feature also is systematically related to the other features. I do not have the space here to evaluate this report except to say that it is self-serving in that it favors the privatization of education.
In An Avalanche is Coming: Higher Education and the Revolution Ahead, Michael Barber, Katelyn Donnelly and Saad Rizv, like the Ernst and Young, report, use the language of “revolution” to describe the changes about to transform higher education. Lawrence Summers, president emeritus of Harvard University who writes the foreword, suggests that An Avalanche is Coming correctly predicts the impending transformation:
Just as we’ve seen the forces of technology and globalisation transform sectors such as media and communications or banking and finance over the last two decades, these forces may now transform higher education. The solid classical buildings of great universities may look permanent but the storms of change now threaten them.
Michael Barber, one-time education adviser to Tony Blair and now consultant for the giant education publisher Pearson, signals that the functions of the traditional university are being “unbundled” – which means that some universities will need to specialize solely in teaching. Barber and his colleagues mention emergent forms of the university: the elite university, the mass university, the niche university, the local university, the lifelong learning mechanism. For Barber and his colleagues, MOOCs are symbolic of an avalanche: “Just as an avalanche shapes the mountain, so the changes ahead will fundamentally alter the landscape for universities.” With the student consumer as king, the growth of MOOCs and a more global system that makes up a leading part of the growth of the knowledge economy, “the new world the learner” will choose an education in a global marketplace with an “eye trained on value.”
The New York Times “Schools for Tomorrow” Conference to be held September 17, 2013, focuses on “Virtual U: The Coming of Age of Online Education.” The opening plenary asks “Is Online Education The Great Equalizer?” and provides the following primer:
There is no doubt that we are in the middle of an online education revolution, which offers huge potential to broaden access to education and therefore, in theory, level the playing field for students from lower-income, lower-privileged backgrounds. But evidence to date shows that the increasing number of poorly designed courses could actually have the reverse effect and put vulnerable students at an even bigger disadvantage.
This is to be followed with the debate: “Has The University As An Institution Had Its Day?” for which this description is added:
Higher education has always been an array of autonomous institutions, each with their own courses, their own faculty, and their own requirements for their own degrees. But online education is starting to break down those lines, in ways that are likely to lead to a lot more shared courses, consortia and credit transfers. In addition, there are a growing number of companies (not schools) providing higher education courses outside the traditional higher education institutions. As we move towards the possibility of a multi-institution, multi-credit qualification, is the traditional higher education institution in danger of losing applicants, income and identity?
The next agenda is devoted to “new era business models” including “an increasing assortment of new ventures offering for-profit schools, for-profit online courses, tests, curricula, interactive whiteboard, learning management systems, paid-for verified certificates of achievement, e-books, e-tutoring, e-study groups and more.” And finally, the conference is to address “Gamechangers: How Will Online Education Revolutionalize [sic] What We Know And Understand About Learning?” with this orientation:
Traditionally, pedagogical research has been done in tiny groups; but new-generation classes of 60,000 students make it possible to do large scale testing and provide potentially game-changing research on how students learn best. Using the big data from online courses, we have access to new information about what pedagogical approaches work best. MOOCs, and many more traditional online classes, can track every keystroke, every homework assignment and every test answer a student provides. This can produce a huge amount of data on how long students pay attention to a lecture, where they get stuck in a problem set, what they do to get unstuck, what format and pacing of lectures, demonstrations, labs and quizzes lead to the best outcomes, and so on. How can we use Big Data for the good of the education profession, and not for “Big Brother”?
In “MOOCs and Open Education: Implications for Higher Education” – a self-described “white paper” – Li Yuan and Stephen Powell embrace a balanced analysis that sees MOOCs as an extension of existing online learning approach, but one that has generated “significant interest from higher-education institutions and venture capitalists that see a business opportunity to be exploited” that offer scalability and new business models of open education, enabling the disaggregation “of teaching from assessment and accreditation for differential pricing and pursuit of marketing activities.” They embrace the theory of disruptive innovation (Bower & Christensen, 1995) to explain why some innovations can disrupt existing markets at the expense of incumbent players and suggest that current UK policy through a radical agenda allows “new, for-profit providers to enter the higher education market.”
