Category Archives: Academics

Podcast CBC: The income gap between tenure faculty & adjunct contract professors in Canadian universities #ubc #ubced#bced #criticaled #edstudies

The Current, CBC– If you’ve got a university student in the family, increasingly they may be being taught by a highly educated professional who can’t get full time work. Or make a living wage. Today, Project Money looks at impoverished professors.

Many people who’ve earned advanced degrees are astonished at how little some universities value their graduates.

“Our working conditions are your learning conditions. I will give you an A plus right now if you promise to agitate on behalf of adjunct equity and rights.”

Fordham adjunct professor Alan Trevithick teases students

In Canada, climbing the Ivory tower has never been harder. More people graduate with PhDs, but full-time tenure track faculty positions are harder to get. Many highly educated Canadians struggle to find adequate-paying work that meets their credentials.

And for those who dream of chalk-boards, lecture halls, and tweed jackets… the best they can get is work as a part-time instructor.

It’s estimated that about half of all teaching in the country is done by contract professors — instead of permanent full time professors.

  • Beth Parton left teaching in search of greener pastures… along with stable work and good pay. She is a former university professor with a doctorate in religion and culture. Beth Parton was in Toronto.
  • Elizabeth Hodgson is a tenured professor at the University of British Columbia but spent 9 years teaching there as an adjunct professor. She is also a member of the Academic Freedom and Tenure Committee at the Canadian Association of University Teachers. Elizabeth Hodgson was in our Vancouver studio.
  • Ian Lee says there are many reasons adjunct professors are falling behind. He is an Assistant Professor in Strategic Management and International Business at the Sprott School of Business. Ian Lee was in Ottawa.

Listen: CBC The Current

Henry Giroux | Reclaiming the Radical Imagination: Challenging Casino Capitalism’s Punishing Factories # criticaleducation #occupywallstreet #occupyeducation #idlenomore

Henry Giroux, Thruthout, January 13, 2014– The Gilded Age is back, with huge profits for the ultrarich, hedge fund managers and the major players in the financial service industries. In the new landscapes of wealth, exclusion and fraud, the commanding institutions of a savage and fanatical capitalism promote a winner-take-all ethos and aggressively undermine the welfare state and wage a counter revolution against the principles of social citizenship and democracy. The geographies of moral and political decadence have become the organizing standard of the dreamworlds of consumption, privatization, surveillance and deregulation. For instance, banks such as JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and other investment companies including Barclays, Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, and UBS prosper from subterfuge and corruption. They also have been transformed into punishing factories that erode the welfare state while pushing millions into hardship and misery and relegating an entire generation of young people into a state of massive unemployment, debt, and repression.  The profits seem endless and the lack of moral responsibility unchecked as the rich go on buying sprees soaking up luxury goods in record numbers. The New York Times reports that dealers of high-end luxury cars cannot keep up with the demand. Indulging in luxury items is no longer a dirty word for the ultrarich in spite of living in a society wracked by massive unemployment, inequality and poverty. One example provided by the Times, without either irony or criticism, points to “Matt Hlavin, an entrepreneur in Cleveland who owns seven businesses, mostly in manufacturing, bought three Mercedes last year: a $237,000 SLS AMG and a $165,000 S63 AMG for himself, and a $97,000 GL550 sport utility vehicle for his wife.”[1]  This example of shameless consumption reads like a scene out of Martin Scorsese’s film The Wolf of Wall Street, which portrays the financial elite as infantilized frat boys out of control in their unquenchable craving for greed, sex, power, and every other debauchery imaginable.[2] At a time when the United States has descended into forms of political and moral amnesia, massive inequity and high levels of poverty, coupled with narratives of excess and over-the-top material indulgence, have become normalized and barely receive any critical commentary in the mainstream media.

It gets worse. As the zombies of casino capitalism rake in unprecedented amounts of wealth, they appear to take delight in mocking and humiliating the poor and disadvantaged as if they are not only responsible for their suffering but deserve such hardships in spite of the fact they are not accountable for the difficulties in which they find themselves. Those with little power or wealth are now seen not only as morally degenerates but as disposable, subject to the whims of the market and outside any consideration of compassion or justice. Yet there is more at work here than a moral deficit or the kind of pathological daring and willingness to remove oneself from any sense of compassion for others. There is also a culture of cruelty willfully reproduced by a rabid form of casino capitalism that measures human worth in cost-benefit analysis and accrues and consolidates power in the interests of the top one percent of the population.

The new extremists balk at extending unemployment benefits or providing food stamps for young children. Yet, they have no trouble offering millions in subsidies to corporate interests or lowering taxes for the ultrarich corporations. Obscene wealth couples with the arrogance of power as billionaires such as the Koch brothers make 3 million dollars an hour from their investments while simultaneously calling for the abolishment of the minimum wage.[3] CEO salaries reach into the financial stratosphere, while the middle and working classes increasingly face impoverishment and misery.  In 2012, the “top 10 percent took in half of the country’s total income” while the top 1 percent took more than one-fifth (22.5 percent) of the income earned by Americans. [4] In the midst of the upward redistribution of wealth, misery proliferates, and the commanding institutions of society are increasingly more divorced from maters of ethics, social responsibility and social costs. This is evident as the ranks of homeless children grow exponentially, while corporate fat cats fund various groups to lobby against health care policies and social provisions for the poor. It is also evident in the growing ranks of people on food stamps, an increase in the homeless population, especially among children. Moreover, 46.2 percent of the American population lives in poverty. [5]

Republicans claim they are now concerned about addressing poverty, especially since the general public rightly views them as heartless, cruel and indifferent to the hardships experienced by people who are unemployed and lack food, shelter, health care and any sense of hope. Yet, the hypocrisy of the apostles of casino capitalism is on full display in a commentary by The New York Times which states: “But at the same time that the party is shifting its focus to poverty, many Republicans are pushing for deep cuts to food assistance programs and unemployment insurance, while 11 million Americans are jobless and poverty rates remain elevated in the wake of the recession.” [6] For the right-wing extremists dominating government, the courts and cultural life, talk about choice and agency is divorced from social responsibility and the emphasis on individual responsibility is nothing more than a cheap trick to divert the public’s attention away from larger structural and systemic problems facing the United States.

