Joe Berry's COCAL Updates +

.. Check out new features, Petition Junction and Conference Corner. Are you shopping an adjunct or higher ed petition? Got a conference ~ on the horizon or in the rear view mirror ~ to share? Email me link and information on petition or conference.  

To subscribe to regular Updates, email joeberry@igc.org.  More about Joe Berry.  Updates are also archived at chicagococal.org. Follow COCAL International on Facebook  

Updates in brief and links

PETITION JUNCTION

• Release the DAVIS DOZEN
• Ana Maria Fores Tamayo to White House: Better Pay for Adjuncts
• from NFM to VP Biden, US Senate and others: Don't blame high tuition on faculty pay
• Progressive Secretary ~ Student Loan Rates, 

CONFERENCE CORNER

• Labor Notes Conference, May 4-5  
• Edufactory Conference: The University is Ours! Struggles Within and Beyond the Neoliberal University, April 27-29, 2012, Toronto, Ontario + photos. 
• COCAL International X Conference, Mexico City, August 10-12, 2012 at Universidad Nacional Autónimo de México (UNAM)  

TAKING ACTION

More Green River Adjunct Workshop coverage + CPFA Conference

Doesn't this make you want to go out and put on a conference just for adjuncts or throw a workshop of your own? When you do, be sure to let us know about it. Jack Longmate sets the example here by writing letting us know about the feature in the student newspaper and a video on YouTube.

The April 20 “The Solution to Faculty Apartheid” conference held at Green River Community College in Auburn, WA, which featured Keith Hoeller, Frank Cosco, Kathryn Re, and me, is described in a feature in the college’s student newspaper, The Current. Click on the issue and then advance to page 10 for a nice picture of Frank and Keith. 

Issue 10, volume 46, Subscribe / Print / Share / Download

And now bring out the popcorn for the main feature: video of presentations on part time college faculty working conditions. Looks at the differences between full and part time faculty pay and other issues and possible solutions to these problems.

Disposable Teachers

 = adjuncts and other precarious academic knowledge workers, also Dissident Voice article, "Cutting to the Bone on College Campuses through Reducing, Reusing, Repurposing" by Paul Haeder / April 28th, 2012

It’s the equal pay for equal work thing, stupid. Union strong and proud. (Bumper sticker on 1972 VW Rabbit, Vancouver, Canada).

Sure, that might be the mantra for the "new faculty majority"  [increasingly organizing into faculty unions. Actually New Faculty Majority's is "Faculty working conditions are student learning  conditions" but close enough], but in a large sense, the fight to normalize the work, pay and benefits of part-time/ contingent/ temporary/migratory/ irregular/ at-will/ auxiliary faculty, AKA “freeway fliers,” is one centered on dismantling the two-tiered system of inequitable pay and punitive treatment between tenure track faculty and non-tenure track faculty.

Teach-in & Workshop, Green River CC, WA

Tomorrow, April 20. It's not national and on too short notice for outside the area. That's not the point. Instead of yearning for major conferences we cannot afford to attend, information silos for preaching to the choir and any silverbacks there by accident, why not begin at home? Hold more local workshops and teach-ins to educate the public and build contingent faculty networks. Share workshop ideas, fliers, plans, materials. Here's one tomorrow that you probably can't make but can take ideas from. Planning your own? Send us the information to post and share.

WHAT: Teach-in and Workshops – Adjunct Faculty In a System of Apartheid. 

WHY:  More than 75 percent of all college faculty members are adjunct/ temporary/at-will. Students and parents are unaware of the sweatshop conditions of their professors.

WHEN: April 20, 2012 – 1-2 p.m. & 2:30-3:30