the New Faculty Majority blog

@DeanDad: Where is He?

2012-01-31T18:36:00.000-07:00

I am very tired, in a good way, after our wonderful NFM-AAUC conference in DC. Read more about it here and here. Then I stumbled across a recent reference to our noble organization on Friday Follow-ups, to which I take exception. Following are my remarks, to Dean Dad ~ some of you may know him, even his name. Anyway, this is just for the elite, the cognoscento, as it were. Gosh, I really am tired. Anyway, I chunked this in here because I can't seem to get it out on the great webish highway any other way:

Dear Dean Dad,

Your comments, as always, are most provocative. You must be enjoying yourself. As a board member of New Faculty Majority though, I have to take exception to your comment about New Faculty Majority’s advocacy of the “Vancouver model” for paying adjuncts making you worry about your hair because you “pull out what little” you have left whenever you read NFM on such subjects. Please. Whatever your notions about Canada being where it is, and not being in the United States, the published NFM position is that we advocate equity in compensation, job security, academic freedom, faculty governance, professional advancement, benefits, and access to unemployment insurance.

The Vancouver Model that Jack Longmate and Frank Cosco based Program for Change on is but one model that is of interest, and it is a good one, in the opinions of many, but we others discuss others. We do not believe that there is just one model. Recently, for instance, there has been interest in the model of Fashion Institute of Technology (SUNY), which is in the United States, actually. Other models were discussed at our recent conference in D.C., held in conjunction with the American Association of Colleges and Universities. We would have loved to have you there and to hear your views, if not to know your name.

In fact, we discuss many models and give a respectful hearing to all of them, but our overall view is that there are many roads to improvement in the currently dreadful working conditions for adjuncts and contingents, who are the majority teaching faculty in the United States. You are always welcome.

I am invited below to "choose an identity." I am Dr. Alan Trevithick, Board member, NFM, and adjunct in anthropology and sociology at Fordham University, Westchester Community College (SUNY), and LaGuardia Community College (CUNY). I invite you and all who are interested to discuss models with me at my personal email address, dralt@optonline.net. Please look after your hair.

Trends in College Spending

2012-01-30T15:28:00.000-07:00

#NewFac12 Summit participants agreed on the importance of transparency, knowing where the money comes from and where it goes. We already know where it doesn't go. Data, data... who's got the data? Who crunches it? IPEDS has data. Now Delta and American Institutes for Research (AIR) do for analyzing according to primary metrics. Next question: who gets access to the results?

According to a recent press release, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) will maintain the Delta Cost Project's database as part of its Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) that conducts annual surveys gathering information from every college, university, and technical and vocational institution that participates in the federal student financial aid programs. For more information about the Delta Cost Project at AIR, contact Rita Kirshstein at rkirshstein@air.org.

Accessing Delta Cost Project measures of spending, revenues, productivity, and enrollment in higher education institutions, Trends in College Spending (TCS) Online is an interactive web-based data system gives higher education stakeholders easy access to information on finance, performance, and enrollments for individual institutions, groups of institutions, or the nation as a whole.

Recent patterns in higher education finance are presented using six primary "metrics" compiled by the Delta Cost Project (follow the "Overview" link below). These metrics mirror those in the Delta Cost Project’s Trends in College Spending reports, where national-level patterns and trends are presented. The TCS system allows institutional-level comparisons with those national data.

The six metrics are revenue, expenditures, cost/price/subsidy, outcomes and spending, spending comparisons and enrollment.

Read the rest at TCS Overview

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#newfac12, now to sum it up

2012-01-29T18:03:00.000-07:00

So far rave reviews, Not that much out yet from those in actual attendance. Organizers are probably still collapsed in a heap somewhere recovering.

I'm stilling gathering materials, waiting for organizers to report to board and definitely not up for a long post but could not resist the word play. Besides, I should address the subject, throw a figurative mortarboard in the air, hail farewell in passing and sum up however briefly before moving on. Undoubtedly there will still be much to report on and materials to put before you.

Team Digital Footprint held its own Social Media Smackdown ~ Bigfeet every one of them too. And there you thought this was convo not a sporting event.

click to view larger version

Brian Croxall logged the most tweets, followed by Karen Kelsky (The Professor is In). Brian overcame early twit-throttling by improvising a GoogleDocs alternative worthy of haystacker or mooc rat

Lee Bessette liveblogged, tweeted and set up an archive for #newfac12 tweets that includes graphic analyses.

New contenders, John A Casey Jr and Josh Boldt (NFM member and chapter organizer), held their own, with Josh earning the distinction of blogging both the first Summit and the first post-summit posts, also cross posted to The-Compost and Facebook

Check out the #newfac12 stream on Twitter and Topsy ... and wait for the next installment...

Summit Up #NewFac12!

2012-01-28T02:11:00.001-07:00

Summit Program - Final.doc Download this file

Yes, today is the day. Can't be there? Got it covered: Twitter, Facebook, live blogging, social media team at the ready and other attendees armed with mobiles. Follow #newfac12 on Twitter. Lee Bessette will be liveblogging the Summit at College Ready Writing. Check out her pre-Summit post with resource links and listing the team so I don't have to again here.

Check @NewFacMajority and NFM's Facebook wall for introductions and links. We'll add others as they come up. I'll be here and there, dropping in on Twitter and Facebook, checking mail and rss feeds. All from New Mexico...

Alas, no livestreaming video. Who knows, maybe there will be mobiles with web cams in the crowd. Never discount serendipity. Audio will be available after the event.

Talking Points: plus a great late add from Gary Rhoades, visibility

Students’ learning conditions equate to faculty’s working conditions.
About 75% of faculty in colleges and universities in the U.S. are working off the “tenure track,” more than 800,000 academic workers.
There is a dearth of data being collected and reported regarding the terms and conditions of employment of these contingent workers, and therefore the general public is misinformed. In particular, they are led to believe that the average salary of a college professor is far higher than it really is.
While the average annual salary of a tenured full professor may be above $80,000, the average per 3-credit course salary of an adjunct is estimated to be about $2500, or the equivalent of about $20,000 for full-time work.
Many part-time contingents do not have access to any benefits, including health insurance, retirement contributions, sick leave, etc.
Despite decade of efforts by unions and other higher education organizations to reverse the trend, more and more full-time tenure-track positions are being converted to either part-time or full-time contingent positions. It’s time for action.
The NFM Foundation invites individuals, groups, organizations and institutions to work together to improve the quality of our higher education system by solving the problems created by the preponderance of contingent employment.
The NFM Foundation hopes that Summit participants will form the nexus of a movement to take actions that will provide contingent faculty with equitable compensation, job security, advancement opportunities, benefits and self governance.

Less Familiar Speakers

Claire Goldstene, Professorial Lecturer (NTT), Department of History, American University: Profile; H-Net Book Review, Shelton Stromquist. Reinventing 'The People': The Progressive Movement, the Class Problem, and the Origins of Modern Liberalism.
Carol Schneider, President, Association of American Colleges and Universities: Bio; Perspectives and Presentations
Adrianna Kezar, Associate Professor of Higher Education, University of Southern California and Associate Director, Center for Higher Education Policy Analysis; NYT debate series article, No Tenure, No Nothing
Heather Wathington, Assistant Professor of Higher Education, University of Virginia and Affiliate of the Center for Urban Education (CUE) - Western Interstate Commission of Higher Education (WICHE) Partnership for Equity and Policy. On Twitter as @hwathington. Publications.
Deepak Bhargava, Executive Director, The Center for Community Change; about the Center; articles about Deepak Bhargava: "A Voice for the Grassroots Inside the Beltway" and "Change We Can Believe In" (Strategies that rely on insider influence can't deliver large-scale change -- but mobilizations outside government can)
Stanley Katz, Director, Princeton University Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies; "How to Justify Our Paychecks," article on productivity in higher education and "Beyond Crude Measurement and Consumerism" (We ought to be up to the task of figuring out what it is that our students know by the end of four years at college that they did not know at the beginning).

Posted via email from Academentia

Weekly #EdTech News Roundup

2012-01-21T10:52:00.000-07:00

Audrey Watters, technology journalist, freelance writer, ed-tech advocate, recovering academic, rabble-rouser, and single mom, reports on ed tech at Hack Education and Inside HigherEd. Her stories have appeared on NPR/KQED's education technology blog MindShift, in the data section of O’Reilly Radar, and in the Edutopia's blog (among other places).

No matter what position taken on ed-tech and its future in / influence on higher education teaching, working conditions and employment, no one can afford to let ignorance be zir lodestar. Keep abreast in a single step and one stop by following Audrey's column. This week's round-up includes politics (SOPA, SCOTUS), launches (Wolfram Alpha), updates/upgrades (e-textbooks), retroactivity (restrictions and other unfortunate news), research and data, funding, contests and awards.

STOP SOPA: #SOPASTRIKE Jan18

2012-01-18T10:21:00.001-07:00

My favorite "stop sopa" page is Zachary Johnson's shadowbox with the moving light (just move your cursor) on Zachstronaut. Adding this one to my feed reader... tomorrow. Today .....

Oops.... the New Faculty Majority web pages missed blacking out. My apologies on their behalf but not my bad. I do just the blog and social media. Otherwise, sites are striking in all different ways, but they are united by this: do the biggest thing you possibly can and drive contacts to Congress. *Put the source code for this page your site* ~ it's my main page at Mountainair Online (the web page). I have no control over blog policies. I'm not really up to tinker with source code to show a black out page on my blogs. So I am settling for posting information and exhortations (like this one). Except for following #sopastrike on Twitter and @fightfortheftr) and Reddit, I'm staying off public pages today. No Facebook or

Personal blackouts seem to be running either 24 hours (midnight to midnight) or 8AM EST to 8PM EST. Major supporting sites like Wikipedia, WordPress, Google, Internet Archive (+ Wayback Machine), Electronic Frontier Foundation, Tucows and many, many more are striking for 24 hours. Looked like a major slow down on Facebook when I checked (before 8 am).

What can you do to support the strike if you don't have a blog or web page, can't blog and RT #sopastrike stories? Make a call; sign the petition; learn more; the action of the hour is to speak out. Write a letter to the editor of your local paper, opposing the bills. Contact local news stations and let them know that this is an issue worth covering. And there is still email, what they could be coming after next...

Today's Google search page:

Tell Congress: Please don't censor the web!

Links: education & labor news

2012-01-17T14:57:00.001-07:00

Not all or just about #highered per se but all relevant... even the accompanying illustration but you'll have to read to the end to learn why.

Cut the pious baloney! about reactions to NLRB recess appointments (finally!)
Jeff Bryant writes about Why accountants should not run schools (or set education policy)
Disrupt Education (stay informed about changes coming whether you like them or not): Opening the Language Learning Classroom to the World
Bob Samuels takes apart Yudoff's defensive mythbusting about UC
Best of the Ed Blogs: Misunderstanding & Misrepresenting the “Costs” & “Economics” of Online Learning
Jonathon Rees at More or Less Bunk writes about Why there is no history department at the University of Phoenix

Leveling the field: What I learned from for-profit education by Christopher Beha. Online, mostly vocational education certainly doesn't sound fun in this article from Harper's.
Internet Times: Zany times in the for-profit college business
Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice (K-12)writes, "Using test scores to evaluate and pay teachers (if you don't think that's coming to a community college near you, I can offer you a great deal on some swamp property): federal officials pushing states and districts to use test scores to determine teaching effectiveness have not done due diligence. And due diligence is what each of us expect of our top decision-makers. ¶ Consider the British experiment called “Payment for Results” in late-19th century England when Parliament legislated that teachers would be paid on the basis of how many of their students passed tests (Rapple, Payment for Results ). In 1887, yes, 1887, one school principal saw the consequences and said: a teacher knows that his whole professional status depends on the results he produces and he really is turned into a machine for producing those results; that is, I think, unaccompanied by any substantial gain to the whole cause of education. (Lyle Jones citing G. Sutherland, Policy-making in Elementary Education 1870-1897 (London:Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 68).
‘Union Stooges?’ The NLRB Is No Panacea for Workers, by Chris Machanoff: Three New Year appointments to the National Labor Relations Board assure that it will continue to operate. But while unions are celebrating the NLRB’s ability to keep the lights on, along with a handful of union-supportive decisions by the board, the hard fact is that even when the NLRB is operational, it doesn’t work for workers.
“1, 2, 3, 4…Can I have a little more?” from More or Less Bunk by Jonathan Rees (and citing us, thank you very much, as well as the following, new add to the overflowing reader even if too late for most of us)
76. There is a culture of fear from 100 Reasons NOT to Go to Graduate School. Why? Why are academics—of all people—afraid of writing (and speaking) honestly about their profession? Why do so many of those who do express themselves feel compelled to do so anonymously? The answer lies in the staggering power imbalance between academics and the people who employ them.
I've always had a weakness for Rube Goldberg devices. Larry Ferlazzo's Best Resources for Learning about Rube Goldberg Machines. Irrelevant? On the other hand, higher education either increasingly resembles one or would be vastly improved if it did.