We now live under a form of casino capitalism that revels in deception, kills the radical imagination, depoliticizes the American public and promulgates what might be called disimagination factories and punishing machines. Idealism has been replaced by a repressive punishing machine and a surveillance state that turns every space into a war zone, criminalizes social problems and legitimates state violence as the most important practice for addressing important social issues. Racism now fuels a mass incarceration system that expands the reach of the punishing state to those viewed as excess and excluded from American society. The carceral state and the surveillance state now work together to trump security over freedom and justice while solidifying the rule of the financial elite and the reigning financial services such as banks, investment houses and hedge funds, all of which profit from the expanding reach of the punishing state. The drug war has become a war on racial minorities just as the war on poverty has become a war on the poor.

Chris Hedges is right when he argues that “any state that has the capacity to monitor all its citizenry, any state that has the ability to snuff out factual public debate through [the] control of information, any state that has the tools to instantly shut down all dissent is totalitarian.” [7]  While Hedges is aware that this disciplinary culture of fear and repression is rooted in a political economy that treats people as objects and makes the accumulation of capital the subjects of history, he underestimates one important element of the new authoritarianism produced by casino capitalism. That is, what is novel about existing registers of discipline and control is that they operate in a new historical conjuncture in which the relationship among political power, cultural institutions and everyday life has become more powerful and intense in the ability to undermine the radical imagination and the power and capacities of individuals to resist repression and make the crucial decisions necessary to take control over the forces that shape their lives. The machineries of public pedagogy and consent have taken on an Orwellian presence in the age of digital technologies, and when challenges to authoritarian rule emerges, the state resorts to the overt and unapologetic repression of critical thought and dissent.

The anonymity of the corporate state becomes invisible as historical and public memory are erased and the American public is increasingly infantilized. Stupidity is normalized through a consumer/celebrity culture, and where that does not work, the machinery of state repression, with its endless culture of fear, punishes those willing to question authority. Authorities try to blind people to the courage exhibited by whistleblowers such as Chelsea Manning, Jeremy Hammond and Edward Snowden, painting them instead as traitors. Courage is now under attack by the sterile and dangerous call for unchecked security. Fear becomes the only value left in the arsenal of the machinery of surveillance, control and social death. David Graeber is right in arguing that the call for public dialogue, dissent and critical exchange in order to hold power accountable no longer provokes informed judgement and outrage among the public or thoughtful responses from politicians and popular pundits. On the contrary, he writes:

Objections to such arrangements are to be met with truncheons, lasers, and police dogs. It’s no coincidence that marketization has been accompanied by a new ethos where challenge is met with an instant appeal to violence. In the end, despite endless protests to the contrary, our rulers understand that the market is not a natural social arrangement. It has always had to be imposed at the point of a gun . . . The question to ask now is not, how do we bring it back. That’s impossible and quite undesirable. The question is what new forms of genuinely democratic self-organization might rise from its ashes? To even begin to ask this question we must first of all get rid of the police. [8]

American politics and culture have been handed over to the rich, lobbyists for the corporate elite, and now function largely to produce a state that offers the ultrawealthy and powerful all of the benefits they need to accumulate even more capital, regardless of the massive inequality in wealth, income and suffering such policies produce. In spite of being discredited by the economic recession of 2008, unfettered casino capitalism remains a dominant force and continues to produce runaway environmental devastation, egregious amounts of human suffering and the reinforcement of what Charles Ferguson has called “finance as a criminalized, rogue industry. [9] And, yet, while resistance to such measures is growing, it is far too weak to offer a significant challenge to the new authoritarianism.

All over the world, the forces of casino capitalism are invoking austerity measures that produce a kind of social and civil death as they dismantle the historically guaranteed social provisions provided by the welfare state, defining profit-making as the essence of democracy, expanding the role of corporate money in politics, waging an assault on unions, augmenting the military-security state, overseeing widening social inequality, promoting the erosion of civil liberties, and undercutting public faith in the defining institutions of democracy. The script is not new, but the intensity of the assault on democratic values, civic engagement and public service has taken a dangerous turn and provides the ideological, political and cultural foundation for a society that seems unaware it is in the midst of an authoritarian stranglehold on all of its most cherished institutions, ranging from schools and health care to the very foundation of democracy. Austerity has become the weapon of choice, an economic poison designed to punish the middle and working classes while making clear that casino capitalism will administer the most severe penalties to those who challenge its authority. The police have become the new private armies of the rich, designed to keep the public in check hoping to make them fearful of being exposed to police brutality, state violence or the expanding mechanisms of the multiple surveillance apparatuses that now collect every piece of information that circulates electronically. Conformity has become the order of the day and fear the new norm, reinforced by a disimagination machine and the punishing state now mutually informing each other.

Within the last 30 years, the United States has been transformed from a society that included a market economy subject to the rule of the state to a society and government that are now dominated almost exclusively by market values and corporate power. We now live in what Robert Jay Lifton once described as a “death-saturated age.” [10] Political authority and power have been transformed into a sovereignty of corporate governance and rule. The United States has moved from a market economy to a market society in which all vestiges of the social contract are under attack, and politics is ruled by the irrational notion that casino capitalism should govern not simply the economy but the entirety of social life.  With the return of the new Gilded Age, not only are democratic values and social protections at risk, but the civic and formative cultures that make such values and protections central to democratic life are in danger of disappearing altogether.

