Union Leader: UNH faculty, staff take buyout deals
DURHAM – More than 60 University of New Hampshire staff members and about a dozen of the faculty are slated to take a buyout and walk away from their jobs.
UNH will buy out 61 staff members for about $2.96 million in money and benefits and 14 faculty members for about $1.7 million, according to numbers the university provided.
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Posted in Campaigns & Contracts
Exchange Morning Post: Tentative deal reached between Wilfrid Laurier University and union representing part-time faculty
WATERLOO, ON – Wilfrid Laurier University and the Wilfrid Laurier University Faculty Association, the union representing the striking Contract Academic Staff members, have reached a tentative agreement, which now requires ratification by both parties.
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Posted in Campaigns & Contracts
The Guardian: Teachers to strike over pay
The prime minister is facing the prospect of the first national teachers’ strike in 21 years after teachers voted to hold a one-day walkout over pay.
Up to 200,000 members of the National Union of Teachers will strike on April 24 in a dispute with the government.
The action will cause mass disruption to primary and secondary schools with many forced to close for the day and most offering a reduced timetable.
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Posted in Strikes & Labor Disputes
Daily Star: Teachers’ strike among ‘most successful’ in union’s history
Teachers’ strike among ‘most successful’ in union’s history
BEIRUT: Private and public school teachers, as well as Lebanese university professors and instructors, held a strike on Thursday to call for an increase of their salaries, which have remained flat since 1996. Nehme Mahfoud, who heads the Teachers Union for private schools, said that the strike was being carried out throughout Lebanon and across all educational fields, adding that “this is one of the most successful strikes in the union’s history.”
Mahfoud also said that Education Minister Khaled Qabbani had informed union members that the Cabinet would discuss the teachers’ demands during its regular session next week.
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Posted in Strikes & Labor Disputes
Mmegi: Unions Call Off Their Strike
Tomorrows planned demonstrations against the recently introduced 15 percent salary increase for civil servants, have been postponed.
The demonstrations were to coincide with the inauguration of the country’s fourth president, Lieutenant General Ian Khama.
Chairperson of the protesters’ steering committee and BOSETU president Eric Ditau, confirmed the postponement to the Monitor last Friday.
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Posted in Strikes & Labor Disputes
The Citizen: Teachers set to strike
Teachers are set to walk out later this month as part of industrial action over pay.
The National Union of Teachers who have more than 1,000 members in Blackpool, Wyre and Fylde, and members from the Preston and Chorley areas are expected to join a one day strike on April 24.
The are calling for an above inflation increase of 2.45 per cent in their salaries this year and voted three to one in favour of the walk-out.
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Posted in Strikes & Labor Disputes
World Socialist Website: Secondary school teachers in France protest proposed job losses
French secondary school teachers have been involved in a series of strikes over the past week to oppose plans to slash up to 11,200 teaching jobs at the beginning of the next school year and proposed cuts in the education budget.
The National Secondary Teachers Union (SNES) called a strike that was held on March 27 in the school district of Créteil, near Paris. According to the Education International web site www.ei-ie.org, education trade unions held a March 26 meeting of some 120 educators representing about 50 schools in 12 local education districts.
The strike follows a previous stoppage by secondary school teachers on March 18.
The unions also planned to hold strike action this week and announced that the SNES will meet with members of parliament and the Ministry of Education for discussions.
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Posted in Protests
Liverpool Echo: Student teachers to strike
TRAINEE teachers are set to join Merseyside’s first teacher strike for more than 20 years.
The ECHO can reveal that student teachers at Liverpool Hope university met with student union chiefs and said they wanted to show their solidarity with the NUT’s April 24 walkout over pay and class sizes.
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Posted in Strikes & Labor Disputes
Plain Dealer: Mystery buyer ready to take over ailing Myers U.
An out-of-state firm is preparing to purchase struggling Myers University.
The buyer is a for-profit entity known in legal documents only as Myers Education LLC. It’s a legitimate group that on Tuesday signed a letter of intent to buy the 160-year-old institution, said Mary Whitmer, an attorney representing the court-appointed special master overseeing the university’s interests.
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Posted in Corporate University
Inside Higher Ed: Pardon Me, but Your Door Is Terribly Offensive
Getting one’s own office can be a rite of passage right up there with defending a dissertation or receiving tenure — and many professors’ lairs are reflections of their own attitudes and beliefs. Usually, it takes just a quick glance at the door, as anyone who’s taken a stroll down the hall of an academic building can attest: What a professor finds amusing, outrageous or just plain interesting is there for all to see.
At a public university, such common displays of individual preference would presumably fall under the protections of the First Amendment. But not when such displays are offensive to others, according to officials at Lake Superior State University, which threatened to reprimand a tenured professor whose door boasted cartoons and other images of a conservative political bent. In a March 26 letter to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, which had been monitoring the case and publicized it on Wednesday, an outside lawyer representing the university reiterated its argument that because the professor “acted in an unprofessional and insubordinate manner, his actions cannot be considered protected speech.”
