The Washington Post: Tehran Jails Iranian American Scholar After Long House Arrest
Iran yesterday detained prominent American academic Haleh Esfandiari, director of the Middle East Program at the Smithsonian Institution’s Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, according to center president and director Lee H. Hamilton and Esfandiari’s husband.
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Posted in Government, International
The Chronicle: Conflict Over Relocation Divides a Catholic Law School, as Professors Say They Have Been Cut Out of the Decision
More than half of the professors at a Roman Catholic law school in Ann Arbor, Mich., are fighting a plan to move the school to a Florida town that is being developed by the former pizza mogul who also founded the law school.
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Posted in Faculty
Houston Chronicle: Jury recommends ex-TSU official get 10 years for misusing funds
Texas Southern University’s former chief financial officer should spend 10 years in prison for illegally allowing the use of TSU funds to improve the home of the university’s president, a jury decided this morning.
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Posted in Legal issues
Inside Higher Ed: ‘Tearing Down the Gates’
In a mix of individual students’ stories and demographic analysis, a new book by Peter Sacks offers a critical analysis of the role of colleges in the class structure of the United States. Tearing Down the Gates: Confronting the Class Divide in American Education is being published this month by the University of California Press. The book urges colleges to pay much more attention to issues of class, and to breaking down class barriers. Sacks is an author whose previous books were Generation X Goes to College (Open Court) and Standardized Minds: The High Price of America’s Testing Culture and What We Can Do to Change It (Perseus). He recently responded to questions via e-mail about the themes of his new book.
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Posted in Equity
Inside Higher Ed: Promotion Decision Questioned
Less than two weeks after a prominent Massachusetts Institute of Technology admissions dean resigned amid allegations that she had claimed three degrees she’d never earned, the University of New Mexico is facing scrutiny for promoting an unidentified professor who has since been accused of misrepresenting his/her publication history — and for letting that promotion decision stand after an elected faculty committee unearthed evidence to that effect.
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Posted in Tenure & Promotion
The Chronicle News Blog: Pentagon Proposes Rules to Judge Colleges’ Compliance With Military-Recruiting Law
The Department of Defense issued proposed rules today describing how the agency would determine if a college was violating the Solomon amendment, the 1994 law that allows the government to withhold federal funds from colleges that bar or limit military recruiting on their campuses.
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Posted in Government
The Chronicle: Israeli Higher Education Shuts Down as Student Strike Stretches Into 4th Week
University campuses across Israel were chained shut on Monday as students intensified their protest, now in its fourth week, against proposed reforms in who pays for higher educationStudents held demonstrations in Beersheba, Haifa, Jerusalem, and Tel Aviv.
In advertisements published in newspapers on Friday, the leaders of Israel’s universities urged students to end their strike, which entered its 24th day on Monday, and threatened to cancel academic credit for the semester for anyone not showing up for class. The Committee of University Presidents extended that deadline until today as government representatives, university presidents, and students continued negotiations in a last-ditch effort to reach an agreement.
But student leaders on Monday rejected a draft agreement offered by the government. Itay Barda, leader of the National Student Organization, described the proposal as “media spin.”
“The draft is still very far from the demands which we have presented,” he said.
The country’s 250,000 students are protesting plans by the Shochat Committee — a government-appointed panel led by a former finance minister, Avraham Shochat — to raise student fees from their current level of about $2,150 per year. The Shochat Committee says student fees should be restructured, with wealthier students paying more. But its proposals, to be presented in June, ignore findings by a previous government-appointed commission and the education committee of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, both of which recommended lowering student fees.
The students are also demanding that the government reinstate some $300-million that has been slashed from the education budget in recent years. The Shochat Committee has agreed to recommend restoring the funds, but only if students accept future increases in fees.
Rabbi Michael Melchior, chairman of the Knesset’s education committee, said a government offer to freeze tuition for students already enrolled while raising fees for new students was “immoral.”
The government and the Knesset agreed to carry out the previous commission’s recommendations to gradually reduce fees, Rabbi Melchior said.
The students’ protest is backed by the two major university-faculty unions, but Moshe Kaveh, president of Bar-Ilan University and chairman of the Committee of University Presidents, said the students were in danger of losing sufficient class time to complete the semester. He offered to extend the current semester by two weeks if the students returned to class by today.
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Posted in International, Strikes & Labor Disputes, Students
Inside Higher Ed: Southern Discomfort
Allegations that Southern University’s board chairman sexually harassed university employees have sent the nation’s largest historically black college system into flux at the end of the academic year.
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Posted in Legal issues
Inside Higher Ed: A Costly Thanksgiving Message
Is a professor about to lose his job for sharing George Washington’s words with his colleagues?
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Posted in Free speech
Inside Higher Ed: AAU Gets on Board
Research university group plans voluntary accountability system, but Spellings panel chairman knocks pace of reporting.
