McSweeney’s: Dispatch 8: On Desire
Between Christmas and New Year’s, my wife, our elder son, and I drove to Washington, D.C., where I attended the Modern Language Association Conference and interviewed for a tenure-track job at a Catholic liberal-arts college in the upper Midwest. This dispatch is on those events and their resolution.
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Posted in Contingent labor
The Chronicle: DEPOLITICIZING TEACHER TRAINING
Washington State University’s College of Education has revised a form that it uses to evaluate students’ dispositions to become teachers, one that, in its previous version, had led to complaints of discrimination against political conservatives.
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Posted in Academic freedom
Inside Higher Ed: A Win for Women at Newman
University settles with woman and EEOC amid reports ex-president preferred male candidates for some positions.
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Posted in Uncategorized
Inside Higher Ed: U Charleston ends illegal job requirement
In an attempt to avoid violating civil rights laws, the University of Charleston has made changes to a controversial job requirement the stated that applicants for the Herchiel and Elizabeth Sims “In God We Trust” Chair in Ethics must believe in God.
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Posted in Uncategorized
Inside Higher Ed: A grilling for Spellings
Members of a U.S. Senate appropriations subcommittee took full advantage Wednesday of their first formal opportunity to respond to the Bush administration’s proposed 2007 budget, peppering Education Secretary Margaret Spellings with probing questions.
The budget calls for $54.4 billion in discretionary appropriations for the U.S. Department of Education in 2007, a decrease of $3.1 billion (or 5.5 percent) from the 2006 amount. Admitting “it is a tough budget, no question,” Spellings stoically defended the administration’s proposals in the hearing before the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education and Related Agencies.
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Posted in Government
Inside Higher Ed: Revolt at Case Western
If the Harvard University faculty can rise up, why not other faculties?
That was the idea that inspired a professor at Case Western Reserve University to send out an e-mail to his colleagues the day after Lawrence H. Summers announced that he would quit the presidency at Harvard. “Yesterday we learned from Harvard … that faculty can ultimately take appropriate responsibility for responding to severe problems in university governance,” wrote Lawrence Krauss, in calling for a vote of no confidence in Case’s president, Edward M. Hundert.
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Posted in Uncategorized
Baltimore Sun: Academic freedom under siege from right
By LIONEL S. LEWIS
Originally published February 28, 2006
On the Web site of an unofficial alumni organization at the University of California, Los Angeles, there are profiles “exposing” the university’s “most radical professors” who “actively proselytize their extreme views in the classroom.” These professors are described as “brainless” and are berated for never having left the “fantasy world of college.”
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Posted in Academic freedom
The Daily Miniing Gazette: Tech union mediation unsuccessful, case heads
A Monday morning mediation to resolve issues stemming from an unfair labor practice charge against Michigan Tech University by MTU’s faculty union proved fruitless.
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Posted in Campaigns & Contracts
Western Front Online: Faculty unionizes
A group of union-supporting Western professors filled the Viking Union lobby Feb. 23 after learning they won the election that determined Western faculty would unionize, by a narrow margin of 16 votes.
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Posted in Campaigns & Contracts
The Chief: 9.4% Wage Increase Proposed: CUNY Reduces Offer to Faculty Union
Out of the ashes of a potential Professional Staff Congress deal with City University of New York management that was torched by the city and the state, a Feb. 16 sitdown produced a new set of proposals that will keep the PSC at the bargaining table.
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Posted in Campaigns & Contracts
The Chronicle: NEA locals allowed to affiliate with labor federation
The AFL-CIO and the National Education Association announced on Monday that local chapters of the NEA would now be allowed to affiliate with the labor federation.
An agreement between the two labor groups will grant NEA members entry into the AFL-CIO’s Central Labor Councils, local bodies where union chapters coordinate political activity. On the state level, the agreement will help the educational association and the labor federation consolidate their lobbying muscle.
Jamie Horwitz, a spokesman for the American Federation of Teachers, an AFL-CIO affiliate, said that the NEA and AFL-CIO independently carry significant political clout in many state and local legislatures. Combine those forces, he said, “and you might have critical mass on some issues.”
While Monday’s announcement signaled a significant new political partnership between the two groups, it is not a merger — nor is it the prelude to one, an NEA spokesman said.
