Tag Archives: Commentary

Some Union Members Are More Equal Than Others

Posted on June 13, 2011 by | Comments Off on Some Union Members Are More Equal Than Others

Commentary

The Chronicle: Some Union Members Are More Equal Than Others

By Keith Hoeller and Jack Longmate

Do tenure-track and adjunct faculty belong in the same union? A 1980 U.S. Supreme Court decision ruled that tenure-track faculty are “managerial employees” and not entitled to unions in the private sector. But in public-sector unions, tenured professors are often combined with contingent faculty, who are certainly not “managerial.” Tenure-stream faculty supervise the adjuncts, determining workload, interviewing, hiring, evaluating, and deciding whether to rehire them. Gregory Saltzman observed in the National Education Association’s “2000 Almanac of Higher Education” that combined units may not be ideal because of the “conflicts of interests between these two groups.”

In fact, the unequal treatment of professors by their unions has come to resemble the plot of George Orwell’s dystopian novel Animal Farm.

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Posted in Unions

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Tenure and the Workplace Avenger

Posted on February 15, 2010 by | Comments Off on Tenure and the Workplace Avenger

The Chronicle: Tenure and the Workplace Avenger

For millions of Americans, last Friday’s mass shooting at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, in which three faculty members were killed and two others and one staff member were injured, has conjured up frightful memories of massacres at Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois University. And in its wake, concerns are being raised yet again about campus safety and emergency response.

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Posted in Tenure & Promotion

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UC-Berkeley Leaders Call for Federal-State University System

Posted on September 28, 2009 by | Comments Off on UC-Berkeley Leaders Call for Federal-State University System

Washington Post: Rescuing Our Public Universities

By Robert J. Birgeneau and Frank D. Yeary

Almost 150 years ago, in an effort to better serve a growing nation, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Morrill Land Grant Act, which gave struggling states federal land with which they could generate revenue to build colleges. The result of that bold action is a national resource: a structure for higher education that is admired, and copied, around the globe in places such as Japan, Germany and Canada. We are the only country to have both private and public universities of world renown. Sadly, this amalgam of great public and private research and teaching universities is at risk as economically struggling states progressively disinvest in public higher education.

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U. of California Cuts: a Faculty Member’s Dispatch From the Front Lines

Posted on July 29, 2009 by | Comments Off on U. of California Cuts: a Faculty Member’s Dispatch From the Front Lines

The Chronicle: U. of California Cuts: a Faculty Member’s Dispatch From the Front Lines

By Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom

Budget cuts at the University of California have generated a lot of attention, especially after a plan of across-the-board salary cuts, combined with mandatory furlough days, was recently announced. How will such drastic financial measures threaten the strengths of that system and other large public universities? Are certain fields of study in the humanities and social sciences especially vulnerable to state cuts because those areas of inquiry—even when dealing with topics of broad importance—rarely get large infusions of national, foundation, or corporate monies of the sort that routinely support work done in areas such as engineering and medicine?

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Posted in Budgets & Funding

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Detroit’s Schools Are Going Bankrupt, Too

Posted on July 27, 2009 by | Comments Off on Detroit’s Schools Are Going Bankrupt, Too

Wall Street Journal: Detroit’s Schools Are Going Bankrupt, Too
Now’s the time to cast off collective bargaining agreements and introduce school choice.

‘Am I optimistic that they can avoid it . . . ? I am not.” That’s what retired judge Ray Graves said this week when asked whether the Detroit public schools, which he is advising, would be forced into bankruptcy. Facing violence, a shrinking student body, and graduating just one out of every four students who enter the ninth grade on time, the city’s schools have been stumbling for years. Now they face a seemingly insurmountable deficit and are expected to file for bankruptcy protection at about the time that students should be settling down in a new school year.

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Posted in Campaigns & Contracts, Unions, Working conditions

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Will Higher Education Be the Next Bubble to Burst?

Posted on May 19, 2009 by | Comments Off on Will Higher Education Be the Next Bubble to Burst?

The Chronicle: Will Higher Education Be the Next Bubble to Burst?

By JOSEPH MARR CRONIN and HOWARD E. HORTON

The public has become all too aware of the term “bubble” to describe an asset that is irrationally and artificially overvalued and cannot be sustained. The dot-com bubble burst by 2000. More recently the overextended housing market collapsed, helping to trigger a credit meltdown. The stock market has declined more than 30 percent in the past year, as companies once considered flagship investments have withered in value.

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End the University as We Know It

Posted on April 27, 2009 by | Comments Off on End the University as We Know It

The New York Time: End the University as We Know It

By MARK C. TAYLOR

GRADUATE education is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans).

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Not worth a strike

Posted on April 7, 2009 by | Comments Off on Not worth a strike

Toronto Star: Not worth a strike

The union representing Toronto’s public high school teachers wants us to believe education would suffer if their members had to supervise students in the hallways for an average of another 20 minutes a week.

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Posted in Strikes & Labor Disputes

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Ward Churchill Redux

Posted on April 6, 2009 by | Comments Off on Ward Churchill Redux

The New York Times: Ward Churchill Redux

By Stanley Fish

Last Thursday, a jury in Denver ruled that the termination of activist-teacher Ward Churchill by the University of Colorado had been wrongful (a term of art) even though a committee of his faculty peers had found him guilty of a variety of sins.