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Posted in Accountability
Inside Higher Ed: Threat to Tenure at Law Schools
ABA is being pushed by some deans to stop regulating terms of employment as part of accreditation.
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Posted in Tenure & Promotion
Inside Higher Ed: Inquiry or Indoctrination?
Let’s face it: Comp 101 doesn’t tend to be the most controversial of courses. But at the University of California at San Diego, a campaign officially begun last month to alter a required freshman writing and social science curriculum has already claimed two casualties.
Benjamin Balthaser and Scott Boehm, two graduate teaching assistants who have led the campaign to restore the year-long Dimensions of Culture sequence to what they say is its original form, have not been re-hired for the upcoming academic year — a circumstance all parties agree is attributable to their efforts to change the curriculum from within.
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Posted in Academic freedom
Sacramento Bee: Students speak out on lack of Latino professors
Eric Alfaro realized about a year ago that something was bothering him about Woodland Community College.
Alfaro said he was among the few Latino students on path to transfer to a four-year university, while others were taking longer to graduate or dropping out of school.
As president of the student group Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan, or MEChA, Alfaro encouraged others to seek answers.
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Posted in Diversity
Jerusalem Post: Student strike goes on despite warning
The strike that has shut down public universities and colleges for more than three weeks will continue despite the threats of university presidents to punish students who do not return to their classes, a National Union of Israeli Students spokeswoman told The Jerusalem Post Saturday night.
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Posted in International, Strikes & Labor Disputes, Students
The Boston Globe: A decade of race-blind admissions at Cal
A fit of spring-cleaning led Eric Brooks to a box of old newspaper clips from 1997. That’s when he was the lone black student enrolled in the incoming law school class at the University of California, Berkeley, following the end of affirmative action admissions.
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Posted in Equity
The New York Times: Whistle-Blower on Student Aid Is Vindicated
When Jon Oberg, a Department of Education researcher, warned in 2003 that student lending companies were improperly collecting hundreds of millions in federal subsidies and suggested how to correct the problem, his supervisor told him to work on something else.
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Posted in Government
U-Wire: Undercover police at work in U. Maryland classrooms
When a government and politics major angrily yelled out “F— this” to his female political philosophy teaching assistant as he threw a blank quiz to the floor, he never expected it would lead police officers to follow him to class the next week.
But that’s exactly what happened. A week after the incident, his professor, Fred Alfrord, sent him an e-mail telling him the zero on the quiz was the least of the trouble he was in. He and the department had reported the incident to University of Maryland Police, which began to investigate the student as a possible threat.
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Posted in Students
The Charleston Gazette: Teacher union won’t strike
Members of West Virginia’s second-largest teachers union overwhelmingly voted against striking to protest the Legislature’s 3.5 percent pay increase.
The state American Federation of Teachers polled members earlier this month to see if they wished to strike in May. By a 3-1 margin, they voted no, according to results released Wednesday.
Judy Hale, president of AFT-WV, said there were no counties where a majority favored striking. Most counties voted at least 2-1 against it, she said. The union has about 7,200 members.
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Posted in Strikes & Labor Disputes
Canada: Indefinite strike at Laval University
A total of 2000 university teachers have been on strike since the 14th of March after management refused to make concessions to their demands.
The strike concerns chargés de cours, who are teachers who are employed part-time to teach specific lessons. They are not permanent employees and are paid significantly less than permanent full-time teachers. The SCCCUL (Syndicat des chargés et chargées de cours de l’Université Laval) is demanding a pay rise and improved working conditions for the chargés de cours in recognition of the fact that the work that they do is no different to that of permanent staff.
The refusal of the management to budge during initial negotiations led to an indefinite strike being called, management claimed that they were able to cover 800 of the posts themselves or with permanent staff. The strike has increased in militancy recently with strikers beginning to heavily picket the university, with most classes being cancelled. The union has issued a statement recognising “the students have a right to their lessons, they have a right to be taught by the same staff as before, once these staff have been given a collective agreement recognising their rights.
Last Wednesday 100 strikers held a sit-in in the assistant rector’s offices, the previous day they blocked a nearby motorway. There are daily demonstrations and pickets.
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Posted in Strikes & Labor Disputes
Daily Telegraph: Teachers vote strike over pay
Teachers vote to strike over pay
Teachers voted yesterday in favour of a national strike in protest over Gordon Brown’s attempts to impose a two per cent pay settlement on public sector workers.
In a direct challenge to the Chancellor’s pledge to limit public sector pay, the National Union of Teachers (NUT) will ballot members for a one-day walkout as the “first stage” of co-ordinated industrial action.
If other unions join the campaign, it will see the closure of thousands of schools across the country.
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Posted in Strikes & Labor Disputes
