Category Archives: Media

Special issue: Educate. Agitate. Organize: New and Not-So-New Teacher Movements #activism #k12 #education #edreform

We are thrilled to launch this Special Issue of Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labour:

EDUCATE. AGITATE. ORGANIZE: NEW AND NOT-SO-NEW TEACHER MOVEMENTS

Special Issue of Workplace
Edited by
Mark Stern, Amy E. Brown & Khuram Hussain

Table of Contents

  • Forward: The Systemic Cycle of Brokenness
    • Tamara Anderson
  • Introduction to the Special Issue: Educate. Agitate. Organize: New and Not-So-New Teacher Movements
    • Mark Stern, Amy E. Brown, Khuram Hussain
  • Articles
  • Principles to Practice: Philadelphia Educators Putting Social Movement Unionism into Action
    • Rhiannon M Maton
  • Teaching amidst Precarity: Philadelphia’s Teachers, Neighborhood Schools and the Public Education Crisis
    • Julia Ann McWilliams
  • Inquiry, Policy, and Teacher Communities: Counter Mandates and Teacher Resistance in an Urban School District
    • Katherine Crawford-Garrett, Kathleen Riley
  • More than a Score: Neoliberalism, Testing & Teacher Evaluations
    • Megan E Behrent
  • Resistance to Indiana’s Neoliberal Education Policies: How Glenda Ritz Won
    • Jose Ivan Martinez, Jeffery L. Cantrell, Jayne Beilke
  • “We Need to Grab Power Where We Can”: Teacher Activists’ Responses to Policies of Privatization and the Assault on Teachers in Chicago
    • Sophia Rodriguez
  • The Paradoxes, Perils, and Possibilities of Teacher Resistance in a Right-to-Work State
    • Christina Convertino
  • Place-Based Education in Detroit: A Critical History of The James & Grace Lee Boggs School
    • Christina Van Houten
  • Voices from the Ground
  • Feeling Like a Movement: Visual Cultures of Educational Resistance
    • Erica R. Meiners, Therese Quinn
  • Construir Y No Destruir (Build and Do Not Destroy): Tucson Resisting
    • Anita Fernández
  • Existential Philosophy as Attitude and Pedagogy for Self and Student Liberation
    • Sheryl Joy Lieb
  • Epilogue
  • No Sermons in Stone (Bernstein) + Left Behind (Austinxc04)
    • Richard Bernstein, Austinxc04

Thanks for the continued interest in and support of our journals, Critical Education and Workplace, and our ICES and Workplace blogs. And please keep the manuscripts and ideas rolling in!

Sandra Mathison, Stephen Petrina & E. Wayne Ross, co-Directors, Institute for Critical Education Studies

#UBC appoints VP communications in thick of PR disaster #ubc100 #ubcnews #caut #bced

With the University of British Columbia wallowing in the depths of a legitimacy crisis of administration, the longtime Ontario and BC Liberals deputy Philip Steenkamp was appointed the University’s new Vice-President, External Relations and Communications. Obviously, his communication with the BC Liberals will be easy.

VP Steencamp’s real test is communication and PR with the community, including, most locally, faculty, staff and students, and media who have lost confidence in UBC’s senior and middle executives and managers. That’s a tall order.

So we shall now see what a $300k+ salary buys an administration in crisis. We shall now see if the new VP can rescue UBC, basically his Office of Communications and Community Partnership and the Public Affairs Office, from its PR bloopers and blunders, including the handling of Chair Montalbano and BoG in the press.

MacLean’s called out the Public Affairs Office as a PR “disaster” while the Ottawa Citizen says UBC’s sunk deep into “damage-control.”

The previous VP Communications, Pascal Spothelfer, came and went in two years.

In the meantime, interim President Piper has yet to shake up PR and the senior admin. Something has to give…

#UBC university watchers advisory #ubcnews #bced #caut #ubyssey #ubcgss

If you are among the “university watchers” identified as such in President Martha Piper’s now infamous speech to the converted, also known as UBC’s comeback speech, as read by Stephen Hawking, you are advised to watch the University from the ivory tower webcam.

