Tag Archives: reports

Senate Report Paints a Damning Portrait of For-Profit Higher Education

Posted on July 31, 2012 by | Comments Off on Senate Report Paints a Damning Portrait of For-Profit Higher Education

The Chronicle: Senate Report Paints a Damning Portrait of For-Profit Higher Education

For-profit colleges can play an important role in educating nontraditional students, but the colleges often operate as aggressive recruiting machines focused on generating shareholder profits at the expense of a quality education for their students.

That’s the unflattering portrait of the for-profit higher-education industry detailed in a voluminous report officially released on Monday by the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee. The report, which also criticizes the accrediting agencies that evaluate the colleges, concludes a two-year investigation into the operations of 30 for-profit higher-education companies from 2006 to 2010.

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Posted in Corporate University

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With Student Learning at Stake, Group Calls for Better Working Conditions for Adjuncts

Posted on July 31, 2012 by | Comments Off on With Student Learning at Stake, Group Calls for Better Working Conditions for Adjuncts

The Chronicle: With Student Learning at Stake, Group Calls for Better Working Conditions for Adjuncts

Academe needs a new model for the professoriate that better supports the growing number of instructors who are off the tenure track, the participants in a national project about the changing faculty have concluded.

The participants, who represent a cross-section of academe and its stakeholders, also said in a report being released this week that they need to align to gather data that will paint a clearer picture of higher education’s increasing reliance on contingent faculty.

A key reason for those two strategies to improve the jobs of contingent faculty members is that their poor working conditions may harm student learning, says the report, a “working document” produced by the Delphi Project on the Changing Faculty and Student Success.

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Posted in Contingent labor, Working conditions

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Academic Freedom and Tenure: Bethune Cookman

Posted on October 25, 2010 by | Comments Off on Academic Freedom and Tenure: Bethune Cookman

AAUP Academic Freedom and Tenure: Bethune Cookman

An Association investigating committee report on Bethune-Cookman University in Florida deals with the 2009 dismissal of four professors and the termination of the services of three additional faculty members. The stated reasons for these actions ranged from charges of sexual harassment of students to claims of insufficient academic credentials to the purported need to reduce the size of the faculty for financial reasons. The report concludes that, in each case, the professors were denied virtually all AAUP-supported protections of academic due process. It further concludes that the administration’s reliance in the dismissals on outside investigators, consultants, and attorneys to deal with matters for which the faculty should have responsibility speaks poorly for the climate of shared governance at the institution.

Read the report (.pdf).

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Posted in Academic freedom, Faculty, Tenure & Promotion, Unions, Working conditions

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AAUP Report Slams Clark Atlanta U. Over Faculty Layoffs

Posted on January 14, 2010 by | Comments Off on AAUP Report Slams Clark Atlanta U. Over Faculty Layoffs

The Chronicle: AAUP Report Slams Clark Atlanta U. Over Faculty Layoffs

The American Association of University Professors issued a report today accusing Clark Atlanta University of numerous violations of faculty rights in connection with its dismissal of about a fourth of its faculty members last year.

The report, by an AAUP investigative committee, concludes that the university’s administration declared a nonexistent “enrollment emergency” last February as a pretext for firing about 55 full-time faculty members without due process.

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Posted in Budgets & Funding

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The Experience of Working Class Students at a Research I University

Posted on September 9, 2009 by | Comments Off on The Experience of Working Class Students at a Research I University

From Michael Zweig at SUNY Stony Brook:

Please see a new study, “The Experience of Working Class Students at a Research I University,” by Veronica Gonzalez, a recent intern at the Center for Study of Working Class Life. Gonzalez compares the academic experiences of students from working class families with those from middle class famllies who entered the State University of New York at Stony Brook between 2001 and 2003.

Go to the study from the link at the upper right of the Center’s home page

http://www.stonybrook.edu/workingclass/publications/VGonzalez09.pdf

or go directly to the .pdf at

http://www.stonybrook.edu/workingclass/publications/VGonzalez09.pdf

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Posted in Students

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The Disappearing Tenure-Track Job

Posted on May 12, 2009 by | Comments Off on The Disappearing Tenure-Track Job

Inside Higher Ed: The Disappearing Tenure-Track Job

Year by year, various federal data sets are released, and document the steady growth of adjunct positions and decline of tenure-track jobs in the academic work force.

In an attempt to draw more attention to these shifts over time, the American Federation of Teachers is today releasing a 10-year analysis of the data, showing just how much the tenure-track professor has disappeared. The overall number of faculty and instructor slots grew from 1997 to 2007, but nearly two-thirds of that growth was in “contingent” positions — meaning those off of the tenure track. Over all, those jobs increased from two-thirds to nearly three-quarters of instructional positions.

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Posted in Job market, Tenure & Promotion

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The Academic Workforce Advocacy Kit

Posted on May 1, 2009 by | Comments Off on The Academic Workforce Advocacy Kit

MLA: The Academic Workforce Advocacy Kit brings together a set of reports and guidelines on faculty workload and staffing norms developed by the association since the 1990s. Armed with these facts and figures, buttressed by goals and guidelines endorsed by the largest professional association of scholars in the country, we can begin to do the hard work of describing the situation in our own institutions; comparing it with the situation on the national level; confronting administrations with the facts, needs, and relevant standards; and educating the public at the local and state level.
—Catherine Porter, Summer 2009 MLA Newsletter

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Posted in Advocacy

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