Read More: TruthOut
Comments Off on Massive Open Online Courses and Beyond: the Revolution to Come
Posted in Adjuncts & Sessionals, Corporate University, Courses, For Profit Universities, Students, Technology, Working conditions
Tagged Academics, adjuncts, Contingent labor, Working conditions
I thought I only had to come out once! In 1996, at 22 years of age, I came out of the closet – the most liberating thing I’ve ever done. Now, I’m coming out again: My name is Robert Applebaum and I have $88,000 worth of student debt!
We’ve recently partnered with over a dozen organizations to launch what we’re calling the #OutWithStudentDebt video project. The goal of this project is to collect as many of your 1-2 minute videos that will be featured on our websites, with the goal of shedding the stigma of shame and embarrassment that comes along with being buried under mounds of student loan debt.
Please click on the graphic above to view StudentDebtCrisis.org’s Artistic Director, Aaron Calafato’s sample/instructional video and then learn how to go about submitting your own #OutWithStudentDebt video!
Over the course of the next 3 weeks, we will be collecting these #OutWithStudentDebt stories and featuring them on our website, after which, we’ll be asking the general public to vote for their favorites.
Please be sure to follow the instructions for uploading your video so that it can be properly entered into the #OutWithStudentDebt Video Project.
Be honest. Be concise. Be brave! You are NOT alone! You are in the company of nearly 40 million Americans who are similarly struggling under the weight of their own student loans. Please join us by creating your own video and telling your personal story. Let’s put human faces on the ever-growing crisis of over $1.2 Trillion in outstanding student loan debt.
You can also help out by spreading the word – simply click here to tweet about the #OutWithStudentDebt Project, or click here to post it to Facebook.
Thank you, as always, for your continued support. Now, let’s all come #OutWithStudentDebt!
Sincerely,
Rob, Natalia, Kyle, Aaron & The StudentDebtCrisis Team.
Follow us on Twitter
Join us on Facebook
P.S. We’d like to give a special thanks to Contest.is for providing the platform for the #OutWithStudentDebt Video Project!
Comments Off on #OutWithStudentDebt video project
Posted in Advocacy, Equity, Government, Organizing, Politics, Protests, Solidarity, Student Movement, Students
Tagged Equity, Government, Protests, Students
AP/ Civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., waves to supporters from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial 28 August, 1963, on The Mall in Washington, DC, upon giving the ‘I Have a Dream’ speech.
The King Center, July 16, 2013– The King Center and the 50th Anniversary Coalition are calling on people and organizations across America to help culminate the 50th anniversary of The March on Washington and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech with “Let Freedom Ring” bell-ringing events at 3:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on August 28th, a half-century to the minute after Dr. King delivered his historic address. In other nations, there will be bell-ringing ceremonies at 3:00 p.m. in their respective time zones.
“We are calling on people across America and throughout the world to join with us as we pause to mark the 50th anniversary of my father’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech with ‘Let Freedom Ring’ bell-ringing events and programs that affirm the unity of people of all races, religions and nations,” said King Center C.E.O. Bernice A. King. “My father concluded his great speech with a call to ‘Let freedom ring,’ and that is a challenge we will meet with a magnificent display of brotherhood and sisterhood in symbolic bell-ringing at places of worship, schools and other venues where bells are available from coast to coast and continent to continent.”
Local groups are encouraged to present diverse commemorative programs, which bring people together across cultural and political lines to celebrate the common humanity in creative and uplifting ways in the spirit of the dream. Ms. King especially urges that all of the programs involve children and young people, since children are mentioned in several passages of her father’s “I Have a Dream” speech.
There will be a “Let Freedom Ring” Commemoration & Call to Action” on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. on August 28th. The program begins with an interfaith service from 9:00 a.m. to 10:30 a.m. at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial on the Tidal Basin, followed by the “Let Freedom Ring” Commemoration and Call to Action at the nearby Lincoln Memorial from 1:00 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. that includes the bell-ringing ceremony at 3:00 p.m.