Note that this cam is pointed directly at the Academic Executives’ Office, where you will not see any admin changes. As you can see, there is really nothing to see here.

Yes, an admin office is bustling with activity inside. But university watchers will not see this. University watchers are also advised to revert to google office view and the watching paint dry cam installed in the UBC Board of Governors.

#MarthaPiper time to clean house #UBC PR, speech writers & handlers #ubcnews #ubcgss #ubyssey #caut #bced

Listening as Stephen Hawking reads the speeches of Martha Piper, it is clear that the interim President of the University of British Columbia needs to begin cleaning house by canning the top of Public Relations, along with her speech writers and handlers.

When MacLean’s calls out your Public Affairs Office as a PR “disaster,” when when the Ottawa Citizen says you’ve sunk deep into “damage-control” mode, when faculty and indie media analysts elaborate, it’s time to actually do something.

When your speech writers reduce the lot of your faculty, staff and students to “university watchers,” it’s time to act.

When the best your hired PR specialist and handler, Susan Danard, can do is assure the world that there will be no “departure costs [$]” to faculty and students from President Gupta’s resignation , it’s time to make a major shuffle.

Instead, with this legitimacy crisis of administration well into its second month at UBC, it’s business as usual. Admin are now wont to party like it’s UBC @ 99. So when UBC announces a leadership transition, it really means that just one staff member quietly walked off campus and otherwise it’s business as usual.

The crisis of legitimacy is deep at UBC from the top levels of management, including the Academic Executives and legal counsel, through its deans and down to its middle managers, the associate and assistant deans, who are appointed at whim.

But you’d never know it. It’s business as usual for UBC @ 100. Time to clean the house of PR and admin President Piper.

We should have said #jesuischarlie before

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Emma-Kate Symons, Quartz, January 7, 2014– The world is rallying around satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and the French people today, after masked assassins – uttering the prayer “God is Great” and invoking vengeance for the prophet Mohammed – massacred 12 in central Paris.

But the global solidarity with the heroic cartoonists, writers and editors of this struggling weekly publication, targeted and murdered by terrorists during their weekly news conference, and victims of a fire-bomb attack on their office and years of death threats from Islamists, comes far too late.

Charlie Hebdo, which has published on and off since 1969, is proudly anti-organised religion and congenitally politically incorrect.

On a shoestring budget it has been fighting the good fight for freedom of thought and expression and a secular public space for years when many were ambivalent.

For its courage it has run into frequent trouble with local and international Islamofascists, having been forced to move its headquarters several times following threats and a fire bombing, notably after it published an edition in 2011 called “Charia Hebdo”.

Its editors had also annoyed and irritated political leaders in its native France, in Britain, and the United States.

When it bravely republished the infamous Danish cartoons mocking the prophet Mohammed in 2006, even as fundamentalist leaders incited demonstrators to violence around the world, it earned a notorious rebuke from president Jacques Chirac who condemned its “overt provocation“.

As I reported from Paris at the time, then Charlie Hebdo publisher Philippe Val hit back at Chirac, saying he was “shocked” the French head of state would accuse the magazine of inflaming passions.

It is not a provocation. The provocation began well before – the fire was sparked on September 11 in New York, and in the attacks on London and on Madrid.

When there were the attacks on Madrid, on London, did we see the Arab street demonstrating because some assassins had committed horrible crimes in the name of Mohammed? We cannot leave it to religious groups to dictate the laws of freedom of expression.

Some in the Bush administration, wary of violence across the Islamic world, joined in the chorus calling for limits on press freedom. The British foreign secretary Jack Straw deplored newspapers’ “insensitivity and lack of respect”. The elite media in these two countries was also far from unanimous in its support.

Even in Paris over the past week, leading figures in the French fourth estate have been condemning the novelist Michel Houellebecq for allegedly bringing extreme right wing ideas into literature with the publication of his incendiary novel Submission.