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Higher Education’s Coming Leadership Crisis

Posted on April 6, 2009 by | Comments Off on Higher Education’s Coming Leadership Crisis

The Chronicle: Higher Education’s Coming Leadership Crisis

By ARJUN APPADURAI

What the current recession, with its associated fears, frauds, and free falls, will ultimately mean for American higher education is still uncertain. Yet some things are clear: Many colleges and universities are seeing drops in applications, and several are reconsidering tenure and other forms of long-term faculty autonomy and job security. Many are freezing salaries and stopping or slowing new hires. Others are scaling back plans to build new facilities or invest in expensive programs. Still others are taking drastic steps, such as the sale of their art collections, to deal with shortfalls in their operating budgets.

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Florida: USF prez sets the model for AIG

Posted on March 16, 2009 by | Comments Off on Florida: USF prez sets the model for AIG

Tampa Tribune: Cringing at USF bonuses

University of South Florida president Judy Genshaft must know that appearances can be as important as reality. Surely, she knew this when she handed out hefty bonuses to four top staff members — after the university had slashed millions from the budget, frozen salaries and ordered big layoffs. Three of those staff members report directly to the president. During these hard economic times, everyone at USF should share the pain. Genshaft, along with her advisers, deserve all the criticism they are getting for this insensitive move.

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Posted in Salary/Economic Benefits

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The Roar of the Crowd; Sports fans’ primal behavior

Posted on March 16, 2009 by | Comments Off on The Roar of the Crowd; Sports fans’ primal behavior

The Chronicle Review: The Roar of the Crowd; Sports fans’ primal behavior

Commentary

Peter A. Facione: A Straight-Talk Survival Guide for Colleges

By DAVID P. BARASH

Marx was wrong: The opiate of the masses isn’t religion, but spectator sports. What else explains the astounding fact that millions of seemingly intelligent human beings feel that the athletic exertions of total strangers are somehow consequential for themselves? The real question we should be asking during the madness surrounding this month’s collegiate basketball championship season is not who will win, but why anyone cares.

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Neoliberalism and Higher Education

Posted on March 10, 2009 by | 1 comment

The New York Times: Neoliberalism and Higher Education

By Stanley Fish

I’ve been asking colleagues in several departments and disciplines whether they’ve ever come across the term “neoliberalism” and whether they know what it means. A small number acknowledged having heard the word; a very much smaller number ventured a tentative definition.

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Reject student evaluation of faculty

Posted on March 3, 2009 by | Comments Off on Reject student evaluation of faculty

Houston Chronicle: Reject student evaluation of faculty
By ROBERT ZARETSKY

“Now what I want is facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life… Stick to Facts, sir!”

Thomas Gradgrind, 

Hard Times

My thoughts drifted the other day to the opening passage from Charles Dickens’ Hard Times. The occasion was a meeting of fellow professors at the University of Houston, gathered to discuss a modest proposal from the board of regents. In the interest of greater efficiency, the regents wanted professors to post on the Web a variety of statistics: how much they earn, how many A’s and B’s they give, how many students they teach, and how much these same students earn once they graduate.

It is endearing that Texas — home to the Bush Administration, which cooked the books on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and Sir Allen Stanford, who is alleged to have cooked the books of his financial empire — is saddling up to catch allegedly AWOL academics guilty of earning in the high two figures. Yet this is the goal of Jeff Sandefer, a board member of the Texas Public Policy Center, a private think tank in Austin devoted to free market principles. (Among the Center’s senior policy fellows are Arthur Laffer, whose theories have justified cutting marginal tax rates of the nation’s wealthiest citizens, and Grover Norquist, director of Americans for Tax Reform, who recently compared the estate tax to the Holocaust.)

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Professors’ Freedoms Under Assault in the Courts

Posted on February 24, 2009 by | Comments Off on Professors’ Freedoms Under Assault in the Courts

The Chronicle: Professors’ Freedoms Under Assault in the Courts

By PETER SCHMIDT

Balance of Power is a series examining new challenges to faculty influence.

Kevin J. Renken learned the limits of his academic freedom the hard way.

As an associate professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, Mr. Renken says he felt obliged to speak out about his belief that administrators there were mishandling a National Science Foundation grant to him and several colleagues. When the university subsequently reduced his pay and returned the grant, he sued, alleging illegal retaliation.

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No shit: how I lost my one-of-a-kind collection and my girlfriend, too

Posted on February 6, 2009 by | Comments Off on No shit: how I lost my one-of-a-kind collection and my girlfriend, too

Times Higher Education Supplement: No shit: how I lost my one-of-a-kind collection and my girlfriend, too

For his PhD, Daniel Bennett had built a unique set of faecal samples from a rare lizard. When it was destroyed, he really hit bottom

To some people it might have been just a bag of lizard shit, but to me it represented seven years of painstaking work searching the rainforest with a team of reformed poachers to find the faeces of one of the world’s largest, rarest and most mysterious lizards. I didn’t realise just how much my bag of lizard shit meant to me until it was “accidentally” incinerated at the University of Leeds early in the third year of my PhD.

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Posted in Academics

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One Man’s Worthless Bag of Dung Is Another’s Priceless Research

Posted on February 6, 2009 by | Comments Off on One Man’s Worthless Bag of Dung Is Another’s Priceless Research

The Chronicle News Blog: One Man’s Worthless Bag of Dung Is Another’s Priceless Research

Daniel Bennett has vowed to sue Britain’s University of Leeds for incinerating 77 pounds of feces he collected from the rare butaan lizard during seven years of doctoral research in the rain forests of the Philippines.

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