Groups are already planning bell-ringing events in places as diverse as Concord, New Hampshire, Allentown PA, Lutry Switzerland and Tokyo Japan. Governors of the 50 states have been asked to support the bell-ringing, and many have already responded enthusiastically, with more expected to join the effort. The King Center requests that all groups planning programs submit a brief description of your 50th anniversary ‘Let Freedom Ring’ bell-ringing event to website@thekingcenter.org.
“Let Freedom Ring” will conclude seven-days of events commemorating the March on Washington and Dr. King’s Dream speech. For the millions who can’t come to Washington, D.C. for the seven-day program, the local ‘Let Freedom Ring’ programs will provide a unique opportunity to get involved in a poignant nation-wide and global day of unity in their respective home towns.
“Our World, His Dream: Freedom – Make it Happen” is the theme for the “Let Freedom Ring” commemoration and call to action. This theme is undergirded by the three sub-themes: “Freedom to Prosper in Life;” “Freedom to Peacefully Co-Exist;” and “Freedom to Participate in Government.”
For more information about the 50th Anniversary of the I Have A Dream speech, please contact The King Center (Atlanta, GA) at 404-526-8944, sklein@thekingcenter.org or visit the websitewww.mlkdream50.com. To stay in touch with updated details, participate with the following: Twitter twitter.com/DCMARCHMLK50; Facebook www.facebook.com/Mlkdream50; Pinterest pinterest.com/mlkdream50/; and Intstagram mlkdream50. The Hashtag is #mlkdream50.
Comments Off on “Let Freedom Ring” events for culmination of 50th Anniversary of March on Washington and MLK dream
Posted in Accountability, Advocacy, Diversity, Equity, Ethics, Events, Government, Human Rights, Organizing, Politics, Protests, Race, Solidarity, Students
Tagged Equity, Ethics, Government, Organizing, Protests, Students
Holly Hobbs, Fairfax Times, July 18, 2013– As the nation reflects on the verdict in the trial of George Zimmerman in the shooting of Trayvon Martin, a college course this fall will offer an academic look at the case’s impact outside of the courtroom.
George Mason University Professor Rutledge Dennis, a professor of sociology and anthropology, will teach “From Homer Plessy to Trayvon Martin: Issues in Race, Culture, and Politics,” which he said would look at historic cases involving race and their impacts on society. The course title has been abbreviated on Mason’s website: Plessy to Martin: Race and Politics.
“I hope our students will get out of it a sense of how racial, political and cultural issues impact how we interact,” Dennis said.
While the course aims to introduce students to historic themes through a contemporary example, Dennis and the university garnered much criticism online, mostly from conservative bloggers and media outlets like The Daily Caller, The National Review and Red Alert Politics.
“I have received a lot of nasty, hateful emails about this course because people assume it’s a course [only] about Trayvon Martin,” Dennis said. “Trayvon Martin is just one case.”
The course begins with coverage of the landmark 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case, which upheld “separate but equal” racial segregation of public facilities. Students also will study other historic cases, such as the 1931 arrests of the “Scottsboro Boys,” a group of nine black teenagers who were accused of raping two white women in Alabama. The course includes a number of contemporary high-profile trials like the 1992 trials of Los Angeles police officers accused of beating construction worker Rodney King and the murder trial of former NFL running back O.J. Simpson, which ended in 1995.
Many of the trials included in the course syllabus occurred before most current undergraduate students were born. The Trayvon Martin case offers a current example and context for undergrads, Dennis said.
“The Trayvon Martin case is important academically because race and issues around race are academic issues,” Dennis said, adding that the humanities often study gender and class; so why not race? “While this case did not begin as a racial case, it ended as one.”
Mason Provost Peter Stearns says criticism of curriculum is not a common occurrence for the university, but it is also not unheard of.
