Happy New Year from New Faculty Majority!

2012 was an important transitional year for us, and 2013 promises even more progress. (Watch your email inbox for the launch of our new e-newsletter, and stay connected daily through our blog and extensive social media.)

Our January 2012 Summit firmly established NFM on the national stage, identifying us as the leading organization working to secure academic excellence through faculty equity and launching new national leaders and projects, like Josh Boldt and The Adjunct Project. Our work this year has concentrated on educating the public and policymakers within and outside of higher education on the state of faculty working conditions in higher education and the need for reform.

Right Leaders of Wrong & other ed-revs

…as told in tweets by @Jessifer (Hybrid Pedagogy) on Storify. Jesse Stommel (IRL) writes...

A short conversation on Twitter about the oncoming revolution in Higher Education. 

It started innocently enough with a few sentences I threw out to the Twitterverse in the weekly hours on a Thursday. Had been thinking about friends and colleagues that are brilliant teachers and wondering why they keep getting pushed out of academia. And why some of them have come to the conclusion that academia is not hospitable to them. It's a weird contradiction -- that in many institutions of higher learning, the folks most passionate about teaching and learning often get overlooked or even aggressively pushed out. 

Read the rest at Right Leaders of Wrong (with tweets) by Jessifer on Storify. Want more, related?

A College Christmas Carol

…at Remaking the University, Chris Newfield compares "A Christmas Carol" to current stories of struggling, indebted students. 

Elsewhere, Stephen Downes comments on the NYT article that Newfield references below, "T[he students] need a broader array of social supports, and most of all, a society determined to help them out of poverty, rather than blame them for being in it. But I see no sign higher education as a sector has any real interest in that."  

Here Newfield calls for that to change and tasks senior college officials with working to restore the bankruptcy option...lest Marley's fate await them... 

As Scrooge leaves his counting-house on Christmas Eve, he encounters his cheerful nephew, who tells his Uncle Scrooge that Christmas is one of those "many things from which I might have derived good, [but] by which I have not profited, I dare say."   The good, the nephew continues, is to have the one moment in the year in which "men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys."

Scrooge dismisses this feeling and, with a final dig at his long-suffering clerk, leaves his office, only to be confronted by two amiable gentlemen who are soliciting "some slight provision for the Poor and destitute, who suffer greatly at the present time."

Scrooge asks them, "are there no prisons?" 

universities are vast copy machines

…linkalicious Omivore is back on the #highered beat in time for year end reflections, plus an informal tutorial by example on elegant link annotation. This O covers more than higher ed: its beat is global and eclectic: politics, science, culture. social sciences, economy, geopolitics, arts, law, ethics, and more…

From Boston Review, pomp and exceptional circumstance: Malcolm Harris on how students are forced to prop up the education bubble. What's your preferred way of finding a paper in your field? Scott McLemee looks at a report on the available options. Siva Vaidhyanathan on how universities are vast copy machines — and that’s a good thing. 

Scholars say higher ed leftist bias helped Obama win. Are the liberal arts useful? Samuel Goldman wonders. Blaine Greteman reviews Speaking of Race and Class: The Student Experience at an Elite College by Elizabeth Aries with Richard Berman. Will state colleges become federal universities? Richard Vedder investigates. Students aren’t the only ones cheating — some professors are, too; Uri Simonsohn is out to bust them. 

Robert Dingwall on why open access is good news for neo-Nazis. Questioning Clay Shirky: It's time to start challenging the popular critique of higher education — and the way the views of many academics have been belittled or ignored, writes Aaron Bady. From PhD Comics, Jorge Cham on the fingerprint of stars. A look at 5 mind-blowing academic theories as taught by classic movies.

universities are vast copy machines - bookforum.com / omnivore

The Best CFP You’ll Ever Get: Help Make a Quittas Book/Site

…group blog mama nervosa in the feed reader's "leaving academia" folder is making an offer no post_ac (or would that be xAc? also aka 'quitta') can or should refuse. Leaving has become an increasing more openly faced and realistically discussed option. "Quitting" no longer carries the same, if any stigma, whether alt_ac, lateral or a 180° ... just another option. Leaving academia stories belong in the corpus of adjunct narratives just as much as any other stories we have to tell and share. 

The Best CFP You’ll Ever Get: Help Us Make a Book/Site for Other Quittas

Me and a couple other post-ac bloggers are going to make a website and e-book for people leaving academia. Because career advice isn’t enough. Because the demand for real stories and practical help is so high. The domain is purchased and outlines are drafted:  now we need your help.

Me, JC @ From Grad School to Happiness, Jet from Ruminations, and Currer from Project Reinvention are pulling together:

• a website with practical, peer-to-peer advice for leaving academia on every topic from emotional issues to getting food stamps to revamping your resume
• an e-book of essays exploring personal stories of leaving academia (a “bath tub book,” as one commenter put it)