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Consider this ~

2012-01-15T11:34:00.001-07:00

Fair Trade in Education matters too: why not certify institutions of higher ed as providers of a Fair Trade Education? Combat exploitation in higher ed degree production. Although relevant in explaining structures and ethics of consumption, the excerpt below from Combating Slavery in Coffee and Chocolate Production is not intended as a direct comparison of adjunct faculty and other precariously employed knowledge workers in higher education with slave and child labor. The moral obligation of ethical production is also a cornerstone of Talmudic Law.

"Morality requires American consumers to purchase fair-trade products whenever possible. Whether one is a egalitarian, believing that people have an obligation to help others, or a libertarian, believing that people are only obligated to not coerce, harm or unjustifiably restrain innocent others, it seems clear that consumers have an obligation to ensure that the people who produce the goods they consume are both not enslaved and basically compensated. Just as a morally decent person understands that it is wrong to purchase cheap goods from a provider who is known to regularly sell stolen goods, so, too, is it wrong to purchase cheap chocolate, coffee, sugar, and other goods that are cultivated through stolen, forced, or exploited labor.

It is also important to point out that buying fair-trade products is not the same as donating to help others. When it comes to the moral uses of money people often think of donating funds to the needy or those who are suffering. While donating to the needy is an important component of a moral life, fewer donations would be necessary if people were justly rewarded for the often very hard work they do. Ideally, no one should purchase fair-trade products with the idea that they are donating to improve the lives of coffee and cocoa growers. Buying fair-trade products is not "donating" to a cause, it is merely doing the decent thing: paying people a reasonable sum for the work that they are doing for you.

.... For the contemporary American consumer our purchasing practices are moral proclamations. To the extent that we refuse to contemplate the people whose labor produces the foods we put in our bodies and the objects we use in our daily lives, we conveniently deny our moral obligation to consider the well being of not only those nearest to us, but also workers living in the shadows of production who also have the basic rights to living a decent life."

Truthout, January 15, 2012: Combating Slavery in Coffee and Chocolate Production by Jeffery Alan Nall PhD (Scholar, Teacher, Culture Critic ~ and one of us: Instructor, Indian River State College and Florida Atlantic University)

In the Middle: The Best MLA is the One I Didn't Attend: Tweeting the Conference

2012-01-15T09:11:00.000-07:00

JJ Cohen writes,

Because I'm on fellowship leave, and because I'm committed to an extraordinary amount of travel in the semester ahead, I didn't attend the MLA conference in Seattle.

I followed the event at a distance through friends on FB and the occasional text message or phone chat. I know a few people who are on the job market, and a delegation of GW English faculty were conducting interviews for our Romanticist position. And maybe that says it: the MLA convention is easy shorthand for the US academic hiring process in literature, since in hotel rooms at that conference most of the interviewing is undertaken.

This year, though, I also experienced the unfolding of the meeting via Twitter.

In the Middle: The Best MLA is the One I Didn't Attend: Tweeting the Conference

Same here and we're not alone. Lee Skallerup tweeted and Storified MLA12 and AHA2012 without attending either. Brian Croxall tweeted both but attending just MLA12. Haystackers in Seattle and Chicago kept the back channels busy. Later, John A Casey Jr, who presented at AHA, posted thoughts on the current conference system, its frustrations, high costs and possible changes:

Yet another way that non-elite faculty are prevented from full participation in the discipline they help sustain.

Among the many changes that I hope will take place as the discipline of English is forced to evolve or disappear is a reexamination of the annual convention model....changes are all desperately needed. Maybe regional conferences affiliated with national ones could pick up the slack. Or perhaps a lot of the work needed could be done online.

In any event, if we want all the members of the profession to have a say in its future, we need something better than the traditional annual convention. The premium for attendance is too steep.

Supply is Not Going to Decrease (So It’s Time to Think About Curating)

2012-01-14T20:40:00.000-07:00

Createquity article about supply, demand and surplus (overproduction ~ sound familiar) in art markets addresses intrinsic motivation conditions similar to those in higher ed ~ used there to rationalize pay imbalance.

"For one thing, conversation about supply and demand breaks down a bit when the suppliers have an intrinsic motivation to be in the marketplace. Classical economic models assume that suppliers don’t have any particular emotional attachment to what they’re supplying; all they really want to do is to make money. As a result, if they’re not making money, they’ll exit the industry, leaving more to go around for everyone else. As we see from Kirk Lynn’s contribution to the discussion, however, many artists (especially artist-entrepreneurs) have far too much passion for their work to consider exiting solely for financial reasons. The result of this lack of exit is a surfeit of fantastic art that few aside from its creators have time to take in."

Read the complete article, Supply is Not Going to Decrease (So It’s Time to Think About Curating)

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What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success

2012-01-10T04:23:00.001-07:00

*How does this relate to #highered #academiclabor & #adjunct issues? What lessons and ideas can we as both educators and academic precariat working for equity in the academic workplace take away from this article and the Finnish example? It's definitely something to talk about at the January 28 Summit, "Reclaiming Academic Democracy: Facing the Consequences of Contingent Employment in Higher Education." So is the Program for Change developed by Jack Longmate and Frank Fosco. What's on your list of questions? Let us know.

Quotes:

What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success - Anu Partanen - National - The Atlantic
Everyone agrees the United States needs to improve its education system dramatically, but how?

Trouble is, when it comes to the lessons that Finnish schools have to offer, most of the discussion seems to be missing the point.

Compared with the stereotype of the East Asian model -- long hours of exhaustive cramming and rote memorization -- Finland's success is especially intriguing because Finnish schools assign less homework and engage children in more creative play.

one of the most significant things Sahlberg said passed practically unnoticed. "Oh," he mentioned at one point, "and there are no private schools in Finland."

There are no private universities, either. This means that practically every person in Finland attends public school, whether for pre-K or a Ph.D.

The answers Finland provides seem to run counter to just about everything America's school reformers are trying to do.

Finland has no standardized tests

teachers are trained to assess children in classrooms using independent tests they create themselves.

"There's no word for accountability in Finnish,"

"Accountability is something that is left when responsibility has been subtracted."

what matters is that in Finland all teachers and administrators are given prestige, decent pay, and a lot of responsibility. A master's degree is required to enter the profession, and teacher training programs are among the most selective professional schools in the country. I

while Americans love to talk about competition, Sahlberg points out that nothing makes Finns more uncomfortable. In his book Sahlberg quotes a line from Finnish writer named Samuli Puronen: "Real winners do not compete."

There are no lists of best schools or teachers in Finland. The main driver of education policy is not competition between teachers and between schools, but cooperation.

Decades ago, when the Finnish school system was badly in need of reform, the goal of the program that Finland instituted, resulting in so much success today, was never excellence. It was equity.

Since the 1980s, the main driver of Finnish education policy has been the idea that every child should have exactly the same opportunity to learn, regardless of family background, income, or geographic location. Education has been seen first and foremost not as a way to produce star performers, but as an instrument to even out social inequality.

But subsequent PISA tests confirmed that Finland

was producing academic excellence through its particular policy focus on equity.

That this point is almost always ignored or brushed aside in the U.S. seems especially poignant at the moment, after the financial crisis and Occupy Wall Street movement have brought the problems of inequality in America into such sharp focus.

All countries are different, and as many Americans point out, Finland is a small nation with a much more homogeneous population than the United States.

But the number of foreign-born residents in Finland doubled during the decade leading up to 2010, and the country didn't lose its edge in education

Educational policy, Abrams suggests, is probably more important to the success of a country's school system than the nation's size or ethnic makeup.

Finland's population of 5.4 million can be compared to many an American state -- after all, most American education is managed at the state level.

despite their many differences, Finland and the U.S. have an educational goal in common.

Finland's experience suggests that to win at that game, a country has to prepare not just some of its population well, but all of its population well,

it is possible to achieve excellence by focusing not on competition, but on cooperation, and not on choice, but on equity.

The problem facing education in America isn't the ethnic diversity of the population but the economic inequality of society, and this is precisely the problem that Finnish education reform addressed.

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Not of General Interest: Random Bullets of MLA 2012

2012-01-09T14:13:00.000-07:00

Succinct MLA 2012 overview from another not-mainstream-academic-press perspective, neither long winded blogger nor minimalist tweeter. I would have said for the broke and otherwise motivated to stay at home but now suspect these may also be necessary to fill in inevitable gaps experienced by those present IRL without benefit of T.A.R.D.I.S. Don't complain about the genre being hard to suss out.

Not of General Interest: Random Bullets of MLA 2012

CLIP Call for Papers

2012-01-09T00:15:00.000-07:00

Call for Submissions: Special Joint Issue of the ADE Bulletin and the ADFL Bulletin, “Non-Tenure-Track Faculty in the Modern Languages: Issues and Directions”

The Modern Language Association’s Committee on Contingent Labor in the Profession...is sponsoring a joint edition of the ADE Bulletin and the ADFL Bulletin to promote informed, professional discussion of contingent labor in departments in the United States and Canada. To support such discussions, the committee created “Professional Employment Practices for Non-Tenure-Track Faculty Members,” a policy document approved by the MLA Executive Council in 2011.

[The joint edition Bulletin] seeks contributions showing how departments and individuals are using or might use the document. Essays relating to academic contingent labor are also welcome on topics including but not limited to the following:

Analyses, documentation, or description of trends or situations, nationally, regionally, or locally
Implications or effects of higher education trends (technology, distance learning, undergraduate education, curriculum issues)
Recruitment and hiring practices
Implications and issues of online or distance-education models for contingent faculty members
Compensation and professional advancement
Coalition building within and across institutions
Professional rights and responsibilities
Professional development and recognition
Graduate education and training issues
Research by contingent faculty members
Integration into the life of the department and institution
Best practices and models (case studies) of departments or institutions
Issues related to community colleges

more at CLIP Call for Papers

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'tis the season ~ of annual meetings

2012-01-07T23:37:00.000-07:00

How to "attend" them (sort of) on the cheap? One answer is social media, especially Twitter. Although both get blogged and covered by "academic media," e.g. Chronicle and Inside HigherEd, Twitter does it better. Plus you can follow simultaneous sessions as well as both Seattle and Chicago, impossible IRL ~ even if we could afford it.

Strategies:

Search hashtags: #mla12 and #aha2012
Narrow focus by adding session hashtags
Use a social media search tool such as Topsy
Set a Google alert
Identify a blogger or active tweeter who is covering the meeting, especially sessions you are most interested in. Brian Croxall is always a good bet. "Active" would be an understatement.

Storified by Lee Skallerup:

The Fight for Public Higher Education #s167 #mla12
Jobs for Historians: Approaching the Crisis #aha2012

Of course, CHE and IHE accounts and post mortems will still be pored over and commented, but they are no longer the whole story for those not in attendance. Add the reflections of academic bloggers. Real time coverage fleshes it out.

Forget about the "cachet" of "being there ... only matters if you let it. Not being left out of the conversation, invisible and silenced when so many communication tools are at hand counts for more.

Consider too the cachet of being greener...

Holiday Wish Lists

2011-12-28T11:31:00.001-07:00

What are your holiday wishes or New Year's resolutions that you hope the faculty majority - both lower and upper case, will make? What do you see or hope to see in your own future in (or out of) the academic workplace?