The book depicts a France in 2022 governed by an Islamist political party. But Houllebecq is now part of this drama having been featured on the cover of this week’s edition of Charlie Hebdo. So what do editors like Laurent Joffrin at Libération newspaper now have to say? Should the novelist, like the editorial staff at Charlie Hebdo, have held their tongues and their pens?

Horribly, the scene at Charlie Hebdo is worthy of an excerpt from a novel by Houllebecq, and eerily echoes his reading of the Koran: “The obvious conclusion is that the jihadists are bad Muslims … an honest reading will conclude that a holy war of aggression is not generally sanctioned, prayer alone is valid.”

But this is not fiction and it is too easy to dismiss the role of religion and, yes, jihadi prayer in this horror.

France has Europe’s largest Muslim population, rising support for the anti-Islam extreme right, a growing problem with homegrown terrorism, fuelled by hundreds who have fought alongside Islamic State and al-Qaeda in Syria and elsewhere, and also the strongest commitment to the secular separation of church and state of almost any Western democracy.

It has a huge job on its hands trying to manage all its internal conflicts, and the sheer shock and fury this attack has created. This is a tipping point akin to the violence that followed the publication of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses in 1988.

Beyond the immediate political fallout, the “greatest” to emerge from this crime expressly motivated by religious fanaticism are not God, the “avenged” prophet, or Islamist extremism – even if the death cult we associate with IS and Al Qaeda has come to the heart of the city of lights, and the Enlightenment, for centuries a refuge for intellectuals, writers, and artists.

Despite the murderers’ prayers invoking God and Allah, the heroes in this horror are the creative minds of this noble publication. Atheistic agitators, they fought literally to the death for freedom of thought and expression, the liberty to offend, and the right to be iconoclasts.

Their fidelity to the fundamental values of democracy, even as many around the world and in France found their editorial line too “provocative” or “offensive”, will long endure after these killers are brought to justice.

They died as they lived: standing up for their principles, the principles the French first fought for in the 1789 Revolution. Their only “weapons” were their illustrating pens and their words.

The martyred editor-in-chief and beloved illustrator “Charb” said it best in 2012, after years of attacks against his magazine:

I am not afraid of reprisals. I don’t have kids, I don’t have a wife, I don’t have a car, I don’t have credit. This may sound a bit pompous but I would prefer to die standing than to live on my knees.

Read More: Quartz

Top story of 2013-14 at #ubc? Failure of accountability for Sauder rape cheer #bced #ubcsauderschool #mba #yteubc

Photo credit: Carmine Marinelli/Vancouver 24hours/QMI Agency

The Ubyssey, April 13, 2014– Starting the year off with a bang, The Ubyssey broke the story that first-years participating in the Commerce Undergraduate Society’s FROSH orientation had been led in a cheer making light of rape. The news shook campus.

As national media jumped on the story, the university scrambled to respond, eventually convening a panel to make recommendations on how to prevent such things from happening in the future.

The Sauder School of Business and its dean Robert Helsley came out of the mess looking less than fantastic. Students said the cheer had been taking place for many years, and there were rumours that Helsley’s predecessor may have been aware of inappropriate events at CUS FROSH.

After Sauder students failed to pass a referendum approving hundreds of thousands of dollars to be put toward the vague goal of mitigating an alleged culture of sexual violence in the faculty, the university was forced to foot the rest of the bill.

The university panel chaired by VP Students Louise Cowin — which, due to pressure from First Nations groups and the media came to include aboriginal issues after a handful of students at FROSH sang a chant related to Pocahontas— came out with recommendations that have mostly yet to be implemented. Read More: The Ubyssey

I appealed directly to Dean Helsley and President Toope with a reworded cheer:

All together now: A.D.M.I.N.!

A is for we like Accountability!
D is for it will be Deferred!
M is for the Money that runs the show!
I is always for I point the other way when the heat is on!

All together now!

UBC President Stephen Toope and Sauder School of Business dean Robert Helsley, how accountable is it to let two student executives of the Commerce Undergraduate Society (CUS) take the fall for the Sauder rape cheer?

At Saint Mary’s University, where a similar cheer took place, Student Union president Jared Perry said, “I tender my resignation.”