“Regularly, university faculty deal with topics that have different viewpoints. [Previously] George Mason University has been accused of being too liberal and too conservative,” he said. “One of the challenges in teaching is you want to make sure students understand the historical context and themes. But we also want to make sure they can apply this knowledge to current issues.”
Dennis said he hopes his course will offer students the opportunity to debate why Martin’s death and Zimmerman’s trial sparked intense media coverage and debate.
“I think it got attention for many people because we have an unarmed teenager who was shot by someone of another ethnic group,” Dennis said. “Young black men have been taken advantage of by the system. … And this becomes, for many, another example of a young black man being taken advantage of by the system.”
As of Wednesday, 16 students had registered for Dennis’ class (AFAM 390), which is cross-listed as both an African and African American Studies and Sociology/Anthropology course.
Comments Off on George Mason University course to examine Trayvon Martin case
Posted in Academic freedom, Advocacy, Courses, Equity, Ethics, Human Rights, Legal issues, Organizing, Politics, Protests, Race, Solidarity, Students
Tagged Equity, Ethics, Organizing, Protests, Students
Jonathan Charlton, The StarPhoeinix, June 17, 2013– The Idle No More movement may have slipped off the front pages, but there is still support below the surface.
“I think we’re at a place where we’ve generated momentum, got people around the world excited, have people active in their own communities and on a global level,” said Alex Wilson, an education professor at the University of Saskatchewan.
Wilson, Sheelah McLean, Erica Lee and Sylvia McAdam, leaders of Idle No More, gave a seminar about the movement and their personal experiences at the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA) conference Saturday.
It was one of the best-attended talks of the week and they received a standing ovation. Other academics posed for pictures with them, bought Idle No More T-shirts and asked the women to sign them.
The movement is ambitious and wide in scope, but the women said it focuses on environmental, democratic and social justice issues.
“The end goal will be the day after there is no racism, the day after there’s no sexism, the day after there’s no homophobia, the day after there’s no systemic inequalities in society. It’s ongoing and ever changing,” Wilson said.
Idle No More has more events planned for what’s being called Sovereignty Summer.
“Really Sovereignty Summer is about encouraging people to do events in their own communities in their own way,” said Lee, a 23-year old youth representative, “because part of Idle No More is about encouraging people to break out of this idea of pan-Indianism, like we’re all the same monolithic tribe.”
But they also want to educate the Canadian public about aboriginal issues and improve relations between the two groups.
“For so long, we’ve only been told one side of Canadian history – so it’s not people’s fault for being ignorant of indigenous issues, because they’re not taught in school,” Lee said.
Read More: The StarPhoenix
Posted in Advocacy, Equity, Government, Human Rights, Idle No More, Organizing, Politics, Protests, Solidarity, Student Movement, Students
Tagged Equity, Government, Idle No More, Organizing, Protests, Students
CBC News, July 17, 2013– First Nations leaders are demanding an apology from the federal government after it was revealed that Canada ran nutritional experiments on malnourished aboriginal children and adults during and after the Second World War.
Recently published research by Canadian food historian Ian Mosby has revealed that at least 1,300 aboriginal people — most of them children — were used as test subjects in the 1940s and ’50s by researchers looking at the effectiveness of vitamin supplements. [See “Administering Colonial Science: Nutrition Research and Human Biomedical Experimentation in Aboriginal Communities and Residential Schools, 1942–1952″]
The research began in 1942 on about 300 Cree in Norway House in northern Manitoba. Plans were later developed for research on about 1,000 hungry aboriginal children in six residential schools in Port Alberni, B.C., Kenora, Ont., Shubenacadie, N.S., and Lethbridge, Alta.
Vivian Ketchum, whose mother attended St. Mary’s Residential School in Kenora, told CBC News that hearing of the experiments has brought her sorrow and anger to a new level. “Immediately my thoughts were to my parents. Like, I thought the residential school issues [were] bad enough, and now this on top of it?” Ketchum said Wednesday.
Mosby said his research puts the spotlight on a little-known event that was perhaps one of the most disturbing aspects of government policy toward aboriginal people. “It shows Canadians the mentality behind Canada’s Indian administration during this period,” he said. “It seems that little good came out of the studies in terms of scientific knowledge.”