I'm still in that vague holiday / vacation mode, working myself up to Serious Summitry (NFM National Summit, Jan 28, 2012 ~ hashtag #newfac12) in the form of updates, exhortations, and other pre-Summit blogging exercises. There are other items on the "I really should get around to blogging this" list, serious, important, meaningful items ~ really, that I am not yet in the mood to do. Why not? Holidays. Winter. Snowed in. Whatever. Procrastination is the obvious solution. Despite tweeting and sharing on Facebook more to make up, the burden of regular blogging beckons yet. Seasonal themes work for other social media commitments, why not here?

NFM board member Judy Olson's birthday was Monday, day after Christmas also Boxing Day. She asked us...

Merry Humbug, everyone; hope you're keeping warm and sane.

If you could ask Santa to get the NEA to do one thing, what would it be? It has to be something the NEA can actually do, but this could be lobby for legislation, for instance.

Monday's my birthday, so maybe we could make your request to Santa your birthday gift to me, and make that the deadline. I'd like a quick, simple off-the-top-of-your-head response anyway.

Thanks!
Hohowhatever

We came up with lobbying to legislate revisions in Federal labor law to close the loopholes in state codes that let states deny adjunct / contingent faculty unemployment compensation, getting the DoL to revise job titles and descriptions so we can be eligible for student debt relief waivers for teaching, among other benefits, and, finally, endorsing and moving to implement the Program for Change.

Judy's deadline is past but the season extends to January 5, Epiphany and Three Wise Men. What could be more appropriate than that? We might even get an epiphany out of it. Let's reshape the parameters and use this a focus exercise for 2012 and the Summit - an extra few days for resolution making.

Quick, simple and off-the-top-of-your-head still preferred. Here it is:

If you could ask for precariously employed academic knowledge workers to accomplish just one thing this year, what would it be? That's all of us, including but not limited to New Faculty Majority, unions, higher education action and even Occupy groups. It has to be something within the realm of possibility, but this could be to implement a campaign or lobby for legislation.

Holiday Greetings & the Gift of Changing Lives

2011-12-25T11:59:00.001-07:00

#newfac12, changing lives ... another way of describing our mission, what we are about and why the NFM Foundation Summit on Contingent Employment in Higher Ed, January 28. Consider then this season, gifts that change other lives... DIY gift would be another relevant post. Too late for that one though. When life resumes after the holidays, we'll pick back up with summitry: plans, updates, more about speakers and participants, even information on how, even if you can't be there, you can still be a part of it. Until then...

Merry Christmas ¡Feliz Navidad! Nadolig Llawen,Joyeux Noël, Glædelig Jul, Prettige kerstdagen! Bones Navidaes! Froue Weihnåcht'n, Jwaye Nowèl, Ya'at'eeh Keshmish, A Blythe Yule / Nollaig chridheil, Crăciun fericit

Mercy Corps Gifts

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There's still time to give a gift that changes lives

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With more than 40 gifts to choose from,
you're sure to find the perfect last-minute gift.

Mercy Corps will use your donation to save and improve lives in the world's toughest places. The gifts you purchase are examples of what we do. To help deliver the most effective solutions to the greatest number of people, your donation will be combined with other funds and used as it is most needed. The gift descriptions in this catalog reflect the kinds of support Mercy Corps provides to the people we serve.

88% of our funds go to programs like:

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12% of our funds go to administration and fundraising.

Charity Navigator awards us four stars for our responsible stewardship of donor funds.

Mercy Corps — PO Box 2669, Dept W — Portland, OR — 97208-2669

Students on the Front Lines of Class War

2011-12-11T12:50:00.000-07:00

So what does that have to do with #adjuncts, #academiclabor & #NFM's #highered mission? In my opinion, plenty. Perhaps Juan Cole's Truthdig essay How Students Landed on the Front Lines of Class War will help explain why we should be there with them. If not, then at least include it in discussions about our purpose and where it fits in the current cultural, economic and higher education landscape.

Joe Wolf (CC-BY-ND)

By Juan Cole

The deliberate pepper-spraying by campus police of nonviolent protesters at UC Davis on Friday has provoked national outrage. But the horrific incident must not cloud the real question: What led comfortable, bright, middle-class students to join the Occupy protest movement against income inequality and big-money politics in the first place?

The University of California system raised tuition by more than 9 percent this year, and the California State University system upped tuition by 12 perceity.

Follow the link to read the rest of How Students Landed on the Front Lines of Class War.

Juan Cole, a celebrated Mideast scholar and the Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan, also blogs at Informed Comment. His Truthdig column appears every other Tuesday.

Reading Room: Patterns in Academia

2011-12-10T06:05:00.000-07:00

Actions. Protests. Campaigns Occupations. Summits. Conferences. Conventions. You know the boundaries are blurring when cops pepper spray not Berkeley but UC Davis (the 2nd whitest UC campus in the system) students and there is a movement to Occupy MLA, about which most of the conversations take place on Twitter. You doubt? Then search and follow the OccupyMLA or OMLA with or without hashtags. See for yourself.

Change and transgression are in the air. So why am I posting a collection on annotated links from a book blog? Easy... we need intel from multiple perspectives, not just the usual academic media, a few blogs written by academics and mainstream media. It's also a change of pace. We need that too

Cathrine Hasse and Stine Trentemoller (Academia): Cultural Work Place Patterns in Academia. Rex J. Pjesky (West Texs A&M) and Daniel Sutter (Troy): Does the Lack of a Profit Motive Affect Hiring in Academe? Evidence from the Market for Lawyers....

Do the humanities really need to be protected from the encroachment of the sciences? .... Distracted by activism: If faculty members in education (and many other disciplines) want to influence public policy, they have no choice but to look beyond traditional academic publishing .... Robert Weissberg writes in defense of bad teaching.

Not feeling the kinship: Anthropologists debate whether their discipline is divided into humanities and science tribes, and wonder why they can’t all get along. Academics from physicists to experts on Scandinavian culture are crafting stand-up comedy routines based on their work — but this is no joke.

Read the rest of Patterns in Academia plus more Omnivore treats at the Book Forum

More Magical Thinking

2011-12-09T17:48:00.000-07:00

You should all really have a look at this Inside HigherEd column: "Castes and Higher Ed" by Gloria Nemerowicz. It is just another in an apparently endless line of “reformist” essays featuring a tenderness of feeling for the poor and the downtrodden, conjoined to a faith in the power of higher education that is rendered ridiculous by some inability or unwillingness to look at the caste system in our colleges and universities. Look:

“Income and wealth inequality in the United States, which has become even more pronounced since 1967, continues to interfere with the national need for an increasingly sophisticated and skilled workforce and citizenry.”

Yikes! Does this author really not know that at least one very sophisticated and skilled workforce—the one doing all the higher ed teaching—is, well, you get the idea.

Furthermore, In regard to the author’s own institution, while the Pine Manor College website claims, no doubt truthfully that "The College employs nearly 200 individuals, including full- and part-time faculty and staff," the US Department of Education reports via IPEDS that PMC has 53 employees whose primary task is instruction, and almost half of these are part-time.

DO have a look and make polite comments in response.

Occupy Colleges Now: Students as the New Public Intellectuals

2011-12-04T09:03:00.000-07:00

Not adjuncts, not lecturers ~ students. That is the group Henry Giroux identifies as the "new intellectuals." How and why did we miss playing a central role? Have we been chasing the wrong brass ring? In my admittedly personal opinion, changing the world trumps "professional dignity" any day.

Police pepper spray students at a UC Davis demonstration on Friday, November 18. (Screengrab: asucd - Click here for video)

Giroux writes,

Finding our way to a more humane future demands a new politics, a new set of values, and a renewed sense of the fragile nature of democracy. In part, this means educating a new generation of intellectuals who not only defend higher education as a democratic public sphere, but also frame their own agency as intellectuals willing to connect their research, teaching, knowledge, and service with broader democratic concerns over equality, justice, and an alternative vision of what the university might be and what society could become. Under the present circumstances, it is time to remind ourselves that academe may be one of the few public spheres available that can provide the educational conditions for students, faculty, administrators, and community members to embrace pedagogy as a space of dialogue and unmitigated questioning, imagine different futures, become border-crossers, and embrace a language of critique and possibility that makes visible the urgency of a politics necessary to address important social issues and contribute to the quality of public life and the common good.

Time for contingent faculty to combine necessary and pragmatic goals of improving our economic and professional lot with crossing a few borders. It's written into our mission statement. Nor are the two mutually exclusive. The famous Hillel quote comes to mind, "If I am not for myself, then who am I for? If I am for myself alone, then what am I?" Not a bad start for our brand and explaining who we are.

Giroux closes,

Hopefully, the Occupy Wall Street movements will expand their appropriation of public space to the university. And if so, let's hope that higher education will be viewed as a crucial public good and democratic public sphere. Under such circumstances, the university might be transformed into a new and broad-based community of learning and resistance. This is a huge possibility, but one worth struggling for. Unlike the youth movements of the past, such a movement will not crystallize around specific movements, but will create, hopefully, a community of the broadest possible resistance and political clout.

In this way, the Occupy movement will connect to the larger world through a conversation and politics that links the particular with broader notions of freedom and justice. And against the pedagogical machine and political forces of casino capitalism, this expanding movement will fight hopefully with renewed energy. It will be determined in its mission to expand the capacities to think otherwise, and courageous in its attempts to take risks. It will be brave in its willingness to change the nature of the questions asked, fight to hold power accountable, and struggle to provide the formative culture for students and others to fight for those economic, political, social, and cultural conditions that are essential both to their future and to democracy itself.

Occupy Colleges Now: Students as the New Public Intellectuals | Truthout

'via Blog this'

CFP: How Class Works, NEW deadline Dec19

2011-12-01T21:02:00.001-07:00

Because of final exam schedules at Stony Brook we will not be able to review proposals for the How Class Works - 2012 conference until Monday December 19, so we are extending the deadline for conference proposals for one week to afford all the extra time. The deadline for proposals is now December 19, 2011. See guidelines below.

The Center for Study of Working Class Life now has a Facebook page http://www.facebook.com/pages/Center-for-Study-of-Working-Class-Life/265261583520258

HOW CLASS WORKS - 2012
CALL FOR PRESENTATIONS
A Conference at SUNY Stony Brook June 7-9, 2012

The Center for Study of Working Class Life is pleased to announce the How Class Works – 2012 Conference, to be held at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, June 7-9, 2012. Proposals for papers, presentations, and sessions are welcome until December 19, 2011 according to the guidelines below. For more information, visit our Web site at <www.workingclass.sunysb.edu>.

Purpose and orientation: The conference seeks to explore ways in which an explicit recognition of class helps to understand the social world in which we live, and ways in which analysis of society can deepen our understanding of class as a social relationship. Presentations should take as their point of reference the lived experience of class; proposed theoretical contributions should be rooted in and illuminate social realities. Presentations are welcome from people outside academic life when they sum up social experience in a way that contributes to the themes of the conference. Formal papers will be welcome but are not required. All presentations should be accessible to an interdisciplinary audience.

Conference themes: The conference welcomes proposals for presentations that advance our understanding of any of the following themes.

The mosaic of class, race, and gender. To explore how class shapes racial, gender, and ethnic experience and how different racial, gender, and ethnic experiences within various classes shape the meaning of class.

Class, power, and social structure. To explore the social content of working, middle, and capitalist classes in terms of various aspects of power; to explore ways in which class and structures of power interact, at the workplace and in the broader society.

Class and community. To explore ways in which class operates outside the workplace in the communities where people of various classes live.

Class in a global economy. To explore how class identity and class dynamics are influenced by globalization, including experience of cross-border organizing, capitalist class dynamics, international labor standards.

Middle class? Working class? What's the difference and why does it matter? To explore the claim that the U.S. is a middle class society and contrast it with the notion that the working class is the majority; to explore the relationships between the middle class and the working class, and between the middle class and the capitalist class.

Class, public policy, and electoral politics. To explore how class affects public policy, with special attention to health care, the criminal justice system, labor law, poverty, tax and other economic policy, housing, and education; to explore the place of electoral politics in the arrangement of class forces on policy matters.

Class and culture: To explore ways in which culture transmits and transforms class dynamics.
Pedagogy of class. To explore techniques and materials useful for teaching about class, at K-12 levels, in college and university courses, and in labor studies and adult education courses.

