On the Teach-In, teaching #NAWD & some history

…a revisited and only moderately updated 2011 newsletter article that, given distribution and placement, I should have blogged here in the first place. So now, thanks to #NAWD and revived Teach-In interest, I'm getting to it. Defend Public Education emerged in 2009, grew, peaked in 2011 and then seemed to fade into Occupy ~ now in eclipse as well. The teach-in / walkout connection is clearer now. 

Not all walkouts are strikes, nor are all labor related. Social injustice, not labor, is the real connection. Students are among likeliest out-walkers. Google walkout and you get more students than unions. Considering workplace inequities, labor practices are a natural target. The last major U.S. walkout was by students in Wisconsin in 2011. 

By way of the sit-in (which also connects to occupy), there's a clear walkout/teach-in connection. I'm somewhat puzzled by the paucity of meaningful online material on both but chalk it up to Eli Pariser's filter bubble. We are not encouraged to remember these connections. Somewhat more history follows below. For the complete newsletter, see the link at the bottom of the post. A more extensive collection of resource links is being bundled and will appear later -- but still in time for teaching-in later this month.

March 2011 was a month of action, in part planned by Defend Public Education and other groups as a coordinated series of actions supporting public education continuing and expanding on those of October 7, 2010 and March 4, 2010. This round, Wisconsin upped the ante. March actions, spreading into April and beyond, moved from previously planned to reactions supporting a broader cause. The massive attack on collective bargaining, public services workers, and public services was not limited to public education. Proposed legislation called for cutting public services drastically and, as part of budgetary package, dismantling or severely restricting collective bargaining.

In March we watched the actions on TV, followed it live online, web streamed and tweeted, and participated when and where possible. Protest manifested in petitions, rallies, marches, demonstrations, and teach-ins, with one California campus holding a "ramen-in."

(Update Notes)
The best covered and recorded, at least in terms of what has lasted, yields results to searches, 2011 Teach-In would have to be the April 5, 2011, National Teach-In on Debt, Austerity, Corporate Greed and What Can Be Done. Like the Defend Public Education page (which would have made a splendid model for NAWD), the event website is gone. The FB Event page infested with spam and bad links. Teach-In coverage remains on The Guardian and elsewhere as well as on a full set of YouTube videos. And now here too.

(back to the original article)

NFM News Feb 2013: Reconnect, Renew, Resolve

…oops, thought I had but forgot to blog the resurrected newsletter…my bad. Either no one noticed or considered it worth mentioning. Although non-members are not supposed to get the newsletter until after members, I doubt the gap was intended to be quite this substantial. All I can do is apologize, try to do better next time and ask the editor to notify me when/if NFM News can be released for blog publication. as you will note below, current newsletters are also published on the New Faculty Majority website. Now to 'adjust' the post date back…

Volume 3: Issue 8: New Faculty Majority E-Newsletter

February 19, 2013

Do you have news to share with the NFM community? Ideas for a story or interview? If so, please contact Newsletter editor Tracy Donhardt at tracy.donhardt@newfacultymajority.info

a straight path into academia

…more Omnivore, a selection of briefly annotated links about academia…highly readable equivalent of "Calgon take me away" for higher ed bloggers. Yes, wedo have our own news and plenty of it: from a new adjunct pages; an important new education column that we hope to feature regularly; chapter news; the impending arrival/revival of the NFM Newsletter; a new installment in the saga of Green River intra-union conflicts ~ to the saga's chronicler working on a new article about the New Faculty Majority (presumably our Foundation  as well). All sufficient unto the morrow, a new day...

From the Los Angeles Review of Books, the academy in peril: A symposium on Blow Up the Humanities by Toby Miller (and more).

Newsletter ToC

News from New Faculty Majority, the NFM bi-monthly newsletter went out to members this morning. Usually I wait until the next day to post here on the blog and sending contents winging out to connected social media. First in line for the newsletter is a membership perk. Later, back issues are archived on the blog. Consider this a less than subtle reminder to join. This time, you get the ToC in advance.

President's Message: Continuing to Move Forward

Maria Maisto's newsletter message recaps recent and upcoming notices, activities and projects: new health insurance initiative; nascent 501(c)3 NFM Foundation; grants from The Ford Foundation and the French American Charitable Trust; our January 28, 2012 "summit" on contingent academic employment in Washington DC; ongoing efforts encouraging faculty unions to include and support contingent/ adjunct faculty members; our participation in the Campaign for the Future of Higher Education (CFHE) advocating faculty-led reform; CFHE's November 4-6 Boston meeting; Campus Equity Week 2011 (October 24-28). 

