The Chronicle: Professors on YouTube, Take 2
Since writing about how professors are finding celebrity on YouTube, several people wrote in to point us to other efforts to offer lecture videos online. So here are a couple of more, with some updates on what they are up to:
Daily Press: Sex show at W&M OK’d by Nichol
The university’s president cites the First Amendment and academic openness in his decision.
WILLIAMSBURG – The Sex Workers’ Art Show will take place Monday at the College of William and Mary, after school President Gene Nichol granted students’ requests for the controversial show to be held on campus.
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Posted in Academic freedom, Free speech
The Red & Black: 20 Years of Shame
After 20 years of intimidation and innuendo, crude comments behind closed doors and boasts of “freaky” hot tubs, a tenured professor in the College of Education quit the day before the University found him in violation of sexually harassing his female students.
William Neil Bender, who teaches in the Communication Sciences and Special Education Department, has faced numerous accusations of harassment spanning back to 1988, the year when many of today’s freshmen and sophomores were born. According to documents obtained by The Red & Black, Bender tendered his resignation in September, but it will not take effect until May 6, 2008. During the interim, Bender is teaching two online courses, but “must refrain from having private and/or personal interactions with University students,” according to a document from the Office of Legal Affairs.
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Posted in Faculty
The Canadian Press: Striking N.B. professors reject final offer from St. Thomas University
6 hours ago
FREDERICTON – Striking professors at St. Thomas University in Fredericton have voted to reject a final contract offer from the university.
The vote, conducted by the province’s Labour and Employment Board, saw the offer rejected by 72 per cent of full-time faculty and 63 per cent of the part-time staff. The faculty association had recommended the offer be rejected.
Union president Suzanne Dudziak says she’s confident a collective agreement can be reached if the two sides can resume negotiations.
The labour dispute began Dec. 27 when the university locked out the professors, who are asking for higher wages. The school recently lifted the lockout, but faculty had already voted to strike.
There have been no classes for the 2,500 students at the university since the Christmas break.
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Posted in Strikes & Labor Disputes
CBC: STU faculty rejects administration’s offer
Faculty at St. Thomas University in Fredericton have rejected the administration’s final contract offer.
The vote conducted Monday and Tuesday by the province’s Labour and Employment Board saw full-time faculty members reject the deal by a count of 74-28.
Part-time faculty voted against it by a margin of 31-18.
The faculty union is calling for both sides to return to negotiations. The administration has not yet said if it’s willing to do that.
The union has been asking for increased wages, more office space and a reduced workload.
The offer that was voted down included a pay increase of three per cent annually for two years and 3.5 per cent in the third year.
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Posted in Strikes & Labor Disputes
The New York Times: Rove Passes Up Commencement Speech at Choate After the Students Object
WALLINGFORD, Conn. — When 17-year-old Alessio Manti heard that Karl Rove, the former chief political adviser to President Bush, would be delivering the commencement address this spring to his class at Choate Rosemary Hall — the elite boarding school that produced such liberal giants as John F. Kennedy and Adlai Stevenson — he was shocked.
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Posted in Students
Reuter: Turkish academic convicted of insulting Ataturk
ISTANBUL (Reuters) – A Turkish court imposed a suspended 15 month jail sentence on Monday on a professor for insulting modern Turkey’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, in a case likely to draw European Union criticism.
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Posted in International
Inside Higher Ed: Challenge to the Power of Tenure
If a faculty member has his or her tenure rights violated, one recourse may be to file a suit — where an aggrieved professor could seek not only damages but reinstatement. While most professors might not want to go to court, the knowledge that they have that as an option gives them an important protection.
What if a state law said instead that tenure violations could be settled with a small sum of money and no reinstatement — and that such minimal compensation is all you could get? Obviously that would be much less protection, and that’s why the American Association of University Professors is seeking to intervene in an unusual dispute involving a professor who was dismissed from a tenured job at the Inter-American University of Puerto Rico. A federal district court ruled that even if the professor could win on the merits of his suit, he would be entitled only to compensation under Puerto Rico’s Law 80, which provides victimized employees with three months of salary, plus a week of salary for every year of service, for those who have worked 15 years or more. (The professor had worked 28 years, so he would end up with less than a year of pay, with no chance at getting his job back.)
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Posted in Tenure & Promotion
Inside Higher Ed: The Sociology of ‘Hooking Up’
Many researchers rely on college undergraduates as subjects for studies of human behavior. For Kathleen A. Bogle, an assistant professor of sociology and criminal justice at LaSalle University who trained her scholarly lens on the students themselves, focusing on that cross-section was part of the design.