How to submit proposals for How Class Works – 2012 Conference

Proposals for presentations must include the following information: a) title; b) which of the eight conference themes will be addressed; c) a maximum 250 word summary of the main points, methodology, and slice of experience that will be summed up; d) relevant personal information indicating institutional affiliation (if any) and what training or experience the presenter brings to the proposal; e) presenter's name, address, telephone, fax, and e-mail address. A person may present in at most two conference sessions. To allow time for discussion, sessions will be limited to three twenty-minute or four fifteen-minute principal presentations. Sessions will not include official discussants. Proposals for poster sessions are welcome. Presentations may be assigned to a poster session.

Proposals for sessions are welcome. A single session proposal must include proposal information for all presentations expected to be part of it, as detailed above, with some indication of willingness to participate from each proposed session member.Submit proposals as an e-mail attachment to michael.zweig@stonybrook.edu or as hard copy by mail to the How Class Works - 2012 Conference, Center for Study of Working Class Life, Department of Economics, SUNY, Stony Brook, NY 11794-4384.

Timetable: Proposals must be received by December 19, 2012. After review by the program committee, notifications will be mailed on January 17, 2012. The conference will be at SUNY Stony Brook June 7-9, 2012. Conference registration and housing reservations will be possible after February 20, 2012. Details and updates will be posted at http://www.workingclass.sunysb.edu.

Conference coordinator:
Michael Zweig
Director, Center for Study of Working Class Life
Department of Economics
State University of New York Stony Brook, NY 11794-4384
631.632.7536
michael.zweig@stonybrook.edu

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AAUP National Elections

2011-11-22T16:49:00.001-07:00

If you are an adjunct / contingent faculty and AAUP member, whether Bargaining Unit or Chapter, please think of yourself as potential candidate for the National Council. It's been a tough year. The previous was no picnic either. Yet waves of resistance to an unbearable status and recent statements favoring a greater voice for us give hope. Maybe I am wrong about a change in the climate. Retired and not a member, what would I know? Call it a hunch (but an educated one). Jeanette Jeneault, certainly more informed than I, agrees and writes,

Greetings,

If you are an AAUP Collective Bargaining or Advocacy chapter would like to run for National Council or one of the other positions of the AAUP, please let me know. I am on the nominations committee, and would like to see more contingent faculty representation. If interested, please read the information on the Nominations Invited page, and if you have any questions let me know.

Thanks for considering this. You will need to attend two meetings per year. All expenses are paid. I am on the nomination committee and on council.

JJ

In case we are not wrong, then surely this is the time for as many adjuncts, contingent faculty and other non-tenurable academic knowledge workers to stand for the council, Then with a slate worth supporting, join and vote it in. There is an advantage to being in the majority, even an exploited one, but not unless we seize it. Now.

The Evolution Of Student Loans

2011-11-12T14:34:00.000-07:00

Plaguing not just students but so many adjuncts as well... yet another way in which our fortunes (or lack thereof) and destinies intertwine. Many adjuncts were GTAs once upon a time, those more recently than others all the more likely to be sharing the same burden of student indebtedness. It's time to join them. How are you supporting the November 17th Day of Action? The date is also International Students Day, established in1941 to commemorate the anniversary of the 1939 Nazi storming of the University of Prague after demonstrations and the execution of nine student leaders, over 1,200 students sent to concentration camps, and the closure of all Czech universities and colleges.

Bob Lawless gave a quick history on student loan law. Mike Konzcal graphed it, arguing thatPlaug we should undo the rules from the 1990s and 2000s because it's "hard to see these [changes] as anything other than a giant subsidy to private agents." Pareene concurs:

Every single law Congress has passed regarding student loans since the federal program was introduced in 1965 has benefited lenders and made repayment or bankruptcy harder for borrowers. In addition to being unfair, this seems perhaps like bad policy, unless we really think it’s best for college graduates to spend their first decade (or decades) in the workforce sending substantial portions of their income to private lenders.

Konzcal's graphic after the jump....

More on The Evolution Of Student Loans

Campaign for the Future of Higher Education Meets in Boston, Plans Next Steps

2011-11-12T03:02:00.000-07:00

Last weekend APSCUF President Steve Hicks and Executive Council member Jen Bacon attended the second gathering of the Campaign for the Future of Higher Education. Here are their reports: Campaign for the Future of Higher Education Meets in Boston, Plans Next Steps.

(and thanks Jen for the NFM mention)

"For those who are interested in learning more about a new organization specific to the issues of contingent faculty, please visit the New Faculty Majority website"

NFM Statement on the Repeal of SB 5 in Ohio

2011-11-10T21:54:00.001-07:00

NFM is pleased to have been a part of the struggle to preserve collective bargaining rights for public employees in Ohio.

However, as satisfying as the victory in Ohio is, it is critically important to remember that part-time faculty and graduate students still do NOT have the right to bargain collectively here in Ohio. It is time now to extend collective bargaining to these faculty members who do the majority of the teaching in appalling working conditions in public colleges and universities in Ohio.

We hope that the faculty unions will commit themselves equally to fighting for professional working conditions for these colleagues as they did to preserving the rights of the full-time faculty. Because faculty working conditions are student learning conditions, all students deserve equal access to professionally supported full- and part-time faculty.

Public Statements that recognize the need to continue to work to extend collective bargaining rights to all faculty:

Reading Room: The college years

2011-11-07T00:06:00.000-07:00

Take a reading break while waiting for final report and wrap on #CFHEs 2nd National Gathering this past weekend at UMass. Preliminary reports for Friday and Saturday are available on Restructuring Public Hi Ed. Have you checked out the NFM Foundation page for information on our 2012 Summit? Results and analysis of our back to school hiring experience survey will appear there soon. Not to left out, the New Faculty Majority page is poised for a relaunch.

.... A review of The University and The People: Envisioning American Higher Education in an Era of Populist Protest by Scott M. Gelber .... Oberlin English professor Anne Trubek quizzes Victor E. Ferrall Jr., author of Liberal Arts on the Brink, about the glum future of the American liberal arts college .... Barbarians vs. Centurions: Culture wars over the literary canon have always been with us — we should make those conflicts part of the conversation in the classroom ....

Sources of illumination: Characterised by creativity and attuned to the needs of their age, the first European universities have important lessons for higher education today .... Why we need for-profit colleges: Profits and education shouldn’t have to be such an ugly combination. Accountability is all the rage in today’s education reform industry and at the university level, but do we really want professors to be productive? Ann Blair on her book Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age.

Read the rest of The college years on the Book Forum

Coalition of Academic Labor: Third Annual Forum on Part Time Faculty Unions

2011-11-04T11:37:00.001-06:00

Saturday, Nov 19, 9am-1pm, Washington DC. See below for details on topics and calls for presentations. This is late getting this out (my bad), so contact Anne McLeer to make sure the Forum is still accepting presentations.

we're feisty

2011-10-29T13:35:00.001-06:00

NFM and contingent academic labor issues cited in Australian academic blog, Music for Deckchairs. Love the blog title and being called feisty:

Miserably, the concession we make to flexibility is by casualising academic labour, so that we can manage fluctuations in demand with last minute hiring practices that pass on to the most precariously employed our own lack of ability to make plans in this churning market. The harm this is doing to the education profession is rightly the stuff of despair (see for example the excellent short documentary Degrees of Shame, being promoted by the feisty New Faculty Majority as part of Campus Equity Week this week.) ... from Trust Wipeout

Read the read of the post too. It goes to budget, ed tech, ed biz incursions, governance, Campaign for the Future of Higher Education issues and more... a thoughtful "WhitherU" post that addresses a question, Can someone in universities please start thinking about cultures of trust and what creates them??, posed in yet another blog.

Other NFM mission relevant points include the lack resources for professional development and increased weight placed on student evaluations

First, in an era of contracting budgets there’s an acute lack of resourcing for teacher development, experimentation or change management, particularly in relation to emerging technologies. Secondly, the rise and rise of student evaluation as a proxy for professional peer review means that we’re constantly beta testing in front of hostile judges. It’s not so much MasterChef as Dancing with the Stars, blindfold and on stilts. In fact, it’s Wipeout, and about as much fun.

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Campus Equity Week in New Jersey, #CEW2011

2011-10-26T19:58:00.002-06:00

Great day today at Union County College in Cranford New Jersey. Our AFT Local's Executive Board hosted a 5 hour marathon for Campus Equity Week in the main hallway of the main building.

Within the first 2 hours we gave away over 100 AFT "I Make a Difference Every Day" T-shirts while the Board wore our Scarlet Letter 'A' is for \Adjunct t-shirts. By the end of the day we went through several large urns of coffee, about 300 cookies and pastries, and a lot of explanation to students about how the adjuncts add to the success of the students.

Yours truly, Bill Lipkin, far left

We harvested over 500 signatures on our petition for proportional compensation for adjunct faculty. The President of the College and several of the VPs actually joined us for a short time and shared cups of coffee. The chapter Executive Board of AAUP (our full time faculty) actually sat at our tables for most of the day to show support for us.

If nothing else, with all of our signs and posters, we did make a statement, and hopefully we can build off of the start we made today for equity for adjuncts.

Hands Up for Fair Employment

2011-10-25T20:28:00.001-06:00

FPSE (Federation of Post-Secondary Education) President's Statement for Fair Employment Week #FEW (Canadian version of #CEW2011)

Hands Up for Fair Employment

This week in post-secondary institutions across Canada faculty and staff are highlighting the problems that non-regular faculty face in their demand for fair employment. It is a struggle that every local in our Federation takes on at the bargaining table and throughout the term of their collective agreements: the struggle to achieve fair and secure employment for every member.

The work we are doing to strengthen contract language and ensure that non-regular faculty achieve real fairness in their workplace is undermined by a provincial government that continues to underfund our post-secondary institutions. Since 2001, real per-student operating grants—the largest single investment that the BC government makes in post-secondary education—has dropped by more than eight per cent The steady decline in funding leads to increased pressures on all faculty to do more with less, an outcome that not only frustrates faculty and their work, it also limits access for our students and diminishes the quality of their education.

As discouraging as these funding cuts are to the work we do as educators, the encouraging news is that we are not alone. A strong majority of BC voters believes that the current provincial government is not investing enough in post-secondary education. In a recent poll commissioned by FPSE on post-secondary education issues, over three-quarters of respondents supported greater investment by the provincial government in our public colleges, institutes and universities. That shift in public support is a first and necessary step in rebuilding the capacity of our institutions to both improve access and improve the conditions of our members who ensure that greater access translates to more learning opportunities for every student.

Making those kinds of improvements has to include substantial changes to the employment conditions of our non-regular faculty members. Those members want and deserve fair access to continuing work within their institution. They want and deserve a fairer system of compensation, a system that moves away from the current system of secondary scales. And finally, those members want and deserve access to full benefits and contractual support programs.

This week we are asking all post-secondary educators in BC to show their support for the struggle of non-regular faculty members. You can do that by talking to your faculty association about the challenges that non-regular faculty face, by talking to your colleagues about this issue, but most of all, by joining with us and putting your hands up for fair employment. Together we are stronger. Pass it on.

Federation of Post-Secondary Educators of BC
400 - 550 West 6th Avenue, Vancouver, BC V5Z 1A1 | Telephone: 604.873.8988 | Fax: 604.873.8865
Email: info@fpse.ca | CUPE 1004

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Ghost at Westchester Community College

2011-10-25T16:16:00.000-06:00

Ok, pretty silly looking, but it does create some comment—will be there again tomorrow and Thursday. All feedback good thus far.

Many other adjuncts wearing little ghost logos: check out our adjunct rep's hand-around and ghost. Thank you, Diane!

October 24 begins [Campus] Adjunct Equity Week. It would be wonderful if we participate in the national campaign to bring recognition to our status and situation. Towards that end, a document that you can cut and wear with your ID card, or as a button/pin or a necklace has been provided. It is a ghost indicating that while our contributions are quite clear our hardships are invisible to the larger community.

I hope you will participate in this campaign and all wear the ghost all week. It is designed to get members of the community to ask you what it means. It is a starting point for the conversation that includes:

We teach a large percentage of all courses taught at WCC
We are hourly workers and do not get paid for prep time or grading
We have no healthcare
We have no personal days
We get one sick day/ semester; it does not carry over
We have limited job security since we are at will workers

Feel free to add your own experiences.