Public and higher education, however deficient, were once viewed as the bedrock for educating young people to be critical and engaged citizens. Schooling was valued as a public good, not a private right. Many educators in the ’70s and ’80s took seriously Paulo Freire’s notion of problematizing education, in which he called for students to be taught modes of critical literacy in which they could not only read the word but also read the world critically. [11] According to Freire, young people should be taught to read and write from a position of agency.  This meant learning how to engage in a culture of questioning, restaging power in productive ways, and connecting knowledge to the exercise of self-determination and self-development. Freire’s notion of critical pedagogy and education for freedom denounced banking education because it viewed students as passive containers into which knowledge was endlessly deposited. Rather than allow students to develop their own meanings, banking education assigned meanings for them, largely to memorize and spit out on intellectually bankrupt forms of testing. [12] Banking education is back with a vengeance and ironically parades under the name of educational reform, common standards and race to the top.   Public education has become a site of pedagogical repression, robbing students of the ability to think critically as a result of the two political business parties’ emphasis on education as mainly a project of mindless testing, standardization and the de-skilling of teachers. In addition, school reform has become a euphemism for turning public schools over to private investors who are more concerned about making money than they are about educating young people.  On the other hand, low-income and poor minority students increasingly find themselves in schools in which the line between prison culture and school culture is blurred.

Higher education, especially in the post-World War II period through the ’60s and ’70s, was, however ideally, considered a place where young people were taught how to think, engage in critical dialogue, and take on the responsibilities of informed and critical citizens. Now such students are subject to a technically trained docility, defined largely as consumers and told that the only value education has is to prepare them to be workers and consumers ready and eager to serve the ideological and financial interests of the global economy.  Critical thought and the radical imagination have become a liability under casino capitalism and for a growing number of institutions the enemy of public and higher education because they hold the potential to be at odds with the reproduction of a criminogenc culture in which greed, unchecked power, political illiteracy and unbridled self-interest work to benefit the wealthy and corporate elite. Under such circumstances, education becomes simply a business, developing an obsession with accountability schemes, measurable utility, authoritarian governing structures, and a crude empiricism for defining what counts as research.

How else to explain the following comment made by the president of Macomb Community College in Michigan: “Macomb is working with the federal government and other community colleges to better prepare students for the world that exists, not the world they want to live in.” [13] Or for that matter the blatant anti-intellectual bias imposed on colleges in Florida where Governor Rick Scott wants to push students toward business-friendly degrees by lowering tuition for academic fields and subjects that “steer students toward majors that are in demand in the job market.” [14] Of course, those areas such as philosophy, sociology, music, the arts, and other mainstays of the liberal arts would be more costly and their demise would intensify. Graeber argues that this assault on higher education has now become an object of intense state violence. He writes:

Make no mistake: to threaten someone with a stick is the ultimate anti-intellectual gesture. And if one thing has become clear in recent months, this is the first – really the only – impulse of the current government when faced with challenges to their vision for higher education. Police infiltration, surveillance, elected student leaders banned from political activities on campus, the arrest of students for simple acts of expression like chalking slogans on sidewalks, send a clear and constant message. There can be no reasoned discussion on these issues. There is no longer anything to talk about. Certainly, democracy has absolutely nothing to do with it. The pursuit of knowledge and understanding have been declared nothing but a consumer product, or else a form of technical training to increase overall economic productivity; these are the only way these matters can be discussed; if anyone wishes to gather to object to this, to gather in places of learning to insist that knowledge and understanding are not mere economic goods but something precious and valuable in their own right, they can only do so by permission of those who are telling them otherwise; otherwise, they can expect to be physically attacked. [15]

Similarly, higher education has become a dead zone for killing the imagination, a place where ideas that don’t have practical results go to die and where faculty and students are punished through the threat of force or harsh disciplinary measures for speaking out, engaging in dissent and holding power accountable. Faculty in most universities have been reduced to part-time jobs and function as indentured servants with no benefits, shockingly low salaries and no power to shape the conditions under which they work. With over 70 percent of faculty now holding the status of contingent labor, they are increasingly becoming one of the largest groups of professionals that qualify for food stamps to survive. These contingent and debt-ridden faculty live in a culture in which time is a burden rather than a luxury and have few opportunities to research, write and engage important social issues. At the same time, they live under both a survivalist mode and a culture of fear knowing that they can be dismissed arbitrarily at any time for the slightest infraction. Even tenured faculty are feeling the heat of a business-oriented de-democratizing university. For example, the Kansas Board of regents recently drastically curtailed tenure and academic freedom by claiming that both tenured and non-tenured faculty who used social media in ways that were not in the interest of the university, decided exclusively by the CEO of the university, were subject to dismissal. Speech that now impairs or reduces the university’s “efficiency” overrides the right of faculty to exercise free speech or address issues they deem socially and politically important.  For all intent and purposes, this signifies not only the end of tenure but academic freedom. Moreover, as William Black points out, “in both substance and dishonesty of presentation, the Regents’ policy is literally Orwellian.” [16]

Read More: Truthout

How far is too far when it comes to religious accommodation?

Matthew Coutts, Daily Brew, January 9, 2014– Is it appropriate to allow university students decline to participate in a class assignment because it would force him to interact with female students, or should they be expected to set their “firm religious beliefs aside” in their search for higher education? And how should technology play into the decision?

That question is at the centre of a debate ongoing at Toronto’s York University, where a sociology professor and university brass have clashed over whether a student’s religious belief should allow him to skip class assignments that bring him into contact with women.

The debate stems from a decision made by Professor Paul Grayson in September, when a male student in an online sociology course asked to be excused from an in-person assignment that would bring him in contact with female students. The students claimed “firm religious beliefs” as his reason for not wanted to intermingle with female students.