In a statement, the federal government said officials are looking into the matter. “If this story is true, this is abhorrent and completely unacceptable,” the statement read in part.
Read More: CBC News
Comments Off on First Nations leaders demand apology for nutritional experiments
Posted in BC Education, Equity, Ethics, Government, Human Rights, Idle No More, K-12 issues, Organizing, Politics, Research, Solidarity, Students
Tagged Equity, Idle No More, Protests, Research
August 19, 2013 9am – 5pm Holiday Inn Yorkdale
3450 Dufferin St, Toronto
Student, social movements and labour activists from across Ontario will come together to build alternatives to a right-wing agenda of austerity, poverty and repression. We believe a future is possible that respects democracy, environment, land and human rights. But we need deep organizing. Speakers include:
For more information: http://weareontario.ca/index.php/ontario-common-front-general-assembly-august-19-2013/
Comments Off on Third General Assembly, Ontario Common Front
Posted in Advocacy, Conferences, Employment rights, Organizing, Politics, Protests, Solidarity, Student Movement, Students, Unions
Tagged Organizing, Protests, Students, Working conditions
Working USA: The Journal of Labor and Society will devote a thematic issue to Building International Labor Solidarity, which will be published in early 2014. The thematic editor is Kim Scipes of Purdue University North Central who will work closely with Working USA editor, Immanuel Ness. As new labor movements emerge in Africa, the Middle East, the Americas, Asia, Europe, and Oceania, we seek essays that focus on research that is designed to build international labor solidarity with these and other workers. The editors seek in-depth, critical description and analyses of efforts motivated by the rise of workers’ movements that engage in transnational solidarity, as well as articles that examine imperial and global power efforts to control, guide, and circumscribe them. Historical examples must retain focus that refract on today’s problems and concerns.
Paper proposals are encouraged that address labor unions and workers’ movements in the United States and beyond, but priority will be given to research across the developed-developing country divide, or among developing countries of the Global South. Proposals for papers in the journal should be submitted by August 15, 2013, with a length of 250-500 words. Final papers will be peer-reviewed by referees appointed by the editorial board, and should not exceed 7,500 words.
For author guidelines, go to the following website: http://www.working-usa.org
Papers must be received by October 15, 2013.
E-mail for questions or submissions: kscipes@pnc.edu and iness@brooklyn.cuny.edu
Comments Off on CFP: Building International Labor Solidarity
Posted in Advocacy, CFPs, Labor Programs, Organizing, Publications, Research, Solidarity, Unions
Tagged Protests, Research, Unions, Working conditions
After Congress failed to keep interest rates on federally subsidized Stafford Loans from doubling on July 1st, just yesterday, the U.S. Senate failed to take up a bill that would have reset interest rates at 3.4% for another year, falling short of the 60 votes needed to begin debate.
Simply put, Congress has, once again, failed the American people. But this isn’t the end of the fight –this is just the beginning.
Throughout this debate, many of you have asked “What about me?” as the vast majority of you wouldn’t be affected by this rate hike anyway. Well, we’ve heard your voices and we think you’re absolutely right! The recent debate over interest rates has sucked most of the air out of what should be a much larger debate over how we fund higher education in America.
Because Congress has remained tone-deaf to the will of the American people, we need to raise our voices even louder! To that end, we’ve started a new petition, demanding that Congress take up Comprehensive Student Debt reform. Rather than focusing on just one small piece of the overall student debt crisis, we’re asking that Congress take a holistic approach to the issue and completely overhaul the student lending system. Among the reforms we’re asking for in this new petition are:
This list is by no means exhaustive. There are countless ways we can reform the way in which higher education is paid for in America, but Congress needs to find the political will to get to work. Please add your name to this petition today so that we can demonstrate to those who purport to represent us that we’re not only deadly serious, but that we’re not going to give up this fight!
To further help spread the word, please click here to automatically share the Student Debt Crisis image with your friends on Facebook. Then, click here to Tweet about the new petition.
