News & Observer: Shaw students protest dorm conditions
RALEIGH – More than 100 of Shaw University students packed the lobby of the university president’s office this morning in a silent protest over poor dorm conditions, including moldy bathrooms, toilets that don’t work and overcrowded dorm rooms.
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Posted in Protests
Newsda: Stony Brook research assistants vote to unionize
Research assistants at Stony Brook University have voted to unionize after a nine-month campaign that organizers called the largest union drive on Long Island in recent memory.
In a vote of 214-135 tallied Friday evening, the research assistants – all doctoral students – decided to join Local 1104 of the Communications Workers of America. There are about 745 research assistants at Stony Brook, organizers said.
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Posted in Organizing
The Tennessean: Regents chief’s cost-cutting ideas inflame Tenn. colleges
4-day weeks, required peer tutoring in plan
With only a few months to go as chancellor of the Tennessee Board of Regents, Charles Manning could have coasted to a quiet exit from his role overseeing 45 state universities, community colleges and technology centers, leaving long-term budget headaches to his replacement.
Manning will not go quietly, it turns out.
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Posted in Administration
The Chronicle News Blog: Tenure at Risk in Kentucky’s Community Colleges
The Board of Regents of the Kentucky Community and Technical College system will vote in March on a proposal to eliminate tenure for all new faculty hires beginning in 2009.
The board, which met today to discuss the proposal, is also considering a plan to wipe out health-care benefits in retirement for people hired after June 30, 2009.
The regents spent about 45 minutes at today’s meeting discussing details of the two proposals, after receiving a report from staff members of the system about how such a plan might be carried out.
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Posted in Tenure & Promotion
Inside Higher Ed: A Faculty Caste System?
WASHINGTON — As many institutions begin to designate and differentiate graduate faculty from regular faculty, they run the risk of creating something akin to an academic caste system. But with careful thought and planning, two speakers at a session of the annual meeting of the Council of Graduate Schools said Thursday, that does not have to be the case.
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Posted in Faculty
Inside Higher Ed: Racial Gaps in Faculty Job Satisfaction
Surveys by COACHE — the acronym for the Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education — have played a key role in recent years in drawing attention to the frustrations and hopes of young faculty members. The studies have been influential in campus discussions about the need for more clarity about tenure expectations or the importance of family-friendly policies.
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Posted in Diversity, Faculty, Tenure & Promotion, Working conditions
The Chronicle: On the Road to Tenure, Minority Professors Report Frustrations
Minority professors on the tenure track aren’t as satisfied with their academic workplace as their white counterparts are, says a new report.
Native American junior faculty members, for instance, felt that most aspects of the tenure process were less clear than did white faculty members, and they were less satisfied with their institution’s culture.
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Posted in Diversity, Tenure & Promotion
Washington Post: Court Rules Against Teacher in MySpace ‘Drunken Pirate’ Case
A student teacher who was denied a teaching degree just days before graduating has lost a court battle against her would-be alma mater. One of the contributing reasons for her dismissal was because of a photo she posted onto MySpace.com
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Posted in Legal issues
The Chronicle News Blog: Stanford’s President and Provost Will Take 10% Pay Cuts
The president and provost of Stanford University are taking immediate 10-percent cuts in their salaries as part of an overall plan to trim the university’s budget, and other senior administrators have also volunteered to take salary reductions, the provost, John W. Etchemendy, said on Tuesday in a letter to faculty and staff members.
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Posted in Salary/Economic Benefits
The Galveston County Daily News: Lawsuit against UT regents raises old fears
A lawsuit filed Tuesday ponders whether University of Texas System regents used a catastrophic hurricane as cover to carry out a long-desired but thorny political coup — moving the state’s oldest medical school to Austin.
An island retailer, a retired medical branch employee and an assistant professor still employed there, along with the Texas Faculty Association, filed the lawsuit in Judge Wayne Mallia’s 405th District Court.
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Posted in Legal issues
San Francisco Chronicle: UC chief changes buyout policy
The new president of the University of California system pledged Tuesday that employees in his office no longer will be allowed to collect full severance checks and then be rehired at other UC locations.
While avoiding open criticism of his predecessor, Robert Dynes, President Mark Yudof noted that the program in which 16 employees got hefty severance checks and landed in other UC jobs this year was created prior to June, when he took the 10-campus university’s top job.