Diane Urban, WCCFT Adjunct Representative

#TrueAdjunctTales: "20 years as an adjunct?"

2011-10-24T17:58:00.000-06:00

Rediscovering @AdjunctMatters.... after a quiet spell, it's back and we're so glad. Add this to you CEW video playlist along with other Xtranormal highered faves

#TrueAdjunctTales presents "20 years as an adjunct? I think I just threw up in my mouth."

True Adjunct Tales
www.youtube.com

20 years as an adjunct? I think I just threw up in my mouth." #TrueAdjunctTales

BYOP: Degrees of Shame

2011-10-24T01:01:00.002-06:00

Welcome to #CEW2011. Past midnight, Campus Equity Week is now officially underway. What could be more appropriate than to start the week with the film that is probably a CEW signature event. If your group is hosting an information table, set up a laptop to screen Degrees of Shame and other videos. A large HD monitor, if you can finagle one would be a plus.

And if there is no table or special campus activity, don't let that stop you. Why not do something on your own or with a few colleagues? CEW originated as a grassroots, local initiative event. Share the video (and others ~ we'll be posting a playlist), blog it, host an informal movie night, ask your local Occupation to show it, email the link to the press with a cover letter (to the editor) and / or to legislators ~ and elsewhere.

Degrees of Shame from Barbara Wolf on Vimeo

In 1960 Edward R. Murrow made Harvest of Shame a television documentary about the plight of migrant farm workers. To Barbara Wolf the economic situation and working conditions of adjunct professors suggested an information economy parallel to migrant farm workers.

Following the logic of Harvest of Shame, Wolf interviews a variety of adjunct faculty to make visible the working lives of these least respected but absolutely vital faculty members who now do more than 40% of the teaching in America's institutions of higher education. Interviews with university administration officials, union leaders, legislators, and other observers document both the problem and possible solutions.

Murrow concluded Harvest of Shame by asking his viewers to cultivate “an enlightened,aroused and perhaps angered public opinion” and to demand a change. Wolf sees her documentary as both informational and, in Murrow’s tradition, as a tool for change.

Reading Room: An unsettled moment in #highered

2011-10-21T13:20:00.001-06:00

Found the Omnivore piece below languishing in drafts, hopefully not too late. Scott McLemee's Occupy piece may seem a tad outdated and even superseded by now. However, with the International Student Movement's November 7-20 Global Weeks of Action just around the corner, the piece is still timely, a reminder of the global.

What a fall calendar: Campus Equity Week 2011 next week (and still resources and exhortations to post!); then Campaign for the Future of Higher Education the 1st weekend in November with ISM actions starting the very next week and peaking November 17 on International Students Day... all against the backdrop of ongoing Occupations. Is it just me or could movements use "action planners" to coordinate schedules? What about cooperative actions?

And the rest? Hate, humanities, culture wars, information overload, protests... all relevant. Mind the ellipses: you know the drill. Here four means at least one link. Catch the missing ones online

.... Is the time right for a field of hate studies? A single interdisciplinary field would bring new insights and understanding to this very human reality, say proponents, but others aren’t sure it’s necessary. From Transformations of the Public Sphere, Stephen Walt on International Affairs and the public sphere.... Oh, the humanities! Joshua F. Leach on how the liberal arts can save themselves. A review of The Public Value of the Humanities.

Conservative think that modern colleges are bastions on unfettered communism, but critics are wrong in thinking that classic western culture has been run out of town.... A review of Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age by Ann M. Blair.... Education is in the streets: A global wave of student protests has spread over the past two years — Scott McLemee looks into a new book from the barricades.

Visit Omnivore for the rest of An unsettled moment in higher education

So, Another President doesn't know how many adjuncts?

2011-10-21T09:57:00.001-06:00

Do see this wonderful post of Jonathon Rees at his More or Less Bunk site.
"Three or four presidents of my university ago (they come and go so fast these days that I’ve lost count), I asked the man what percentage of courses on campus are taught by adjuncts. He said he didn’t know."

I told you there were more-anybody have any more such stories? It's truth time, don't you think? Get up, stand up-preferably in scary ghost costume.

For Campus Equity Week. Cheers, Alan Trevithick

still writing & occupying but why

2011-10-20T22:22:00.001-06:00

I'm working my way through blogs, FB pages and Twittiverse and have the outlines of a Why I Write blog post in hopper ~ unless I burn out before getting to it. Today, after all, is National Day on Writing and composition adjuncts are legion in the academy. Ethan has been addressing numbers in his series but not yet by discipline. Just getting counted is the first step. In the meantime, there is still OWS. This ~ Occupy Mordor, below ~ caught my fancy. There are clever posters but not enough much humor, the price of earnestness.

A couple of analysis articles from The Nation caught my attention: From Occupy Wall Street to Occupy Everywhere and Occupy Wall Street: The Beginning Is Here. Notable omission: We are 99% on Tumblr. Among other historical background pieces, a Salon interview, Occupy Wall Street: A Historical Perspective, explores the historical and populist roots of popular movements in the US, comparing root causes and manifestations to the one at hand. A Chronicle article on The Intellectual Roots of Wall St is also worth a look. Overall, a well populated feed reader and hashtags are still better sources than academic or progressive mainstream media.

Although the phenomenon is not as new as pundits claim, organization strategies are. A retired military Special Ops specialist posted a series on the movement at Global Guerrillas and created an OWS wiki. Cac.ophony analyzed Occupation Communication. Our lesson, as I pointed out in an earlier post, will be what we can or are willing to take away from the occupy movement.

How can we adapt and apply OWS lessons? Some are clear, less problematic: others will go against the grain. A Tumblr blog modeled on "We are the 99%" is easy and obvious. We are, after all, the 80%. Leaderless (non-hierarchical) and "open source" actions will be sticking points.

For now, what can we adapt or use for Campus Equity Week 2011? What popular CEW activities can updates modeling on Occupy adaptations?

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Where are All the Faculty? Ask Somebody: Including USED

2011-10-20T15:39:00.001-06:00

If you are just tuning in, look at some previous posts on the matter of misreporting, here, and here.

Ok, we’ve done Peterson’s and Collegeview, now let’s look at some Federal numbers. Again, this is just for one of the places where I work—Westchester Community College—but you should ask questions about your institution(s) as well. Maybe everybody but WCC is reporting more thoroughly?

Maybe.

Remember from previous posts that I think there are more than 1000 faculty at WCC, and that 85% or more are adjuncts-or “Part-time” in the reporting. So, look at WCC:

Part B - Employees by Assigned Position - Part-time staff

Number of part-time staff by faculty status and primary function/occupational activity

That’s from the National Center for Education Statistics, US Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences.

Therein, for 2009, we find that part-time faculty are listed at 311. Full-timers are said to be 167. That’s 478, no? Check my math. Now off you go to the WCC Facts and Figures-Faculty for 2009? 170. All full-time. No part-timers at all. Where are the missing faculty?

Shouldn’t they all come out, like ghosts, for Campus Equity Week?

Peterson's, and Collegeview: Where do they get their information?

2011-10-19T08:43:00.001-06:00

NOTE: Thanks to commenter below-I should have pointed out, there are more than 1100 faculty at WCC, and therefore the info given to Collegeview must refer only to full-timers. So, why? Who left out the majority of the faculty? More later.

Ok here's another, and my query:

I am an adjunct prof at Westchester Community College (WCC) and elsewhere. Your faculty numbers for WCC are not correct. There are more than 1100 faculty at WCC, but your numbers indicate a total of only 174. Where did you get your numbers from? This is a serious difficulty. I am sure that the WCC Office of Institutional Research and Planning can help you correct this.

I hope other people are looking at their colleges. On these types of sites and, by the way, at the Bureau of Labor Statistics—don't get me started, I have to grade a zillion exams!—there are strong hints of very dicey reporting practices, for many colleges and institutions, not just WCC

Do you know what your institutions are telling the public, and state and federal government?

#CEW Cookbook: Spice up #TeachIns

2011-10-18T15:54:00.001-06:00

Not part of #CEW2011, but organized by UNM's Peace Studies Program to support #OWS and supplement 'burque's iteration, activities planned for this event certainly could be adapted for Campus Equity Week. Teach-ins and poetry. Lectures to livestreamed. Video night. I wouldn't be surprised to hear live about live music being added, especially with slam and hip-hop already on the bill. The overall structure is familiar: added performance elements spice it up, and livestreaming delivers it to a larger audience.

Adjuncts and contingent faculty scheduling non-violence training might give admin pause though. OK scratch that one. Teach-in topics as listed do not directly address higher ed issues, let alone confront contingency. Although no faculty speakers are specifically identified as adjuncts, some could be. Members of G.E.T., the UNM graduate student employees organization will be filling some slots.

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) - University of New Mexico professors are slated to aid the "(Un)occupy Albuquerque" protesters with teach-ins.

The professors are scheduled to join the protesters from now and until Friday by giving teach-ins on the "occupy" movement in New Mexico and around the nation.

Organizers say the lectures are aimed at discussing how current protests against Wall Street around the country compare to previous protest movements.

Among those set to give lectures are UNM Architecture professor Mark Childs and American Studies professor Alyosha Goldstein. The lectures also will be streamed live.

"Occupy Albuquerque" movement changed its name recently to "(Un)occupy Albuquerque" after concerns were raised about the negative connotations of the word 'occupy' in a city with a large Native American population.

Posted 10/18/2011 8:24 AM by: The Associated Press

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Professors' #OWS Petition Taking Off

2011-10-17T21:59:00.001-06:00

"Professors support Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Movements Everywhere" and more petitions... don't sign just one! If you know of others, send us the links.

Target: The 1%

Sponsored by: Marc Blecher, Steve Crowley, Chris Howell, Steve Volk; Oberlin College

We, the undersigned college and university professors, stand in solidarity with the Occupy Wall Street movements in New York City, around the country, and around the world. We do so in the knowledge that the dramatic increases in poverty, joblessness and economic insecurity in our society are directly related to the extraordinary rise in inequality, particularly the wealth captured by the 1% of our population, which has deeply corrupted our political system. We stand united with the 99% to take back our economy and government from the 1%.
See also:

HIGHER EDUCATION FACULTY (Full-time/Part-time/Adjunct/Unemployed) support OCCUPY WALL STREET (and more "occupy" petitions on Change.org)

Higher Education Faculty support the OCCUPY WALL STREET protest. We see the impact of the economic crisis in our classrooms and on our campuses each day. Our students are burdened with crippling student loans as they face a bleak and depressed job market and an economic recession with no end in sight, while our institutions increasingly rely on adjunct and part-time faculty. We teach more and more for less and less, and our students suffer as we lose our ability to mentor because of our own lack of time and financial insecurity.
The OCCUPY WALL STREET movement is a step towards a better and more just future for our past, current, and future students and for higher education faculty. We stand in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street.

The World vs. Wall Street (on Avaaz)
CUCFA petition (on iPetition)

We, members of the faculty of the University of California
, write in solidarity with and in support of the Occupy Wall Street movement now underway in our city and elsewhere.

This statement was sponsored by members of the Council of University of California Faculty Associations.

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Really, How Many Adjuncts Teach Where you Are?

2011-10-17T07:44:00.000-06:00

Full text of email I just sent to Peterson's. Check out your place. Now, where do they get this sort of misleading info?

Hi there Peterson's-I don't really know who to contact here but wanted to tell somebody at Petersons that some of your information on Westchester Community College is very much outdated. To wit:

www.petersons.com/college-search/westchester-community-college-faculty-000_10004477_10007.aspx
Westchester Community College - Faculty
Total: 524
Full-time: 32% full-time
Student/faculty ratio: 18:1

That # and that percentage may have been true 20 or so years ago but no longer. FT faculty now comprise less than 15% of total faculty.

You should check with the WCC office of institutional research about this. I will be happy to talk to you more about this if you wish.