Grayson denied the request on the ground that it marginalized and punished female classmates. York University officials, however, approved the student’s request for religious accommodation and ordered Grayson to allow the student to remain absent from the session.

The student acquiesced and ultimately completed the project. In the meantime, however, the professor and university have locked into a battle that could write the playbook for future arguments around religious accommodation.

“If for religious reasons you exempt a student from interacting with females, there are religious reasons people could advance for not interacting with blacks, Jews, gays, you name it,” Grayson told SunNews Network. “In the bible and in religious practice you can find a basis for that kind of appeal.”

University Provost Rhonda Lenton retorted in a statement that every accommodation request is considered on its own merits. She said the circumstances of this case led the university to conclude the accommodation could be made.

“A deciding factor in this case was that it was an online course where another student had previously been given permission to complete the course requirement off-campus,” Lenton announced. She later told CBC’s Metro Morning that, “Had it not been an online course, it is my view that … the advice that would have been given to the professor and to the student is that this is a course that is being delivered on campus and in person, and part of the assignments are to work with other students in the class.”

Lenton notes that another student was allowed to skip an in-person assignment, suggesting it was an accommodation the professor was willing to make under some circumstances. Grayson said in interviews that a student taking the course from Egypt had previously been shown leniency due to his or her distance from campus.

Indeed, details published in the National Post suggest that the student at the centre of the debate enrolled in the online sociology course out of a belief that it would allow him to finish his degree without intermingling with other students – specifically females.

If that is the case, then it could be seen as an attempt by the student to work within the framework of York – accommodate the university and its inclusive environment, you could say – to balance his religious beliefs with his desire to complete his degree.

It is not clear what religion the student holds, and Grayson has said he consulted several religious leaders before coming to his decision. It should be noted, however, that when the professor denied the accommodation request, the student agreed to participate without further complaint. He even thanked Grayson for the way he handled the situation.

Lenton said that while the student and teacher were able to come to an agreement, “the broader issue of religious accommodations in secular universities remains an important societal concern that warrants further discussion.” The Ontario Human Rights Commission is reviewing the case.

Part of that review should be the role technology has played in all of this. Is it truly reasonable to expect religious accommodation through online courses? Should such a course allow members of society to harbor personal beliefs that will surely come to a head later in life?

Regardless of whether the course is online or not, the student in question will graduate with a degree from York University. Is the school comfortable attaching their reputation to a student who may, upon entering the job market, beg out of meetings because female co-workers and bosses will be in attendance?

York University should have one set of standards across campus. Accommodation is important but reason should still be a factor, whether the student is logged on from home or sitting in a classroom.

York U student’s request not to work with women stirs controversy

Professor Paul Grayson says, ‘This takes us back to the dark ages’

CBC News, January 9, 2014– A York University student taking an online course is seeking to be excused from group work because his religious beliefs forbid him from meeting with female classmates.

His professor at the Toronto university, Paul Grayson, rejected his request, which ignited a controversy at the university about human rights.

“I was quite shocked,” Grayson told CBC-Radio’s Ontario Today. He said he did not know the religion of the student, but fundamentally did not agree with accommodating him.

The sociology professor got in touch with the Centre for Human Rights and the dean’s office at York. Both replied that he had to comply with the student’s request, with the dean issuing three separate orders to comply.

“I basically refused,” said Grayson. “My main concern was that for religious beliefs, we also can justify not interacting with Jews, blacks, gays, you name it. And if this were allowed to go through, then all these other absurd demands could be made.”

Grayson said accommodating the student would be against everything he stands for.

“Women for 50 years have been making gains in universities,” said the professor. “This takes us back to the dark ages as far as I’m concerned. It’s completely unacceptable.”

The communication between Grayson and the university took about three months. In that time, Grayson had a conversation with the student directly about his request.

“Very early in the game, I got in touch with the student and said, look, I’m sorry, I simply cannot accommodate you. And his reaction basically was, oh, OK. And he was OK with it. The student is not the problem.”

The student participated in the group project, ultimately. But Grayson said the university ordered him to make it clear to the student that he did not have to meet with female classmates.

The university issued a statement saying it is committed to respecting religious beliefs, but said the case was “complicated by the fact that it was an online course where alternative arrangements were put in place to accommodate students who were unavailable to attend classes on campus.”

Federal politicians back professor

A handful of federal politicians say they agree with the professor and that the school went too far in siding with the student.

Justice Minister Peter MacKay said that having men and women attend school together was precisely what Canada fought to accomplish when it sent soldiers to Afghanistan.

Liberal MP Judy Sgro, who represents the riding of York West in which the university is located, said the professor made the right decision. Conservative MP Mark Adler, who represents the adjacent riding of York Centre, says there is no place in Canadian society for sexism

NDP Leader Tom Mulcair said universities should not be accommodating such a demand.

Read More: CBC News

CAUT and CFS withdraw from Copyright Board Hearing #ubc #yteubc #bced

CAUT, December 23, 2013– The Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) and the Canadian Federation of Students (CFS) announced today that they will withdraw their participation from the Post-Secondary Educational Institution Tariff (2011-2013) hearing before the Copyright Board of Canada. Access Copyright has been attempting to use this tariff to force colleges and universities to pay a dramatically higher per-student fee in order to use works in their repository.

“When the university and college associations dropped out of the process, the CAUT and CFS were left as the last institutional adversaries to the tariff,” said CAUT Executive Director James Turk. “We had to weigh the potential positive impact we can have in the hearing against appearing to legitimize a process of which we are increasingly doubtful. In the end we believe it would be better to withdraw.”

