Counter-conference video

Session: Organizing Labor and The Academic Class War | Berry, Nicholls and Maisto

Video follow up to  pre-Counter-conference blogging and then IRL + links to Counter-conference videos at Occupy Everything (and/or evacuate ~ love the title, don't you?).  Thanks to Michael Wilson for helping me get the right embed code so you can view the video with minimal frustration.

Critical University Studies: Chris Newfield reports

Not the MLA but from across the Freeway: Notes on the Counter-conference... cheerfully cribbed from Chris' excellent and often recommended Remaking the University (utototherescue). This time heed the recommendation: bookmark the blog, add the feed to your rss reader, follow Chris on Twitter, @cnewf. Visiting and posting a comment would be nice too. Chris has another blog, Chris' Blog Archives, more like a spare blog closet (I could use one of those too for all the notes and links stashed about). 

. . . actually more like tweets, organized around themes not presentations and slighting all sorts of good stuff from a full Merrifield amphitheatre (image above) at Loyola Law School:

(Counter) Conference Announcement

LA 2011 IS MORE THAN MLA 2011

BUT ALSO

A Counter-Conference: Strategies for Defending Higher Education

Conventions and conferences abound in academia. You could even say they are a convention of the profession. It's time to be unconventional, break with convention, call unconventional counter-conferences. When better to schedule one than during the annual MLA Convention? 

The announcement below comes courtesy of organizer Bob Samuels, UC-AFT President, blogging higher ed and UC at Changing Universities. 

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Please circulate this announcement to any of your faculty groups or departmental lists.

A Counter-Conference: Strategies for Defending Higher Education

This counter-conference will take place during the annual MLA Convention in Los Angeles, January 8th, 2011 from 1-5 at Merrifield Hall, Loyola Law School (919 Albany St, 4 blocks north of the Marriott). While thousands of people will be meeting at the traditional convention, we will hold a one-day event centered on discussing actual strategies for making higher education more just.  Speakers will be presenting short papers on topics like the death of tenure, the corporatization of the university, the possibilities of unionization, direct social action, the use and abuse of graduate students, organizing contingent faculty, and taking back shared governance. 

Schedule

1:00-1:45 - Remaking the University of California, (after Chris Newfield's similarly named blog, Remaking the University): Catharine Liu, UC Irvine; Chris Newfield (author of Unmaking the Public University), Joshua Clover, UC Davis

1:45-2:30 - Defending the Humanities and Shared Governance: Cary Nelson, President AAUP; Jeffrey Williams, Carnegie Mellon; Michelle Masse, LSU

2:30-3:15 - Organizing Labor and the Academic Class War: Marc Bousquet, Santa Clara University; Maria Maisto, New Faculty Majority; Joe Berry, Chicago COCAL, School of Labor and Employment Relations at UI Urbana-Champaign

3:15-4:00 - 

Graduate Students and Precarious Labor: 

Annie McClanahan, Harvard (UAW bargaining unit); 

Jasper Bernes, GSOC, UC Berkeley; 

Stephanie Seawell, UIGEO, Champaign-Urbana; 

Kerry Pimblott,  

UIGEO, 

UI Champaign-Urbana

4:00-4:30 - Quality, Access, and Affordability: Murray Sperber, Professor Emiritus, IU Bloomington; Bob Samuels, UCLA, President UC-AFT

4:30-4:55 - Open Discussion on Strategies for Changing Higher Education
RSVP by emailing bobsamuels_us@yahoo.com or at the Counter-Conference Facebook Event page if you plan to come. $10 donation suggested but not required. You do not have to be a member of MLA to attend. 

Bob Samuels, President, UC-AFT

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