Category Archives: Corporate University

New issue launch Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor #35 (2024-2025)

 

 

 

 

 

 

New issue launch Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor #35 (2024-2025)

Articles in Workplace #35 address a variety of labour issues on campus and beyond, including the first in a series of articles by graduate student participants in the Global Labour Research Centre Symposium at York University.

Find the Workplace #35 here: https://ices.library.ubc.ca/index.php/workplace/index

Call for Chapters: Precarity, Unions, and Meaningful Work in Adult, Community, and Vocational Education  

Call for Chapters: Precarity, Unions, and Meaningful Work in Adult, Community, and Vocational Education  


Submit chapters here https://www.igi-global.com/publish/call-for-papers/submit/6670

Call for Chapters

Proposals Submission Deadline: September 22nd, 2023

Full Chapters Due: December 21, 2023
Submission Date: December 21, 2023

Introduction

“Neoliberalism has had destructive effects on the academic profession. While fulltime academic employment has always been a privilege for a few, the academic precariat has risen as a reserve army of workers with ever shorter, lower paid, hyper-flexible contracts and ever more temporally fragmented and hyper-mobile lives.” (Ivancheva, 2015, p. 39)

According to Standing (2016), starting in the 1980’s, globalisation “has generated a class structure, superimposed on earlier structures, comprising an elite, a salariat, proficians and old ‘core’ working class (proletariat), a precariat, the unemployed and a lumpen-precariat (or “underclass”)” (2014, p. 12) Connecting precariousness with vulnerability Lorey (2011) suggests Precarity is a “category […] that denotes the effects of political, social, and legal compensations for general precariousness” (para. 4). Chinnery explains: “so while we are all vulnerable to whims of fortune, health, violence, and natural disasters, there are some people whose social, economic or political status renders them more vulnerable, more precarious than others” (2015, p. 2). These people, the Precariat, are also susceptible to “the governmental or the structural ways in which precariousness in distributed and managed” (Lorey, 2011, para. 5), what Chinnery (2015) and Lorey (2011) refer to as Precaritisation.

Objective

This edited volume will provide a comprehensive scan of the politics and policies that inform and shape precarity in adult, community, and vocational education. It will explore the in/adequacy of existing theories of adult and workplace education and professional development to capture the experiences of the precariat. It will explore the role of unions and union learning in facilitating and combating precarity experienced by educators. It will showcase first-person narratives of educators who experience precaritisation, each and every day. Finally, it will explore the concept of meaningful work and self-care and describe what meaningful work and self-care look and feel like in this landscape of precarity.

Target Audience

Writers, researchers and practitioners in areas of:

  • Adult, community and vocational education
  • Employment, precarity and the impact of neoliberalism
  • Union education
  • Meaningful work
  • Self-care

Recommended Topics

This work will be a significant addition to the field addressing politics and policy, theory and practice, first-person narratives, all in relation to the concept and experience of meaningful work and self-care. This work will be a useful resource for adult, community, and vocational educators across a range of contexts.

In no particular order contents will include, but may not be limited to:

• Contexts of adult, community and vocational learning
• Neoliberal and globalised politics and policy as they relate to work, workplace education and professional development
• The role of unions and union learning
• Theories of work, workplace education, and professional development
• Precaritisation, precariousness, precarity
• First-person narratives of experience
• Meaningful work
• Self-care

Editors

Rupert C. Collister, PhD, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education/University of Toronto, University of New Brunswick, & Yorkville University, Canada

Submission Procedure

Researchers and practitioners are invited to submit on or before August 23, 2023, a chapter proposal of 1,000 to 2,000 words clearly explaining the mission and concerns of his or her proposed chapter. Authors will be notified by September 6, 2023 about the status of their proposals and sent chapter guidelines. Full chapters are expected to be submitted by December 21, 2023, and all interested authors must consult the guidelines for manuscript submissions at https://www.igi-global.com/publish/contributor-resources/before-you-write/ prior to submission. All submitted chapters will be reviewed on a double-blind review basis. Contributors may also be requested to serve as reviewers for this project.

Note: There are no submission or acceptance fees for manuscripts submitted to this book publication, Precarity, Unions, and Meaningful Work in Adult, Community, and Vocational Education. All manuscripts are accepted based on a double-blind peer review editorial process.

All proposals should be submitted through the eEditorial Discovery® online submission manager. Submit your proposal here:https://www.igi-global.com/publish/call-for-papers/submit/6670

Publisher

This book is scheduled to be published by IGI Global (formerly Idea Group Inc.), an international academic publisher of the “Information Science Reference” (formerly Idea Group Reference), “Medical Information Science Reference,” “Business Science Reference,” and “Engineering Science Reference” imprints. IGI Global specializes in publishing reference books, scholarly journals, and electronic databases featuring academic research on a variety of innovative topic areas including, but not limited to, education, social science, medicine and healthcare, business and management, information science and technology, engineering, public administration, library and information science, media and communication studies, and environmental science. For additional information regarding the publisher, please visit https://www.igi-global.com. This publication is anticipated to be released in 2024.

Important Dates

September 22nd, 2023: Proposal Submission Deadline

From September 6, 2023: Notification of Acceptance

December 21, 2023: Full Chapter Submission
February 18, 2024: Review Results Returned
March 31, 2024: Final Acceptance Notification
April 14, 2024: Final Chapter Submission

Inquiries

Rupert C. Collister, PhD
Ontario Institute for Studies in Education/University of Toronto, University of New Brunswick, & Yorkville University

rc_collister@hotmail.com

FACULTY MEMBERS AT SOUTH ASIAN UNIVERSITY SUSPENDED FOR SUPPORTING STUDENT RIGHTS

Four faculty members at South Asian University (New Delhi, India)  have been suspended pending investigation for asking the university not to call police inside the campus while student protests were going on and to resolve matters amicably.

Faculty also asked administration to withdraw punishment meted to students because due process of rules and regulations were not followed.  Ravi Kumar, one of the suspended professors said, “This is unprecedented in the academic history where four faculty members have been suspended for suggesting measures in a constructive spirit.”

Brief chronology of incidents at South Asian University (SAU), New Delhi

  1. On October 14, 2022, faculty members wrote to the university administration against the act of calling police into the campus to disperse protesting students and to resolve internal issues.
  1. On November 4, 2022, the university administration issued office orders announcing expulsion, rustication or suspension of 5 students. On November 5, 2022, several faculty members wrote an email to the university community expressing their deep concern regarding these arbitrary actions of the university administration that were taken without following any due process and in gross violation of rules, regulations, and bye-laws, and were in contravention of principles of natural justice.
  1. Students began a mass indefinite hunger strike from November 7, 2022. Quite a few students had to be admitted to hospital on emergency basis to revive their physical condition. One of the five students who were expelled/rusticated/suspended, Ammar Ahmad (MA Sociology, Ist semester), collapsed on the night of November 22, 2022 and had to be admitted to the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) of a hospital. Till date Ammar’s speech remains severely affected, he cannot walk on his own, and remains fully dependent on care-givers for his daily functioning.
  1. On December 30, 2022, five faculty members received notices from the university administration asking them to respond to several charges, including: writing letters to the university community regarding certain administrative decisions in relation to the student protests (as noted above in points 1 and 2 above). The faculty members include: Dr. Snehashish Bhattacharya (Faculty of Economics), Dr. Srinivas Burra (Faculty of Legal Studies), Irfanullah Farooqi (Department of Sociology, Faculty of Social Sciences), and Dr. Ravi Kumar (Department of Sociology, Faculty of Social Sciences). These faculty members individually responded to the notice on January 16, 2023.
  1. The four faculty members were called to appear before a Fact Finding Committee (FFC) on Friday, May 19, 2023 for an interaction. During the interaction, the faculty members were asked to provide answers to between 132 and 246 questions in writing by the end of the working day, using pen and paper and sitting in front of the committee members. They were told that their responses might be used as evidence to decide on further proceedings against them. The questions included fresh (though unsubstantiated) allegations and accusations that were not part of the communication from the administration dated December 30, 2022, or the responses submitted on January 16, 2023.
  1. The four faculty members submitted a written request to the committee to send the questions electronically and to provide more time too. They also wrote to the Acting President on May 25, 2023, regarding this issue and seeking appointment. However, they have not heard back from the committee or from the Acting President yet in this regard.
  1. On June 16, 2023, office orders were issued placing the four faculty members under suspension with immediate effect, stating that “there are allegations of misconduct” and violation of the code of conduct of the University, “which need to be investigated.” The faculty members have been directed not to leave station without permission, vacate their offices, return their office computers and identity cards, and register their attendance on all working days in the offices of their respective deans.
  1. The faculty members responded to the Acting President in writing on June 19, 2023, terming the actions patently illegal as they have been taken in contravention of the rules and regulations of the university. They have called upon him to withdraw the orders at the earliest.

Action requested

The suspension of the faculty members should be revoked as it is a violation of the university rules, regulations and byelaws. The faculty members have been only requesting that the university to resolve matters within university and amicably.

*****

Jawaharlal Nehru University Teachers Association
New Delhi-110067

JNUTA Statement on arbitrary suspension of four faculty at South Asian University

The JNUTA strongly condemns the arbitrary suspension of four faculty by the South Asian University administration. The JNUTA sees this act as unacceptable, unjust, and an attempt to intimidate and spread fear among the teaching community.

The suspension notice issued to the faculty by the SAU administration on 16.06.2023 came after a spate of humiliation of the four faculty members by the Fact Finding Committee that on May 19, 2023, asked them to provide handwritten answers to over a hundred questions sitting in front of the committee members. The faculty raised objections to this process and wrote to the FFC and the SAU administration, but they received no reply. On the contrary, they were served with suspension orders that justified it by accusing the faculty of ‘inciting and leading students and outsiders’, and ‘anti-social acts’, among other things; without following due process of investigation. This illegal and unacceptable suspension notice has directed them not to leave the station without permission, vacate their offices, return their office computers and identity cards, and register their attendance on all working days in the offices of their respective deans.

The JNUTA strongly condemns this unprecedented harassment, coercion, and intimidation of the SAU faculty by the administration. There are several news reports that the University served notices and expelled/suspended/rusticated several students protesting against the reduction of monthly stipends without following the due process. Several faculty in SAU have also raised their concerns regarding the arbitrary actions of the university administration against the students. These notices of expulsion and rustication have put the students under tremendous stress, both mentally and physically.

