The Globe and Mail: Queen’s cuts homecoming over rowdies
Queen’s University is cancelling its annual fall homecoming event for two years in an effort to put an end to the rowdy street party that has grown up around the weekend.
In its place, it will hold a spring reunion in May, the Kingston, Ont., university announced Tuesday morning.
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Posted in Students
Inside Higher Ed: Layoffs at ORU
Oral Roberts University is planning to eliminate the jobs of about 100 people over the course of the academic year. While many colleges are facing tough times because of the economy, Oral Roberts has the additional burden of recovering from a scandal that led to the departure of its previous president. The university has pledged that no one will lose a job until at least March.
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Posted in Budgets & Funding
AP: Venezuela, Iran team up on university plan
CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — Venezuela and Iran plan to start a new university program in the South American country with a focus on teaching socialist principles.
Venezuela’s government says it plans to establish the University of Civilizations under accords recently signed with Iran.
Deputy Minister for Academic Development Tibisay Hung says the program will begin in Caracas at the existing, tuition-free Bolivarian University.
Hung tells the state-run Bolivarian News Agency that the aim is to promote discussion of “21st century socialism.” Venezuela announced the program on Monday.
President Hugo Chavez is promising to lead Venezuela toward socialism, and in recent years has built increasingly close ties with Iran.
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Posted in Government
Inside Higher Ed: Nevada College Chancellor Asks U.S. for $3 Billion Bailout
Jim Rogers has never been accused of lacking chutzpah. But he may have outdone himself this time.
Rogers, chancellor of the Nevada System of Higher Education, has spent most of this year in a public (and one-sided) war of words with the state’s governor, Jim Gibbons, over the impact on the state’s education system of Nevada’s deteriorating economy. He has sent Gibbons weekly memos criticizing his policies, laying out dire scenarios that may befall the state’s colleges and schools, and not-so-occasionally insulting the governor.
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Posted in Budgets & Funding
The Chronicle: Binghamton Rescinds Punishment of Social-Work Student in Poster Incident
The social-work department at the State University of New York at Binghamton has dropped its case against a graduate student who professors had said should be suspended after he displayed posters on the campus criticizing the city’s housing authority, which is led by an adjunct instructor in the department.
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Posted in Students
The Chronicle: Cal State System Threatens Enrollment Cuts
California State University says it will cut enrollment by 10,000 students next fall if state lawmakers fail to find more money for the 23-campus system.
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Posted in Budgets & Funding
ABC News: Teachers’ ballot endorses strike
A ballot of public school teachers in South Australia has endorsed a strike plan for next Friday and further rolling stoppages until the end of term.
The SA Government will ask the Industrial Relations Commission to intervene to avert the action.
Correna Haythorpe from the Australian Education Union says about 80 per cent of members have backed next Friday’s strike plan, and the further rolling stoppages.
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Posted in Strikes & Labor Disputes
Daily News Online: Govt says most teachers’ claims not genuine
As teachers yesterday announced a countrywide strike starting next Monday, the government has said about half of their claims are not genuine. The decision to call the strike was announced by the President of the Tanzania Teachers Union (TTU), Mr Gratian Mukoba, yesterday at a press conference in Dar es Salaam two days after the Court of Appeal had ruled in their favour.
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Posted in Salary/Economic Benefits
Daily News Online: Teachers divided over strike
Teachers are sharply divided over which way to go…strike or go back to class, our random survey reveals. However, the President of the Tanzania Teachers Union (TTU), Mr Gratian Mukoba, has maintained that today’s strike remains as scheduled.
But his position is not shared by teachers in Mbeya and Mwanza regions, where teachers say they will not join in the strike. “TTU should address itself to more serious problems facing teachers…teachers are sacked from their jobs without proper procedures while others are mistreated by their education officers and the TTU takes no action,” some teachers said in Mbeya.
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Posted in Strikes & Labor Disputes
KVUE: UT faculty, staff demand domestic partner benefits
They call it a fight for their civil rights. Some faculty and staff at the University of Texas say it’s time for the school to provide domestic partner benefits.
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Posted in Equity, Salary/Economic Benefits
Golden Gate [X]press: Budget battle begins with student, faculty sit-in
Universities in the CSU system have been asked to make an additional $66 million in mid-semester cuts to their programs, and at least one department at SF State is saying “no way.”
The Department of Anthropology has refused to make the proposed cuts called for by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s latest budget revision, using class time to discuss the reductions that could catastrophically limit class availability and tarnish the program’s credibility in the academic community, said department chair Doug Bailey.