At UBC, Enzo Woo and Gillian Ong, president and VP engagement of the CUS respectively, resigned.

All together now: A.D.M.I.N.!

A is for we like Accountability!
D is for it will be Deferred!

A month and a rushed fact-finding report later, the administration at UBC remains entrenched solely in damage control. Curiously, the words “administration” and “administrator” do not appear in the fact-finding report [“student/s” appears 46 times].

Protect the brand! Especially now. Especially for commerce. No resignations, no accountability.

Photo Credit: Arno Rosenfeld, The Ubyssey

More appeals, but still no accountability at the top:

In the fact-finding report, curiously, the words “administration” and “administrator” do not appear while “student/s” appears 46 times. There were no facts to find on administrators or administration?

If it is plausible that of the 11 Assistant and Associate Deans + Dean Helsley, none have responsibilities for “students” in their portfolio, then the President’s Office has failed. That’s a fact of administrative bloat: Between 1999 and 2013, this Faculty’s administrators at that level more than doubled. Yes, Sauder has Dean Muzyka to thank. And increasing tuition and fees have that to factor in. Yet none of these 12 now have any responsibilities for students? I don’t buy that. So is the buck or loonie passed back to the Sauder Dean’s Office?

Similarly, someone or something is failing at the top if of the 12 senior administrators none have curriculum in their portfolio. I find it incomprehensible that it has taken this cheer, a fact-finding report, campus outrage, and nearly 2014 for Sauder to finally get around to, announced on 1 November by Dean Helsley, “Implementing changes in the curriculum to enhance themes of social justice, ethics, gender and cultural sensitivity, and their role in corporate social responsibility and the creation of a civil society”?

A top business school finally getting around to this? In this economy and world? There are 12 senior administrators and none have curriculum and courses in their portfolio? What exactly are they doing? Not all can be running around consulting, like Bob Sutton, teaching CEOs how not to be assholes.

An accountability cheer for UBC #ubcsauderschool #mba #bcpoli #bced #ubc #yteubc

The Ubyssey, November 6, 2013

All together now: A.D.M.I.N.!

A is for we like Accountability!
D is for it will be Deferred!
M is for the Money that runs the show!
I is always for I point the other way when the heat is on!

All together now!

UBC President Stephen Toope and Sauder School of Business dean Robert Helsley, how accountable is it to let two student executives of the Commerce Undergraduate Society (CUS) take the fall for the Sauder rape cheer?

At Saint Mary’s University, where a similar cheer took place, Student Union president Jared Perry said, “I tender my resignation.”

At UBC, Enzo Woo and Gillian Ong, president and VP engagement of the CUS respectively, resigned.

All together now: A.D.M.I.N.!

A is for we like Accountability!
D is for it will be Deferred!

A month and a rushed fact-finding report later, the administration at UBC remains entrenched solely in damage control. Curiously, the words “administration” and “administrator” do not appear in the fact-finding report [“student/s” appears 46 times].

Protect the brand! Especially now. Especially for commerce. No resignations, no accountability.

However, amidst the smoking guns and smoking pipes of politics back east, UBC’s rape chant is still making headlines.

On Oct. 31, the CUS rejected a referendum to approve a $200,000 allocation for student counselling and education on sexual abuse and violence.

Still talking but not walking, Helsley issued yet another statement that he was predictably “deeply disappointed.” Why? Maybe because it is time for Helsley to walk and for Toope to walk the talk.

From all optics, it is the students who are taking care of business — resigning, reflecting, self-governing, voting and regrouping. Students have realized that lines were crossed and are dealing with it. Given the rejection of the referendum, are the students simply saying they are dealing with their own behaviour?

Administrators, figure out what your role is for oversight of students in the 21st century. Enough of remaining “deeply disappointed” that students are not assuming your accountability.

There is an apparent culture of entitlement within Commerce. That may be why neither the president’s office nor the Sauder dean’s office have tendered resignations, cut salaries or revoked budget lines. We dare not conclude that atrocious chants originate or thrive within these cultures, yet one may draw conclusions that a culture of entitlement hurts accountability at the top in times like these.