The suspension order served to four faculty members by the SAU administration is an attempt to intimidate and silence the faculty and the students who raise their voice against the arbitrary and authoritarian actions of the administration. The JNUTA stands in complete solidarity with the faculty of SAU in defending their rights to speak truth to power. It also stands in support of the students of the SAU who have been protesting against the gross act of injustice of the SAU administration. The JNUTA demands that the suspension orders of SAU faculty and rustication/expulsion order of SAU students be immediately revoked and the administration start a dialogue to discuss the demands for an agreeable resolution at the earliest.

Sd/-

D K Lobiyal                                                                                                        Avinash Kumar

President, JNUTA                                                                                       Secretary, JNUTA

 

*****

Janhastakshep: a campaign against fascist designs
Press release
24 June, 2023

Contact: drvikasbajpai@gmail.com; (M): 9717820427

Subject: Suspension of four faculty members at South Asian University, an extension of the continuing attacks on institutions of higher learning.

Janhastakshep unequivocally condemns the suspension of four faculty members – Dr Snehashish Bhattacharya (Faculty of Economics), Dr Srinivas Burra (Faculty of Legal Studies), Dr Irfanullah Farooqi (Department of Sociology) and Dr Ravi Kumar, also of the department of Sociology, at New Delhi’s South Asian University by the university administration and demands unconditional revocation of the suspension orders of all suspended faculty members with immediate effect.

The events leading up to the suspension, the manner of suspension and the subsequent conduct of the ‘Fact Finding Committee’ constituted by the university to conduct a sort of inquiry against the suspended faculty members reek of utterly cavalier attitude calculated to please the powers that be in the political circumstances obtaining in the country as of date.

The present suspension of faculty members is rooted in the events related to the agitation by the university’s students in November last on their legitimate democratic demands impacting on their immediate wellbeing. That agitation was handled with a heavy hand by the university authorities resulting in rustication and expulsion of the students. It led to serious consequences to the health of one student Ammar Ahmad and later to another Phd scholar Apoorva in the Faculty of Legal Studies.

The suspended faculty members were first handed notices on 30 December 2022 on charges such as – writing letters to university community questioning certain administrative decisions in relation to the student protests; instigating students to protest and association with a “Marxist” study circle among other allegations. In levelling these charges against the faculty, those sitting in top administrative positions at the University have exhibited regrettable lack of comprehension of a university’s function, the nature of the learning / teaching process and the responsibilities of the students, teachers and administration at institutions of higher learning towards each other.

No education, let alone new knowledge generation can be transacted if the students are not supported by their teachers and the administration in availing of amenities, including financial support, that facilitate their endeavors in this direction. A teacher and more so the administration shall be failing in their duty if such support and understanding were to be substituted with a ‘coercive disciplinary’ approach which unfortunately has been the dominant trend forced upon all manner of publicly funded institutions of higher learning in the country in last 9 years. It is nothing but a poor parody that the suspended faculty members have been accused of associating / encouraging a ‘Marxist Study Circle’ in a university space that is supposed to lend itself to a free contestation of ideas. This certainly sits at odds with the eulogy of ‘Indian Democracy’ proffered by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Washington D C.

Even as Janhastakshep calls upon the different bodies of academicians and intellectuals at large to support the faculty and students of SAU in this hour of need, we also appeal that this suspension of faculty members should be seen as part of the larger thrust by the Modi led government to further curb the space for ideas which militate for Democratization of society, challenge authoritarianism, uphold economic and social justice. These suspensions are part of the efforts to terrorize and stultify the intelligentsia into submission.

Apart from revoking the suspension of the faculty members and continuing rustication of the students, the bunch of ‘Actors’ (Acting President, Acting Vice-President and Acting Registrar) complicit in ‘over-acting’, who are presently ruling the roost at SAU should be replaced with academics of repute and integrity capable of steering the university towards achieving its cherished goals.

– sd –

(Dr Vikas Bajpai)                                                                                    (Anil Dubey)

Convener                                                                                              Co-convener

Prof JNU                                                                                            Senior journalist

*****

Links to some of the press coverage:

Workplace Special Issue: Third Space Academic Labor

Workplace journal logo

#CFP Workplace Special Issue: Third Space Academic Labor

Guest Editor: Aaron Stoller, Colorado College

You are invited to submit proposals for a special issue of Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor focusing on Third Space labor in higher education. Despite most colleges and universities’ equity and inclusion commitments, labor in higher education is organized, valued, and supported along a false and exclusionary dichotomy. On one side, the “academic” domain — occupied by faculty — is the site of expertise, critical nuance, and knowledge production. On the other, the “non-academic” domain — occupied by staff — is the site of non-intellectual and largely replaceable managerial activity. This labor binary underpins most aspects of university life, radiating into a culture of exclusion regarding professional support systems, agency in governance structures, labor contracts, and policy environments.

Although this dichotomy pervades almost all college campuses, the nature of academic labor is far more complex (Stoller, 2021). Since the late 1960s and early 1970s, colleges and universities have increasingly depended upon what Whitchurch terms Third Space academic labor (Whitchurch, 2013).

Working through problems of division and exploitation between so-called First and Third Worlds, Bhabha (1990; 2004) introduced the concept of Third Space as a creative, disruptive space of cultural production. Following Bhabha, in social theory Third Space has been used to resolve a range of binaries through the conceptualization of identities that trouble conventional ways of being and behaving. Scholars have used Third Space to examine disability, race, gender, and sexuality, where fluid identities disrupt rigid social categorizations and the cultural hierarchies that inevitably follow. Third Space identities are risky and dangerous because they span and complicate defined cultural categories. They are also spaces of creativity and innovation that open new cultural possibilities (Soja and Hooper, 1993).

Whitchurch uses Third Space to identify a non-binary social class within higher education: emerging groups of professionals who disrupt the false distinction between “academic” and “non-academic.” Third Space professionals work in diverse areas of the institution, such as academic advising, writing programs and centers, quantitative reasoning centers, honors programs, first-year experience and transitions programs, women’s and LGBTQ centers, accessibility resources, and teaching and learning centers among others.

By spanning, interweaving, and disrupting traditional notions of academic labor, Third Space professionals bring tremendous value to their institutions and students. They hold deep academic expertise in teaching and learning, increasing the university’s capacity for immersive and engaged pedagogies (Ho, 2000; Gibbs and Coffey, 2004). They also support the DEI missions of colleges and universities. Almost all Third Space professions developed in response to traditional faculty being unable or unwilling to serve students from marginalized, minoritized, and under-resourced backgrounds (Astin, 1971; Boquet, 1999; Carino, 1996; Groark and McCall, 2018). Because of their organizational positionality and academic expertise, they uniquely understand the student learning experience, and they are positioned to advocate for policy, structural, or curricular changes needed to create more equitable learning environments. Third Space professionals work across departmental lines and can identify and develop opportunities for cross-campus partnerships and interdisciplinary collaborations (Bickford & Whisnant, 2010). They create new forms of scholarship (Eatman, 2012, 2014) and have pluralistic forms of scholarly impact (Arguinis, Shapiro, Antonacopoulou, & Cummings, 2014). They advance multiple university goals, often using scholarly approaches to improve a campus’s understanding of an issue and use their knowledge to develop praxis-based scholarship that shapes national and international change movements (Janke, 2019). Because they have advanced degrees and often teach and conduct research, they also enhance the college’s portfolio and can enrich its curriculum.

Like other non-binary identities, Third Space professionals fall outside normative social categories and therefore face interpersonal, cultural, and structural challenges specific to their work and professional identities. Their work is consistently miscategorized within the academy’s false labor binary, resulting in it being reduced to a “mere” administrative activity (Stefani & Matthew, 2002; Green & Little, 2017), or an “illegitimate” form of scholarship (Rowland et al., 1998; Harland & Staniforth, 2003). Faculty often frame Third Space professional contributions in oppositional (rather than complementary) terms (Handal, 2008). Because they are coded as “non-academic” and not tied to “home” departments, their expertise is rendered invisible in the epistemic economy of the university (Solomon et al., 2006). They rarely have access to institutional support structures for their academic work (e.g., teaching, research, grants, and fellowships), although their contracts often include these activities as part of their professional duties (Bickford and Whisnant, 2010). Third Space professionals are often barred from receiving institutional recognition, such as institutional designations, named professorships, and teaching and research awards, simply because of their class category (Post, Ward, Longo, & Saltmarsh, 2016). Despite their academic expertise and connection to the teaching and research mission of the university, they are systematically excluded from university governance structures (Bessette, 2020a). They also have no clear pathways for professional growth (Kim, 2020; Bessette, 2020b) and yet are often criticized for “abandoning” their institutions for professional gain. Because their labor often performs a “helping” function, it is often coded as “feminine” and devalued as a result (Tipper, 1999; Leit et al., 2007; Bernhagen & Gravett, 2017). Conversely, because traditional academic labor is culturally assumed to be more desired and desirable, Third Space professionals are often coded as “failed” academics (Whitchurch, 2015, p. 86).

This cultural denigration of their labor means they are frequently the subject of bullying and micro- aggressions by traditional faculty, but because faculty enjoy the protections of tenure there is no possibility of accountability for workplace abuses suffered by Third Space professionals (Henderson, 2005; Perry, 2020).

This issue seeks articles that identify and conceptualize problems cutting across the diverse forms of Third Space labor, and articles that propose pathways forward. Questions addressed by articles might include but are not limited to:

  • How might we redefine the nature of academic labor from a Third Space positionality, or how might we create language that more adequately describes Third Space academic labor?
  • What are the theoretical and practical connections that unify diverse forms of Third Space labor and professional identities?
  • What are the material, structural, and cultural barriers to supporting and legitimizing Third Space academic labor?
  • How might we organize and create solidarity between Third Space laborers nationally and internationally?

Inquiries or to Submit:

 For inquiries or to submit proposals, contact Aaron Stoller at astoller@coloradocollege.edu. Prospective contributors should submit a proposal of 1-2 pages plus bibliography and a 1-paragraph author bio to Aaron Stoller astoller@coloradocollege.edu. Final contributions should be between 5,000 – 8,000 words and follow APA style.