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Posted in Protests
The Chronicle News Blog: U.S. Senator Questions Whether College Presidents Should Serve on Corporate Boards
Washington — Sen. Charles E. Grassley has issued a written statement urging college trustees to reconsider whether their presidents should serve on corporate boards.
“University boards should look at what students gain or lose from having the university president sit on corporate boards, such as Bear Stearns,” said Mr. Grassley, an Iowa Republican and the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee. “Maybe there are fund-raising gains, but those gains might be undercut by time away from the institution or conflicts of interest.”
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Posted in Administration, Corporate University
The Chronicle News: Professor Is Among 8 Arrested in Colombia in Connection With Alleged Guerrilla Activities
Bogotá, Colombia — The police have arrested at least eight people, including a professor at a public university, in connection with an investigation into alleged guerrilla activities on Colombian campuses.
The investigation was triggered by the military’s capture in February of a flash memory stick from a camp of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, guerrillas who have been fighting for decades to overthrow Colombia’s elected governments and are labeled terrorists by the United States and Colombian governments. The information on the memory stick included the identities of thousands of guerrilla agents, including 55 doing subversive work at the nation’s universities, according to El Tiempo (in Spanish), a newspaper.
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Posted in Faculty
Inside Higher Ed: Nicholls State Faulted on Treatment of Long-Term Adjunct
After 12 years of work, you are entitled to more than one day of notice that you no longer have a job, even without tenure. That is among the conclusions of a report by an investigative committee of the American Association of University Professors
The AAUP found that Nicholls State University, in Louisiana, violated the due process rights and academic freedom of Maureen Watson when it terminated her in that way last year. Watson had been working as a non-tenure-track lecturer in mathematics, earning exemplary reviews until her dismissal.
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Posted in Contingent labor, Employment rights, Working conditions
Post-Intelligencer: College paper up in the air over shutdown
The doors of the City Collegian newspaper office have been closed — at least for now. The locks were changed over the summer. The lights are off, and stacks of Seattle Central Community College’s student paper are barely visible through a window.
The once-biweekly newspaper is frozen in time online, too — its Web site still displaying news stories dated June 9. That was the last time the Collegian published, a date that might mark the most recent link in a chain of college newspaper deaths around the state.
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Posted in Free speech, Students
Houston Chronicle: UTMB to lay off 3,800 people
AUSTIN — The University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, still reeling from Hurricane Ike, is laying off some 3,800 people.
In a news release, the UT Board of Regents said it was forced to make the job cuts because the teaching hospital was running out of money.
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Posted in Budgets & Funding, Faculty, Working conditions
Inside Higher Ed: Vigilante Justice on Plagiarism
At Texas A&M International, an instructor told students he would fail and publicly humiliate them if they engaged in academic dishonesty. They did and he did — so the university fired him.
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Posted in Ethics, Faculty, Students, Working conditions
The Chronicle News Blog: Californians Cite Costs and Budget Cuts as Biggest Problems in Higher Ed
Berkeley, Calif. — Californians believe affordability and a lack of government support are the top issues facing colleges and universities in the state, but a majority are unwilling to pay more taxes or tuition to support higher education, according to a statewide survey conducted by the Public Policy Institute of California and released late Wednesday.
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Posted in Economics
Ottawa Citizen: Ottawa university instructor arrested in 1980 blast at Paris synagogue
An Ottawa university instructor has been arrested for the infamous terrorist bombing of a Paris synagogue in 1980 that killed four people, injured scores of others and put synagogues around the world on a tough new security footing.
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Posted in Faculty
Inside Higher Ed: Accusations and Suicides
For the second time this year, a professor at the University of Iowa has taken his own life after being accused of sexual harassment.
For the university, which also has faced a scandal involving alleged sexual assault by athletes and a devastating flood this year, the latest incident added to an unsettling semester.
On Wednesday, just a week after he was accused of sexual harassment in a lawsuit, Mark Weiger killed himself. He was a professor of music known for his oboe performances and teaching. A former student and teaching assistant’s lawsuit, filed in federal court against Weiger and the university, charged that he had a romantic relationship with another student, engaged in repeated classroom banter and touching of an inappropriate nature, and created a sexually hostile environment. According to the suit, the university conducted its own investigation of the situation last year, found Weiger had violated policies against sexual harassment, and then resolved the issue “informally.” He was found in his car, dead from carbon monoxide poisoning, with the garage door at his home closed. Authorities said he left a note.
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Posted in Faculty
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