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Posted in Free speech
The Ubyssey: On campus demonstration turns ugly; 20 students arrested
Updated Tuesday, April 8, 2008—Twenty UBC students were arrested Friday night as Knoll Aid 2.0, a student-organized demonstration, turned ugly.
The demonstration, billed as a “peaceful celebration in defence of public space” by organizers, began to escalate at around 6pm after students listening to music and dancing in the area between the old bus loop and the grassy knoll decided to light a large bonfire on the sidewalk.
Approximately one hour later campus RCMP and firefighters arrived, to the dismay of those in attendance. Students responded by trying to obstruct the firefighters’ access to the bonfire.
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Posted in Uncategorized
Georgia Straight: Students allege RCMP brutality at UBC
Students for a Democratic Society issued this news release (see below) in connection with allegations of RCMP brutality on the UBC campus this weekend. Straight.com has been unable to confirm the allegations contained in this news release, but decided to post it on the Web site for the benefit of anyone wondering about the students’ point of view on this matter.
PRESS RELEASE: POLICE BRUTALITY AT KNOLL AID
Today a peaceful celebration in defence of public space at UBC was violently quashed by the RCMP. This press release was written on April 5th at 1 a.m. with limited available information. All the events discussed herein have been either captured by camera or can be corroborated by multiple eyewitness accounts.
On Friday, April 4th, UBC students loosely associated with Trek Park and SDS held “Knoll Aid 2.0,” a musical celebration of public space on campus.
Knoll Aid 2.0 was part of a larger campaign against the commercialization of campus, the demolition of the grassy knoll, and the development of a $40 underground bus-loop. Knoll Aid 2.0 was an overwhelmingly peaceful event and featured local musicians, free food, and three simultaneous petition drives. It was attended by primarily UBC students.
Though Knoll Aid 2.0 began at noon on Friday, at around 8:00/8:30 RCMP and the Fire department arrived at the area known as “Trek Park” (a liberated space near the grassy knoll) because some students had created a small bonfire. Citing a bylaw violation, the RCMP approached one student, Stefanie Ratjen, in a rather aggressive manner and began speaking with her.
After a dialogue, the contents of which are still unknown, Stefanie was grabbed by an RCMP officer and thrown to the ground, pinned, and handcuffed. Her face was literally shoved in a puddle of mud while an RCMP officer sat on top of her. After this uncalled act of police aggression, fellow students came to her aid. One musician was immediately arrested for questioning the RCMP officer’s treatment of Stefanie. For approx. two hours students formed a chain to protest RCMP action and several students attempted to peacefully negotiate the release of Stefanie and the musician (whose name at this point is unknown).
During this time approx. 30 RCMP cars with officers from across Vancouver and the lower mainland including Richmond came to UBC. Campus security was also present and threatened to discipline students if they did not cooperate with the RCMP. Police officers systematically attempted to break the human chain students had formed by pushing, shoving and kicking.
RCMP officers randomly arrested any student present at the scene including Bahram Norouzi who was arrested in the middle of a CTV interview. At around 10:30 p.m. on approx. 25 students were arrested and detained. They were brought to a Main and Hastings detention center where they presently still remain.
This press release would like to draw attention to the conduct of the RCMP.
A university is intended for students, not the police. Upon entering student space, the police should have had the decency, at the very least, to deal with students in a respectful and dignified manner. Instead, RCMP officers were highly aggressive and belligerent. RCMP officers committed gross abuses of power by, for example, threatening to release dogs on students and pointing taser guns at students that were already pinned down to the floor.
The actions of RCMP officers are testament of police misconduct, if not brutality. We demand the release of all students arrested and demand that all charges be dropped. Furthermore, we demand an inquiry of the RCMP’s actions in relation to this event and the treatment of students. Lastly, we demand that UBC administration defends student’s rights to a peaceful protest.
To repeat, this was a peaceful celebration/concert in defence of public space. The RCMP had no right to violently quash a peaceful student protest.
Signed,
Trek Park for the People
Students for a Democratic Society
Student Environment Center
Social Justice Center
—
Students for a Democratic Society, UBC
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Posted in Protests
Vancouver Sun: 19 UBC students under arrest
Nineteen students protesting the loss of a favourite meeting spot at the university are being held by police in Vancouver
VANCOUVER — Nineteen students were arrested at the University of British Columbia Friday night after an open-air gathering became what UBC RCMP are calling a “volatile situation.”
The students were socializing at the tail-end of an eight-hour music and social event dubbed “Knoll Aid 2.0,” which was being held to protest ongoing campus development and the expected loss of a well-loved public space — the grassy knoll outside the student union building.