Timeline:

  • Call for Proposals: April – June 2022
  • Peer Review and Acceptance of Proposals: July – October 2022
  • Full Drafts of Papers: February 2023
  • Issue Publication: March 2023

Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor

Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor is a refereed, open access journal published by the Institute for Critical Education Studies (ICES) and a collective of scholars in critical university studies, or critical higher education, promoting dignity and integrity in academic work. Contributions are aimed at higher education workplace scholar-activism and dialogue on all issues of academic labor.

Peter Wylie on academic mobbing at the University of British Columbia #ubc #ubcnews #ubconews #bced #highered

The account and evidence of how, when, where, and why Professor Wylie (Peter) was mobbed by UBC administrators are disturbing. It’s a travesty that he had to endure this mobbing. Faculty are tremendously grateful that he brought the facts out for an airing and hearing.

My Campus Administration, Faculty Association, Senate, and Me: A Case Study in Academic Mobbing

Peter Wylie
Faculty member, University of British Columbia

This in the author’s view is a clear case of academic mobbing. The case fits perfectly with what is argued that almost all scholars who study academic mobbing agree is its primary characteristics; it is initiated by administrators whose malfeasance was questioned or revealed though the expression of academic free speech; the target tend to be tenured professors who publicly speak out about administrative wrongdoing; it involves manipulation or misrepresentation of the facts regarding the victim’s motivations or behavior; the target’s colleagues are either poisoned against him or her, or choose not to support the victim due indifference, or a lack of conviction, and the target is left personally and professionally injured, while the perpetrator(s) goes unpunished (MacDonald et al., 2018, para. 12). To this the author would add that the kangaroo court investigation procedures of the university are merely an extension of the academic mobbing process. (pp. 206-207)

Read More: Wylie, P. (2019). My Campus Administration, Faculty Association, Senate, and Me: A Case Study in Academic Mobbing. In C. M. Crawford (Ed.), Confronting Academic Mobbing in Higher Education: Personal Accounts and Administrative Action (pp. 187-210). Hershey, PA: IGI Global.

Peter Wylie: My Faculty Association and Me: A Case Study in Sweetheart Unionism and Academic Mobbing

My Faculty Association and Me: A Case Study in Sweetheart Unionism and Academic Mobbing

By Peter Wylie

This paper recounts recent experiences of mine with the University of British Columbia (UBC) Faculty Association (UBCFA). I am a tenured Associate Professor at UBC, Okanagan campus (UBCO) and I began my FA role as 1st Vice-Chair of the Okanagan Faculty Committee (OFC), an executive position on this standing committee of the FA, in July 2017. The paper is couched in terms of the relatively recent concept of academic mobbing, defined as “an insidious, non-violent and sophisticated kind of psychological bullying that predominantly takes place in college and university campuses.”1 It also employs the concept of “sweetheart unionism” defined as a deal between an employer and union officials that benefits both at the expense of employees; in this case, a deal between UBCO and UBCFA that benefits UBCO management and FA Executive Director and staff in Vancouver at the expense of UBCO faculty members.

My Faculty Association and Me A case Study in Sweetheart Unionism and Academic Mobbing.pdf

Dignity at work and #mismanagement at #UBC #ubcnews #bced #ubysseynews

There have been questions about what we mean by “mismanagement” at the University of British Columbia? What is meant by claims that at key moments in the past two years, there was evident mismanagement by the Board of Governors? Some faculty members juxtaposed the BoG’s failures against the University Act and best practices or Nolan Principles.

What do we mean by suggesting that UBC’s Committee of Deans establishes a bad model for the campus (i.e., mismanagement, e.g., no agendas, minutes, etc.)? What is meant by mismanagement by omission of a policy to regulate the appointment of Associate Deans?

Or, what is meant by charges that specific programs, such as UBC’s Master of Educational Technology program, a proverbial digital diploma mill, are mismanaged? What is meant by the mismanagement of a Career Advancement Plan?

So here’s a clarification and why good management matters:

Workers tend to have a keen sense of mismanagement when they experience it and academic workers are no different. Academics have a keen sense of academic mismanagement when they see it.

The sense used here is not the common legal definition of gross mismanagement, e.g., “a continuous pattern of managerial abuses, wrongful or arbitrary and capricious actions…” Nor is it used in the sense of financial mismanagement (e.g., p. 274).

Rather, mismanagement in most UBC cases refers to simply a failure to adhere to best practices (of accountability, equity, governance, hiring, etc.). The concern is with omissions. Of course, omissions may be intentional and this does not preclude arbitrariness, deception, or a destitution of integrity, etc.

In Dignity at Work, the key text on the topic, Hodson (2004) articulates in detail the short and long-term effects of mismanagement. The basic thesis is this: “Working with dignity is a fundamental part of achieving a life well-lived, yet the workplace often poses challenging obstacles because of mismanagement or managerial abuse” (frontispiece).

In the first paragraph then, Hodson prefaces: “Even where abuse is commonplace and chaos and mismanagement make pride in accomplishment difficult, workers still find ways to create meaning in work and to work with dignity” (p. 3). We see this in the most exploited workers at UBC: Sessional Lecturers.

“The first hurdle in the quest for dignity at work, Hodson says, “is thus the possibility of mismanagement and abuse” (p. 83). Indeed, “mismanagement and abuse have a central role in generating resistance and undermining citizenship in the workplace.” And he emphasizes, the buck stops at the top:

Chaotic and mismanaged workplaces undercut workers’ pride and erect barriers to quality work. The consequences of poorly organized workplaces can also spill over to coworker relations, further undermining organizational effectiveness. (p. 109)

Hodson concludes: “significant denials of dignity remain in the workplace. Chief among these are mismanagement and abuse” (p. 273).

Helps explain the state of working conditions in various programs and units at UBC, doesn’t it?

#UBC100 at a glance: Vague memories of life at #ubc #ubcnews #bced #highered

Dear UBC diary,

Year 100: Does anyone at the University of British Columbia remember last year, when on the day of the institution’s 100th birthday party Arvind resigned? If memory serves me right, Martha waltzed in, blew out the candles, and made the wish. Does anyone recall this happening? Like a dream, there are some vague memories of documents and decisions being hidden from access and scrutiny. Speculation. Secret meetings and the like…

I vaguely remember a resignation of the Chair of the Board of Governors and an academic freedom complaint. I kind of remember a Freedom of Information bungle in UBC’s Office of the University Counsel. My memory is incomplete but I sense that I signed a few petitions, went to meetings, protests, and rallies, and voted No Confidence in the BoG. Who doesn’t remember the Deans being made to reappear? And the pablum in the sun? That was a good Houdini trick! There are traces of the Faculty Association sabre-rattling with a few PDFs.

Anybody remember any of this at UBC?

I think I remember some brouhaha over an Advisory Committee for the appointment of a new President and a resignation from said Committee. I remember hearing that President Gupta phoned the Committee but was left on hold! I don’t remember candidates meeting with faculty, staff, and students. Was busy and may have missed that part.

Year 101: Santa is here! I think some other new people were hired on campus but irrelevant, Santa is here! And then Dave came back to set the birthday year right again. Just in time.

The UBC year at glance confirms that we were dreaming! Nothing that we vaguely remember happening in year 100 actually happened! None of those memories made it onto UBC’s 2015-2016 highlight reel or appear in Dave’s yearbook!

Alas, we were finally ordered to “cease using the UBC 100 logo and revert back” to, well, you know, this was like an order to cease thinking about last year and revert back to, well, you know…

Summer and fall 2016 at UBC, back to business as usual… restoration… so calming, like an aromatherapeutic misty spritz on the wrist…

Public university board’s secrecy disrespects faculty, public

The University of British Columbia’s problems with board secrecy, corporate mentalities, and presidential searches conducted under a shroud are not isolated occurrences, as you’ll see from the following account of what’s happening at Washington State University.

WSU regents’ secrecy disrespects faculty, public

April 5, 2016
Moscow-Pullman Daily News

By Terence L. Day

There would appear to be no cause to doubt Kirk Schulz’s qualifications to become the 11th president of Washington State University, but there is every reason to question the process by which he was appointed.

Let attorneys argue whether regents violated the state’s open meeting law. We don’t need lawyers to tell us what should be obvious to all: WSU regents disrespected the faculty and the public by conducting a secret search and faculty and citizens who support the university are rightly offended.

If what the regents did doesn’t violate Washington’s open meeting law, the law should be fixed.

In the good old days presidential finalists would be brought to campus and “run through the mill.” Finalists were expected to come to campus, conduct a public seminar, meet faculty and administrators and perhaps university constituents.

Unfortunately, today is a different time.

Sadly, secrecy in searches for new university presidents is becoming standard operating procedure throughout the nation. Secrecy is rationalized on the assertion that the best candidates for the job will refuse to participate in an open process, and that may well be true in some instances.

Private universities are entitled to conduct secret searches if they believe that best suits their ends; but public universities are public. What don’t WSU regents understand about the word “public”?

The very concept of public business requires openness, and speaking in code is an offense to reason.

Certainly all public business cannot be conducted in a fish bowl and appropriately isn’t, but selection of a public university president isn’t one of those things.

Regent Mike Worthy’s lame excuse that WSU’s attorney approved the secrecy with which Schulz was chosen is reminiscent of Mark Twain’s advice that youth should get up early with the lark, “… and if you get the right kind of lark, and work at him right, you can easily train him to get up at half past nine, every time.”

I asked WSU officials how long they have been conducting secret presidential searches. They haven’t been forthcoming, but I remember a day when they were very public.

WSU regents aren’t alone in using secret searches. My sources advise that many top-notch potential university presidents refuse to be candidates if their candidacy isn’t kept secret.

This dynamic is corrupting the search process from beginning to end. It encourages universities to turn the process over to “head hunters,” who work more for candidates than for the hiring university and claim a significant percentage of the successful candidate’s first year’s salary.

Regents are politically appointed and WSU’s regents, at least, are poorly equipped to understand the dynamic and culture of collegiality in higher education. Judging from their biographical sketches posted on the regents’ Web page, five and a half of nine members are in the business world, one is a politician and public administrator, one is an attorney, one a farmer and one is a WSU undergraduate student. I give Regent Lura Powell half credit for her experience as an administrator in the public technology sector and half credit for her experience as a manager in the private technology sector.

