Hundreds of University of Illinois Educators Form Union 7/09/2014 Non-tenure track faculty in Champaign-Urbana join national movement to improve university working conditions and student success CHAMPAIGN – Nearly 500 Non-tenure track (NTT) faculty at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) won a major victory by forming a union, which was certified today by the laborContinue reading “PRESS RELEASE: Hundreds of University of Illinois Educators Form Union”
Category Archives: Story of the Week
Our Weekly Reader for Week Beginning December 2, 2012
1. The big story this week was the GEO and its apparently successful negotiations with the university. The vote will take place this week. From the source: http://www.uigeo.org/ Tentative Agreement Reached Posted by stephseawell on November 27, 2012 The GEO’s bargaining team reached a tentative agreement today on all outstanding issues in contract negotiations withContinue reading “Our Weekly Reader for Week Beginning December 2, 2012”
Our Weekly Reader for week beginning November 25, 2012
1. Lead story right now is the potential GEO strike this week. For up to date information, don’t read this, go to https://cfaillinois.org/tag/geo2012/ http://www.uigeo.org/ 1b. Google-news-ing led to a piece on wsws.org, which appears to be a website written through a Trotsky lens. http://www.wsws.org/articles/2012/nov2012/grad-n20.shtml Their point of view is very much anti-AFT and the essayContinue reading “Our Weekly Reader for week beginning November 25, 2012”
Chronicle Article Highlights Dilemmas of Professors Expressing “Opinions”
‘I’m Not Paying for Your Opinion’ August 13, 2012, 11:13 am By Rob Jenkins Perhaps, to explain Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa’s now infamous findings in Academically Adrift, we need look no further than the current customer-service culture. That thought came to me after a recent incident in my introductory rhetoric course. We were talkingContinue reading “Chronicle Article Highlights Dilemmas of Professors Expressing “Opinions””
The Dialectics of Distance
I’ve been thinking lately about the ways that secondary costs related to higher education are another source of expense (and debt) for students, faculty and institutions. Electronic information communication technology (ICT) is one obvious form of recent expense that has shifted from the periphery to the center. One of the ways that developments in ICTContinue reading “The Dialectics of Distance”
Cutting Class
Former Labor Secretary (and current Professor of Public Policy at UC Berkeley) Robert Reich just posted an editorial for the Baltimore Sun that takes on the financial cuts afflicting public higher education and the implications for such cuts on social equity. As Reich notes: Unemployment among college graduates is just under 5 percent nationally. It’sContinue reading “Cutting Class”
Who Benefits from Benefits?
Benefits and pensions are undoubtedly a complicated subject. In the “public sector,” they’ve also become a rather heated one. The debate is a well rehearsed one, one that usually follows a scripted battle between deregulated privatization versus government redistribution. A common rhetorical question is, “If most workers must provide for their own post-employment futures, whyContinue reading “Who Benefits from Benefits?”
Imagining Public Work
The LA Times recently ran an op-ed by Joseph A. McCartin (Historian at Georgetown University and author of Collision Course: Ronald Reagan, the Air Traffic Controllers, and the Strike that Changed America) that briefly summarizes the origins of public sector unions in the US. As McCartin points out, for most of their history, public sectorContinue reading “Imagining Public Work”
Leveraging Class
Back in 2005, the Atlantic ran a piece about financial aid leveraging as a tactic used by colleges and universities to recruit wealthy and “high performing” students. Along with the growth of the “enrollment manager,” the article discusses the ethical and moral dilemma faced by institutions of higher ed as they compete for US NewsContinue reading “Leveraging Class”
Fitting In
A recent, reflective piece by Carolyn Foster Segal on the slippery definitions of academic work got me thinking about the ways that such work is understood in terms of its labor value. This existential crisis is unquestionably a political one, as can be seen in a recent conflict between Graduate Student Research Assistants who are attempting toContinue reading “Fitting In”
Campus Faculty Association 