Dr. Alan Trevithick
Board Member, New Faculty Majority
and Adjunct
Westchester Community College
Fordham University
Laguardia Community College

Campus Equity Week at Union County College, #CEW2011

2011-10-13T19:10:00.000-06:00

The Union County College Chapter of United Adjunct Faculty of New Jersey is planning a day of action during Campus Equity Week, on October 26. We have approval for some tables in the main hallway which our Chapter Board will man wearing Scarlet Letter Polos- a Red A for Adjunct. We have some posters being made up to demonstrate our exploitation and will have a big change jar with a sign something like –“we need change for adjuncts’…

We will also have petitions to be signed and AFT giveaways along with some free goodies (candy and cookies) and possibly some basic food items for ‘starving’ adjuncts. We also plan to have a section of a table with an ‘ASK AN ADJUNCT’ sign for students to ask us about our working conditions.

We are still working on other things to do.

Bill Lipkin
Co-President UCC CHapter UAFNJ
Secretary/Treasurer- United Adjunct Faculty of New Jersey
Treasurer- NFM and NFM Foundation

Longest Serving CC president tells Rose to Take a Note: New Era of Openness

2011-10-12T14:35:00.000-06:00

Just got back from Westchester Community College. State-of-the-college speech by Dr. Joseph Hankin, world's longest-serving community college president! Boy was that fun. Asked him if he could do anything about the "Facts at a Glance" that appear online and in BOTH the full-time and the adjunct handbooks-the part that claims that there are 175 faculty at WCC. I know, it's only maybe a little off, like maybe 7 or 8 times less than the actual number, but that's just because they left out the adjuncts! Silly, really.

President Hankin did seem surprise, and asked "no part-timers?" I said no, no part-timers. (That's their word for people who can't get full-time jobs at their place because their sections are capped - not his fault, I think: that's my union). So, anyway, he said, "Rose," I think that was the name, "take a note on that." So, anyway, I'll let you know when Rose gets around to that. Or not. But I'm psyched. Have to go teach.

Cheers, Alan T.
BTW-I am not Ethan Valerick, but that's a cool name, isn't it? Am working on a few fixes here.

Longest serving community college president in the nation!

2011-10-12T08:03:00.000-06:00

Well, I was going to go down to Occupy Wall Street, to hand around with the young people and brush up on my drumming and chanting skills—seriously, I approve of drumming and chanting, and I am looking forward to that and will make my way down there Friday—but remembered that today is the day that we will hear, at Westchester Community College, from Dr. Joseph Hankin, our president, who has been on the job since 1971.

Hankin is currently the longest serving community college president in the nation.

So he's been there for forty years, not so long, say, as Queen Elizabeth, who still reigns as monarch over, let's see, England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland, Cornwall—do you know that the Duke of Cornwall is also the Prince of Wales: outrageous!—Canada (including Quebec), Australia, New Zealand, Jamaica, Barbados, the Bahamas, Granada, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Tuvulau, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, the Falkland Islands (?)—all, right, whew!—but beating out Queen Margrethe of Denmark and Sheikh Sultan bin Mohamed Al-Qassimi of Sharjah.

At 11 a.m. we will hear the State of the College Address from Dr. Hankin, and that’s exciting. There’s a NYSUT (AFT affiliate) meeting at 1, and then, after that, the whole campus will be in something of a tizzy getting ready for the evening’s big celebration, which is being called “Dr. Hankin’s 40th Anniversary Festival” on the WCC website. Not as ostentatious, by any means, as Lord Curzon’s 1903 Delhi Durbar, the fete will nonetheless be pretty snazzy, and aims to collect several hundreds of thousand dollars for a student scholarship fund.

Such scholarships are more and more integral to the functioning of our systems of higher education, as more and more people realize that the traditional link between higher education and the ability to pay back federally guaranteed loans has been broken. Frankly, in this regard, I was kind of hoping that the monies collected would go to a relief fund for adjuncts at WCC, who do about 85% of the teaching and who probably will be, most of them, unable to attend this evening’s celebration because it conflicts with their 2nd or 3rd jobs.

Be that as it may, I myself will be teaching anthropology in the northernmost corner of our beautiful county, and so cannot be there tonight. I will update you on the State of the College address.

Cheers, Dr. Alan Trevithick

Moving the furniture and making changes

2011-10-11T09:00:00.000-06:00

Did you notice changes on the page? This post is mostly just few words about them and other page notions under consideration. First (this is the easy one), I added a column to the layout, three now instead of two, and trimmed a few items. The Newsreel at the top, the Video bar at the bottom of the page are still there, Twitter reader, links, blogroll, subscription and share options are all still there.

Links may move, expanded or widgetized, to a page of their own, as might the Blogroll, which would expand as well. Other new pages under consideration include Chapters, Foundation, (Contingency) Summit, Unemployment Comp and CFHE. I would like a calendar but not enough to create, embed and maintain one. The page limit is 10 and we already have Newsletter and Program4Change (in need of updating). How does a public bulletin board sound?

Major content changes are republishing the "contributors" list, this time at the top left of the page, where, according to studies, the eye alights first, and doing what it takes to get contributor submissions. Board members all, they used to be on the masthead, but were not contributing. No, I didn't fire them ~ just took the list down but will now try another tack: listing them in the most prominent place on the page where readers just might notice and comment. Please do.

One of two new contributors has already posted. Do show your appreciation by visiting his blog. I remain hopeful (the triumph of faith over reason), but will still remind (trust but verify) as needed. This is important. Not only will you get NFM updates and important notices sooner, but the more more varied the voices here, the more interesting and representative the blog will be. That includes member voices too, not just BoD. Guest post proposals and suggestions invited. Email me at vanessa.vaile@newfacultymajority.info

and now a (very) few words about #fundraising

2011-10-10T16:02:00.001-06:00

Support New Faculty Majority *and* Fair Trade in Education by shopping at our online stores at Zazzle, Screend and FTE Coffee ~ coffee and travel mugs for freeway flyers to drink it from, bumper stickers, tees with messages (not just for #CEW2011) and more.

Visit our online stores:

FTE Coffee

Screened

Zazzle

CC President is Hardly a Tireless Advocate for Faculty

2011-10-10T08:57:00.000-06:00

My title here is in regard to a recent article in a local on-line paper about Dr. Joseph Hankins, President of Westchester Community College, one of my workplaces. Dr. Hankin is a very nice man, with a terrific sense of humor—let's see how all that works out—who is now being celebrated for his 40-year tenure as chief exec at WCC.
My strong view is that, whatever his other virtues, he cannot count among them that he's been a tireless advocate for faculty, least of all the adjunct faculty who do most of the teaching at WCC. Indeed, Dr. Hankin has presided, in his decades of leadership at WCC, over a continuous decline in the professional status of the faculty—the core of any college or university. When he arrived, there were roughly as many full-time as part-time faculty teaching at WCC. At this time there are perhaps 15% of the total faculty who enjoy full-time employment status and the professional courtesies and benefits that go along with that fast-disappearing status.
None of this, of course, is any surprise to NFM members and friends: I invite any and all who have suffered from the continuing degradation of the faculty, and especially the exploitation of adjunct/contingent labor, to share in this space or elsewhere their stories. Dr. Hankin is surely not the only community college—or university—president who is being celebrated for his many achievements even while the status of the key contributors—faculty—continues to be undermined.
Some attention to such matters is particularly appropriate as Campus Equity Week (October 24-30) approaches.
Cheers, Dr. Al (Trevithick)
Westchester Community College, LaGuardia Community College, and Fordham University; New Faculty Majority, and blogger at http://cringingliberalelite.blogspot.com/.

December Conference on Human and Labor Rights, D.C.]

2011-10-07T07:00:00.000-06:00

Statue of Antonio de Montesinos in Santo Domingo

On December 2-4, 2011, a coalition of universities and other institutions is hosting a conference in Washington, D.C. to assess what has been achieved in 500 years of human rights advocacy. The conference is scheduled to include Sunday, 4 December, the conventionally identified date in 1511 when Antonio de Montesinos, O.P. delivered a sermon in Santo Domingo calling for reform of Spanish policy toward the indigenous.

That sermon launched a Spanish debate about protecting the indigenous from enslavement. This advocacy in-turn contributed to the movement toward human rights universality. While concerned with the history, the conference will have as its focus current institutional and legal approaches to refine and enhance protections of labor rights and other human rights.

Please submit paper or panel proposals by OCTOBER 17, 2011

Papers and panels are invited on the following topics:

The history and philosophy of universal human rights, while we anticipate special interest in the Americas and in imperial nations, we encourage wider perspectives;
The relationship of human rights to issues such as sovereignty, migration, labor rights, gender, development, and security/terrorism;
The institutional structure and processes for protecting universal human rights (including the responsibility to protect), especially from Nuremberg to the ICC;
The relationship of universal rights to different national, regional, historical, and indigenous cultures; and Religion and human rights.

More information and registration information is at http://humanrights500.org

Please contact Montesinos@alma.edu or call Ed Lorenz, Conference Chair, and Director, Public Affairs Institute, Alma College, Alma, MI 48801 or call 1 (989) 463-7203

The Culture Of Dissent

2011-10-06T16:31:00.002-06:00

The question: will #OccupyEverything influence #CEW2011. Will all that is blowing in the wind play out in &/or influence the community (such as it is) of adjunct, contingent faculty and other NT knowledge workers? If so, how? If not, why? Awaiting your comments.

The Culture Of Dissent is re-posted from Firedog Lake where Billy Glad blogs at Annals Of The Hiests like Occupy Wall Street — fast becoming Occupy Your Street (Any Street) — and October 2011, coming soon to Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C. The protestors have rejected politics. They are wide awake. They no longer believe a political solution to America’s problems is possible. They are determined to win or lose in the streets, and they are committed to the notion that culture trumps politics. (Think of the beginnings of the Civil Rights Movement and the anti-war, anti-draft movement that ended the Vietnam War and the Johnson Presidency at the price of undermining The Great Society and opening the door of the Oval Office for Richard Nixon.) The way, we used to say, the cookie crumbles. [cont'd.]

When I came home from the Army in the late Sixties, I spent a lot of time, lounging around and arguing with a good friend — a Marcusian who had ditched his Swiss name for “Baptiste” — about whether everything was politics — his idea — or everything was culture. I’ve never been more convinced I was right. Politicians, like everyone else, swim in the sea of mass culture. Political movements emerge and ride the wave of mass culture for a while, then sink back into the sea. It is impossible to imagine the New Deal outside a culture that valued people and the idea of society, just as it is impossible to imagine the Civil Rights Movement and the anti-war protests that followed outside the Counter Culture of the Sixties and Seventies — precisely the culture Blow derides in the title of his essay.

The real question is: Can the emerging protest movements stay alive in the absence of something like the Counter Culture of the Sixties? Has enough work been done to build a culture of dissent to sustain them?
When I was a graduate student at the University of Texas, the UT School of Communication, together with Stanford University, hosted a week-long seminar every year at Pebble Beach. The schools brought a handful of graduate students and professors to Pebble Beach to spend a week with the leaders of the mainstream media. The kicker — the brainchild of Stanley Donner — was that the “leaders” who were invited to the seminars were the number two men and women of the broadcast industry. The men and women UT and Stanford figured had the best shot at grabbing power and doing something different when they did. The theory was that the last people in the world who would shake things up were the people in charge. If you wanted to talk to somebody in the industry about doing something better, the person you needed to get to was the heir apparent.

The problem with the American political system now is that not only the leaders, but all of the possible pretenders to positions of leadership — to political office, you see — have been vetted by an establishment process that has eliminated the possibility that any anti-establishment — read anti-Wall Street and anti-Corporate — idea will work its way into the political process. The culture just isn’t there to sustain it.

Five Things That #OccupyWallStreet Has Done Right

2011-10-01T17:20:00.000-06:00

What can can adjuncts, contingent faculty and other marginalized academic knowledge workers learn from Occupy Wall Street about organizing and building a movement that we can't from either marketing strategies or by the book union methods?

"#OccupyWallStreet protests are now well into their second week, and they are increasingly capturing the public spotlight. This is because, whatever limitations their occupation has, the protesters have done many things right."

1. They chose the right target.

2. They made a great poster.

3. They gave their action time to build.

4. They created a good scenario for conflict.

5. They are using their momentum to escalate.

"... the fact that #OccupyWallStreet has not relied on established progressive organizations ends up being a strength. Its independent participants are inspired by the increasing attention their critique of Wall Street is getting, and they are willing to make greater sacrifices now that their action has begun to capture the public imagination."