None of these backgrounds offer much understanding, sympathy or fealty to openly conducting the public’s business. Secrecy is the leadership style of the business world, not of academia.

Fortunately, faculty and students from sea to sea and from the heartland to the mountains are beginning to protest hiding searches from faculty and the public. It’s time the WSU community joined the protest.

Terence L. Day has been a Pullman resident for 43 years and retired in 2004 from the WSU faculty after 32 years. He has been a professional journalist for 54 years. terence@moscow.com

More bucks than brains: James Ramey and the ruination of the University of Louisville

[Cross-posted from Where the Blog has No Name]

What was he thinking? - University of Louisville president posed for photo in sombrero, poncho at the his 2015 Halloween party

University of Louisville president James Ramsey  posed for photo in sombrero, poncho at the his 2015 Halloween party

In the late 1990s, Kentucky’s legislature initiated a program to upgrade and reform the state’s postsecondary education system, it was called “Bucks for Brains.” (The state’s promotional tagline at the time was “Open for Business.”)

I was recruited to the University of Louisville in 2001 and spent two-and-a-half years on the faculty there as a department chair and distinguished university scholar, which gave me an up close and personal experience with a university administration that’s, as they say where my family’s from, sigogglin.

John W. Shumaker, a classics scholar, was UofL president when I arrived and he proved to be an incredible fund raiser, increasing the university’s endowment from under $200 million to $550 million.

Of course, the UofL has long been the recipient of corporate largesse, especially from the Louisville’s corporate giants Brown-Forman (one of America’s largest spirits and wine companies); Brown & Williamson (which chemically enhanced the addictiveness of cigarettes, remember whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand? No? Well I’m sure you remember Russell Crowe playing Wigand the blockbuster movie The Insider); Papa John’s Pizza (UofL football Cardinals play in Papa John’s Cardinal Stadium); and Yum! Brands (“feeding the world” crap food via KFC, Pizza Hut, and, of course, Taco Bell, more on the Mexican connection later).

The Brown & Williamson Club at the University of Louisville's Papa John's Cardinal Stadium

The Brown & Williamson Club at the University of Louisville’s Papa John’s Cardinal Stadium

After Shumaker left to head up the University of Tennessee (where he resigned in disgrace after 3 years), he was replaced by James R. Ramsey, who had been Kentucky’s state budget director under Gov. Paul E. Patton (who became wealthy by exploiting Kentucky’s coal miners).

Patton’s major achievement as governor was overhauling postsecondary education in the Kentucky. But Patton’s political career was de-railed by duelling scandals: (1)  an extramarital affair and a sex-for-favors scandal; and (2) pardoning four of his political advisers who were indicted for violating Kentucky’s campaign finance laws and for allegedly abusing his patronage powers.

All of this is just everyday Kentucky politics, so Patton wasn’t distracted enough to forget he had to find a soft-landing for his budget director, thus Ramsey, with no university administration experience, became the 17th president of the University of Louisville.

Since Ramsey has been in office the UofL, in endowment has continued to grow and is now pushing the $1 billion mark, which is really the only logical explanation for why he hasn’t been bounced because Ramsey’s administration has more ethical lapses than Carter has liver pills, pretty much proving that the UofL has more bucks than brains.

Robert Felner: Former Dean, Convicted Felon

Felner arrived in Louisville with some spiffy credentials: PhD in psychology from Yale; former head of the department of psychology at the University of Illinois; a CV packed with pages upon pages listing his publications in top journals and, most importantly for the UofL administration, a staggering number of grants.

Despite several red flags about Felner’s candidacy for dean of UofL’s College of Education and Human Development, Ramsey and his long time provost, Shirley Willihnganz, couldn’t wait to get Felner on campus.

Ramsey was in such as rush to land Felner he and Willihnganz forgot to tell the interim dean (and other finalist for the position) they hired Felner, so he was left to discover the decision when Felner call his secretary and started giving her instructions. So much for that HR seminar!

Things in CEHD soon started to fall apart.

I resigned from my department chair position two weeks after Felner took over as dean and later moved to UBC.

Within a few years, there had been 30 grievances filed by faculty and students against Felner for a wide range of abusive managerial practices and a faculty vote of no-confidence in Felner’s leadership of the CEHD. Reasons given by faculty for the vote of non-confidence included:

Public humiliation of faculty, work place harassment, retaliation for voicing opinions, little or no governance, decisions that hurt College, unacceptable and unfair hiring practice; rude, offensive, unethical behavior by CEHD representatives; denial of support for research to those who differ in opinion; and extreme inequity of pay. (See CEHD meeting notes published here.)

Despite the abominable conditions in CEHD, UofL Provost Willihnganz and Ramsey both supported Felner publicly.

One year after the vote of no-confidence, Felner announced he was leaving the UofL to become president of the University of Wisconsin, Parkside.

The Chronicle of Higher Education described Felner as “riding high” a couple of years into his deanship at UofL, well-paid, and having secured a $700,000 grant from the US Department of Education. However, he “pressed his luck” during his last weeks in Louisville.

Even though only $96,000 remained in the account, he implored Louisville officials to approve a $200,000 subcontract with a nonprofit organization in Illinois that had already received $450,000 from the grant. Perhaps, he suggested, the university could draw on a special fund that had been established by the daughter of a former trustee.

The Illinois group, Mr. Felner said, had been surveying students and teachers in Kentucky. That survey would “let us give the feds something that should make them very happy about the efficiency and joint commitment of the university to doing a good job with an earmark, as I know we will want more from this agency,” he wrote in an e-mail message on June 18.

But on June 20, his last day as Dean of CEHD before he headed off to Wisconsin, those big black SUVs with government plates (like the ones you see on Criminal Minds) rolled into the CEHD parking lot. US Secret Service, US Postal Inspectors, and UofL Police questioned Felner and escorted him off campus, along with his computers and records.

There was a simultaneous raid on UW-Parkside to confiscate material Felner had shipped ahead of his arrival there.

In October 2008, a federal grand jury indicted Felner on nine counts of mail fraud, money laundering, and tax evasion. According to the indictment,

the Illinois nonprofit group, known as the National Center on Public Education and Prevention, was simply a shell that funneled money into the personal bank accounts of Mr. Felner and Thomas Schroeder, a former student of his and the group’s “executive director.” Prosecutors say the two men siphoned away not only the $694,000 earmarked grant, but also $1.7-million in payments from three urban school districts, money that ought to have gone to the legitimate public-education center that Mr. Felner had created in Rhode Island.

In January 2010, Felner pleaded guilty to nine Federal charges, including income tax evasion.

In May 2010, Felner was sentenced to 63 months in US Federal Prison for his role in defrauding defrauding the UofL and the University of Rhode Island, where he had been director of the School of Education, of $2.3 million of US Department of Education funds earmarked for No Child Left Behind Act research.

aka Robert Felner

10775-033 aka Robert Felner was released from US Prison in May 2014

For a a short course on the felonious Felner see the PageOneKentucky.com summary of events. For a full course on the Felonious Felner and the incompetence and ethical lapses of Ramsey’s UofL administration click here. (Shout out to Jake at PageOneKentucky for excellent investigative reporting on Felner and the UofL.)

For Workplace Blog coverage of Felner click here.

And here is a Louisville Courier-Journal profile of Felner that pretty much sums up the guy that Ramsey defended until he pleaded guilty: Robert Felner profile: Arrogant, outrageous, abusive and duplicitous.

Felner Footnotes: Indians, John Deasy, Non-Disclosure Agreements & Ramsey as the Frito Bandito

(1) When Felner announced his resignation, UofL president Ramsey wroted to Felner and said he was worried about “letting the Indians get back in control of the reservation.” That’s some serious respect for university faculty and the idea of shared governance, eh?

(2) Los Angeles school superintendent, John Deasy, has had his academic credentials called into question. Deasy was given a PhD by the University of Louisville after he was enrolled for four months and received a total of nine credits.

Deasy’s doctoral advisor was, surprise, Robert Felner! Deasy had previously awarded $375,000 in consulting contracts to Felner, while Deasy was Superintendent of Santa Monica schools.

Ramsey appointed a “blue-ribbon” panel to investigate Deasy’s degree. The panel found that getting a PhD in four months at the UofL was not cause for concern, thus plunging the UofL’s academic reputation down into the neighbourhood of fly-by-night for-profit “higher” education.

Deasy is now working in an unaccredited training program sponsored by educational de-formers the Broad Foundation, which teaches school leaders business methods and supports charter schools and closing public schools.

(3) Ramsey has been making double retirement payouts to UofL administrators for their silence.

Records show that the school paid a full year’s salary to outgoing vice presidents Michael Curtin ($252,350) and Larry Owsley ($248,255) and to assistant to the president Vivian Hibbs ($66,391) to induce them not to “disparage, demean or impugn the university or its senior leadership.”

In March 2014, UofL made a $346,000.00 settlement with university counsel Angela Kosawha:

The University of Louisville is paying another large settlement in connection with the retirement of a high-ranking official — this time, $346,844 to its top lawyer. University counsel Angela Koshewa is on a three-month leave of absence before she officially retires June 1. Documents obtained under the Kentucky Open Records Act show the university is paying Koshewa — who has questioned some expenditures and proposals backed by President James Ramsey and Dr. David Dunn, the executive vice president for Health Affairs — twice her final salary.

It costs a lot for Ramsey to cover up details of his administration’s incompetence and shenanigans, but remember there are lots of bucks at UofL.

(4) Provost Shirley Willihnganz stepped down as UofL provost earlier this year. The Louisville Courier-Journal reported that

Under her watch, however, university employees have stole, misspent or mishandled at least $7.6 million in schemes at the health science campus, the law school, the business school and the athletic department’s ticket office.

Willihnganz also was criticized for approving about $1 million in buyouts for former high-ranking employees, some of which included agreements not to disparage the university or its leaders.

She also was forced to apologize to CEHD faculty in 2008 for failing to take any common-sense action against Felner for his intimidation, harassment, humiliation and retaliation against faculty, staff, students and alumni.

Willihnganz said at the time that she tended to dismiss the early complaints against Felner — including a no-confidence vote by faculty — because he was a “high performer” and because the complaints came from professors and staff “entrenched in their ways and resistant to change.”