Universities and colleges across Canada are opting out of licensing agreements with Access Copyright, relying instead on open access journals, fair dealing, and direct licenses with publishers. Throughout the hearing, the Copyright Board has shown little interest in CAUT’s and CFS’s request to first address fundamental legal questions relating to the scope and authority of the tariff. In this context, the likelihood of CAUT and CFS influencing the outcome of the hearing, and the relevance of the hearing itself, have become increasingly remote.

“Remaining involved in the Copyright Board hearing is no longer advantageous in defending students against exploitation by Access Copyright,” said Jessica McCormick, National Chairperson of the CFS. “We will continue this fight on our campuses and in our classrooms until students’ right to use materials for educational purposes takes precedence over private profits.”

The Copyright Board hearing is scheduled to begin February 12, 2014. CAUT and CFS filed a formal objection to the tariff in August 2010. The Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada and the Association of Community Colleges of Canada withdrew their objections on April 24, 2012 and October 25, 2013 respectively.

The Canadian Federation of Students is Canada’s largest student organisation, uniting more than one-half million students in all ten provinces. The Canadian Federation of Students and its predecessor organisations have represented students in Canada since 1927.

The Canadian Association of University Teachers is the national voice of more than 68,000 academic and general staff at over 120 universities and colleges across the country.

Read More: CAUT

CAUT Equity and Diversity Forum, February 7-9, 2014 #ubc

Perpetual Crisis? Diversity with Equity in the Academy
CAUT Equity and Diversity Forum
Courtyard Marriott Downtown Hotel in Toronto
February 7-9, 2014

We are pleased to announce CAUT’s Equity and Diversity Forum which will be held at the Courtyard Marriott Downtown Hotel in Toronto on February 7-9, 2014.

The theme of the Forum is “Perpetual Crisis? Diversity with Equity in the Academy” and will bring together an exciting group of panellists and speakers.

The event provides an important opportunity for members of your association – officers, executive members, chief negotiators, equity activists, and other interested members to meet colleagues from other associations, share high level discussion and best practices and build a network of contacts and support so that your association can more effectively fulfill its obligations in relation to the promotion of equity within your institution and the larger society.

The Forum begins on Friday, February 7, 2014, with registration beginning at noon and the opening session at 13:30. The Forum will end at noon on Sunday, February 9. The Forum will be conducted in English; there will be no simultaneous translation.

We hope your association will send as large a delegation as possible – association leaders and equity activists. If you have any questions about the Forum, please contact Lynn Braun.

Henry A. Giroux : : Intellectuals as subjects and objects of violence #truthout #educationbc

Henry A. Giroux, Truthout, September 10, 2013– Edward Snowden, Russ Tice, Thomas Drake, Jeremy Scahill, and Julian Assange, among others, have recently made clear what it means to embody respect for a public intellectual debate, moral witnessing and intellectual culture. They are not just whistle-blowers or disgruntled ex-employers but individuals who value ideas, think otherwise in order to act otherwise, and use the resources available to them to address important social issues with what might be called a fearsome sense of social responsibility and civic courage. Their anger is not treasonous or self-serving as some critics argue, it is the indispensable sensibility and righteous fury that fuels the meaning over what it means to take a moral and political stand and to continue the struggle to live in a substantive rather than fake democracy.

These are people who work with ideas, but are out of place in a society that only values ideas that serve the interests of the market and the powerful and rich.  Their alleged wrongdoings as intellectuals and truth tellers is that they have revealed the illegalities, military abuses, sordid diplomacy and crimes committed by the United States government in the name of security. Moreover, as scholars, scientists, educators, artists and journalists, they represent what C. Wright Mills once called the “organized memory of society” and refuse “to become hired technician[s] of the military machine.”[1]

There is a long tradition of such intellectuals, especially from academia and the world of the arts, but they are members of a dying breed and their legacy is no longer celebrated as a crucial element of public memory. Whether we are talking about W. E. B. Dubois, Jane Jacobs, Edward Said, James Baldwin, Murray Bookchin, Martin Luther King, Jr., Michael Harrington, C. Wright Mills, Paul Sweezy or Ellen Willis, these were bold intellectuals who wrote with vigor, passion and clarity and refused the role of mere technicians or lapdogs for established power. They embraced ideas critically and engaged them as a fundamental element of individual agency and social action. Such intellectuals addressed the totality of problems faced in the periods in which they lived, made their publications accessible, and spoke to multiple publics while never compromising the rigorous nature of their work. They worked hard to make knowledge, and what Foucault called, dangerous memories available to the public because they believed that the moral and cultural sensibilities that shaped society should be open to interrogation. They paved the way for the so-called whistle-blowers of today along with many current public intellectuals who refuse the seductions of power. Intellectuals of that generation who are still alive are now largely ignored and erased from the public discourse.

Intellectuals of that older generation have become a rare breed who enriched public life. Unfortunately, they are a dying generation, and there are not too many intellectuals left who have followed in their footsteps. The role of such intellectuals has been chronicled brilliantly by both Russell Jacoby and Irving Howe, among others.[2]  What has not been commented on with the same detail, theoretical rigor and political precision is the emergence of the new anti-public intellectuals. Intellectuals who act in the service of power are not new, but with the rise of neoliberalism and the huge concentrations of wealth and power that have accompanied it, a new class of intellectuals in the service of casino capitalism has been created.  These intellectuals are now housed in various cultural apparatuses constructed by the financial elite and work to engulf the American public in a fog of ignorance and free-market ideology. We can finds hints of this conservative cultural apparatus with its machineries of public pedagogy in the Powell Memo of 1971, with its call for conservatives to create cultural apparatuses that would cancel out dissent, contain the excesses of democracy and undermine the demands of the student free speech, anti-war and civil rights movements of the 1960s. What has emerged since that time is a neoliberal historical conjuncture that has given rise to a new crop of anti-public intellectuals hatched in conservative think tanks and corporate-driven universities who are deeply wedded to a world more fitted to values and social relations of fictional monsters such as John Galt and Patrick Bateman.