Read more about the Five Things That #OccupyWallStreet Has Done Rightat Talking Union .Rephrase the above statement, making judicious substitutions for "Occupy" and "Wall Street." Start thinking about how we could adapt them, scale them down for CEW.

'via Blog this'

Occupation Updates: Breaks in the Media Blackout

2011-09-30T14:19:00.001-06:00

NFM has been following, sharing links on FB but not covering Occupy Wall Street in the same depth as either Defend Education and 'Junct Rebellion. Our readers, however, are following events and sharing similar dismay over the conspicuous absence of US mainstream media. This makes a welcome update - and, for others less keenly interested, a cautionary reminder against being too dismissive of a grassroots reaction. Having trouble viewing this? View it on the FAIR website

Activism Update: Some Breaks in the Blackout of Wall Street Protests, 9/29/11
After a FAIR Action Alert (9/23/11) criticized the virtual media blackout of the Occupy Wall Street protests, corporate news coverage has increased--sparked largely by the escalating police brutality at the ongoing demonstration. (See FAIR Blog, 9/23/11, for a sample of the messages sent by FAIR activists to the network nightly news shows.)

On ABC World News Sunday (9/25/11), anchor David Muir read this short item while playing footage of cops assaulting protesters:
And here in New York, protests continued against the big banks and the bailout that helped the banks, Wall Street, they say, not Main Street. It turned ugly this weekend when protesters marching through Lower Manhattan clashed with police. One man right there brought down forcefully by an officer. About 80 people were arrested, in fact. The protesters posted this video on the Internet.

NBC Nightly News aired a somewhat longer report the next day (9/26/11), with correspondent Ron Allen actually traveling downtown to the protest encampment in Liberty Plaza. His report included this "he said, she said": "The protesters charge that the police used excessive force. The police say that anyone who resists arrest can expect to encounter some level of force, but nothing excessive." The following morning's Today show (9/27/11) briefly aired footage of a police official pepper-spraying nonviolent demonstrators in the face, noting that "the NYPD calls the officer's actions appropriate.

Some journalists seemed strikingly reluctant to take videotaped evidence of police violence at face value. CNN anchor Ali Velshi (9/26/11) introduced footage of a police assault by dismissively saying that protesters were "now screaming abuse after they were arrested over the weekend." After the footage of a cop violently subduing a protester, co-anchor Carol Costello noted, "Of course, what you can't see is what came before the fight"--a disclaimer that could be made of every single piece of videotape that CNN runs.

A September 27 New York Times piece (FAIR Blog, 9/28/11) seemed to defend the police force's brutal response, with reporter Joseph Goldstein depicting a police department concerned about "terrorism" and the "destruction and violence" that supposedly accompany "anticapitalist demonstrations." Such police worries, according to Goldstein, "came up against a perhaps milder reality on Saturday, when their efforts to maintain crowd control suddenly escalated"--an oddly passive way to introduce the use of pepper spray and body slams against nonviolent demonstrators.

"Even as the members of Occupy Wall Street seem unorganized and, at times, uninformed, their continued presence creates a vexing problem for the Police Department," Goldstein wrote--though his acceptance of media myths about violent demonstrators (Extra!, 1-2/00, 3-4/00; FAIR Action Alert, 7/25/00) makes the reporter seem less informed than the protesters he patronizes.
Similar condescension was on display in another New York Times piece ("Gunning for Wall Street, With Faulty Aim," 9/25/11), with reporter Ginia Bellafonte deriding the "intellectual vacuum" of the protests, with "its apparent wish to pantomime progressivism rather than practice it." Bellafante described one protester as a "half-naked woman... with a marked likeness to Joni Mitchell and a seemingly even stronger wish to burrow through the space-time continuum and hunker down in 1968."

The Times did, however, print a column by Jim Dwyer (9/28/11) that grappled seriously with the police brutality on display in the videos of the march. "If a nightstick were substituted for pepper spray, a conventional weapon instead of an exotic one, the events on 12th Street would bear a strong resemblance to simple assault," Dwyer noted straightforwardly.
Perhaps the harshest critic of police violence in corporate media was MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell, who devoted a remarkable segment to the issue on September 26. Pointing to footage of police tackling a person carrying a video camera, O'Donnell noted:
The reason that man is being assaulted by the police is because of what he has in his hand. He's holding a professional grade video camera. Since the Rodney King beating was caught on an amateur video camera, American police officers have known video cameras are their worst enemy. They will do anything they can to stop you from legally videotaping how they handle their responsibility to serve and protect you.

Another outstanding moment in corporate media coverage was filmmaker Michael Moore's appearance on CNN (9/26/11). Host Piers Morgan gave Moore a rare opportunity to actually articulate some of the grievances that have prompted the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations in the first place:
The main thing is, number one, is that the rich are getting away with a huge crime. Nobody has been arrested on Wall Street for the crash of 2008. They're not paying their fair share of the taxes. And now with the Citizens United case of the Supreme Court, they get to buy politicians up out in the open....
It all points to, are we going to live in a democracy that's run by the majority of the people, or are we going to be living in a kleptocracy, where the kleptomaniacs down on Wall Street, who have stolen people's pension funds, they've wrecked people's lives, millions have been thrown out of their homes, millions are without health insurance, millions have lost their jobs?

Still, as late as this week, some in the media establishment were continuing to debate whether the Occupy Wall Street protests were worth covering at all. NPR ombud Edward Schumacher-Matos devoted a column (9/26/11) to the network's decision not to air any reports on the demonstration:
We asked the newsroom to explain their editorial decision. Executive editor for news Dick Meyer came back: "The recent protests on Wall Street did not involve large numbers of people, prominent people, a great disruption or an especially clear objective."

The next day, the previously unimportant non-news was worth covering after all, as Schumacher-Matos wrote (9/27/11):
The Occupy Wall Street protests have persisted into this week, so the newsroom has decided to include a segment on tonight's All Things Considered.

FAIR thanks all media activists who wrote to news outlets and helped to change their minds about the newsworthiness of the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations. There's still a long way to go.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

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Upcoming Conferences on #Highered Issues

2011-09-29T18:09:00.001-06:00

Some upcoming events posted on the Academe blog, with the request that you email at academeblog@aaup.org if you have events to recommend. Please share them with us too. We're trying to develop a national event calendar and plan to add a calendar feature to the newsletter. Post questions and event recommendations in comments. The following list does not include contingent faculty issue panels or sessions at professional and discipline specific association meetings. We welcome adding those to our list too.
“The Higher Education Crisis in Texas: An AAUP Advocacy Workshop,” October 29, 2011, Austin, Texas.
The Second National Gathering of The Campaign for the Future of Higher Education, Friday, November 4th, 5:00 p.m. to Sunday, November 6th, 2011, 12:00 p.m., University of Massachusetts, Boston.
AAUP Shared Governance Conference and Workshops, November 11–13, 2011, Omni Shoreham Hotel, Washington, DC.
SEIU L500 Coalition of Academic Labor Conference 2011, 3rd annual conference on part-time faculty unions, Saturday November 19th, 2011, 9am to 1pm, Washington, DC. Contact Anne McLeer <McLeerA@seiu500.org>
National Summit on January 28: “Reclaiming Academic Democracy: Facing the Consequences of Contingent Employment in Higher Education”—sponsored by the New Faculty Majority Foundation
39th Annual National Conference A Joint Labor/Management Meeting Academic Collective Bargaining Under Siege: Implications for a Public Good, April 1, 2, 3, 2012, National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions, Hunter College, NYC
“How Class Works” Conference, June 7-9, 2012, Stony Brook, NY, SUNY
AAUP Annual Conference on the State of Higher Education, June 13 –17, 2012, Mayflower Renaissance, Washington, DC.

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Whither U? "Charting the Future of Higher Education"

2011-09-28T21:00:00.001-06:00

But who or what is Education Sector (self described as innovative and an "independent think tank")? Siegfried Sassoon's definition of foxhunting (the unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible) comes to mind.

YouTube clips from Education Sector's September 15, 2011, event, "Charting the Future of Higher Education"
Panelists
for this event include: Zakiya Smith, Senior Advisor for Education, White House Domestic Policy Council; A. Craig Powell, CEO, ConnectEDU; Robert W. Mendenhall, President, Western Governors University; Kevin Carey, Policy Director, Education Sector; Paul Glastris, Editor, Washington Monthly (as moderator), with introductory remarks by  Jamie Merisotis, President, Lumina Foundation for Education.
This event will be videotaped and recordings will be available following the event.
Education Sector and Washington Monthly thank the Lumina Foundation for its support of this event.

"Charting the *Future of Higher Education*" Clip 1 - YouTube
Introductory remarks: Lumina Foundation's Jamie Merisotis talks ... www.youtube.com/watch?v=VV0VkKQXl8s&feature...

"Charting the *Future of Higher Education*" Clip 2 - YouTube

Kevin Carey, Policy Director, Education Sector, talks about the outdated process ...
www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIeYqOPdopw&feature...

Highered in the News: Chris Newfield's Links for September 19

2011-09-20T07:08:00.000-06:00

I've been neglecting California and good CA highered resources ~ can't say whether it's because (not being into disaster porn) I couldn't bear watching or the unfortunate influence of an equally unfortunate tendency to focus East Coast and upper Midwest. Time to stop that. California, the Southwest and the Deep South are not separate countries even it may seem so at times. Besides, there is that legal maxim about CA as bellweather (in reference to legal trends and changes in state codes) that other states will eventually follow. A mismatched pair with Ohio as presidential bellweather. Or mine canary. It's OK too reminding me if I forget or you notice neglecting an region or topic. Mind you, I can't blog everything relevant to the deplorable state of highered adjunctivation. I keep an overflowing feed reader and recommend it as Rx for the insufficiently informed. So, finally. here are Chris Newfield's highered but not just about CA Links for September 19, emphasis added:
To distract yourself from the California meltdown, read UK Universities Minister David Willetts take to the Guardian defend the multi-year elimination of nearly all direct public funding, among his other measures. See Willetts sophistically claim that government investment has not been cut because student loans are really the same as grants.

This weekend the New York Times magazine had several good pieces on education. See in particular What if the Secret to Success Is Failure, which is about the role of education in building personalities that can sustain effort, insight, creativity, and success -- all depending on the kind of individualizing environment that budget cuts are wrecking at the public college level.

Salt Lake's Deseret News seems to be one of the few dailies that noticed the US slipping again in the OECD's international rankings of student attainment, this time from 12th to 16th. Paul Glastris attributes national complacency to US News's annual parade of elite privates, which he says suggests the U.S. is still on top.

But there's a deeper dynamic at work, something more weirdly self-destructive within American policy today. For example, Paul Krugman writes what must be his 50th denunciation of irrational Hooverist austerity that torpodoes the economy -- or, in today's metaphor, that applies leeches to bleed an already enfeebled patient.

Closer to hope, I am nearly done listening to a recording of last Thursday's UC Regent's Committee on Finance discussion of UCOP's idea of presenting Sacramento with a simple tradeoff between increased state support and tuition hikes. There is no consensus among the Regents about what the legislature thinks of UC, and thus nothing close to a strategy. I'll say more about this meeting later, but a mysterious vortex is pulling at everyone.

Many Regents returned to the old standby solution of increased private fundraising, this time with more emphasis on scholarships to preserve access. At the same time, coverage of Moody's new report on higher education begins, "Public and private universities across the United States have been struggling with endowment losses, thin liquidity, declining gifts, reduced state help and resistance to tuition hikes since 2008." Fundraising was flat in 2010, and the decline in megagifts implies that the costs of fundraising are increasing faster than the returns themselves. The Regental debate suggests skepticism towards philanthropy on the Board as well.

How to save the traditional university

2011-09-17T13:00:00.000-06:00
More homework, reading to get us up to speed for when the Campaign for the Future of Higher Education meets in Boston at UMass, November 4-6 ... and this isn't even the half of it. Got questions for the Think Tank (Center for the Future... etc), ideas to add or items to suggest for the agenda? We'd like to hear them and promise to pass them on. Come too if you can. The better our turnout, the stronger our voice; and the stronger our voice, the harder ignore us and our issues.

From the Graduate Journal of Social Science, a special issue on Interdisciplinarity and the "New" University.
Storm the Ivies, revolutionaries of North America — nationalize them into submission, kick away the American plutocracy’s favorite ladder and watch a thousand flowers bloom.