She later told faculty at a meeting that she was sorry. “Mostly what I think I want to say is people have been hurt and something very bad happened, and as provost I feel like I am ultimately responsible for that,” she said.

No duh! She actually is directly responsible for the Felner disaster (along with Ramsey), that’s probably why she feels that way. And speaking of resistance to change …

(5) This next item has nothing to do with Felner, except that his former boss and advocate, James Ramsey, is also the long time boss of UofL basketball coach Rick Pitino who admitted to having sex with a women in a swanky Italian restaurant in Louisville. Apparently that’s not a problem with Ramsey and the UofL because Pitino said it wasn’t rape.

And, now Pitino is using hookers and strippers to recruit high school basketball players to come to the UofL. See Dave Zirin’s pieces on the latest Ramsey supervised scandal:

(6) And I almost forgot. Remember the Taco Bell/Mexican connection. This week Ramsey had a little halloween party at the UofL. Ramsey goes racist (again). Yes, he dressed up like the Frito Bandito.

UofL President James Ramsey illustrating his knowledge of multiculturalism

UofL President James Ramsey says “Yo quiero Taco Bell.”

And you thought the HR training at UofL was bad, get that guy to the diversity office and cross your fingers that they’re better than the university’s accounting folks.

YouTube Preview Image

At #UBC, #RBC counterbalances #BMO, no worries #bced #ubcnews #highered #ubyssey

Was Martha Piper waiting in the wings?

Were Martha Piper and BMO waiting in the wings?

One of the known unknowns, as E. Wayne Ross explained, is that Martha Piper and BMO must’ve played a role in the “transition” or removal of Arvind Gupta from the President’s Office at the University of British Columbia. Now is the time to speculate. What was that role?

We may have missed it, but no one has explained how and why Martha was so readily available, at the drop of a dime, on resignation day, to race back into UBC’s President’s Office and begin sweeping things under the rug.

The known knowns of admin include the devices and mechanisms that churn and turn in the background as these types of what UBC still calls “leadership transitions” play out.

Another known known is that bank Corporate Directors do very little and so theoretically Martha could have been just hanging around with nothing better to do on that August day when John Montalbano gave her the call. And then John begins to call around to faculty members and admin, of course with different messages for the two groups. But that’s way too recent of a history to this thickening plot.

So is it way too fantastic that Martha just cares for the “magnificent University” that UBC is and jumped at the chance to save its languishing admin from certain failure. This is the righting of the ship theory that Wayne mentioned.

So yes, we need to know. Has the Bank of Montreal bought its way into UBC’s President’s Office? Over $2.2 million in recent “financial support” to UBC (chump change for BMO) can buy a bank a lot. $500k to the Sauder School of Business can buy a bank a lot. A BMO Corporate Director in UBC’s President’s Office can seemingly buy the bank something. Can it not?

The questions are exaggerated, for sure, and let’s have faith in the UBC Board of Governors. The Acting Chair of BoG is a Corporate Director of RBC, so what’s the concern? All the Canadian universities do this, so what’s the big deal?

At UBC, RBC counterbalances BMO. Trust the BoG and the administrators, Trust the chartered banks. Cut interest rates. End of question period. So, it is time to look forward.

President Piper now needs to please come clean on the August “leadership transition”.

*Yes, this is satire. Yes, this is parody. UBC says now is the time to speculate. Yes, this is gentle mocking. And the BMO connection is a conflict, is it not?

How not to run a university (Prologue + Trilogy)

Here are links to E. Wayne Ross’ commentaries on the ongoing leadership crisis at the University of British Columbia. All the commentaries have appeared on his blog and several have also appeared in the Vancouver Observer:

#FAUBC calls for #UBC Chair of BoG resignation #highered

FAUBC, August 19, 2015– The events at UBC following the unexplained resignation of Professor Arvind Gupta as President have been exceptional. Fallout from the resignation created the unprecedented situation in which the Chair of the Board of Governors is alleged to have compromised the academic freedom of a UBC faculty member. Academic administrators are also implicated in allegations surrounding this incident. Since these allegations came to our attention last Wednesday, we have been working hard to maintain the integrity of the normal labour relations processes we use at UBC to resolve our grievances. While these processes have been working well as we investigate the roles that various academic administrators have played in this case, established procedures have been compromised as they pertain to the alleged actions of the Chair.The concerns leading to this conclusion focus on the fact that the University itself has sidestepped standard protocols for handling grievances. More specifically, the Chair of the Board of Governors, the Board’s chief spokesperson, gave public, personal testimony related to the case in a University media release. We were shocked that this happened in a formal University media release posted on a University website. (This media release seems to have been removed from news.ubc.ca late Tuesday evening. We have a downloaded copy.) Mr. Montalbano has confused personal interests with the University’s interests.

As a result of this communication, we had earlier in the day decided to call for Mr. Montalbano to step aside during an investigation of the allegations against him.

By late afternoon, we became aware Mr. Montalbano was giving a series of interviews on radio and television, entirely in contradiction to the August 17th press release signed by Provost pro tem Anji Redish and Interim President Martha Piper in which it was affirmed that: “it would entirely be inappropriate to comment further on the allegations until this process has been concluded.”

And, yet, Mr. Montalbano was doing precisely this in his capacity as Chair of UBC’s Board of Governors.Finding a sound and proper process inside the University or with the Board for investigation of the concerns around Mr. Montalbano’s behaviours no longer seemed a viable option.While the University has publicly said that a grievance involving Mr. Montalbano could be managed under our usual collective agreement processes, this no longer seemed possible. Mr. Montalbano is a government appointee, not a University employee, so establishing and implementing a fair process to investigate the Chair of the Board of Governors given that Chair’s dominating presence in and apparent mobilization of the entire system in his own interest seemed challenging, to say the least.

Indeed, even though we had initiated our usual informal processes with the University in a way that made it clear that there were serious allegations against Mr. Montalbano, Mr. Montalbano did not step aside as Chair pending the conclusion of a full investigation.

We have lost confidence that there can be an internal investigation process uninfluenced by Mr. Montalbano, either within our usual labour relations processes or through a Board-driven process.

Consequently, we are calling for Mr. Montalbano’s immediate resignation as Chair of the Board of Governors. He has shown an inability to allow proper procedures to proceed and has used his office as Chair of the Board to engage personally and publicly with the issues under investigation. This behaviour is ill judged and threatens the integrity of ongoing processes.

We did not take this decision to request Mr. Montalbano’s resignation lightly. His handling of Professor Gupta’s resignation and his mismanagement of subsequent events are now compounded by breaches of standard protocols, and lead us to believe that his resignation will be in the best interests of the University and the public.

Please read our letter carefully.

Sincerely,
Mark Mac Lean
President

CFP: Critical Theories for the 21st Century

Critical Education is proud to be the sponsor journal for Critical Theories in the 21st Century

4th annual:
critical theories in the twenty first century:
a conference of transformative pedagogies
november 6th & 7th

location:


West Chester University
700 South High St, West Chester, PA 19383

2015 THEME:
CRITICAL PEDAGOGY VS. CAPITAL:
REIGNITING THE CONVERSATION

Sponsored by:
Educational Foundations
The Department of Professional and Secondary Education
West Chester University of Pennsylvania

Closing Conference Keynote (November 7th):
Dave Hill

Call For Papers
The 4th Annual Conference on Critical Theories in the 21st Century aims to reinvigorate the field of critical pedagogy. The primary question driving this conference is: What is to be done to make critical pedagogy an effective educational weapon in the current struggle against capitalism and imperialism?

There is no doubt that we are at a critical juncture in history in terms of the limits of nature’s vital ecosystems, the physical limits of the progressive accumulation of capital, and the deepening reactionary ideology and scapegoating that exacerbates the oppression of youth of color. If critical pedagogy is to play a significant role in intervening in the current context, then a sharpened sense of purpose and direction is needed.

Some examples of possible topics include:

  • Marxism
  • Post-structuralism/post-modernism
  • Anarchism
  • Challenging the unholy trinity of state, capital, and religion
  • Class and the capital-labor dialectic
  • Identity and economics
  • Hierarchical and vertical forms of organization (i.e., vanguards versus networks)
  • Reform versus revolution
  • Socialism, communism, & democracy
  • Affect theory and the new materialisms
  • The knowledge economy, post-Fordism, and “cognitive capitalism”
  • Critical geography

While this conference will include important presentations and debates in critical pedagogy, it will not be limited to this focus. In other words, as critical theory becomes more inclusive, global, and all encompassing, this conference welcomes more than just academics as important contributors. That is, we recognize students and youth groups as possessing authentic voices based on their unique relationship to capitalism and will therefore be open to them as presenters and discussion leaders.

While this conference will include important presentations and challenging discussions based in critical pedagogy, it will not be limited to this focus. In other words, as critical theory becomes more inclusive, global, and all encompassing, this conference welcomes more than just academics as important contributors.

Please submit abstract proposals (500-1000 words) to:
Curry Malott (cmalott@wcupa.edu)

Proposal due date: September 27th, 2015

Call for Submissions: Teaching Poor: Voices of the Academic Precariat

Via the CoCal distribution list:

*Call for Submissions*: *Teaching Poor: Voices of the Academic Precariat*

The career of college professor, giving back to the society that provided for them through education, was once a respectable path to the middle class. That class position is now slipping through the hands of the very people who helped create it, thanks to the erosion of tenured and tenure-track positions in favor of short-term contract positions without security. What should be rags to riches stories about the power of education to lift people out of poverty by providing a pathway to better jobs have become, for many academics, stories of stagnation, downward mobility, and outright impoverishment under the burden of massive debt uncompensated for by the very academy that helped contract faculty incur it.

*Teaching Poor: Voices of the Academic Precariat* will be a collection of voices from the world of so-called adjunct or contract college instructors who now teach 60-75% of all college courses in the United States and are paid wages equivalent to Walmart workers. In the tradition of Studs Terkel’s *Working*, *Teaching Poor* will honor both the difficulties and the triumphs of this new class of impoverished white collar laborers in the academic trenches, detailing personal struggles with the resultant poverty produced by low wages, crushing student loan debt, lack of healthcare and retirement provisions, and the professional and cultural costs this system levies on individuals and the students they teach.