This entitlement is apparent when faculty contracts are negotiated, with Sauder’s breakaway faculty association independently bargaining for bigger pieces of the pie for themselves; when the Sauder chief is appointed to oversee the University’s budget; and when its bloated administrative lines are sacred.

Yet to this moment in the throes of the rape chant controversy, not a single Commerce administrator has resigned, and the President has pulled not a single line.

Potentia ad Populum,

Stephen Petrina, professor

Read More: The Ubyssey

David Suzuki: Government not protecting wild salmon, scientists censored

David Suzuki, CBC Radio, April 18, 2013– David Suzuki gave an extended interview on CBC’s On the Coast, profiling Alexandra Morton’s new film “Salmon Confidential” and elaborating on the Canadian government’s censorship of scientists.

Listen to CBC’s On the Coast Interview with David Suzuki

Muzzling scientists is an assault on democracy

David Suzuki, Rabble.ca, April 9, 2013–

Access to information is a basic foundation of democracy. Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms also gives us “freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication.”

We must protect these rights. As we alter the chemical, physical and biological properties of the biosphere, we face an increasingly uncertain future, and the best information we have to guide us comes from science. That scientists – and even librarians – are speaking out against what appear to be increasing efforts to suppress information shows we have cause for concern. The situation has become so alarming that Canada’s Information Commissioner is investigating seven government departments in response to a complaint that they’re “muzzling” scientists.

The submission from the University of Victoria’s Environmental Law Centre and Democracy Watch alleges that “the federal government is preventing the media and the Canadian public from speaking to government scientists for news stories – especially when the scientists’ research or point of view runs counter to current Government policies on matters such as environmental protection, oil sands development, and climate change” and that this “impoverishes the public debate on issues of significant national concern.”

The complaint and investigation follow numerous similar charges from scientists and organizations such as the Canadian Science Writers’ Association and the World Federation of Science Journalists, and publications such as the science journal Nature. Hundreds of scientists marched on Parliament Hill last July to mark “the death of evidence”.

The list of actions prompting these grievances is long. It includes shutting the world-renownedExperimental Lakes Area, axing the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy, eliminating funding for the Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences and prohibiting federal scientists from speaking about research on subjects ranging from ozone to climate change to salmon.

All of this has been taking place as the federal government guts environmental laws and cuts funding for environmental departments through its omnibus budget bills. It has justified those massive environmental policy changes in part by saying the review process was slow and inefficient, but research by scientists at the University of Toronto, published in the Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences, “found no evidence that regulatory review in Canada was inefficient, even when regulators had an ongoing load of over 600 projects for review at any given time.”…

Read More: Rabble.ca

At social media command centre, U of S student in eye of storm of #IdleNoMore

Erica Lee, photo by Richard Marjan

Jeremy Warren, StarPhoenix, 16 January 2013: Erica Lee is at the centre of Idle No More and has witnessed the best and worst of the made-in-Saskatchewan national movement.

Lee, a 22-year-old University of Saskatchewan student, manages the movement’s main Facebook page, which serves as Idle No More’s unofficial headquarters. It’s the hub where people from around the world go to find help organizing rallies, share stories and support the cause.

The Idle No More page is also where people go to vent and berate. Lee spends much of her day checking it to remove racist and violent comments.

“A teenage boy sent me a message calling me a ‘squaw,’ ” Lee said while scrolling through comments at a computer in the U of S Aboriginal Students’ Centre this week. “I’ve deleted messages that say, ‘Quit drinking Lysol.’ That’s a really common one.”

Lee, who also sits on the Indigenous Students’ Council, is never without a cell-phone and she regularly checks it between classes. The page reached 1.5 million people in the week leading up to Friday’s meeting between First Nations leaders and Prime Minister Stephen Harper, according to Face-book measurements that account for views, “likes” and “shares.”

There are also posts that inspire, Lee says. She is particularly fond of a picture someone posted of a lone person standing on a building in Palestine holding an Idle No More poster.