Unlike an older generation of conservative intellectuals such as Edward Shils, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Norman Podhoretz, William Buckley and Allen Bloom, who believed in reasoned arguments, drew upon respected intellectual traditions, affirmed the world of ideas, and engaged in serious debates, the new anti-public intellectuals are ideologues who rant, speak in slogans, and wage a war on reason and the most fundamental institutions of democracy extending from public schools and labor unions to the notion of quality health care for all and the principles of the social contract. We hear and see them on Fox News, the Sunday talk shows, and their writings appear in the country’s most respected op-ed pages.

Their legions are growing, and some of the most popular include Peggy Noonan, Thomas Freidman, Tucker Carlson, Juan Williams, S. E. Cupp and Judith Miller. Their more scurrilous hangers-on and lightweights include: Karl Rove, Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh. The anti-public intellectuals are rarely off-script, producing tirades against, among others: the less fortunate, who are seen as parasites; immigrants who threaten the identity of white Christian extremists; women who dare to argue for controlling their reproductive rights; and people of color, who are not American enough to deserve any voting rights. They deride science and evidence and embrace ideologies that place them squarely in the camp of the first Gilded Age, when corporations ruled the government, Jim Crow was the norm, women knew their place and education was simply another form of propaganda.  Much of what these Gilded Age anti-public intellectuals propose and argue for is not new. As Eric William Martin points out, “Many of the proposals themselves are old; not founding-fathers old, but early-20th-century old. They are the harvest of a century of rich people’s movements.”[3]

What the anti-public intellectuals never include in their screeds are any mention of a government corrupted by the titans of finance, banks and the mega rich, or the scope and extent of the military-industrial-academic-surveillance state and its threat to the most basic principles of democracy.[4] What does arouse their anger to fever pitch are those public intellectuals who dare to question authority, expose the crimes of corrupt politicians, and call into question the carcinogenic nature of a corporate state that has hijacked American democracy. This is most evident in the insults and patriotic gore heaped recently on Manning and Snowden, who are the latest in a group of young people whose only “crime” has been to expose the abusive powers of the national security state. Rather than being held up as exemplary public intellectuals and true patriots of democracy, they are disparaged as traitors, un-American or worse.

The role of the anti-public intellectuals in this instance is part of a much larger practice of self-deceit, self-promotion, and the shutting down of those formative cultures that give rise to intellectuals willing to take risks and fight for matters of freedom, justice, transparency and equality.  For too many intellectuals, both liberal and conservative, the flight from responsibility turns into a Faustian pact with a corrupt and commodified culture whose only allegiance is to accumulating capital and consolidating control over all aspects of the lives of the American public. Liberal anti-public intellectuals are more nuanced in their support for the status quo. They do not condemn critical intellectuals as un-American, they simply argue that there is no room for politics in the university and that academics, for instance, should save the world on their own time.[5] Such views disconnect pedagogy from any understanding of politics and in doing so make a false distinction between what Gayatri Spivak calls “the possibility of civic engagement and democratic action and teaching in the classroom.”[6]  She argues that “this is a useless distinction because I think what you have to realize is that it is with the mind that one takes democratic action.  . . . The Freedom to teach, to expand the imagination as an instrument to think “world” is thus deeply political. It operates at the root of where the ethical imagination and the political mingle.”[7]  C.W. Mills goes further and dismisses the attempt to take politics out of the classroom as part of the “cynical contempt of specialists.”[8]  He then offers a defense for what public intellectuals do by insisting that:

I do not believe that intellectuals will inevitably ‘save the world,’ although I see nothing at all wrong with ‘trying to save the world’- a phrase which I take here to mean the avoidance of war and the rearrangement of human affairs in accordance with the ideals of human freedom and reason. But even if we think the chances dim, still we must ask: If there are any ways out of the crises of our epoch by means of the intellect, is it not up to intellectuals to state them?[9]

Intellectuals should provide a model for connecting scholarship and public life, address important social and political issues, speak to multiple audiences, help citizens come to a more critical and truthful understanding of their own views and their relations to others and the larger society. But they should do more than simply raise important questions, they should also work to create those public spheres and formative cultures in which matters of dialogue, thoughtfulness and critical exchange are both valued and proliferate. Zygmunt Bauman is right in arguing that it is the moral necessity and obligation of the intellectual to take responsibility for their responsibility – for ourselves, others and the larger world. Part of that responsibility entails becoming a moral witness, expanding the political imagination, and working with social movements in their efforts to advance social and economic justice, promote policies that are just, and make meaningful the promises of a radical democracy.

What might it mean for intellectuals to assume such a role, even if in limited spheres such as public and higher education?…

Some have argued, wrongly in my estimation, that such intellectuals, because they address a broader audience and public issues, betray the scholarly tradition by not being rigorous theoretically. I think this is a massive misreading of much of the work published by such intellectuals, as well as a distortion of what is often published in online journals such as Truthout, CounterPunch, and Truthdig.  In fact, Truthout often publishes substantive theoretically rigorous articles under its Public Intellectual Project that are accessible, address important social issues, and at the same time, attract large numbers of readers. I am inclined to believe that at the heart of this misinformed critique is an unadulterated nostalgia for those heady days when one could publish unintelligible articles in small journals and make the claim, generally uncontested, that one was an intellectual because one wrote in the idiom of high theory. Those days are gone, if they ever really existed so as to make a difference about anything that might concern addressing significant public issues.

Read More: Truthout

What Contingent Faculty Can Learn From Fast-Food Workers #bced #yteubc

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

From McJob to McAdemic: Labor activism and unrest as economy tanks #bced #yteubc

(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.

Elizabeth Warren’s Student Loan Fairness Act goes to vote

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.
  