I welcome creative non-fiction, biographical essay, short stories, poems, comics and, in the spirit of hacking the academy through digital humanities, may eventually expand to multimedia and a permanent archive of work similar to Story Corps. Length can vary wildly, but around 7500 words for prose is the average we’re looking for. Longer pieces will probably be reserved for the online archive.

This project is in its very early stages and I’m looking to see what kind of interest there is both in contributors and publishers before defining it or looking into other funding/publishing sources. I have publishers in mind (AK, Haymarket, Soft Skull, Atropos, Verso, ILR), but also welcome suggestions. I do want this to be more than a self-published ebook though, and perhaps something truly groundbreaking if we can make a collaboration work. Send your queries and submissions to Lee Kottner at teachingpoor@gmail.com by Jan. 1, 2015. That, too, is a very soft deadline, but please at least query by then.

Dark Days for Our Universities

[Recent events at Capilano University and University of Saskatchewan have raised serious concerns about the health of the academic culture of post-secondary institutions in Canada. Crawford Kilian, who taught at Capilano College from its founding in 1968 until it became a university in 2008, wrote the following analysis of Canadian academic culture for The Tyee, where he is a contributing editor. The Institute for Critical Education Studies at UBC is pleased to reprint the article here, with the author’s permission.]

Dark Days for Our Universities
Dr. Buckingham’s censure only confirms the long, tragic decline of Canadian academic culture
Crawford Kilian
(Originally published in TheTyee.ca, May 19, 2014)

On May 13 I attended a meeting of the Board of Governors of Capilano University, which has had a very bad year.

Last spring the board agreed to cut several programs altogether. This caused considerable anger and bitterness, especially since the recommendations for the cuts had been made by a handful of administrators without consulting the university senate.

Recently, the B.C. Supreme Court ruled that the board’s failure to consult with the senate was a breach of the University Act. This upset the board members, who may yet appeal the decision.

Adding to the angst was the disappearance of a satirical sculpture of Cap’s president, Kris Bulcroft, which had been created and displayed on campus by George Rammell, an instructor in the now-dead studio arts program. Thanks to media coverage, the sculpture has now been seen across the country, and by far more people.

Board Chair Jane Shackell (who was my student back in 1979) stated at the meeting that she had personally ordered the removal of the sculpture because it was a form of harassment of a university employee, the president. Rather than follow the university’s policy on harassment complaints (and Bulcroft had apparently not complained), Shackell seemed to see herself as a one-person HR committee concerned with the president alone.

At the end of the meeting another retired instructor made an angry protest about the board’s actions. Like the judge in a Hollywood court drama, my former student tried to gavel him down.

I didn’t feel angry at her; I felt pity. It was painfully clear that she and her board and administration are running on fumes.

The mounting crisis

I look at this incident not as a unique outrage, but as just another example of the intellectual and moral crisis gripping Canadian post-secondary education. The old scientific principle of mediocrity applies here: very few things are unique. If it’s happening in North Vancouver, it’s probably happening everywhere.

And it certainly seems to be. On the strength of one short video clip, Tom Flanagan last year became an unperson to the University of Calgary, where he’d taught honourably for decades. He was already scheduled to retire, but the president issued a news release that made it look as if he was getting the bum’s rush.

More recently, Dr. Robert Buckingham publicly criticized a restructuring plan at the University of Saskatchewan, where he was dean of the School of Public Health.

In a 30-second interview with the university provost, he was fired and escorted off campus.

A day later the university president admitted firing him had been a “blunder” and offered to reinstate him as a tenured professor, but not as a dean. It remains to be seen whether he’ll accept.

The problem runs deeper than the occasional noisy prof or thin-skinned administrator. It’s systemic, developed over decades. As the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives noted last November, the University of Manitoba faculty very nearly went on strike until the president’s office agreed to a collective agreement ensuring professors’ right to speak freely, even if it meant criticizing the university.

Universities ‘open for business’

At about the same time, the Canadian Association of University Teachers published a report, Open for Business. CAUT warned about corporate and government deals with universities that would ditch basic research for more immediately convenient purposes.

“Unfortunately,” the report said, “attempts by industry and government to direct scholarly inquiry and teaching have multiplied in the past two decades…. For industry, there is a diminished willingness to undertake fundamental research at its own expense and in its own labs — preferring to tap the talent within the university at a fraction of the cost.

“For politicians, there is a desire to please industry, an often inadequate understanding of how knowledge is advanced, and a short time horizon (the next election). The result is a propensity to direct universities ‘to get on with’ producing the knowledge that benefits industry and therefore, ostensibly, the economy.”

This is not a sudden development. The expansion of North America’s post-secondary system began soon after the Second World War and really got going after Sputnik, when the Soviets seemed to be producing more and better graduates than the West was. That expansion helped to fuel decades of economic growth (and helped put the Soviets in history’s ashcan).

Throughout that period, academic freedom was in constant peril. In the Cold War, U. S. professors were expected to sign loyalty oaths. In 1969-70 Simon Fraser University went through a political upheaval in which eight faculty members were dismissed and SFU’s first president resigned.

A Faustian bargain

What is different now is that Canadian post-secondary must depend more and more on less and less government support. Postwar expansion has become a Faustian bargain for administrators: to create and maintain their bureaucracies and programs, post-secondary schools must do as they’re paid to do. If public money dwindles, it must be found in higher student fees, in corporate funding, in recruiting foreign kids desperate for a Canadian degree.

So it’s no surprise that Dr. Buckingham was sacked for criticizing a budget-cutting plan to rescue an ailing School of Medicine by putting it into Buckingham’s thriving School of Public Health.

And it’s no surprise that Capilano University had shortfalls right from its announcement in 2008. It had to become a university to attract more foreign students than it could as a mere college, but at the last minute the Gordon Campbell Liberals reneged on their promise to give it university-level funding.

For six years, then, Cap’s board and administration have known they were running on fumes. They are in the same predicament as B.C. school boards, who must do the government’s dirty work and take the blame for program and teacher cuts.

In 40 years of teaching at Cap, I rarely attended board meetings, and never did a board member visit my classes. I don’t know the members of this current board, apart from a couple of faculty representatives, but I’ve served as a North Vancouver school trustee. As an education journalist I’ve talked to a lot of university and college administrators, not to mention school trustees. I know how they think.

Managing the decline

For any school or university board, underfunding creates a terrible predicament: protest too loudly and you’ll be replaced by a provincial hireling who’ll cut without regard for the school’s long-term survival. If you have any love for the institution, you can only try to do damage control. But when your teachers or professors protest, as they have every right to, that annoys and embarrasses the government. It will punish you for not imposing the “silence of the deans” on them.

University presidents and senior administrators make six-figure salaries and enjoy high prestige. They are supposed to be both scholars and managers. Their boards are supposed to be notable achievers as well, though their achievements have often been in the service of the governing party. Their education has served them well, and now they can serve education.

But a Darwinian selection process has made them servants of politics instead, detached from the true principles of education. When they realize that their job is not to serve education but to make the government look good, they panic. Everything they learned in school about critical thinking and reasoned argument vanishes.

In reward for previous achievements and political support, the B.C. government appointed Cap’s board members to run the school without giving them the money to run it well, or even adequately. And whatever their previous achievements, they have lacked the imagination and creativity — the education — to do anything but make matters worse. Faced with an angry faculty and a humiliating court judgment, they have drawn ridicule upon themselves and the university.

They can’t extricate themselves and they have no arguments left to offer — only the frantic banging of a gavel that can’t drown out the voice of an angry retired prof exercising his right to speak freely. [Tyee]

#CAUT begins censure of #UBC for course copyright policy #highered #bced #bcpoli #yteubc #criticaled

Faculty Association of UBC, March 20,  2014– At its meeting on March 14 & 15, the CAUT Academic Freedom and Tenure Committee considered UBC’s Policy 81 and all of the associated documentation.  Following that consideration, the committee voted unanimously to recommend to the CAUT Executive that it bring a motion to CAUT Council in early May to begin the censure process of the UBC Administration. If they approve the recommendation, the Executive would bring a motion to Council that “CAUT will censure the UBC Administration at its November 2014 Council meeting unless the University ends the policy that the University may use, revise, and allow other UBC Instructors to use and revise a faculty member’s teaching materials, unless the faculty member specifically prohibits such use.”
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Chomsky on the destruction of #highered #criticaled #edstudies #ubc #yteubc

Noam Chomsky, AlterNet, Reader Supported News, March 1, 2014– The following is an edited transcript of remarks given by Noam Chomsky via Skype on 4 February 2014 to a gathering of members and allies of the Adjunct Faculty Association of the United Steelworkers in Pittsburgh, PA. The transcript was prepared by Robin J. Sowards and edited by Prof. Chomsky.

How America’s Great University System Is Getting Destroyed

On hiring faculty off the tenure track

That’s part of the business model. It’s the same as hiring temps in industry or what they call “associates” at Wal-Mart, employees that aren’t owed benefits. It’s a part of a corporate business model designed to reduce labor costs and to increase labor servility. When universities become corporatized, as has been happening quite systematically over the last generation as part of the general neoliberal assault on the population, their business model means that what matters is the bottom line. The effective owners are the trustees (or the legislature, in the case of state universities), and they want to keep costs down and make sure that labor is docile and obedient. The way to do that is, essentially, temps. Just as the hiring of temps has gone way up in the neoliberal period, you’re getting the same phenomenon in the universities. The idea is to divide society into two groups. One group is sometimes called the “plutonomy” (a term used by Citibank when they were advising their investors on where to invest their funds), the top sector of wealth, globally but concentrated mostly in places like the United States. The other group, the rest of the population, is a “precariat,” living a precarious existence.