From LRB, from Robbins to McKinsey: Stefan Collini on the dismantling of the universities.  From Arena, an article on the idea of the university, out of the shadow of the neo-liberal academy.... Clayton Christensen and Henry Eyring on how to save the traditional university, from the inside out.

While global elites continue their cynical assault on higher education unabated, the global student movement shows us that another world is possible ....

Read the rest of How to save the traditional university

Catching up with California: links for September 15 & 16

2011-09-16T22:18:00.000-06:00

By Michael Meranze from Remaking the University: excerpts from links for September 15

The LAT has more info on UCOP's Magic Never-Ending Tuition Machine.
Community Colleges across the nation face increasing financial strains. So do students.
California Student Default Rates: They are highest at for-profits.
SAT scores are down. Whatever that means.
and September 16

Even the Regents don't seem to buy UCOP's Magic Tuition Machine But they are happy to raise executive salaries.
Regent David Crane thinks UC should become more like a private university.
Berkeley Public Education Coalition responds to Tuition increases.
Regents discuss Graduate Funding
And the LAO is skeptical that UC needs so much money. (h/t Dan Mitchell)
Is the renovation of Cal Stadium a huge financial mistake? (h/t Catherine Cole)
The Defense has rested its case in the Irvine 11 case.
Cutting Administration may not be everything. But it sure isn't nothing.
If you want to improve K-12 education you need to work with teachers not attack them
Applications for Unemployment are up, the economy is down, and the political class is pushing for more cuts to government spending. Have a great weekend. More for you to read tomorrow...

Participate in NFM Survey on Back to School Hiring Experience

2011-09-16T18:48:00.000-06:00

Yes, the survey again.... and this won't be the last time either. If there is any problem with the link in the message below, try this link.

New Faculty Majority Foundation

The NFM Foundation is launching a survey today to study the Fall 2011 back-to-school hiring process experienced by those faculty members employed in contingent (also known as adjunct or non-tenure-track positions, whether full-time or part-time).

The survey, which should take no longer than 15-20 minutes, is part of a larger study we are doing of hiring practices. This survey is intended to give us some preliminary data on what contingent faculty experience during the beginning of the academic year.

The survey link can be found below.  We would appreciate receiving responses no later than Sept 20. We look forward to sharing the results with you. Please feel free to contact Dr. Esther Merves, Director of Research and Special Programs, if you have any questions or if you are interested in participating in more surveys and/or helping with research projects. She can be reached at esther.merves@newfacultymajority.info.

Take this survey

Thank you for your participation in this important research!

Sincerely,
Paul Ehrlich, Board President
Maria Maisto, Executive Director
New Faculty Majority Foundation

New Faculty Majority Foundation supports the work of New Faculty Majority: The National Coalition for Adjunct and Contingent Equity with complementary programming. Its mission is to educate the public about the impact of the contingent faculty crisis on educational quality and the public good, and to mobilize a broad coalition of constituencies to support ethical reform. The NFM Foundation has received support from The Marguerite Casey Foundation, The Ford Foundation, and the French American Charitable Trust. Federal tax-exempt 501(c)3 sttus is pending for the NFM Foundation. Tax-deductible contributions to the Foundation can currently be made through our fiscal agent, The Center for Community Training and Assitance (CTAC) in Boston, MA.

New Faculty Majority | 1700 West Market Street #159 | Akron | OH | 44313

PS ~ I asked for information on how survey data would be used and am still waiting. If you have questions about the survey, contact Dr Merves, esther.merves@newfacultymajority.info

Sketches of academic loons

2011-09-16T11:02:00.001-06:00
Once more into the breach, a ready made Reading Room post for the harried blogger. Forget Calgon take me away: Omnivore to the rescue. It's not like I don't have posts simmering in drafts (notably), issues to address (some even relevant) and drums to beat. but this is like coming home late after a tiring commute and not having to cook dinner.

What, you might ask, is the point of loons? For starters, that is the stereotype held by much of the public, not Indiana Jones but the Nutty Professor. Loons are not the best marketing image unless marketing to other loons. Why read about them? Go ask Bobbie Burns, you louse, or if the unexamined (professional) life is worth professing

The Left-leaning tower: why conservatives steer clear of grad school. Left-leaning lecture halls: Universities like to think of their lecture series as&In academianbsp;extensions of the education that students get in their classrooms — unfortunately, they usually are. Paul Gottfried on character sketches of academic loons. Less academics, more narcissism: The University of California is cutting back on many things, but not useless diversity programs. English professors have long been straying far afield from literary studies, expanding into women’s studies, disability studies, ethnic studies, even fat studies — recently they have migrated into animal studies.

In academia, new manifestations of gnosticism, a very old heresy, are found in English departments everywhere. Where trendy is 17th century: "Classical Christian" colleges turn to the Great Books curriculum in order to advance a small but growing sector of higher education. From The Catholic Thing, the historical situation in which we find ourselves — one of opposition to or avoidance of the Catholic nature of Catholic institutions of higher learning — has a long history; and moving the universities to get into the nitty-gritty of being called Catholic is fundamental to the Church’s presence in the larger pagan and agnostic culture.
From Catapult, if the resurrection story has the power to shape everything we do, how does it shape the education of ourselves and our children? God is in the basement of the Empire State Building: Dinesh D’Souza, the new president of the city’s only Evangelical college, wants to build a “Christian A-team” — but can the man who says Obama supports radical Muslims persuade students to follow him? Reinventing religious life on campus: Religious identity has largely been replaced by ethnic and racial identities as markers of group membership and solidarity. A review of Thriving at College: Make Great Friends, Keep Your Faith and Get Ready for the Real World! by Alex Chediak.

Devolving public universities

2011-09-13T06:55:00.001-06:00

Article by Christopher Newfield in radical philosophy (UK) #CFHE
It is easy enough to be fatalistic about the current funding situation in higher education. US public universities have locked themselves into a model that has led to the slashing of public funding off and on for thirty years and that has been forcing public universities towards an ever-growing dependence on private money. This funding model rests on (though is not limited to) the 'high tuition/high aid' paradigm, in which tuition is to be pushed up rapidly – it's now between $15,000 and $20,000 for in-state students at many leading public universities – with offsets for needy students that come through financial aid, and a vast pool of student loans whose total volume last year surpassed the country's aggregate credit card debt.1

Oddly enough, the unsustainability of the overall financial system that became obvious in 2008 has for the moment made that system politically stronger. The same has happened to the American funding model for higher education (AFM). Its clear failure to maintain necessary revenues has only increased its power over the educational mission. In the incumbent model's weakness lies its strength. In the strength of the criticisms lies their futility. Hence our widespread fatalism.
A broken funding model
Read the rest here; see also preview and brief commentary at reclaim UC, "provisional home of the College of Debtors in Defiance"
A new article from Chris Newfield about public universities and the "American Funding Model" (AFM) whose primary effect has been to shift "public university revenues to a specific kind of private source, for three decades. Voters are often told that the shift means that wealthy donors and research sponsors have picked up a big part of the educational bill, but this is simply not true. The AFM means shifting educational costs from the overall population to students and their families. The model also shifts costs from old to young, and in California from a 70 per cent white voting public to a 70 per cent student-of-colour secondary-school population."

#CFHE Meeting

2011-09-12T21:58:00.001-06:00

Come to Boston November 4-6 for The Campaign for the Future of Higher Education Meeting at UMass. It starts Friday at 5 P.M. and ends Sunday at 12 Noon. We will have a packed agenda, but also plenty of time to get to know and learn from each other in more relaxed ways.

You will hear and discuss how disinvestment, privatization, cost-shifting and curriculum changes – i.e. the attack on students and the public sector – are playing out on campuses and in states around the country. We will hear how students, faculty, and citizens in coalition are finding new ways of fighting back. Most important, together we will build on the vision for CFHE and decide on activities to help us attain that vision. And we might even have an action while we're all here!

Most meals will be provided; donations will be accepted on a voluntary basis. Address conference inquiries to CFHE.conference@gmail.com. Local CFHE organizer John Hess is managing the email address, responding to emails, answering questions and appropriately redirecting ones he can't.

A block of rooms has been reserved at Hampton Inn and Suites - Crosstown Center, 811 Massachusetts Avenue, Boston 02118. Tel:617-541-2406. Rates: Double Standard $139.00 plus 14.45% tax; King Standard $129.00 plus 14.45% tax

All rooms include a full hot breakfast buffet, free shuttle service to and from Logan Airport from 5 am – 10:30 pm, indoor heated pool, fitness center open 24 hours, free high speed internet throughout out the hotel.

There is public transportation to UMass Boston via the #8 bus which picks up right outside the hotel and drops off at UMASS. But it doesn't run as frequently as we might like outside of rush hour, so taking a taxi to UMass, which with three or four or more in it would not be expensive, basically the cost of the bus, might be the best bet.

The rooms are on hold for us until October 15, so please register by then. The hotel won't guarantee availability after the 15th. Register as early as you can and be sure to mention you are registering for the CFHE meeting. If you encounter any difficulty registering, ask for Erika Ortiz, the events manager.

Heads Up Writing Teachers! The Machine is coming for you too!

2011-09-11T14:21:00.001-06:00

... and you, Dear Adjunct, were worried about text analysis based grading and editing software replacing you. Today, journalism: tomorrow, romance novels, content mill articles and student essays. When students submit machine written essays, just send them to another machine to grade. Students, teacher, all middlemen ~ superfluous? Forget the Terminator narrative: could this be how machines really start talking to one another?

This story, surely a foreseeable next step for text analysis software, surfaced over a year ago in the business press. Later, bloggers and web writers started receiving email offers on software to generate content, not just edit articles but write them from scratch. Now the Grey Lady is running with it in the business section. Is anyone among us so foolish as not see any connection with the much touted free open access Stanford AI Course? Recent articles suggest less transparent motives, Beta testing a platform for mega delivery and assessment modes, may trump touted Open Education impulse.

"In Case You Wondered, a Real Human Wrote This Column," September 10, 2011, in the New York Times business section

WISCONSIN appears to be in the drivers seat en route to a win, as it leads
51-10 after the third quarter. Wisconsin added to its lead when Russell
Wilson found Jacob Pedersen for an eight-yard touchdown to make the score
44-3 ... .

Those words began a news brief written within 60 seconds of the end of the third quarter of the Wisconsin-UNLV football game earlier this month. They may not seem like much but they were written by a computer.

The clever code is the handiwork of Narrative Science, a start-up in Evanston, Ill., that offers proof of the progress of artificial intelligence the ability of computers to mimic human reasoning.

The companys software takes data, like that from sports statistics, company financial reports and housing starts and sales, and turns it into articles. For years, programmers have experimented with software that wrote such articles, typically for sports events, but these efforts had a formulaic, fill-in-the-blank style. They read as if a machine wrote them.

But Narrative Science is based on more than a decade of research, led by two of the companys founders, Kris Hammond and Larry Birnbaum, co-directors of the Intelligent Information Laboratory at Northwestern University, which holds a stake in the company. And the articles produced by Narrative Science are different.
.....
Experts in artificial intelligence and language are also impressed, if less enthralled. Oren Etzioni, a computer scientist at the University of Washington, says, The quality of the narrative produced was quite good, as if written by a human, if not an accomplished wordsmith. Narrative Science, Mr. Etzioni says, points to a larger trend in computing of the increasing sophistication in automatic language understanding and, now, language generation.

The innovative work at Narrative Science raises the broader issue of whether such applications of artificial intelligence will mainly assist human workers or replace them. Technology is already undermining the economics of traditional journalism. Online advertising, while on the rise, has not offset the decline in print advertising. But will robot journalists replace flesh-and-blood journalists in newsrooms?

Read the complete article at http://tinyurl.com/3kgyga9

Additional related links:
Web Semantics: Machine Generated Journalism (Wired, 9/10/11)
Narrative Science Raises $6m to Replace Web Copywriters, How long until journalism is automated? (Trends in the Living Networks, Ross Dawson, futurist, 1/30/11)
Are Sports Writers Really Necessary? Narrative Science's software takes sports stats and spits out articles (Bloomberg Business Week, 4/29/10)
Narrative Science (in their own words), "We turn data into stories"
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