A six-minute video posted on YouTube (warning: coarse language) shows several dozen students chanting “save the knoll” as they gathered around a pallet-fueled bonfire that was lit near the knoll Friday evening.
Inside Higher Ed: Many Uses for ‘New York Times’ Distance Ed Venture
Instead of sifting through existing texts to find case studies suitable for his course, Matt Cookson decided to go straight to the source. In his Introduction to Public Relations class, which he teaches as an adjunct at the University of New Hampshire at Manchester, he uses content pulled directly from online archives of The New York Times — embedded within the course management system itself.
Except it isn’t a course management system, exactly, though it does allow faculty members to post assignments and readings online for students to download. Calling it a social network wouldn’t be fair either, though it does offer personalized profiles for students and professors. An “integrated online course content, portfolio and communications tool” is a bit closer, but its actual name is Epsilen. Last September, the Times announced a partnership with the service in its push into the distance learning market.
Last month, it finalized a deal to purchase a 53 percent majority stake in the holding company that markets Epsilen, an environment that was originally developed at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis’s Purdue School of Engineering and Technology. (For the record, Felice Nudelman, director of education for the Times, called it “the most robust Web 2.0 learning platform in the world.”)
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Posted in Media
Inside Higher Ed: The Seniority Pay Cut
To get a good raise, do you need to quit?
That may well be the case at many colleges that are suffering from salary compression and salary inversion — situations where those hired most recently are paid disproportionately more or flat out more than those with more experience. The issue is attracting the attention not only of faculty leaders, but of college administrators, who fear that these salary gaps discourage talented faculty members from staying at an institution.
On Tuesday, at the annual meeting of the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions, some college officials and experts shared their takes on the issue, and strategies for eliminating these “anomalies” in what people are paid.
The most striking example was offered by Mark Preble, assistant vice chancellor for human resources at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. He did an analysis last year of the salaries of all assistant professors. He found that those hired in 2007 – who hadn’t been there long enough to have received raises — earned more on average than those hired in 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005 or 2006. The starting salary has gone up by so much, he said, that those not on the market are effectively punished for not moving. Indeed those hired that year were earning about $10,000 more a year than those hired five years before.
“It pays to quit,” he said.
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Posted in Salary/Economic Benefits
Inside Higher Ed: Tenure News on YouTube
Sure, colleges may issue press releases to announce those who have recently been awarded tenure. But is that really individual or special enough to share the news of such a key moment? You can read the news about Brian Donovan winning tenure in sociology at the University of Kansas in the official announcement here. But he also took to YouTube with a video to mark the moment. Congratulations, Brian.
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Posted in Tenure & Promotion
Inside Higher Ed: Affirmative Action Challenged Anew
When Texas and a few other states responded to bans on affirmative action with “percent plans,” which guarantee admission to public colleges to those who graduate in some designated top percentile of their high school classes, some critics of affirmative action were troubled. The plans were adopted in states like Texas where many high schools are largely segregated (by housing patterns, not law), so offering automatic admission for the top 10 percent of graduates assures a measure of diversity at public universities. Some critics viewed the plans as an end run around the bans on affirmative action since the plans were designed with the idea of getting more black and Latino students into top universities — but in a way that couldn’t be legally challenged.
St Petersburg Times: Strapped colleges are paying double-dippers
TALLAHASSEE — At a time when universities are capping enrollment, cutting staffs and losing faculty members to other states, more than 475 employees at state universities have “retired” and returned to the payroll.
On top of state retirement benefits, they are collecting salaries of about $23-million.
Double-dipping among university employees is similar to what has been happening in the rest of state and local government, where 8,000 public employees and elected officials are double- and even triple-dipping.
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Posted in Salary/Economic Benefits
Chronicle News Blog: Faculty Coalition Urges Colleges to Investigate Clustering of Athletes in Easy Courses
An influential faculty-led athletics coalition issued a call this morning for colleges to investigate whether their athletes are clustered in certain majors and taking snap courses.
The announcement by the Coalition on Intercollegiate Athletics, made up of more than 50 faculty senates at NCAA Division I-A institutions, comes in response to allegations that athletes at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor are steered into independent-study courses where some professors give them an easy pass.
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Posted in Academics
The Chronicle: Lawsuit Accuses U. of Texas of Illegally Reintroducing Race-Based Admissions
A federal lawsuit filed here on Monday accuses the University of Texas at Austin of improperly considering an applicant’s race when more-effective, race-neutral, ways of achieving diversity were available.
The plaintiff, a white, 18-year-old applicant from Richmond, Tex., who was rejected by the university, filed the suit with the backing of the Project on Fair Representation, a Washington-based legal-defense fund that opposes affirmative action. A copy of the complaint is available on the organization’s Web site.
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Posted in Diversity