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Posted in Salary/Economic Benefits
Toronto Star: Time to end York strike, professor says
Dec 02, 2008 04:30 AM
As a faculty member, I am distressed by the debilitating effects on students of the avoidable labour dispute and lockout between management and contract faculty/tutorial assistants at York University. Many of these students have been victims of strikes since they were in elementary school in the anti-education years of the Harris government. Now my fourth-year students end their 17 years of schooling with this debacle. York’s administration cannot replace the time lost or the resources wasted. Hardball tactics over the years have resulted in a series of often lengthy strikes with faculty, admin staff and contract teaching staff. York’s management rhetoric on academic standards, currently amplified for the 50th anniversary in 2009, is hollow when students feel betrayed and abandoned.
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Posted in Strikes & Labor Disputes
InsideToronto.com: York U. strike passes four-week mark
Talks have broken off between York University administrators and the union representing 3,300 contract faculty, teaching assistants and graduate assistants after coming back to the bargaining table with a provincial mediator for three days late last week.
Greg Long, the mediator from the Ontario Ministry of Labour, released a statement on Monday saying, “The parties remain far apart on the key issues in this dispute and that a settlement is not close in hand. Therefore, there are no further negotiations scheduled at this time.”
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Posted in Strikes & Labor Disputes
USA Today: Studies link part-time college faculty to worse education
It’s no secret that colleges and universities are relying increasingly on part-time instructors or other faculty who are neither tenured nor on track for tenure. But a flurry of recent studies draw troubling conclusions about what kind of impact that is having on the quality of a student’s education.
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Posted in Contingent labor
Burlington Free Press: Layoffs, salary freezes loom at UVM
Fogel cites austerity measures to come
Layoffs and spending freezes are likely at the University of Vermont in the face of a projected $22 million budget gap, President Dan Fogel told the UVM community in a memo Tuesday. Details on staff cuts, however, won’t be available until the first of the year.
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Posted in Budgets & Funding
The Chronicle: Nearly Half of Undergraduate Courses Are Taught by Non-Tenure-Track Instructors
A new report offers some hard data on how often undergraduates at the nation’s public colleges and universities take courses taught by contingent faculty members, those who are neither tenured nor on the tenure track.
Such faculty members, most of whom work part time, teach…
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Posted in Tenure & Promotion
Ann Arbor News: Former University of Michigan dental student awarded $1.72M
A jury awarded $1.72 million Tuesday to a former University of Michigan dental student who said she was illegally kicked out of school.
Alissa Zwick claimed she was thrown out of the dental school in 2005 because of a feud between the associate dean, Dr. Marilyn Lantz, and two faculty members.
A jury in federal court in Detroit said Zwick’s due-process rights were violated when she was dismissed after her third year. She had a “B” average but was told she wasn’t performing well in clinical classes.
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Posted in Legal issues
The New York Times: Cleveland Clinic Discloses Doctors’ Industry Ties
The Cleveland Clinic plans to announce this week it has begun publicly reporting the business relationships that any of its 1,800 staff doctors and scientists have with drug and device makers.
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Posted in Corporate University
Inside Higher Ed: Tenure on the Chopping Block
Amid state budget concerns, the Kentucky Community and Technical College System may eliminate tenure for all new faculty members and instead offer short-term renewable contracts. System leaders say the plan will give them a flexibility they need, but many professors fear a potential loss of academic freedom and job security.
The system’s Board of Regents will discuss a proposed revision of its employment policy during its next meeting this Friday. The proposed policy revision would grandfather in those individuals who either have already been granted tenure or are on a tenure track prior to July 1, 2009. Currently, the system has 168 faculty members on the tenure track, and they would either have tenure granted or denied by 2014.
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Posted in Tenure & Promotion
Inside Higher Ed: Breadth of Adjunct Use and Abuse
The use of adjuncts is well known among academics, but many believe that these instructors are utilized primarily in certain areas (such as the humanities) or certain types of institutions (such as community colleges). But a report being released today by the American Federation of Teachers suggests that the breadth and depth of adjunct use is greater than many realize — such that they are teaching a majority of public college and university courses, and are a major force in a wide range of disciplines.
The report — “Reversing Course: The Troubled State of Academic Staffing and a Path Forward” — is designed to publicize the extent of adjunct use with a mind toward encouraging more colleges to either improve the pay they offer adjuncts or shift more of their positions to the tenure track. Along those lines, the AFT is releasing a new tool that allows colleges to calculate the costs of changing staffing policies. The goal is to show that modest changes may be possible — even in tight budget years like this one — and that over time, such changes could have a meaningful impact on the makeup of faculties and the compensation of adjuncts.
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Posted in Contingent labor
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