The Philadelphia Inquirer: To woo academic recruits, college makes them stars
Justin Chung knew Wilkes University wanted him when he got one of its first acceptance letters in February. But he didn’t know how badly until he saw the mall kiosk with his name on it.
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Posted in Students
The Chronicle: Google E-mail Service Inspires Fears of U.S. Spying Among Canadian Faculty Members
An arbitrator convened a hearing this week to consider a grievance filed by the faculty association of a university in Ontario. The group fears professors’ messages will not be secure once they cross the border.
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Posted in Technology
Detroit News: U-M instructors back to class
Graduate student teachers settle contract with university, ending one-day strike.
ANN ARBOR — Following a one-day strike, graduate student instructors at the University of Michigan reached a tentative agreement with school officials late Tuesday and will return to class today.
“We feel encouraged,” said Kiara Vigil, vice president of the Graduate Employees Organization. “Both the university and students will benefit. It’s a win.”
The union, which represents some 1,700 members, and university officials bargained until about 11:40 p.m. Tuesday.
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Posted in Strikes & Labor Disputes
CBC News: St. John’s prof maltreated, external review finds
A Memorial University of Newfoundland medical professor was bullied and harassed by employers and colleagues at a St. John’s teaching hospital, according to a report released Wednesday.
Dr. Cathy Popadiuk, a professor of medicine at Memorial as well as an oncologist with the Eastern Health regional authority, complained five years ago that her professional reputation was unfairly damaged by allegations that she was incompetent.
A report released by the Canadian Association of University Teachers, which struck a three-member committee to investigate the case, found that Popadiuk was poorly treated by supervisors at both her university and hospital.
“We concluded that there were incidents of harassment and threats to academic freedom,” said Albert Katz, a University of Western Ontario psychology professor who headed the investigation.
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Posted in Faculty
Chronicle News Blog: Canadian University Treated Professor Unfairly, Review Team Finds
An external review says a medical professor at Memorial University of Newfoundland was subjected to years of harassment and bullying. According to a report released today, the review committee concluded that Cathy Popadiuk, a gynecological oncologist, “experienced a pattern of harassment that extended over a period of years.” The report says that Dr. Popadiuk “was placed in an intimidating, hostile environment, has been discouraged by her superiors in carrying out acceptable treatment options she deemed best for her patients,” and “has had her clinical work assessed in a manner that denied her natural justice.”
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Posted in Faculty
AP: College-Town Record Stores Shuttering
CHAPEL HILL, N.C. (AP) — You need a college, of course, but that’s not the only ingredient in a good college town. You need quirky bookstores. Coffee shops — preferably not all chains. A diner. An artsy cinema. A dive bar.
There’s one other thing you need, and it’s getting harder to find: a local record store. The kind of place with poster-covered walls, tattoo-covered customers, and an indie-rock aficionado at the cash register, somebody in a retro T-shirt who helps you navigate the store’s eclectic inventory.
A few years ago on just one block of Chapel Hill’s Franklin Street, the main drag in what’s been called America’s ideal college town, four or five such places catered both to locals and University of North Carolina students.
But with the demise of Schoolkids Records, the last one is gone. Schoolkids had planned to gut it out through March, but couldn’t even make through its final week and shut down Saturday. It’s just the latest victim in an industry hit by rising college-town rents, big-box retailers, high CD prices, and — most importantly — a new generation of college students for whom music has become an entirely online, intangible hobby they often don’t have to pay for.
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Posted in Campus Life
The Washington Post: Affirmative Action Foes Push Ballot Initiatives
Activists, With Eyes on November, Focus on Five States
CHICAGO — Sixteen months after voters in Michigan voted to kill affirmative action in the public sphere, opponents of preferences based on race and gender are pushing five more states to ban the practice.
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Posted in Equity
The Chronicle News Blog: Japanese Academics Decry Government Decision That Blocked Italian Philosopher’s Visit
Japanese academics have criticized a government decision that they say effectively refused to allow the Italian scholar and political activist Antonio Negri to enter the country.
Mr. Negri, a Marxist philosopher who served a prison sentence in Italy on controversial charges of “insurrection against the state,” had been scheduled to give a series of lectures at the Universities of Tokyo and Kyoto and other venues in late March and early April, but was forced to abruptly cancel his trip last week after being told he would need a permit to entry the country. Italian nationals can normally travel to Japan without visas, but a Foreign Office spokesman said “political criminals” needed “special landing permits.”
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Posted in Academic freedom, Free speech, Government
Inside Higher Ed: Florida Lawmaker to Forgo Pay in University Job
A Florida state senator is giving up her $120,000-a-year position at a university reading research center that she was instrumental in helping to create, four days after Inside Higher Ed first publicized the arrangement.
An article on this site last week highlighted the appointment of Sen. Evelyn J. Lynn to help Florida State University get a new outreach center for its Florida Center for Reading Research off the ground on Lynn’s home turf of Daytona Beach. While Lynn was a longtime teacher and administrator in the schools of Florida’s Volusia County and has a doctorate in instructional leadership and administration, the arrangement drew scrutiny because, as head of the Senate’s education committee in 2006, she worked to ensure that language creating the center made its way into legislation.
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Posted in Ethics, Government
The Detroit News: U-M instructors skip classes today and Wednesday over pay
ANN ARBOR — Graduate student instructors at the University of Michigan will conduct a work stoppage today and Wednesday after negotiations broke down Monday.