Lee deletes much of the racist comments, but she doesn’t shy away from criticism. Many people have questions about the goals and activities of Idle No More and honest dialogue might lead to some good, Lee says.

“We don’t want to remove dissenting comments because we want a good discussion,” she said.

“If you delete a question, people will never learn. There’s still so much misunderstanding about First Nations in Canada.”

Read more: StarPhoenix

“Academic Theory behind Idle No More” @ National Post

As if Idle No More can be reduced to academic theory, today’s National Post went a step further and reduced the academic theory to “indigenism.” Drawing on an analysis from University of Calgary professor an ex-advisor to the Harper government Tom Flanagan, the Post strikes a defensive tone from the start: “It is a realm in which it is uncontroversial to call Canada an illegitimate, racist, colonial power, or to claim its government is now engaged in the genocide of its native peoples, or that non-native Canadians, especially those of European descent, are “colonizers,” at best blind to their own bigotry and privilege.” Flanagan concludes that this is “standard fare among the academic left.” “That’s what’s driving Idle No More,” he says. “It’s not new. This whole vision was widely articulated during the hearings on the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples.” Read more: National Post.

Rather than begging a question of academic theories behind the movement, the Post would be much better off covering the movement behind the theories or asking whether theorists are now poised to invite and welcome the movement to the doorsteps and inside the halls of academia.

All of this begs the question of whether students, this year nationally, will have the politics such as that  demonstrated in force across Quebec from February through August to sustain their foothold on Idle No More. As Algonquin journalist Martin Lukacs wrote last year in “Quebec student protests mark ‘Maple spring’ in Canada,” “the fault-lines of the struggle over education — dividing those who preach it must be a commodity purchased by “consumers” for self-advancement, and those who would protect it as a right funded by the state for the collective good — has thus sparked a fundamental debate about the entire society’s future…. Little wonder students’ imagination was stirred by the past year of world rebellion. That inspiration has been distilled in the movement’s main slogan, “Printemps érable,” a clever play on words that literally means Maple Spring but sounds like Arab Spring.”

Indeed, the Quebec student association ASSÉ released a statement yesterday committing to solidarity with indigenous students and Idle No More: “We stand in solidarity with Idle No More. We stand in solidarity with Indigenous hunger strikers Theresa Spence, Emil Bell, Raymond Robinson, Aniesh Vollant and Janet Pilot from the Quebec Innu community of Uashat, and others whose names we have not yet learned.”

“If 2012 was the year of our Maple Spring, we are ready to greet the Native spring of 2013.”

After Media Success, U. of California Protesters Look Ahead

The Chronicle: After Media Success, U. of California Protesters Look Ahead

Even in this deficit-riddled state, the sheer size of the University of California’s tuition increase last week was enough to spark a collective wave of anger and disbelief among many students, escalating protests that have been simmering throughout the system for months.

Protesters occupied buildings on four campuses to protest the higher tuition, drawing large crowds and causing hundreds of classes to be canceled. At Berkeley, a group of 40 students and their supporters barricaded themselves inside a major academic building for 11 hours, and top university officials were sent into the building as crack negotiators to end the standoff.

Conn. student newspaper faces harassment claims

Hartford Courant: Conn. student newspaper faces harassment claims

HARTFORD, Conn. – A satirical column that uses derogatory language to mock women for one-night stands has prompted harassment claims against a Connecticut college newspaper that published the piece.

Student editors at The Fairfield Mirror are concerned the controversy could affect the paper’s $30,000 funding stream from Fairfield University and jeopardize the paper’s editorial independence. The Catholic university in southwest Connecticut has about 5,000 students,

’60s Tactics, New Cause

walkout_medium

Inside Higher Ed: ’60s Tactics, New Cause

Few think the clock will be turned back to the Berkeley of the 1960s, but the protests planned across the University of California today mark a return to the tactics of another era. This time, however, the cause isn’t free speech or an end to war, but instead a response to the university administration’s budget-cutting proposals.

