Workplace Blog

The Chronicle: Education-Industry Group Asks Supreme Court to Halt Whistle-Blower Lawsuit Against U. of Phoenix

The Career College Association and three other industry groups are urging the U.S. Supreme Court to side with the University of Phoenix in that institution’s attempt to halt a whistle-blower lawsuit against it.

The university in January asked the Supreme Court to consider the case, after a federal appeals court in September reinstated it (The Chronicle, September 6). The court is expected to decide by spring whether to take up the case, in which the University of Phoenix, a for-profit institution that is also the largest private university in the country, faces liability that could exceed $1-billion. The Career College Association, which represents the for-profit higher-education industry, calls the case a potentially “lethal trap” to all colleges if it is not overturned.

San Francisco Chronicle: UC faculty to join talks on big BP biofuels deal
They want campus values retained despite partnership

UC Berkeley’s administration has invited faculty members to join the contract talks on the $500 million BP biofuels deal amid pressure to ensure that campus traditions and values are safeguarded in the partnership.

Journalism Professor Bill Drummond, chairman of the campus Academic Senate, said the administration will allow four professors who chair Senate committees — Calvin Moore, Patrick Kirch, Christopher Kutz and J. Miguel Villas-Boas — to participate in the negotiations. Different groups are writing different portions of the contract, and their work is expected to continue through June.

The Chronicle: Faculty Union Sues to Disrupt Plan That Would Privatize a SUNY Teaching Hospital

A plan to privatize the State University of New York Upstate Medical University — or at least its teaching hospital — prompted a union to file a lawsuit this week challenging its legality and warning that medical education and patient care could suffer.

“We believe that, if the responsibility of medical education at our teaching hospitals shifts to corporations, quality would suffer as concern about a healthy bottom line, rather than healthy citizens, becomes the main priority,” said William E. Scheuerman, president of United University Professions.

The union, an affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers, represents SUNY’s professors and professional staff members, including 2,200 employees at the medical university. That facility, in Syracuse, includes a teaching hospital, a medical school, and other affiliated health-care colleges.

A commission charged with streamlining the state’s sprawling health-care system recommended a plan, which became law on January 1, that would privatize the Syracuse medical center and study the possible privatization of SUNY hospitals in Stony Brook and Brooklyn.

The plan calls for Crouse Hospital, a nonprofit hospital in Syracuse, and the SUNY Upstate Medical Center, as the university is also called, to join “under a single unified governance structure under the control of an entity other than the State University of New York.”

Los Angeles Times: Oversight of for-profit schools may end

A state law regulating the colleges and vocational programs, which enroll more than 400,000 students a year, will expire in July.
By Jordan Rau, Times Staff Writer
March 26, 2007

SACRAMENTO — A class assignment gave Robert Thornton an early clue that the computer training program he was enrolled in might have higher priorities than his education.

“They had had us all put together computers for their school because they were expanding into another building,” Thornton said. His fellow students at the Computer Education Institute’s San Diego campus grumbled “that they were getting free labor out of us and calling it teaching.”