“We’re going to withhold our labor,” said Kiara Vigil, vice president of the Graduate Employees Organization union, which represents some 1,700. “It’s unfortunate that we have to walk out, but we have the strength of our membership.”
The union, which met with university officials four times last week, voted Saturday for the work stoppage if a proposed three-year deal had not been reached by midnight today, when their contract expired.
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Posted in Strikes & Labor Disputes
Inside Higher Ed: The ‘Double Hit’ on Women’s Salaries
Surveys abound showing that women in academe (and the rest of society) earn less than men. Likewise theories abound for why this is the case, so many years after it ceased to be acceptable for deans (or other bosses) to automatically assume a woman could make do with less.
A scholar at the University of Iowa who has been mining national data presented his latest findings Monday at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association. The results in short say that — even using the most sophisticated possible approach to take into consideration non-sexist reasons for pay differentials — a pay gap remains, based on gender. And while this can’t be definitively tied to sexism, there aren’t a lot of likely alternative explanations.
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Posted in Salary/Economic Benefits
The Chronicle Wired Campus: 3 of the Funniest E-Mail Messages From Students to Professors — and What They Say About Technology
Students these days seem to have no problem dashing out informal e-mail messages to their professors with gripes—er, feedback—or excuses. In The Chronicle’s forums, professors have been posting some of the rudest, most obnoxious, and least grammatical messages from students.
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Posted in Campus Life
The Chronicle New Blog: At One Major University, Not Much Evidence of Salary Compression
For at least two decades, older faculty members have fretted about a shrinking gap between junior and senior professors’ salaries on the tenure track – a phenomenon known as salary compression.
But at at least one major university, there is not much evidence of such compression across the last two decades, according to a paper presented here Monday during the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association.
The study was presented by Sharon L. Weinberg, a professor of educational statistics and psychology at New York University. Ms. Weinberg previously served there as vice provost for faculty affairs. Her study does not name the university under analysis, but during the conference panel, she strongly hinted that it is NYU.
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Posted in Strikes & Labor Disputes
The Chronicle: Gender Gap in Academic Wages Is Linked to Type of Institution, Researcher Says
The wage gap between men and women in academe is driven more by women’s concentration at certain institutions than by their concentration in certain disciplines, a scholar reported Monday at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association.
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Posted in Equity, Salary/Economic Benefits
The New York Times: In an Era of School Shootings, a New Drill
Teachers and students at South Brunswick High in Monmouth Junction, N.J., hiding in locked classrooms with the lights off during a recent emergency drill.
MONMOUTH JUNCTION, N.J. — Tim Matheney stalked the silent hallways of South Brunswick High School one recent Wednesday at 1:07 p.m., peering into dark, seemingly empty classrooms and jotting down room numbers whenever he heard giggles behind locked doors. Students were supposed to remain silent and out of sight.
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Posted in Campus Life
BBC: Greece to vote on pension reform
Trade unions say the planned changes are too brutal
Greece’s parliament is due to vote on a controversial pension reform bill that has triggered mass public protests.
The bill would eliminate most early retirement schemes, merge pension funds and cap auxiliary pensions.
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Posted in Strikes & Labor Disputes
The Cord Weekly: Part-time faculty strike: Day two
A rally of unprecedented size was held on campus Thursday afternoon in support of the CAS strike.
Part-time faculty strike: Day two355 activists provided their support for the contract academic staff (CAS) strike through a large protest on Thursday.
Beginning at noon in the parking lot of the St. Michael’s campus building, protestors including students, both full-time and part-time faculty and community members, showed up with signs, whistles and a variety of other noisemakers to display their solidarity alongside those on strike.
Also present were members of the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) and activists from universities including Memorial University, University of Prince Edward Island, University of Moncton, University of Guelph, Brock University, University of Western Ontario, York University and University of Ottawa.
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Posted in Strikes & Labor Disputes
The Norman Transcript: OU faculty: No guns in class
NORMAN, Okla. —
University of Oklahoma faculty spoke out this week against a state bill that would allow people to carry concealed weapons on college campuses.
The OU Faculty Senate passed a resolution against the bill early this week, despite being off for spring break.
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Posted in Campus Life
Brantford Expositor: Some teachers cross picket lines; No new talks scheduled between Laurier instructors, university
A handful of part-time teachers spent another cold day on the picket line Thursday as the strike at Laurier Brantford continued.
Picket captain Ron Ross, warming his hands with a hot cup of coffee, spent the day walking between downtown university buildings wearing a placard reading: “Our Vision? A Fair Wage.” He said he’s hoping for a quick resolution to the dispute but says the union is ready for a long haul.
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Posted in Strikes & Labor Disputes
Alberta: Struggling Sessionals
Gauntlet News: Struggling sessionals
It’s a generally-accepted view that university professors are paid more than burger-flippers. However, many students would be shocked and appalled to learn the wages at McDonalds are significantly higher than those received by a full quarter of the university’s teaching staff.
Sessional instructors at the university comprise 25.7 per cent of the overall academic staff. As opposed to tenured professors, who are contracted by the University of Calgary to teach on an ongoing basis, sessional instructors are given a set stipend per class they teach and are often seen as little more than auxiliary staff.
According to The University of Calgary Faculty Association president Anne Stalker, there are over 500 sessional instructors at the university with an additional 200 or so on contingency terms.
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Posted in Commentary