This idea is sometimes made quite overt. So when Alan Greenspan was testifying before Congress in 1997 on the marvels of the economy he was running, he said straight out that one of the bases for its economic success was imposing what he called “greater worker insecurity.” If workers are more insecure, that’s very “healthy” for the society, because if workers are insecure they won’t ask for wages, they won’t go on strike, they won’t call for benefits; they’ll serve the masters gladly and passively. And that’s optimal for corporations’ economic health. At the time, everyone regarded Greenspan’s comment as very reasonable, judging by the lack of reaction and the great acclaim he enjoyed. Well, transfer that to the universities: how do you ensure “greater worker insecurity”? Crucially, by not guaranteeing employment, by keeping people hanging on a limb than can be sawed off at any time, so that they’d better shut up, take tiny salaries, and do their work; and if they get the gift of being allowed to serve under miserable conditions for another year, they should welcome it and not ask for any more. That’s the way you keep societies efficient and healthy from the point of view of the corporations. And as universities move towards a corporate business model, precarity is exactly what is being imposed. And we’ll see more and more of it.

That’s one aspect, but there are other aspects which are also quite familiar from private industry, namely a large increase in layers of administration and bureaucracy. If you have to control people, you have to have an administrative force that does it. So in US industry even more than elsewhere, there’s layer after layer of management-a kind of economic waste, but useful for control and domination. And the same is true in universities. In the past 30 or 40 years, there’s been a very sharp increase in the proportion of administrators to faculty and students; faculty and students levels have stayed fairly level relative to one another, but the proportion of administrators have gone way up. There’s a very good book on it by a well-known sociologist, Benjamin Ginsberg, called The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters (Oxford University Press, 2011), which describes in detail the business style of massive administration and levels of administration-and of course, very highly-paid administrators. This includes professional administrators like deans, for example, who used to be faculty members who took off for a couple of years to serve in an administrative capacity and then go back to the faculty; now they’re mostly professionals, who then have to hire sub-deans, and secretaries, and so on and so forth, a whole proliferation of structure that goes along with administrators. All of that is another aspect of the business model.

But using cheap labor-and vulnerable labor-is a business practice that goes as far back as you can trace private enterprise, and unions emerged in response. In the universities, cheap, vulnerable labor means adjuncts and graduate students. Graduate students are even more vulnerable, for obvious reasons. The idea is to transfer instruction to precarious workers, which improves discipline and control but also enables the transfer of funds to other purposes apart from education. The costs, of course, are borne by the students and by the people who are being drawn into these vulnerable occupations. But it’s a standard feature of a business-run society to transfer costs to the people. In fact, economists tacitly cooperate in this. So, for example, suppose you find a mistake in your checking account and you call the bank to try to fix it. Well, you know what happens. You call them up, and you get a recorded message saying “We love you, here’s a menu.” Maybe the menu has what you’re looking for, maybe it doesn’t. If you happen to find the right option, you listen to some music, and every once and a while a voice comes in and says “Please stand by, we really appreciate your business,” and so on. Finally, after some period of time, you may get a human being, who you can ask a short question to. That’s what economists call “efficiency.” By economic measures, that system reduces labor costs to the bank; of course it imposes costs on you, and those costs are multiplied by the number of users, which can be enormous-but that’s not counted as a cost in economic calculation. And if you look over the way the society works, you find this everywhere. So the university imposes costs on students and on faculty who are not only untenured but are maintained on a path that guarantees that they will have no security. All of this is perfectly natural within corporate business models. It’s harmful to education, but education is not their goal.

In fact, if you look back farther, it goes even deeper than that. If you go back to the early 1970s when a lot of this began, there was a lot of concern pretty much across the political spectrum over the activism of the 1960s; it’s commonly called “the time of troubles.” It was a “time of troubles” because the country was getting civilized, and that’s dangerous. People were becoming politically engaged and were trying to gain rights for groups that are called “special interests,” like women, working people, farmers, the young, the old, and so on. That led to a serious backlash, which was pretty overt. At the liberal end of the spectrum, there’s a book called The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission, Michel Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington, Joji Watanuki (New York University Press, 1975), produced by the Trilateral Commission, an organization of liberal internationalists. The Carter administration was drawn almost entirely from their ranks. They were concerned with what they called “the crisis of democracy,” namely that there’s too much democracy. In the 1960s there were pressures from the population, these “special interests,” to try to gain rights within the political arena, and that put too much pressure on the state-you can’t do that. There was one special interest that they left out, namely the corporate sector, because its interests are the “national interest”; the corporate sector is supposed to control the state, so we don’t talk about them. But the “special interests” were causing problems and they said “we have to have more moderation in democracy,” the public has to go back to being passive and apathetic. And they were particularly concerned with schools and universities, which they said were not properly doing their job of “indoctrinating the young.” You can see from student activism (the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, the feminist movement, the environmental movements) that the young are just not being indoctrinated properly.

Well how do you indoctrinate the young? There are a number of ways. One way is to burden them with hopelessly heavy tuition debt. Debt is a trap, especially student debt, which is enormous, far larger than credit card debt. It’s a trap for the rest of your life because the laws are designed so that you can’t get out of it. If a business, say, gets in too much debt it can declare bankruptcy, but individuals can almost never be relieved of student debt through bankruptcy. They can even garnish social security if you default. That’s a disciplinary technique. I don’t say that it was consciously introduced for the purpose, but it certainly has that effect. And it’s hard to argue that there’s any economic basis for it. Just take a look around the world: higher education is mostly free. In the countries with the highest education standards, let’s say Finland, which is at the top all the time, higher education is free. And in a rich, successful capitalist country like Germany, it’s free. In Mexico, a poor country, which has pretty decent education standards, considering the economic difficulties they face, it’s free. In fact, look at the United States: if you go back to the 1940s and 50s, higher education was pretty close to free. The GI Bill gave free education to vast numbers of people who would never have been able to go to college. It was very good for them and it was very good for the economy and the society; it was part of the reason for the high economic growth rate. Even in private colleges, education was pretty close to free. Take me: I went to college in 1945 at an Ivy League university, University of Pennsylvania, and tuition was $100. That would be maybe $800 in today’s dollars. And it was very easy to get a scholarship, so you could live at home, work, and go to school and it didn’t cost you anything. Now it’s outrageous. I have grandchildren in college, who have to pay for their tuition and work and it’s almost impossible. For the students that is a disciplinary technique.

And another technique of indoctrination is to cut back faculty-student contact: large classes, temporary teachers who are overburdened, who can barely survive on an adjunct salary. And since you don’t have any job security you can’t build up a career, you can’t move on and get more. These are all techniques of discipline, indoctrination, and control. And it’s very similar to what you’d expect in a factory, where factory workers have to be disciplined, to be obedient; they’re not supposed to play a role in, say, organizing production or determining how the workplace functions-that’s the job of management. This is now carried over to the universities. And I think it shouldn’t surprise anyone who has any experience in private enterprise, in industry; that’s the way they work.

On how higher education ought to be

First of all, we should put aside any idea that there was once a “golden age.” Things were different and in some ways better in the past, but far from perfect. The traditional universities were, for example, extremely hierarchical, with very little democratic participation in decision-making. One part of the activism of the 1960s was to try to democratize the universities, to bring in, say, student representatives to faculty committees, to bring in staff to participate. These efforts were carried forward under student initiatives, with some degree of success. Most universities now have some degree of student participation in faculty decisions. And I think those are the kinds of things we should be moving towards: a democratic institution, in which the people involved in the institution, whoever they may be (faculty, students, staff), participate in determining the nature of the institution and how it runs; and the same should go for a factory.

These are not radical ideas, I should say. They come straight out of classical liberalism. So if you read, for example, John Stuart Mill, a major figure in the classical liberal tradition, he took it for granted that workplaces ought to be managed and controlled by the people who work in them-that’s freedom and democracy (see, e.g., John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy, book 4, ch. 7). We see the same ideas in the United States. Let’s say you go back to the Knights of Labor; one of their stated aims was “To establish co-operative institutions such as will tend to supersede the wage-system, by the introduction of a co-operative industrial system” (“Founding Ceremony” for newly-organized Local Associations). Or take someone like, John Dewey, a mainstream 20th-century social philosopher, who called not only for education directed at creative independence in schools, but also worker control in industry, what he called “industrial democracy.” He says that as long as the crucial institutions of the society (like production, commerce, transportation, media) are not under democratic control, then “politics [will be] the shadow cast on society by big business” (John Dewey, “The Need for a New Party”[1931]). This idea is almost elementary, it has deep roots in American history and in classical liberalism, it should be second nature to working people, and it should apply the same way to universities. There are some decisions in a university where you don’t want to have [democratic transparency because] you have to preserve student privacy, say, and there are various kinds of sensitive issues, but on much of the normal activity of the university, there is no reason why direct participation can’t be not only legitimate but helpful. In my department, for example, for 40 years we’ve had student representatives helpfully participating in department meetings.

On “shared governance” and worker control

The university is probably the social institution in our society that comes closest to democratic worker control. Within a department, for example, it’s pretty normal for at least the tenured faculty to be able to determine a substantial amount of what their work is like: what they’re going to teach, when they’re going to teach, what the curriculum will be. And most of the decisions about the actual work that the faculty is doing are pretty much under tenured faculty control. Now of course there is a higher level of administrators that you can’t overrule or control. The faculty can recommend somebody for tenure, let’s say, and be turned down by the deans, or the president, or even the trustees or legislators. It doesn’t happen all that often, but it can happen and it does. And that’s always a part of the background structure, which, although it always existed, was much less of a problem in the days when the administration was drawn from the faculty and in principle recallable. Under representative systems, you have to have someone doing administrative work but they should be recallable at some point under the authority of the people they administer. That’s less and less true. There are more and more professional administrators, layer after layer of them, with more and more positions being taken remote from the faculty controls. I mentioned before The Fall of the Faculty by Benjamin Ginsberg, which goes into a lot of detail as to how this works in the several universities he looks at closely: Johns Hopkins, Cornell, and a couple of others.

Meanwhile, the faculty are increasingly reduced to a category of temporary workers who are assured a precarious existence with no path to the tenure track. I have personal acquaintances who are effectively permanent lecturers; they’re not given real faculty status; they have to apply every year so that they can get appointed again. These things shouldn’t be allowed to happen. And in the case of adjuncts, it’s been institutionalized: they’re not permitted to be a part of the decision-making apparatus, and they’re excluded from job security, which merely amplifies the problem. I think staff ought to also be integrated into decision-making, since they’re also a part of the university. So there’s plenty to do, but I think we can easily understand why these tendencies are developing. They are all part of imposing a business model on just about every aspect of life. That’s the neoliberal ideology that most of the world has been living under for 40 years. It’s very harmful to people, and there has been resistance to it. And it’s worth noticing that two parts of the world, at least, have pretty much escaped from it, namely East Asia, where they never really accepted it, and South America in the past 15 years.

