NPR.org - California Budget Woes Hurt University System

Not just on the blogs, gone mainstream media and NPR: California Budget Woes Hurt University System. You've been reading about it here (I hope) ~ now LISTEN

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[Not Yet] Summer School for X-Fac

Excerpted from Marc Bosquet's Aug 2, 2009, Brainstorm column in CHE, also crossposted at How the University Works. I have no idea why an August 2009 column would take so long to show up in my rss reader, so don't ask... but I'm glad of it.  Good reading list even if referenced articles and topics are from last summer. I've already recommended Chris Newfield's splendid and indispensable Remaking the University, with Journal of the Edu-Factory Collective high on my "to-blog" list. Academe and Workplace, please note, have long been listed on our sidebar. "X-Fac" in subject line refers to recent thread on naming at adj-l list and Marc's determination to replace familiar but demeaning and/or inaccurate standbys. I'm not sure what with, hence the "X"  ... that or for X-men who teach.... Summer School For Faculty Possibly you're tired of beach reading--or perhaps you couldn't afford the beach this year? You say you'd like to get beyond the "Thank you, sir! May I have another?" school of governance?  I have a few suggestions.

Academic Freedom Journal

New from the #AAUP ~ free too ~ can’t beat that deal with a stick.

With this message, we introduce a new online project—The AAUP Journal of Academic Freedom. Scholarship on academic freedom—and on its relation to shared governance, tenure, and collective bargaining—is typically scattered across a wide range of disciplines. People who want to keep up with the field thus face a difficult task. Moreover, there is no one place to track the developing international discussion about academic freedom and its collateral issues. Edited collections and special issues of journals have helped fill the need for many years, but there has been no single journal devoted to the subject. Now there is. It is published by the organization most responsible for defining academic freedom. Publishing online gives us many advantages, the first being the ability to offer the journal free to everyone interested. A link to this inaugural issue will go out by e-mail to nearly 400,000 faculty members. We hope they forward it to students and colleagues everywhere. Online publication also gives us the freedom to publish quite substantial scholarly essays, something that would be much more costly in print. We invite people to submit essays for our next issue. Whether the journal is published as an annual volume or twice a year will depend in part on the number of quality submissions we receive. We will also maintain a continuing relationship with the AAUP’s annual conference on the state of higher education, itself founded in 2009. We are publishing four essays from the 2009 conference but expect to increase that number next time.. This first issue is devoted to essays solicited by the editor, with members of the editorial board checking essays for historical errors. The next issue will be conventionally refereed. Neither the editor nor the board members are ex officio. All were appointed on the basis of their publishing history and expertise. We have done our best to gather a diverse range of essays. They range from historical studies to analyses of contemporary conflicts, from accounts of individual faculty experiences to institutional histories. Thus Phillip Deery details a case from the McCarthy era; whereas, Ellen Schrecker analyzes the Ward Churchill case. Four essays deal with institutional crises—Jan H. Blits’s, Jean Gregorek’s, Cary Nelson’s, and one jointly authored by Nancy D. Campbell and Jane Koretz. Dan Colson breaks new ground in discussing graduate student academic freedom, whereas Larry Gerber reviews the history of the relationship between academic freedom and shared governance. We welcome your responses and suggestions. Cary Nelson, Editor AAUP President

The AAUP Online is an electronic newsletter of the American Association of University Professors.  Learn more about the AAUP. Visit us on Facebook.

Online reading roundup

Online reading roundup (some from this morning / some earlier): sampling of ad-con relevant links that, if not hot off the presses, then hot off my rss feeds reader. Please take the time to visit at least a few sites and post comments as the spirit moves you. I especially urge you to visit the Stonybrook Adjuncts blog and cheer them on. To sail ahead, staff should be in the same boat on pay, from Times Higher Education (UK, imo more forthright than US academic press) Lessons of an Academic Vagabond, Career Advice from IHE Plight of the Adjunct, from In the  Service of Clio: Essays on Career Management in the Historical Profession (extensive quotes from article in local newspaper/ popular press) As Protesting Students were Beaten, Regents Approved More Executive Increases, from Bob Samuel's Changing Universities Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's Bob and Charlie, from Chris Newfield's blog, Remaking the University, Schwartz on Oversight of [UC] Bond Indebtedness, Chris' Blog Archives New Voices Debut On AdjunctNation.com Blogs—More to Come Stalemate Continues At The NLRB Adjuncts at Stony Brook University Welcome to Adjuncts at Stony Brook University A hero for adjuncts We are the new faculty majority!

Branding Education

What's in a logo? There's a bad mood rising against the corporate brands, not just among students and faculty in colleges and universities where corporatization is on the rise. No Logo is the warning on the label.


Excerpted from Naomi Klien’s book, No Logo: the chapter, "The Branding of Learning" ~ Click to View

In this excerpt, Naomi Klein discusses the corporatization of education (both in pre-k-12th and at the university level).

(from post by Brit Reed on Defend Education)

In the last decade, No Logo has become a cultural manifesto for the critics of unfettered capitalism worldwide. As the world faces a second economic depression, No Logo's analysis of our corporate and branded world is as timely and powerful as ever.

