Category Archives: Commentary

Globe and Mail:

The labour party

Howard Hampton, the outgoing Leader of Ontario’s New Democratic Party, has some nerve calling for compensation for York University students who have seen their school year savaged by a strike by 3,500 teaching assistants and contract faculty. It is the NDP that has denied the Ontario government unanimous consent for back-to-work legislation, prolonging a dispute that is in its 12th week and aggravating the hardship facing 50,000 students. Will the Ontario NDP contribute toward any compensation?

These students deserve compensation

CHRISTIE BLATCHFORD

After a day spent perusing the various websites, pro and con, devoted to the still-ongoing York University strike and the anonymous meanness it has everywhere spawned, finally, there comes a lovely bit of clarity.

Unsurprisingly, it comes from neither the university nor the Canadian Union of Public Employees Local 3903, which represents the 3,340 striking contract faculty and teaching, graduate and research assistants. Neither side has distinguished itself during the now 83-day-long strike except by putting its own respective interests ahead of those of 50,000-plus students, and that unhappy conduct continues unabated.

Balancing the right to strike with the right to learn

MURRAY CAMPBELL

There is one question that hangs over the messy, long-running labour dispute at York University: Where is the adult supervision?

The 12-week strike by contract faculty and teaching assistants has unfolded like a pyjama party in the basement when the parents have gone out and the babysitter has fallen asleep. The kids really do intend to turn off the television and head to bed but they don’t get around to it.

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The Chronicle News Blog: Opinion: Where’s the Academic Outrage Over the Bombing of a University in Gaza?

By Neve Gordon and Jeff Halper

Not one of the nearly 450 presidents of American colleges and universities who prominently denounced an effort by British academics to boycott Israeli universities in September 2007 have raised their voice in opposition to Israel’s bombardment of the Islamic University of Gaza earlier this week. Lee C. Bollinger, president of Columbia University, who organized the petition, has been silent, as have his co-signatories from Princeton, Northwestern, and Cornell Universities, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Most others who signed similar petitions, like the 11,000 professors from nearly 1,000 universities around the world, have also refrained from expressing their outrage at Israel’s attack on the leading university in Gaza. The artfully named Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, which organized the latter appeal, has said nothing about the assault.

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The Chronicle: In Alternative Universe: Iraq War Ends — Bush Indicted For Treason

The Yes Men media pranksters have claimed responsibility for a million-copy spoof edition of The New York Times handed out yesterday on Manhattan streets.

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The Chronicle: Public Universities at Risk Abandoning Their Mission

By GENE R. NICHOL

I am an admirer of Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class, a new book by Christopher Newfield, who writes in this issue of The Chronicle about how certain myths exacerbate the financial plight of those institutions. Newfield, a professor of English at the University of California…

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The Chronicle: Want Tenure? Sign on the Dotted Line

Stephen Joel Trachtenberg: Want Tenure? Sign on the Dotted Line

Something is wrong with tenure, and we need to make it right. Abolishing it altogether is not politically or culturally feasible, or even likely. Any such attempt would set the many academic constituencies against all the rest simultaneously and, like the famous circular firing squad, leave everyone at least grievously injured and possibly some higher-education institutions dead.

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The Post: Your turn: Data point to unionization as ‘move backward’ for OU

Ohio University Faculty Senate is contemplating a resolution for collective bargaining. Pro-union faculty suggest collective bargaining will benefit faculty long-term. Unfortunately, data do not support this argument. Institutional Research Salary Study data demonstrate that 5-year cumulative salary increases at non-union schools are higher than union schools for all faculty ranks: Professors, 16 percent non-union versus 11 percent union; Associate Professors 13 percent union versus 10 percent union; Assistant Professors, 16 percent non-union versus 14 percent union. Faculty salary increases (%) at Ohio University often equal or exceed the salary increases (%) at other non-union universities in Ohio.

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Inside Higher Ed: The Worst Academic Careers — Worldwide

By Philip G. Altbach and Christine Musselin

Successful universities and academic systems require career structures for the academic profession that permit a stable academic career, encourage the “best and brightest” to join the profession, reward the most productive for their work, and weed out those who are unsuited for academic work. We have been struck by the dysfunctional nature of career structures in many countries — with disturbing negative trends — and would, only with a small sense of irony, suggest a ranking for career structures that guarantee to fail to build a productive academic profession. Our serious point is this: Without a career structure that attracts quality, rewards productivity, and permits stability, universities will fail in their mission of high-quality teaching, innovative research, and building a “world-class” reputation.

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The Chronicle Review: Generational Myth

Not all young people are tech-savvy

By SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN

Consider all the pundits, professors, and pop critics who have wrung their hands over the inadequacies of the so-called digital generation of young people filling our colleges and jobs. Then consider those commentators who celebrate the creative brilliance of digitally adept youth. To them all, I want to ask: Whom are you talking about? There is no such thing as a “digital generation.”

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