The Olympian: 7,000 jobs could be axed to close $9 billion budget gap
Education takes a big hit in plan from Senate Democrats
The Senate Democrats’ budget plan outlined Monday would cut more than $3 billion from state programs, including big slices from public schools, universities and health care over the next two years.
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Posted in Budgets & Funding
Tagged Budgets & Funding, Government, Job cuts
Star-Telegram: Colleges line up against allowing guns on campuses
AUSTIN — Texas universities are firing back against a bill that would permit students to carry handguns on campus.
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Posted in Working conditions
Tagged Government, Guns, Texas
Arizona Daily Star: Stimulus money hangs in balance
Lawmakers must reverse cuts to universities or lose $800M
PHOENIX — State lawmakers will have to restore at least $150 million in cuts they just made to higher education to keep Arizona from losing more than $800 million in federal education stimulus funds.
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Posted in Budgets & Funding
Tagged Budgets & Funding, Government
Los Angeles Times: USC marketing class helps CIA recruitment
Looking to hire recent graduates, Central Intelligence Agency turns to university students nationwide for help developing ad campaigns. The economic downturn increases the jobs’ appeal.
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Posted in Academics
Tagged Academics, CIA, Government, marketing
Dallas Morning News: Texas education board cuts provisions questioning evolution from science curriculum
AUSTIN – Social conservatives lost another skirmish over evolution Friday when the State Board of Education stripped two provisions from proposed science standards that would have raised questions about key principles of the theory of evolution.
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Posted in Academics
Tagged evolution, Government, K-12 issues, Religion, science
Green Left: France: General strike shakes government
21 March 2009
On March 19, record numbers of people took to the streets as part of a general strike against President Nicolas Sarkozy’s anti-worker economic policies, a British Guardian article said the following day.
The demonstrations, involving more than 3 million people, followed a general strike called by the union movement on January 29, which involved 2.4 million workers.
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Posted in Strikes & Labor Disputes
Tagged France, General Strike, Government, Strikes & Labor Disputes
World University News: Switch to online journals under attack
A trend to make printed scientific journals available online worldwide, is under fire. Although President Obama has signed a measure to make the National Institutes of Health Public Access Policy permanent, some US lawmakers have launched legislation to roll back the effort. While advocates assert moving science journals online is tech-savvy, economical and the only proper use of taxpayer-generated research, problems with costs, archiving, copyright, and support of small professional organisations (centred on their journal identity and research collaboration) are causing second thoughts.
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Posted in Academics
Tagged Government, Journals, Research
Chronicle Journal: Native education program gets an F: audit
OTTAWA – The Harper government flunks accountability, says a new audit that blasts lax controls over almost $300 million meant to help native students get to college or university.
The bruising report calls for tighter tracking of that cash and says funding has not kept pace with tuition hikes.
Ottawa does not trace how many native kids beat staggering odds to make it through high school only to be denied help to go on.
It spent $292 million last year to help 23,000 students – that’s down from a high of 27,000 funding recipients a decade ago.
The New York Times: California Warns of Layoffs at Schools
SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) — Public school employees throughout California are being warned of extensive job cuts as local officials face a deadline for issuing layoff notices to educators.
The State Department of Education estimates that preliminary notices will be given to 26,500 teachers by the Sunday cutoff. An additional 15,000 bus drivers, janitors, secretaries and administrators are also expected to receive the written warnings.
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Posted in Budgets & Funding
Tagged California, Government, K-12, Layoffs
World University News: CHINA: Hong Kong professor denied entry into Macau
A Hong Kong professor and two pro-democracy politicians have been barred from Macau, raising serious concerns about academic freedom. AFP News reported that Johannes Chan, Dean of the University of Hong Kong’s law faculty, was turned away by immigration officers on 28 February when he went to give a speech at the University of Macau.
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Posted in Government
Tagged Academic freedom, China, Democracy, Faculty, Government, Hong Kong, Macau
BBC: Poor still shunning universities
Universities say they do try to draw in a wider range of students
The government has given universities £392m to get more working class youngsters in England to attend but progress has been slow, MPs say.
The Commons public accounts committee says it is “dismayed” the government seems to have little idea what they have done with the money.
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Posted in Government
Tagged Budgets & Funding, Government, Working class
Vancouver Sun: Teachers want top court to quash strike definition
Appeal to be sought over ‘political protest’ rulings
Published: Saturday, February 14, 2009
The B.C. Teachers’ Federation will seek an appeal of a court decision that ruled the union’s one-day walkout in 2002 was an illegal strike, while the teachers saw it as a political protest.
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Posted in Strikes & Labor Disputes
The New York Times: Professor Accused of Pocketing NASA Money
GAINESVILLE, Fla. (AP) — Federal investigators are accusing a University of Florida professor and three members of his family of fraudulently receiving millions of dollars from NASA and then funneling money to their personal bank accounts, court documents show.
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Posted in Faculty
Tagged Ethics, Faculty, Fraud, Government
The Chronicle: Iowa Professors Mobilize Against Measure on Teaching Alternatives to Evolution
More than 200 faculty members at 20 Iowa colleges have signed a statement opposing a proposed state law that would give instructors at public colleges and schools a legal right to teach alternatives to evolution.
The Chronicle News Blog: Nevada Governor Cuts Off Discourse With Chancellor After ‘Personal Attacks’
Tense relations between Nevada’s higher-education chancellor, James E. Rogers, and the state’s Republican governor, James Gibbons, may have reached the breaking point. After the outspoken chancellor sharply criticized Mr. Gibbons in a newspaper commentary published on Sunday, Governor Gibbons announced today that he would no longer deal directly with Mr. Rogers. Instead, he asked the Board of Regents of the Nevada System of Higher Education to appoint a liaison who could work with his office and the legislature “in a professional and courteous manner.”
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Posted in Government
Tagged Administration, Governance, Government
Times-Picayune: National science group boycotting Louisiana in protest of Science Education Act
BATON ROUGE — A national organization of scientists has informed Gov. Bobby Jindal it will not hold its annual convention in Louisiana as long as the recently adopted Science Education Act remains on the books.
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Posted in Protests
Tagged Academics, Government, Protests
The Times: Zim threatens to fire teachers
Striking teachers are set to defy a Zimbabwe government ultimatum to return to work tomorrow in spite of threats of instant dismissal.
In an apparent about turn education authorities moved from pleading with striking teachers to attend classes to threatening them with dismissal.
The Chronicle: Stimulating Higher Ed
By Marc Bousquet
Take students out of the workforce and create real jobs for educators.
This week, lawmakers will meet to forge a compromise between the House and Senate versions of the stimulus bill. The likely consequence will be something similar to the Senate version, which targeted education funds for aggressive reductions — chopping an average almost $1-billion per state in funds that would largely have gone to help meet payroll for teachers.
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Posted in Government
Tagged Budgets & Funding, Government, labor
International Herald Tribune: Thai professor flees to England after alleged insult to monarchy
BANGKOK: A prominent academic facing 15 years in prison for allegedly insulting the Thai monarchy has fled to England, saying Monday that he did not believe he would receive a fair trial.
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Posted in Faculty, Government
Tagged Faculty, Government
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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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Posted in Commentary
Tagged Commentary, Evaluation, Government, Students, Taylorism, Teaching