Today will be the first day of classes for 8 of the 10 campuses in the California system, and protest organizers plan to send an early message that the budget cuts besetting the university have been inappropriately addressed by system leaders. The centerpiece of the planned action is a walkout, which has been supported by systemwide student and technical employee organizations…

Moyers and the crisis of organized labor

Bill Fletcher and Michael Zweig are scheduled to appear on the Bill Moyers Journal on PBS stations this weekend in a conversation about the crisis facing organized labor, and its relationship to the Obama administration and the broader working class. Check local listings for the times of broadcast in your area. In NYC, the program airs on Channel 13 Friday September 18 at 9 p.m. and is rebroadcast Sunday September 20 at 7 p.m. It will also be available on the Bill Moyers Journal pages of pbs.org.

Hiding Adjuncts From ‘U.S. News’

Inside Higher Ed: Hiding Adjuncts From ‘U.S. News’

Everyone knows that adjuncts and graduate assistants do a lot of the teaching these days, right? Well, maybe not everyone.

The American Federation of Teachers on Wednesday posted a blog item asking how it is, given those well documented trends, that magazine rankings give parents the sense that most of the teaching at large universities is done by full-time faculty members. “The majority of top colleges report well over 80 percent of their faculty are full-time and a large number report that well over 90 percent of their faculty are full-time. University of Nebraska-Lincoln even reports that 100 percent of its faculty are full-time,” the blog says of institutions in the U.S. News & World Report rankings, a small part of which are based on the percentage of faculty who are full time. “Amazing!”

Does NBC Still Think a Professor Is War Criminal?

Inside Higher Ed: Does NBC Still Think a Professor Is War Criminal?

Last December, NBC News producers approached officials at Goucher College, in Baltimore, asking serious questions about Leopold Munyakazi, a visiting French professor from Rwanda. The producers, accompanied by Rwandan prosecutors, claimed Munyakazi is wanted on charges that he was directly involved in the 1994 genocide in his home country and noted they were working together on a television “series about international war criminals who are living and working in the United States.” In response to the charges, Goucher suspended Munyakazi for the remainder of his time at the college — without any evidence of wrongdoing. Many human rights officials and Munyakazi himself maintain his innocence, asserting that he is probably wanted because of controversial statements he has made about the 1994 conflict instead. The New York Observer reports that NBC is going ahead with the series on war criminals, entitled “The Wanted,” and it will debut July 20. An NBC press release notes the series will feature “an elite team with backgrounds in intelligence, unconventional warfare and investigative journalism” and that it will focus “on real operators, in search of real targets — all in an effort to see individuals brought to justice.” The press release makes no mention of Munyakazi in a list of suspects to be featured in the series. The Observer muses, “Presumably, NBC News is no longer working with Rwandan prosecutors to possibly arrest Mr. Munyakazi.” An NBC spokeswoman did not return a request for comment about whether the series still had an interest in Munyakazi. Kristin Keener, Goucher spokeswoman, said NBC had not told the college if the series would run beyond the two episodes that have been publicly promoted, neither of which will supposedly investigate Munyakazi.

C-J Still Ignoring UofL Leadership Failures

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PageOneKentucky.com: C-J Still Ignoring UofL Leadership Failures

Yesterday we shared three lengthy articles from The Chronicle of Higher Education that essentially served as an indictment of the University of Louisville’s leadership team. The stories detailed the long nightmare of the Robert Felner scandal and the embarrassing lack of action and willful ignorance on the part of UofL’s head honchos.

The Tenure Lawsuit of a Lifetime

The Chronicle: The Tenure Lawsuit of a Lifetime

Joseph M. Hayse’s three-decade quest for tenure is littered with bodies. It has outlived the careers of most of the people involved — and several of the people themselves.

In 1979, Mr. Hayse filed a lawsuit against the University of Kentucky that has turned into a legal Ping-Pong match anecdotally described as the longest-running court battle in the Bluegrass State, and perhaps the lengthiest tenure dispute in the country.

Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor now on Facebook!

Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor is now on Facebook!

Join our Facebook page and look for the forthcoming issue on “Mental Labor” (guest edited by Steven Wexler).