Equal parts cultural analysis, political manifesto, mall-rat memoir, and journalistic exposé, No Logo is the first book to put the new resistance into pop-historical and clear economic perspective. It tells a story of rebellion and self-determination in the face of our new branded world.


(from Naomi Klein's website)

Get Involved: Send Aid to Haiti

Here's to working for the radical notion of fairness. Start with this Freelancers Union Advocacy list of organizations doing work in Haiti and ollecting donations for earthquake relief.

Resist, Mobilize, Transform

Protect Your Education RGB 8.5x11, originally uploaded by Nick Bygon.

Please click through the image above (or link beneath to read Nick Bygon's comments on his poster for the March 4th Day of Action in Defense of Public Education and all Public-Sector Services, supported and endorsed by the California Federation of Teachers (CFT), the California Faculty Association (CFA), AFT 2121, UESF, the San Francisco Labor Council, Community College students and unions, and dozens of public education and public-sector unions.

"Resist, Mobilize, Transform" surely applies to the New Faculty Majority's mission as well as it does to protecting higher education ~ which we, especially as "The New Majority," are part of too.

Do you recall that well-used and by now well worn favorite of pundits: "as goes California, so goes the county"? It's not just an old pundit's tale. California's higher ed dilemma is either coming to your campus or has already arrived.

If you don't feel you can support the proposed actions (not place to tell you what to do or how ~ and vice versa), at the very least you owe to yourself and your profession to be as well informed as possible, which means reading more than just the mainstream media and the established/ establishment academic press.

The following are my personal picks from the many excellent independent online sources out there:

• Remaking the University (Chris Newfield)
• Changing Universities (Bob Samuels)
• How the University Works (Marc Bosque)
• Student Activism (Angus Johnston)
• University Probe (Charlie Schwartz et alia), a critical forum on Research Universities, their finances, their governance... their futures

To be sure there are more ... all worthy of listing. And who knows, may well get their hat tip or even a blogroll of their own.

Do you have favorites to recommend? Please submit them, preferably annotated...

AHA 09 and the Townsend Report

MLA 09 and the report on the dismal job market in the humanities were the big buzz ~ or gut punch. This week it's the AHA's Townsend Report on that profession's dismal job market and the annual AHA Conference.

Winter break seems to have slowed down the California flow somewhat. Soon enough California and other states joining it in the higher ed meltdown race ~ New York seems the likeliest contender ~ will be back front and center, flanked by stories of record enrollments at community colleges and online for-profits. 

I started out collecting "adjuncts in the blogosphere" links for an Adjunct (or Academic) Labor Blogroll to grace our sidebar. On seeing how many of the "adjunct faculty" news alerts are AHA related, I decided to post just about that before turning my attention back to adjunct blogs (and thoughts of adapting the 350 Blogging Challenge to adjunct or whatever we call ourselves issues ~ the last being yet another topic, but not today.

In the meantime, here's more on the AHA report and reactions to it:

The American History Association's Townsend report, "Troubling News on the Job Market for History PhDs"

And reverberations through the academic blogosphere:

• "More Labor Pains" in another history blog More or Less Bunk, (title from Henry Ford quote)
• "Sympathetic labor pains," in the same blog 
• "Checking in on the AHA-hahahahaha? (Lolsob.)" at Historiann 
• "Tales From the Pit, part deux: Classy Claude files his report on AHA 2009," also at Historiann 
• Marc Bosquet's "At the AHA: Huh?" and
• "Who’s A Historian to the AHA?", both at How the University Works
• "History “Job Czar” Shuts Down Phd Production (PhD “Oversupply” Continues For Two Decades)," part 3 of a 3-parter in response to the annual job report for historians. in The Valve
• "'Tis the season to lament the state of academic employment" in US Intellectual History, a group blog (think The Valve); post by Andrew Hartman commenting on, among other aspects of the stated topic, the Bosquet series

Most With Least

Savage Chickens sums up the grim assessments of the academic job market as well as or better than any of the many articles, essays, blog posts, tweet collections, what have you...

More productivity.

Happy New Year: philosophy & other advice for #adjunct faculty

Break is almost over but today is still a holiday even if my New Year's Eve was quiet and sober. MLA09 was well covered by tweet, not just mine.  Summing up tweet (MLA 09 in under 140) and the entire #MLA09 archive, a cast of thousands: download from site or subscribe to feed.

I've been diligently collating more materials than I can possibly use ~ but will somehow try. In the meantime, here's a little something to help you be more philosophical about what's facing us in 2010. Enjoy...





More to enjoy. I discovered a blogging soul mate at I Used to Be Disgusted But Now I Try to Be Amused, self-described as "a low-level academic who likes to vent his spleen a little too much." Inspired, insightful snark, and we like the same books and movies. Granted, I'm not much on basketball but there's always beer.

• A Modest Proposal to Deal With the Rise in Unemployed History PhDs
  
• Administrative Buzzwords and Phrases, and What They Really Mean
• What a Glenn Beck Student Essay Would Look Like

Techie notes: I set up sync apps to auto-post links to blog posts to both @NewFacMajority on Twitter and the New Faculty Majority Coalition Facebook Page in case you prefer getting your updates and following us via either of those popular social media.