Campus Equity Week 2011, October 24-28, is a week-long, national campaign to highlight the problems associated with contingency and the lack of equity on campuses across the country. Start planning now for events on your campuses, and let us know of your plans so we can help publicize them.

Keep up to date on plans for our Summit to Confront Contingent Employment Practices in Higher Education at the NFM Foundation website

News from NFM #6,

New Faculty Majority eNewsletter, April 7, 2011 

Table of Contents (use Control + F to navigate)

• Presidents Message, (Connecting to) The News of the World
• New Jersey County College Adjuncts Federate, By Bill Lipkin
• Meet the NFM Board: Anne Wiegard (NFM Secretary)
• Me and UC: Fighting "reasonable assurance" One adjunct's story
• A Word from NFM's Treasurer By Bill Lipkin
• A Documentary in the Making: Con Job
• Teach-on: Teach-in By Vanessa Vaile
• Announcements

(Connecting to) The News of the World    by Maria Maisto, NFM President

First, I am pleased to report that The Marguerite Casey Foundation in Seattle, Washington has awarded $25,000 to our nascent 501c(3) organization, New Faculty Majority Foundation, to support its ability to provide programming complementary to that of NFM.  The NFM Foundation's goal for the next year is to 1) build capacity in ways that include employing staff, seeding further fundraising efforts and expanding its base of stakeholders; 2) begin identifying and gathering essential data currently missing from research on adjunct and contingent faculty; and 3) sponsor a summit meeting in Washington, DC, tentatively titled "Confronting Contingency."

Dear Colleagues:  Incredible, inspiring movements in support of justice and democracy have swept our country and others over the last couple of months. At the same time, unimaginable tragedy has befallen the residents of Japan, and regularly occurs both locally and globally every day. I sometimes find it difficult to keep perspective in the face of events that are so large in scope and significance. The project in which we are engaged - to establish fair and ethical working conditions for all higher education faculty in the US - can seem trivial when compared to the life-or-death situations of people in our communities and around the world. Indeed, when we take our message beyond our campuses, we often find that people respond to us in exactly this way. Expecting support from members of our communities, we are hurt when we hear instead, "You should be glad you have a job rather than complaining about your pay."

News from NFM, #5

As announced recently, the newsletter is here. Sent to members a few mornings ago, posted to our Facebook page midday same day ~ and tweeted @NewFacMajority shortly thereafter, so this won't be the first time some of you get the news. Call it building in redundancy, aka the new nagging... 

The Newsletter Archives page has a link to the online version, link valid for 60 days before Constant Contact archives it and I have to hunt down the new link. 

Table of Contents: (sorry, still no targeted anchors ~ use Control + F to navigate) 

• 
  

  
  

  Presidents Message, 

  Big Changes Within NFM
• NFM Welcomes Its 1,000th Member!
• Meet the NFM Board (New Feature!): Vanessa Vaile; Peter G. Brown
• Me and UC: Fighting To Win ... Again By Adjunct in Connecticut
• Conference Update By Maria Maisto
• Announcements: Insurance Update; Post Your Comments on the New Faculty Majority Blog and Facebook; Got regional news you'd like to share?; Call for Stories
• Passing the Mortarboard ($$)

PS... we're making plans for 2011. Tell us what tops your NFM wish list by taking this short poll.