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Rob, Natalia, Kyle, Aaron & The 
Student Debt Crisis Team
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Lessons of Harvard’s secret email search

Dan Gillmor, The Guardian, March 11, 2013— According to Harvard Universityemail subject lines are not “content”. This remarkable claim comes in a university statement, sardonicallycalled a “partial apology” by the Boston Globe, attempting to explain why Harvard semi-searched email accounts of 16 “resident deans” to find out who’d leaked information about a student cheating scandal to the press.

The statement attempted to put to rest a mini-uproar set off by theGlobe’s initial report on the leaker probe methods. In attempting to explain what had happened, and to assure the Harvard community that people’s emails weren’t being scanned wholesale, the statement answered some questions but only provoked others.

Most of all, the entire episode highlighted several realities in today’s working world: notably, the folly of using an employer’s email system for any purpose that might ever prove controversial.

I won’t even attempt to sort out the Harvard explanation; it’s too convoluted. But I do want to point to the bizarre assertion mentioned at the top of this piece. The statement says, in part:

“The search did not involve a review of email content; it was limited to a search of the subject line of the email that had been inappropriately forwarded. To be clear: no one’s emails were opened and the contents of no one’s emails were searched by human or machine.”

I have news for the deans under whose names this statement appeared. Like most people who send email, I try hard to make the subject line relevant enough that the recipient will be inclined to open the missive and read it. Other highly relevant material in my email includes the name of the person I’m sending it to; the date; the time; the internet address of the machine I’m using; and the network I’m sending from. None of those is the message itself, but they are “content” in every way that matters. That data form the basis for all kinds of inferences and knowledge about me.

I take for granted that Harvard, like all employers, has a right to look at pretty much anything it pleases on the machines that are part of its network, and I’d put administrative email accounts, as these were, fairly high on the list. That doesn’t mean Harvard is necessarily doing the right thing, or that any employer exercising its internal snooping rights, except in the rarest of circumstances, is being honorable with its employees.

It does mean that employees should always assume that their employers’ networks are under surveillance, at least internally.

Read More: The Guardian

Four More Years

Four More Years

Libby A. Nelson

(Inside Higher ed, November 7, 2012) President Obama, who won re-election Tuesday night, has already hinted how he might deal with higher education in a second term. The question now is how much of that agenda he will be able to accomplish in the next four years, given the budget crises he will face and the expectation that Republicans in Congress will continue to oppose his priorities.

The president’s victory means that colleges can expect the White House to continue to stand up for federal financial aid, as well as for federal research money, in the likely fierce budget battles in the coming months. But the depth of the financial issues the country faces means that federal dollars are likely to be limited, and the president’s support is more likely to halt deep spending cuts than it is to find new money for higher education programs.

It also suggests the continuation of a regulatory agenda that many colleges, especially for-profits, found to be onerous or at least overreaching.

In the near term, a second Obama administration means that the status quo will continue. Education Secretary Arne Duncan has already said he plans to stay for the president’s second term. Although the “gainful employment” regulation, which seeks to rein in for-profit colleges by denying federal aid to those whose students cannot earn enough to pay back their loans, was thrown out in court in July, the department has signaled it intends to take another stab at implementing the regulations, which the court supported in principle. The department will also go forward with new federal rules making income-based student loan repayment more generous, published Thursday but not yet in effect.

In the short term, “I think it’s very likely that the Education Department will continue to use its regulatory authority to advance federal education policy,” said Terry Hartle, senior vice president for government and public affairs at the American Council on Education, after several networks called the race for the president late Tuesday night. Several new regulations are expected in the coming months, including new rules governing teacher preparation programs and a new round of negotiated rule-making dealing with fraud.

But the administration will also confront a fiscal crisis with serious implications for federal financial aid. The “fiscal cliff” — a combination of mandatory spending cuts and expiring tax breaks — arrives Jan. 2, and Congress must reach a long-term deficit deal to avert across-the-board cuts to defense and domestic discretionary spending. Whether the same lawmakers who were unable to do so a year ago might be more effective now is an open question. (See related article on the results of the Congressional election.)…

In other areas, Obama’s victory means current trends are likely to continue. The National Labor Relations Board is considering allowing greater unionization, both for graduate students and at private universities, and may grant it in the president’s second term, when he is able to appoint more members whose views align with his own. The Education Department will also consider its aggressive enforcement of Title IX and civil rights laws.

While the administration is likely to hold the line it has established on for-profit colleges, it’s unlikely that the next four years will see significant new regulations aimed at those colleges. Future regulation, if there is any, is likely to focus on colleges that get money from the GI Bill and other veterans’ benefits.

Read more: Inside Higher Ed

The birth of critical university studies

The Chronicle Review: Deconstructing Academe

By Jeffrey J. Williams

Over the past two decades in the United States, there has been a new wave of criticism of higher education. Much of it has condemned the rise of “academic capitalism” and the corporatization of the university; a substantial wing has focused on the deteriorating conditions of academic labor; and some of it has pointed out the problems of students and their escalating debt. A good deal of this new work comes from literary and cultural critics, although it also includes those from education, history, sociology, and labor studies. This wave constitutes what Heather Steffen, a graduate student in literary and cultural studies with whom I have worked at Carnegie Mellon University, and I think is an emerging field of “critical university studies.”

Intellectual Roots of Wall St. Protest Lie in Academe

The Chronicle: Intellectual Roots of Wall St. Protest Lie in Academe

Academics have become frequent visitors to Zuccotti Park, the 33,000-square-foot pedestrian plaza in the heart of New York City’s financial district that is now the site of a nearly monthlong protest, Occupy Wall Street.

Famous scholars like Cornel West, Slavoj Zizek, and Frances Fox Piven have spoken to the crowd, with their remarks dispersed, word-for-word, from one cluster of people to the next through a “human megaphone.” Many others, such as Lawrence Lessig, have lent their support from farther away, as the demonstrations have spread to cities and college campuses nationwide.