On the alleged need for “flexibility”

“Flexibility” is a term that’s very familiar to workers in industry. Part of what’s called “labor reform” is to make labor more “flexible,” make it easier to hire and fire people. That’s, again, a way to ensure maximization of profit and control. “Flexibility” is supposed to be a good thing, like “greater worker insecurity.” Putting aside industry where the same is true, in universities there’s no justification. So take a case where there’s under-enrollment somewhere. That’s not a big problem. One of my daughters teaches at a university; she just called me the other night and told me that her teaching load is being shifted because one of the courses that was being offered was under-enrolled. Okay, the world didn’t to an end, they just shifted around the teaching arrangements-you teach a different course, or an extra section, or something like that. People don’t have to be thrown out or be insecure because of the variation in the number of students enrolling in courses. There are all sorts of ways of adjusting for that variation. The idea that labor should meet the conditions of “flexibility” is just another standard technique of control and domination. Why not say that administrators should be thrown out if there’s nothing for them to do that semester, or trustees-what do they have to be there for? The situation is the same with top management in industry: if labor has to be flexible, how about management? Most of them are pretty useless or even harmful anyway, so let’s get rid of them. And you can go on like this. Just to take the news from the last couple of days, take, say, Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JP Morgan Chase bank: he just got a pretty substantial raise, almost double his salary, out of gratitude because he had saved the bank from criminal charges that would have sent the management to jail; he got away with only $20 billion in fines for criminal activities. Well I can imagine that getting rid of somebody like that might be helpful to the economy. But that’s not what people are talking about when they talk about “labor reform.” It’s the working people who have to suffer, and they have to suffer by insecurity, by not knowing where tomorrow’s piece of bread is going to come from, and therefore be disciplined and obedient and not raise questions or ask for their rights. That’s the way that tyrannical systems operate. And the business world is a tyrannical system. When it’s imposed on the universities, you find it reflects the same ideas. This shouldn’t be any secret.

On the purpose of education

These are debates that go back to the Enlightenment, when issues of higher education and mass education were really being raised, not just education for the clergy and aristocracy. And there were basically two models discussed in the 18th and 19th centuries. They were discussed with pretty evocative imagery. One image of education was that it should be like a vessel that is filled with, say, water. That’s what we call these days “teaching to test”: you pour water into the vessel and then the vessel returns the water. But it’s a pretty leaky vessel, as all of us who went through school experienced, since you could memorize something for an exam that you had no interest in to pass an exam and a week later you forgot what the course was about. The vessel model these days is called “no child left behind,” “teaching to test,” “race to top,” whatever the name may be, and similar things in universities. Enlightenment thinkers opposed that model.

The other model was described as laying out a string along which the student progresses in his or her own way under his or her own initiative, maybe moving the string, maybe deciding to go somewhere else, maybe raising questions. Laying out the string means imposing some degree of structure. So an educational program, whatever it may be, a course on physics or something, isn’t going to be just anything goes; it has a certain structure. But the goal of it is for the student to acquire the capacity to inquire, to create, to innovate, to challenge-that’s education. One world-famous physicist, in his freshman courses if he was asked “what are we going to cover this semester?”, his answer was “it doesn’t matter what we cover, it matters what you discover.” You have gain the capacity and the self-confidence for that matter to challenge and create and innovate, and that way you learn; that way you’ve internalized the material and you can go on. It’s not a matter of accumulating some fixed array of facts which then you can write down on a test and forget about tomorrow.

These are two quite distinct models of education. The Enlightenment ideal was the second one, and I think that’s the one that we ought to be striving towards. That’s what real education is, from kindergarten to graduate school. In fact there are programs of that kind for kindergarten, pretty good ones.

On the love of teaching

We certainly want people, both faculty and students, to be engaged in activity that’s satisfying, enjoyable, challenging, exciting-and I don’t really think that’s hard. Even young children are creative, inquisitive, they want to know things, they want to understand things, and unless that’s beaten out of your head it stays with you the rest of your life. If you have opportunities to pursue those commitments and concerns, it’s one of the most satisfying things in life. That’s true if you’re a research physicist, it’s true if you’re a carpenter; you’re trying to create something of value and deal with a difficult problem and solve it. I think that’s what makes work the kind of thing you want to do; you do it even if you don’t have to do it. In a reasonably functioning university, you find people working all the time because they love it; that’s what they want to do; they’re given the opportunity, they have the resources, they’re encouraged to be free and independent and creative-what’s better? That’s what they love to do. And that, again, can be done at any level.

Read More: RSN

#Berkeley students protest UC President Napolitano #highered #edstudies #occupyeducation #ubc #yteubc

Photo by Alejandra Gonzalez Ramirez

Sahil Chinoy and Adriann Dinolfo, Daily Californian, February 13, 2014–UC President Janet Napolitano has been protested across her tour of the UC system, and her visit to UC Berkeley proved no different as individuals from several campus coalitions coalesced in two separate demonstrations Thursday – one continuing into the night – to express their discontent.

As of 1 a.m., the demonstrations remained ongoing, although a diminished version of earlier iterations, with about 30 to 40 protesters outside the Blum Center for Developing Economies, inside of which nine students have locked themselves.

BAMN, a group that advocates for immigrant rights, began the first round of protests at 10 a.m. with a small group of about 15 people outside Sutardja Dai Hall. Three hours later, about 150 people gathered on Upper Sproul Plaza for another protest led by the Students of Color Solidarity Coalition.

Both groups expressed disapproval of Napolitano’s history of deportation as the former Secretary of Homeland Security and of her nonacademic background.

Jasmene del Aguila, a UC Berkeley freshman watching the Sproul Plaza protest, said she supported the demonstrators because she knows undocumented students attend the university, adding that these individuals should have the same opportunities as other students.

In comparison, Nic Jaber, a UC Berkeley sophomore who also observed the protest, was not convinced the SCSC had the right strategy.

“Whether or not she enforced immigration has nothing to do with her proclivity to be our UC president,” Jaber said. “She’s trying to work with us, and we just keep slapping her in the face.”

The protesters then marched through campus and blocked the entrance of the Blum Center, near where BAMN was still stationed.

Nine SCSC students entered the Blum Center about 2:40 p.m., chaining the door and locking themselves inside, according to SCSC organizer and UC Berkeley alumna Natalie Sanchez. She added that the students are risking arrest, and some are risking deportation.

The protesters have three demands to the administration: that individuals inside the building receive amnesty, that Chancellor Nicholas Dirks call for Napolitano’s resignation and that those in solidarity cancel classes Friday and “build a strike.”

Read More: Daily Californian

#Berkeley and the myth of the activist life #highered #occupyeducation #criticaled #edstudies #ubc #yteubc

Alexandra McGee, Counterpunch, February 14, 2014– On February 13th, 2014, I attended a UC Berkeley protest against the appointment of Janet Napolitano as President of the UC system.* The qualms against her appointment fall outside of my purview to describe here. This piece is much larger than Napolitano, or the protest itself. Instead, lets look at how systemic economic inequality has affected the mentality (and thereby the capability for action) of my generation.

Organized by the Associated Students of the University of California, the protest attracted upward of 500 people, purported thousands if you count onlookers and those who bore witness momentarily. With protest signs, cloth banners, megaphones and fists of solidarity, this crowd of young students had been protesting since 10 am. I started asking onlookers what their motivations were for being there and what they thought of the movement until I realized, this was no real protest.

Napolitano was in Sutardja Dai Hall. Protesters had taken the nearby Blum Center For Developing Economies. We stood, fists held high and shouting into a megaphone, all pointed in the opposite direction from our supposed target. Sutardja Dai Hall was inconveniently guarded, with five large men guarding the bottom entrance, doors locked on the second floor, three cops with shiny sunglasses glaring down at us from the top floor and two cops on bikes circling the building. News reporters stood aside, pointing their video camera into the disjointed group, many of whom were unaware of what our strategy was, or what our demands were.

Why aren’t we occupying Sutardja Dai Hall?

I began to ask those around me. The ASUC had emphasized that they were “not going to negotiate with Napolitano on the issue of her resignation.” But how would occupying a nearby building do anything at all? Why are we not engaging in constructive dialogue? “El pueblo unido jamas sera vencido!” But how will chanting together do anything but stroke our own egos? “But this is Berkeley, radicals. All of us!” Pure ideological masturbation unless you do something provocative to cause change.

I am frustrated that Berkeley continues to perpetuate the myth of its activist lifestyle for economic gain. It sells an image of the rebel protester, the ideological martyr, to a generation of youth that cannot find their way four blocks north without GPS, never mind find their way past the bureaucratic labyrinth to create substantial change. With their tuition and the gradual privatization of education (see: millions of dollars from ecologically destructive corporations like BP), they perpetuate the inequality of wealth and even endorse human rights abusers, as they have by allowing Napolitano to be their system president.

If Mario Savio were amongst us, he would hang his head in absolute shame. Not just at the cafe on campus toting his name as a publicity stunt, but at our failure to question the status quo. To disturb the system, you don’t occupy a building which poses no strategical advantage, you don’t chant just to make yourself feel good, and you do not boast that you are creating community when really all you’re doing is attracting people who want to update their facebooks with a new “rebel” profile picture.

This frustration is also fueled by great hope that I once had in the Occupy movement. Surrounded by well-intentioned, intelligent people, I was sure that change was in our grasp, but we were outlasted in our patience, overcome by our fragmentation, and overconfident in our abilities. Now, I was ready to rush the police to occupy a space of power for those who couldn’t. To represent those who had been deported from their country because of Napolitano’s discriminatory policies. To recognize our own humanity in a space where we would not be welcome. To demand recognition and respect as a human being rather than an authorized citizen.

But doing so would require facing down strongmen of the establishment. To do so would put in jeopardy our clean police records with some nonsense charge of non-compliance. As a fellow protester said, she worried that if we actually tried to change something, she wouldn’t be able to get a job because it would show up on her record. She didn’t actually think anything would change.

Bulls eye. Compliance to capitalism fueled by fear. The threat of economic punishment if we are labeled as radical.

Read More: Counterpunch