---

Issue: #5 - New Faculty Majority E-Newsletter, February 4, 2011 New Faculty Majority   The National Coalition for Adjunct & Contingent Equity Big Changes Within NFM    by Maria Maisto, NFM President Dear Colleagues, The usual greeting at this time of year when new years and school terms begin is one of hope and confidence, both of which can be in short supply for so many of us who are uncertain about our class assignments, unpaid until sometime in February, or just plain unemployed. We hope that some of that anxiety might be relieved by the knowledge that this year holds much promise for NFM and therefore for all faculty and others determined to hold higher education to the standards of integrity that students, our colleagues, and the public expect and deserve. Earlier this month I was in LA to introduce NFM at a session on contingency at the 2011 MLA Convention, and then to participate in the January 8 "Counter Conference" organized by NFM founding Board member Bob Samuels. (You can read my brief report elsewhere in this edition of the newsletter.) The biggest NFM news that I reported at both conferences is the progress we've made in the last several months on forming our nascent 501(c)3 NFM Foundation, an affiliated nonprofit that will focus on fundraising, public education on a broad scale, support for targeted research on contingency-related topics that have been misunderstood or neglected, and other projects that fit most properly into the category of educational and charitable activities. Our fiscal agent, which provides us with the legal ability to fundraise while our 501(c)3 determination is pending, is CTAC, the Community Training and Assistance Center in Boston, MA. We have several fundraising prospects in the works and hope to have happy news to report very soon. Meanwhile, we are continuing to build membership -- see the profile of our one thousandth member! -- in NFM proper, which is a 501(c)6 tax-exempt professional organization that promotes better working conditions for its members through activities, including lobbying, that are free from the restrictions placed on a 501(c)3. By having two affiliated nonprofit organizations, we believe that we can expand and maximize the opportunities available for accomplishing our core mission, which is of course to end the exploitation of adjunct and contingent faculty at colleges and universities nationwide. Now that our organizational structures are stabilizing, we have specific projects that we need help with:

NFM Newsletter, Issue #4, now out

Members have already received their copies of News from New Faculty Majority by email. Back issues are available online here and on the New Faculty Majority website's newsletter page. The address for online viewing will remain active for 90 days ~ not indefinitely. It will still be available archived at a different link. Once archived, that link will be added to both back issue sites noted above. In the meantime, I'll be adding the temporary link to the blog's newsletter archive. 

Yes we have no targeted anchors in the menu to navigate a long page. Sorry about that. I keep asking. Until then, use ToC keywords + page search function. It's that or scroll. scroll, scroll your cursor (or the ↓ arrow ke y) merrily down the page.  

Table of Contents 

• On adding more voices: President's message
• Our collective voice will be heard: Tracy Donhardt, Board member, Newsletter Editor 
• Noteworthy adjunct activism: Board member Steve Street 
• Me and UC: unemployment filing narratives
• Gaining support and benefits at UI filing party: Peter Brown
• Part II: Non-tenure track researchers: Paul Erlich
• How to file a Freedom of Information Act request
• Announcements
• (Passing the Mortarboard)

And now jump to the newsletter...

News and more news

News and more news: that makes today a news day... or a catch-up day. First comes the newsletter, News from New Faculty Majority, issue #2 emailed to members last week and promptly tweeted. Over here in this corner of the blogosphere, I was waiting for the archive url to blog and post to adjunct groups/lists. The shortened link is http://bit.ly/NFMnl2 ~ please forward and share the link widely.

Blogkeeping: a preview of things to come

Sunday night - or would that be Monday morning - blogkeeping? No, even after midnight, Auntie Mame would still call it Sunday night, middle of the night hours away.


Blogkeeping is catching up odds and ends. Kalte Ente by any other name. I intended to introduce a column for personal reflections so I don't lose my voice in midst of adjunct faculty advocacy, NFM stuff, relevant news and recycled content. I waited too long and now it's deck clearing time. Such are the wages of procrastination. What's coming and what needs clearing out of the way?

On the horizon...
Today's teleconference board meeting focused on NFM's soon to to be rolled out for our 2010 BIG and multi-tiered initiative: adjunct unemployment compensation. Briefly, the first wave gets out information on filing and emphasizes encouraging as many contingent faculty to file as possible. Following stages will address gathering more information on filing experiences state by state and ultimately advocating for legislative change at state and federal levels. On the way there, however, we must all become as well informed as possible.

News(letter Issue 1) from New Faculty Majority

If you aren't a New Faculty Majority member or haven't received your copy yet, the 1st issue of the NFM newsletter is available online. Future issues are scheduled for monthly publication, articles already being assembled for issue #2. Please forward and share the newsletter widely. 

We're targeting early May (I'd like to say May Day! but don't want to jinx it) to roll out (softly) our Unemployment Insurance Initiative ("take the initiative" ~ "file for your rights"). 

Obviously, Unemployment benefits for adjunct faculty and contingent academic labor will be a major focus in May issue ~ but not the only one. Other May newsletter topics include (but are not limited to) articles on how to form chapters and steps in planning a health care initiative for NFM members. 

You're invited - indeed strongly encouraged - to recommend topics, ideas for future features and to inquire about submitting articles for future issues. 

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