The University Has No Clothes

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.

U of L watches closely as Grawemeyer Award winner’s book is challenged

Courier-Journal: U of L watches closely as Grawemeyer Award winner’s book is challenged

U of L announced last week that it was presenting the award to author Greg Mortenson, just days before the CBS news show aired a segment saying two of his books — “Three Cups of Tea” and “Stones into Schools: Promoting Peace with Books, not Bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan” — contained inaccuracies and fabrications.

“The Grawemeyer Awards program has taken author Greg Mortenson at his word, as have millions of readers around the world. Given the impact of his work, we hope these early reports are unfounded but we will be closely watching this situation as it unfolds,” Allan Dittmer, executive director of U of L’s Grawemeyer Awards, said Monday in a statement.

U. of Louisville’s Grawemeyer Program Awaits Outcome of Allegations Against Prize Winner

The Chronicle: U. of Louisville’s Grawemeyer Program Awaits Outcome of Allegations Against Prize Winner

The University of Louisville’s Grawemeyer Awards program is monitoring developments regarding allegations against Greg Mortenson, an author and philanthropist who was recently named the winner of the program’s education prize, The Courier-Journal reported. The CBS program 60 Minutes has alleged that two books Mr. Mortenson wrote about his efforts to found schools for girls in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Three Cups of Tea and Stones Into Schools, contain inaccuracies and that some of the schools he claims to have founded do not exist. Allan Dittmer, executive director of Grawemeyer Awards, said officials hoped the reports were unfounded and had made no decision about whether to go ahead with the award or rescind it. “At this stage of the game, it is hard to know where this is all going to end up,” he said. The Courier-Journal reported Mr. Mortenson’s selection as the winner last week. The awards program’s Web site states only that an “announcement is pending.”

Red Scare at Georgia university

Inside Higher Ed: The Would-Be Provost Who Quoted Marx

“In the university, the higher up the hierarchical structure, the more one has decision-making power and the further one is from the actual ‘work’ (discovering and disseminating knowledge).”

Timothy J. L. Chandler, the co-author of a 1998 journal article with that quote about university hierarchies, is going to stay a step closer to actual work. On Thursday, he announced that he is turning down the position of provost at Kennesaw State University — in part because of furor set off in the local area over the article, which applies class analysis and several times cites Marx.

Purple Thistle Institute—Radical change from below

Announcing the Purple Thistle Institute!
RADICAL SOCIAL CHANGE FROM BELOW

The Purple Thistle in East Vancouver, Coast Salish Territory is super‐pleased to announce that in JULY 2011 we will be running a three‐week summer institute. We’d be thrilled if you would consider attending.

WHAT IS IT? The PTI will be something like an alternative university, or maybe better: an alternative‐to-university.

The idea is to bring together a bunch of engaged, interested people to talk about theory, ideas and practise for radical social change. We’ll have a great time, meet good people, get our praxis challenged and with luck refine and renew our ideas, politics and energies.

Importantly, the conversations will very deliberately cut across radical orientations – anarchists, socialists, lefties, progressives, anti‐colonialists, anti‐authoritarians, ecologists of all stripes are welcome.

The idea is to work, think and talk together – to articulate and comprehend differences sure – but to find common ground, get beyond factionalized pettiness and stimulate radical ecological and egalitarian social change. We want to get good people with good ideas together to talk and listen to each other.

WHEN IS BEING HELD? July 4th – 23rd, 2011

WHAT WILL THE SCHEDULE LOOK LIKE? Essentially all three weeks will follow the same pattern. We will be running 6 days a week with Sundays off. We will be offering 8 morning classes of which participants will be able to choose up to four to attend. Then we will all have lunch together, then every afternoon community work placements will be offered. Evenings will be a mix of open‐space activities, shows, speakers, films and free time.

WHAT WILL THE CLASSES BE LIKE? We have put together an awesome roster of instructors and speakers including Astra Taylor, Cecily Nicholson, Carla Bergman, Am Johal, Matt Hern, Geoff Mann, Glen Coulthard and lots more. The classes will be fairly rigourous (loosely at an upper‐year university level) and include a certain amount of reading and some writing. Attendance is not mandatory and you can engage with as much or as little as you like. The classes include: Decolonization, Activist Art, Urban Studies, Deschooling, Understanding Economics, Contemporary Social Philosophy and Critical Theory.

WHO IS THIS FOR? The PTI is for anyone, of any age, but we will be giving priority to youth, racialized and low‐income folks. As mentioned the classes will be pretty rigourous intellectually, but please don’t let that scare you off. The language will not be overly academicized and as long as you like to read, think, talk and listen you’ll probably be OK. The one real requirement is that you are keenly interested in radical social transformation and come with a generous spirit ready to listen and collaborate.

WHAT WILL IT COST? The three weeks are priced on a sliding scale: $350 ‐ $500. This includes lunch six days a week. If you are coming from out of town, need a place to stay and want to kick down an extra $100 we will find you a good billet who will give you a bed and feed you. There will be a few bursaries available, but we are going to need most people to pay at least the minimum.

HOW DO I APPLY? Hit us with an email at institute@purplethistle.ca and we’ll send you a formal application and instructions.

UC Berkeley bloated, wasteful, consultants say

San Francisco Chronicle: UC Berkeley bloated, wasteful, consultants say

For a world-class university studded with Nobel laureates and innovative research, UC Berkeley manages its finances a bit like a sloppy undergrad, a new report suggests.

The campus could save about $75 million a year by streamlining purchases, concentrating job duties and laying off “redundant” managers, according to consultants hired last fall to help the school become a leaner operation

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/04/12/BAIH1CTI5M.DTL#ixzz0kzxgNagR