Thank you, as always, for your continued support. Now, let’s raise our voices even louder than they’ve been before and let Congress know: they have a job to do and we’re not going anywhere until they do it!
Sincerely,
Robert Applebaum, Co-Founder & Executive Director
StudentDebtCrisis.org
Comments Off on US Congress Fails Student Loan Borrowers Once Again
Posted in Accountability, Advocacy, Government, Organizing, Politics, Protests, Solidarity, Student Movement, Students
Tagged Government, Organizing, Protests, Students
Huffington Post, July 9, 2013– Elizabeth Warren’s proposal, presented in May, would offer the same interest rate on federal Stafford loans as the one that banks receive from the Federal Reserve. Under her plan, the rate on government-issued student loans would fall from 6.8 percent to 0.75 percent, saving students thousands over the life of their loans.”
“The proposal in Congress to extend current rates does not do enough to help students with mounting debt,” the professors’ letter reads. “Congress should address this urgent problem by passing Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s bill to let students borrow money at the same low rate as banks.”
More than 1,000 college professors from 568 higher education institutions around the country have signed a letter calling on Congress to pass legislation authored by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) that would dramatically lower interest rates on federal student loans.
Student Debt Crisis Team, July 9, 2013– The U.S. Senate is finally expected to vote tomorrow on whether to keep interest rates low on students loans.
Because they failed to reach a deal by the July 1st deadline, rates have doubled from 3.4 to 6.8 percent. Unless reversed, this means the average student will owe an extra $1,000 per year of their loan, affecting nearly 7 million borrowers.
In light of soaring education costs and a tough economy for recent graduates, now more than ever is the time to keep college affordable.
Please make this message clear by sharing this image now: http://bit.ly/13HiPMu
Thank you for making your voices heard!
Sincerely,
Rob, Natalia, Kyle, Aaron & The Student Debt Crisis Team
Follow us on Twitter
Join us on Facebook
Comments Off on Elizabeth Warren’s Student Loan Fairness Act goes to vote
Posted in Academic freedom, Academics, Advocacy, Equity, Government, Organizing, Politics, Protests, Student Movement, Students
Tagged AAUP, Academics, Government, Organizing, Protests, Students
You are cordially invited to the 22nd annual Coalition of Graduate Employee Unions (CGEU) conference and the 9th annual Canadian Coalition of Graduate Employee Unions conference, hosted concurrently by United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America Local 896/Campaign to Organize Graduate Students (COGS). This year’s conference will be held on the campus of the University of Iowa from August 1-4, 2013. The conference will begin in earnest Friday morning and wrap up by noon on Sunday.
The C/CGEU was formed to support the organization of new graduate student employee unions; to strengthen established unions; and to provide a forum for graduate employee unionists to meet, share information, and work together toward common goals. The annual conference features workshops on organizing, leadership development, negotiation strategies, and member mobilization.
We invite you to participate on panels and/or in workshops on a variety of subjects. Possible topics might include:
• Organizing in a Right-to-Work (for less) State: Examples and Strategies
• Fighting “Back Door Tuition”: Bargaining Against Increased Student Fees
• The Affordable Care Act: Anticipating Changes and Using Them to Your Advantage
• Effective Use of Social Media
• Higher Education and the Labor Movement: Where Do We Fit In?
• Developing New Leaders
• Building Coalitions On and Off Campus
• Political Action and Legislative Fightback: On ALEC and other Woes
• Strengthening Steward System/Training
You’ll find other options on the registration form, including panels on bargaining contexts. If you would like to propose a panel or workshop not listed above, there will be a space on the electronic registration form to do so. We look forward to your suggestions.
Please join us in Iowa City in August to meet unionists from throughout Canada and the United States. To register for the conference, please use the following link at the bottom of the page or click on the CGEU tab of our website, cogs.org. For a discounted registration rate of $45, please submit your registration by Monday, July 1, 2013. After that date, registration will increase to $50. Please be sure to bring your conference registration fee with you to the conference if you choose not to mail it in advance.