The NEA, which represents 2.8 million teachers and other education workers, is the largest independent union in the country. The various unions that make up the AFL-CIO together represent nine million workers.
The pact will bolster the finances and the political leverage to the AFL-CIO, which last year lost nearly a third of its members to a splinter federation called Change to Win.
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Posted in Unions
The Chronicle: Mass layoffs expected for UNO
Faculty members at the University of New Orleans, hundreds of whom have been sleeping in spare bedrooms or on office floors since they returned to their hurricane-damaged campus in January, are bracing for layoffs that could be announced as early as next week.
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Posted in Uncategorized
The Chronicle: AGREEMENT IN REVERSE-BIAS CASE
The U.S. Department of Justice and Langston University have reached a deal in a reverse-discrimination case, but the white professor at the center of the flap is not satisfied with the $30,000 she would receive under the settlement. She is now considering suing the university herself.
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Posted in Equity
The Chronicle South Dakota Senate Kills Bill Requiring Annual Reports on Intellectual Diversity at Colleges
The South Dakota Senate last week rejected legislation that would have required the state’s public colleges to report annually on steps they had taken to ensure intellectual diversity and the free exchange of an array of ideas on their campuses.
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Posted in Academic freedom
Inside Higher Ed: Slowing down tenure
The tenure clock and the biological clock — both for birth and for death — just tend to get in one another’s way.
In part to try to make the academy family friendly, the University of Michigan is currently mulling over changes to the process it uses to promote professors, which would include extending the maximum time to receive tenure from 8 to 10 years.
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Posted in Tenure & Promotion
Inside Higher Ed: Professor Skinhead
t’s not the kind of honor universities want for their instructors. Robert Huber, a Ph.D. student in physics at the University of Delaware, who taught physics last semester, is a member of the Skinhead Hall of Fame.
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Posted in Uncategorized
Inside Higher Ed Who’s afraid of David Horowitz?
One indisputable fact about my new book The Professors is that it has upset a lot of people. Indeed a veritable army of detractors has formed to attack it. Thus it has been denounced by a coalition of left-wing organizations including the American Civil Liberties Union, the American Association of University Professors, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, People for the American Way and George Soros’ children’s crusade, Campus Progress. It has been assaulted by the left-wing blogosphere and by radical sites like Counterpunch.org, 17 of whose contributors appear in my book.
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Posted in Academic freedom
Inside Higher Ed: A faculty panel investigating allegations of research misconduct by Ward Churchill said last week that it needed more time and would try to have a report done by May 9. The University of Colorado at Boulder panel was created following an uproar over statements about 9/11 by Churchill, who teaches ethnic studies. The investigation is not over those statements, but over allegations concerning Churchill’s scholarship that surfaced after the controversy broke. Churchill has denied any wrongdoing. The panel said that it needed more time because of the number of allegations and because some committee members quit and needed to be replaced.
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Posted in Ethics
The Miami Herald: UM janitors vote to strike
UM janitors vote to strike, but decline to say where and when workers will picket.
Janitors at the University of Miami authorized a strike Sunday against the Boston-based company that hires them to clean UM’s dorms, classrooms and grounds. The workers’ lack of healthcare and their wages — some of the lowest in any major U.S. university — have garnered unflattering national attention for the university. UM President Donna Shalala, following four and a half years of prompting from faculty and students, promised last week that the school would convene a committee to review the wages of about 900 contract workers — including about 400 janitors employed by Boston-based Unicco.
MIAMI, Feb. 26 /PRNewswire/ — Amid cheers, hundreds of janitors at the Episcopal Church on the University of Miami campus overwhelmingly voted to authorize a strike over Unfair Labor Practices committed by UNICCO — the company hired by the University to clean the campus. Workers will open a strike office at the church on Tuesday at noon.
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Posted in Strikes
Knoxville News Sentinel: Union to push for raises at UT again
$1,200 across-the-board hike is United Campus Workers’ goa
A University of Tennessee employees union plans to try again this year to get a $1,200 across-the-board raise for higher education employees through the state Legislature. The United Campus Workers argues that the measure is fairer for UT’s lowest paid employees than Gov. Phil Bredesen’s proposed 2 percent raise.
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Posted in Salary/Economic Benefits