When people talk about “hooking up,” they’re referring to a subculture with a complex set of rules and expectations. Not surprisingly, most of what they know about student “hookup” culture comes from alarmist news reports of “risky sex” and the American Pie movies, not serious scholarship. In her new book, Hooking Up: Sex, Dating, and Relationships on Campus (New York University Press, 2008), Bogle wields the tools of the sociologist, employing in-depth interviews with students and graduates from two unnamed universities — one a large East Coast public university, the other a smaller Roman Catholic institution in the Northeast — and placing the culture of hooking up in a historical context. She answered questions via e-mail, shedding light on what she calls the “center of college social life.”
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Posted in Campus Life
The Chronicle: Turkish Professor Gets Suspended Sentence for Insulting Nation’s Founder
A professor of politics and political theory at a university in Ankara, Turkey, was convicted on Monday of insulting the memory of the founder of the modern Turkish Republic during a public panel discussion, and was given a 15-month suspended prison sentence.
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Posted in International
The Chronicle News Blog: A Victory for Adjunct Professors at Pace U.
A federal appeals court has blocked Pace University’s attempt to limit the size of the bargaining unit for adjunct professors, who are locked in a longstanding battle to negotiate a contract.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, in an opinion issued last week, agreed with the National Labor Relations Board that the union for part-time faculty members at Pace should include every instructor with a class load of at least three credit hours.
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Posted in Campaigns & Contracts, Contingent labor
Los Angeles Times: Racist Displays Persist at Minn. College
Bisharo Iman hoped college in St. Cloud would be different than attending high school there — no more taunts of “Go back to your country” aimed at her Somali dress, no more being slammed into lockers.
“I did get away from it — for a while,” said Iman, a junior business major at St. Cloud State University.
That was before a frightening six-week stretch in November and December when vandals carved or scrawled more than a dozen swastikas and other racist images on campus walls, elevators and bathroom stalls.
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Posted in Diversity
AP: WVU reforms team to probe degree granted to governor’s daughter
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – West Virginia University tapped three independent educators from New York, Missouri and Pennsylvania on Monday to help investigate allegations that Gov. Joe Manchin’s daughter was granted a master’s degree she didn’t earn.
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Posted in Ethics
CBC: Student union urges STU professors to accept contract
Student leaders at St. Thomas University in Fredericton say if striking faculty vote against a contract offer from the university next week, it will be viewed as a vote against students.
Student union president Colin Banks said students can no longer tolerate the faculty association’s disregard for students.
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Posted in Strikes & Labor Disputes
World Socialist Web Site: Canadian university forces locked-out faculty to vote on “final offer”
St. Thomas University has invoked an anti-worker provision of New Brunswick’s labor code to force 160 full- and part-time faculty, now in their fifth week of a strike-lockout, to vote on its “final contract offer.”
The vote, which is to be conducted by the province’s labor relations board, will be held today and Tuesday.
The forced vote is the latest step in an aggressive campaign led by the Board of Governor’s of St. Thomas University—a publicly-funded, liberal arts college located in Fredericton—to cripple, if not outright break, the faculty union, which is affiliated with the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT).
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Posted in Strikes & Labor Disputes
News & Star: Strike vote
NEARLY 3,000 teachers in Cumbria are to be asked if they would support a to strike.
It could lead to the first walk-out by teachers in more than 20 years.
The National Union of Teachers’ national executive agreed on Thursday that it would ballot its members in England and Wales on a one-day strike over pay.
The government has offered a rise of 2.45 per cent this year and 2.3 per cent in each of the following two years.
The union says the figure is below inflation as measured by the Retail Price Index which is at four per cent.
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Posted in Strikes & Labor Disputes
The Age: Catholic teachers threaten walk-out
VICTORIAN Catholic school teachers are planning to walk off the job on March 7 in pursuit of higher wages, lower class sizes and better working conditions.
The 24-hour strike could come only three weeks after 25,000 government school counterparts stage a threatened statewide stopwork.
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Posted in Strikes & Labor Disputes
AFP: Zimbabwe teachers strike over pay: union
HARARE (AFP) — Teachers in Zimbabwe’s state-run schools have begun an indefinite strike to press for better salaries and more funding for equipment, a union official said Sunday in an official statement.
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Posted in Strikes & Labor Disputes
Red Orbit: KU Trustees Affirm Support for President
Jan. 25–In a move to fend off a faculty no-confidence vote on the leadership of F. Javier Cevallos, Kutztown University’s trustees closed ranks behind the university’s president Thursday at a meeting on campus.
“The council of trustees affirms unanimously its unwavering support for Pres. F. Javier Cevallos,” a resolution adopted by the council stated, “and encourages the (faculty union) executive council to reconsider its proposed action.”
The vote of confidence came one week after the campus leadership of the faculty union, the Association of Pennsylvania State College and University Facilities, called for a no-confidence vote on Cevallos, president since 2002.
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Posted in Administration
Vanguard: National AAUP reps give faculty support
Amid mediation, PSU faculty take outside advice
The Portland State chapter of the American Association of University Professors met with national representatives of the organization yesterday to discuss possible strategies in the event of a faculty strike.
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Posted in Strikes & Labor Disputes