In Solidarity,
The CGEU 2013 Organizing Committee
Comments Off on Coalition of Graduate Employee Unions (CGEU) conference August 1-4, 2013
Posted in Adjuncts & Sessionals, Advocacy, Employment rights, Job market, Organizing, Protests, Solidarity, Student Movement, Students, Unions
Tagged adjuncts, Contingent labor, Organizing, Protests, Students, Unions
Ellen Brown, Truthout, 17 June 2013– On July 1, interest rates will double for millions of students – from 3.4% to 6.8% – unless Congress acts; and the legislative fixes on the table are largely just compromises. Only one proposal promises real relief – Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s “Bank on Students Loan Fairness Act.” This bill has been dismissed out of hand as “shameless populist demagoguery” and “a cheap political gimmick,” but is it? Or could Warren’s outside-the-box bill represent the sort of game-changing thinking sorely needed to turn the economy around?
Warren and her co-sponsor John Tierney propose that students be allowed to borrow directly from the government at the same rate that banks get from the Federal Reserve — 0.75 percent. They argue:
Some people say that we can’t afford low interest rates for students. But the federal government offers far lower rates on loans every single day — they just don’t do it for everyone. Right now, a bank can get a loan through the Federal Reserve discount window at a rate of less than one percent. The same big banks that destroyed millions of jobs and broke our economy can borrow at about 0.75 percent, while our students will be paying nine times as much as of July 1.
This is not fair. And it’s not necessary, either. The federal government makes 36 cents on every dollar it lends to students. Just last week, the Congressional Budget Office announced that the government will make $51 billion on the student loans it issued this year — more than the annual profit of any Fortune 500 company, and about five times Google’s yearly earnings. We should not be profiting from students who are drowning in debt while we are giving great deals to big banks.
The archly critical Brookings Institute says the bill “confuses market interest rates on long-term loans (such as the 10-year Treasury rate) with the Federal Reserve’s Discount Window (used to make short-term loans to banks), and does not reflect the administrative costs and default risk that increase the costs of the federal student loan program.”
Those criticisms would be valid if the provider of funds were either a private bank or the American taxpayer; but in this case, it is the U.S. Federal Reserve. Warren and Tierney assert, “For one year, the Federal Reserve would make funds available to the Department of Education to make these loans to our students.” For the Fed, completely different banking rules apply. As “lender of last resort,” it can expand its balance sheet by buying all the assets it likes. The Fed bought over $1 trillion in “toxic” mortgage-backed securities in QE 1, and reportedly turned a profit on them. It could just as easily buy $1 trillion in student debt and refinance it at 0.75%.
Read More: Truthout
Comments Off on Elizabeth Warren’s QE for Students: Populist Demagoguery or Economic Breakthrough?
Posted in Accountability, Advocacy, Budgets & Funding, Economics, Government, Organizing, Politics, Protests, Solidarity, Student Movement, Students
Tagged Budgets & Funding, Government, Organizing, Protests, Students
Have you attended a for-profit university, such as the University of Phoenix?
If so, we’d like to hear about your experiences.
For Profit U is a project of Service Employees International Union centered on improving transparency and increasing student and faculty success at for profit universities. We need input from you. Click the link to take a short survey about your experiences as a student at a for-profit university: http://action.seiu.org/page/content/for-profit-students/
For-profit colleges enroll between 10 to 13% of college students, yet receive 25% of all federal financial aid dollars. Ninety-six percent of for profit students take out student loans, and almost one-quarter default default within 3 years of entering repayment. By sharing your experiences, we can work to improve transparency and student outcomes at for-profit schools. Take the survey here: http://action.seiu.org/page/content/for-profit-students/
If you haven’t attended a for-profit university but know someone who has, please forward the survey to them. Thank you, as always, for your continued suppport.
Sincerely,
Rob, Kyle, Natalia, Aaron & The Student Debt Crisis Team
Comments Off on For Profit U Survey
Posted in Adjuncts & Sessionals, Corporate University, For Profit Universities, Organizing, Students, Unions
Tagged Contingent labor, Students, Unions
Follow