Category: Organizing labor
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By: Samir Chopra In response to my previous post making note of the lock-out of faculty at Long Island University (LIU), a Facebook friend wrote on my page: So, I don’t understand. What makes university professors any different than people who work any other job? If you don’t like the pay, or don’t like the…
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By: Samir Chopra Some university administrators manage to put up a pretty good front when it comes to maintaining the charade that they care about the education of their students–they dip into their accessible store of mealy mouthed platitudes and dish them out every turn, holding their hands over their hearts as paeans to the…
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Over at DailyNous, we read that the University of Oregon has sent a letter to international graduate students warning them that they would face deportation if they were to join a strike being undertaken against the university by the Graduate Teaching Fellows Federation (GTFF). Several things should be said about this. 1) The threat appears…
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by Leigh M. Johnson We continue awaiting the decision of a grand jury on whether or not to indict Darren Wilson, a white police officer, who shot and killed Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, exactly 15 weeks ago today on a suburban street in Ferguson, Missouri. News reporters from across the globe have been camped…
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In comment #9 at this post, Susan makes a kind of canonical case I've heard from lots of assessment people. First, I should say that I agree with 95% of the intended answers to Susan's rhetorical questions. We should be much clearer about what we want our students to get out of their degrees, and…
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This article in Dissent is a good call for action, focusing on the University of Illinois-Chicago strike last week. However, one additional factor needs to be put into the equation: undergraduate student-workers, who do lots and lots of service and clerical work: checking books out of the library, answering phones in department offices, and on and…
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Article in Jacobin here: On February 18, the tenure track and non-tenure track faculty who make up the University of Illinois-Chicago faculty union UICUF Local 6456 will walk out of the classroom and onto the picket line for a two-day strike. Barring a dramatic change-of-heart by university administrators at the bargaining table the weekend, it will…
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I like the result of the NYU graduate student unionization election (I would like to say, "obviously," but as too many profs use the "in principle I like unions, but …" line when it comes to grad student organizing I guess I can't). But I don't think the subhead of this column ("An important victory…
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The good news: NYU and the UAW have agreed to allow graduate teaching assistants to hold a union election. The "sigh" moments come in the first and last clauses here: Outside the South, graduate student unions are common in public higher education (where collective bargaining rights are determined at the state level), but have been…
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