Last month, faculty members at Cincinnati State Technical and Community College went on strike for a week before going back to work. They did so without a new contract and without any movement in the negotiating position of the administration – the traditional goals of a strike. Also last month, faculty members at the C.W. Post campus of Long Island University went on strike for four days before a five-year contract was signed with university officials.

Strikes have also been authorized by unions at Southern Illinois University; there is talk of one at California State University. Last week, faculty members at Rider University [3] voted to authorize a strike. So did those at Lewis and Clark Community College. [4]

The strikes and possible strikes (many authorization votes aren’t followed by strikes) raise the question about whether work stoppages are still a viable option in these changing times.

Administrators and faculty members are guarded in their opinions.

Read more at Inside Higher Ed…

September 30, 2011

Latinos Need More Support to Raise Lagging Graduation Rates, Report Says

By Lacey Johnson

The college graduation rate for Latinos is less than half of the national average and will not improve until they are offered more help as they come up through the education pipeline, according to a report released Friday by the College Board Advocacy & Policy Center.

The study, conducted in 2009, found that only 19.2 percent of Latinos between the ages of 25 and 34 had earned a two- or four-year degree, compared with 41 percent nationally.

To increase Latino college completion, policy makers and educators must, among other steps, improve middle- and high-school counseling, make preschool more available to low-income families, provide additional need-based grant money, and simplify the financial-aid system, the report says.

Read more at the Chronicle…

ADMINISTRATORS ATE MY TUITION

Want to get college costs in line?
Start by cutting the overgrown management ranks.

By Benjamin Ginsberg
No statistic about higher education commands more attention—and anxiety—among members of the public than the rising price of admission. Since 1980, inflation- adjusted tuition at public universities has tripled; at private universities it has more than doubled. Compared to all other goods and services in the American economy, including medical care, only “cigarettes and other tobacco products” have seen prices rise faster than the cost of going to college. And for all that, parents who sign away ever-larger tuition checks can be forgiven for doubting whether universities are spending those additional funds in ways that make their kids’ educations better—to say nothing of three times better.

Between 1975 and 2005, total spending by American higher educational institutions, stated in constant dollars, tripled, to more than $325 billion per year. Over the same period, the faculty-to-student ratio has remained fairly constant, at approximately fifteen or sixteen students per instructor. One thing that has changed, dramatically, is the administrator-per-student ratio. In 1975, colleges employed one administrator for every eighty-four students and one professional staffer—admissions officers, information technology specialists, and the like—for every fifty students. By 2005, the administrator-to-student ratio had dropped to one administrator for every sixty-eight students while the ratio of professional staffers had dropped to one for every twenty-one students.

Read more at The Washington Monthly…

With dueling hypothetical examples, the chief advocate of a proposed e-mail policy for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and critics of the plan are debating whether it should be adopted.

Consider this example from Michael Corn, chief privacy and security officer of the university: A student and faculty member are e-mailing one another, and both end up using their non-university accounts. The potential danger — and the kind of situation the new policy is trying to avoid — is that by storing certain academic information on e-mail systems disconnected from the university, the faculty member may be unwittingly violating the student’s privacy rights under federal law.

Read more at Inside Higher Ed…

Tenure Reconsidered (a Bit)

August 31, 2011

Scholarship was reconsidered. Tenure, not so much.

That’s the conclusion of a new book, The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Reconsidered: Institutional Integration and Impact (Jossey-Bass), the latest in a series of examinations by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching of the impact (potential and realized) of the late Ernest Boyer’s 1990 work, Scholarship Reconsidered.

The new book is full of examples of the impact of Scholarship Reconsidered — in the work of faculty members at all kinds of institutions. Further, the new book argues that the ideas of Scholarship Reconsidered could dovetail nicely with the assessment movement, given that both focus on student learning outcomes. But the work being released this week finds mixed results when it comes to applying Scholarship Reconsidered to the tenure and promotion process — and acknowledges that this reality may be holding back efforts to institutionalize Boyer’s ideas.

Read more at Inside Higher Ed…

KNO

7 in 10 Students Have Skipped Buying a Textbook Because of Its Cost, Survey Finds

By Molly Redden

For many students and their families, scraping together the money to pay for college is a big enough hurdle on its own. But a new survey has found that, once on a campus, many students are unwilling or unable to come up with more money to buy books—one of the very things that helps turn tuition dollars into academic success.

In the survey, released on Tuesday by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, a nonprofit consumer-advocacy organization, seven in 10 college students said they had not purchased a textbook at least once because they had found the price too high. Many more respondents said they had purchased a book whose price was driven up by common textbook-publishing practices, such as frequent new editions or bundling with other products.

Read more at the Chronicle…

What Students Don’t Know

August 22, 2011

CHICAGO — For a stranger, the main library at the University of Illinois at Chicago can be hard to find. The directions I got from a pair of clerks at the credit union in the student center have proven unreliable. I now find myself adrift among ash trees and drab geometric buildings.

Finally, I call for help. Firouzeh Logan, a reference librarian here, soon appears and guides me where I need to go. Several unmarked pathways and an escalator ride later, I am in a private room on the second floor of the library, surrounded by librarians eager to answer my questions.

Most students never make it this far.

This is one of the sobering truths these librarians, representing a group of Illinois universities, have learned over the course of a two-year, five-campus ethnographic study examining how students view and use their campus libraries: students rarely ask librarians for help, even when they need it. The idea of a librarian as an academic expert who is available to talk about assignments and hold their hands through the research process is, in fact, foreign to most students. Those who even have the word “librarian” in their vocabularies often think library staff are only good for pointing to different sections of the stacks.

Read more at Inside Higher Ed…

Learning from Wisconsin

It’s time to discard the pernicious hierarchical structures that prevent faculty members from seeing themselves as part of a campus community of workers.

By Jamie Owen Daniel

Like thousands of other people from around the country and, indeed, around the world, I was heartened and inspired by the tenacity, immediacy, and creativity of the pushback by Wisconsin’s public-sector unions against Governor Scott Walker’s unscrupulous moves to eviscerate their collective bargaining rights. And like many others who made the trek to Madison to stand, march, and holler in solidarity, I was exhilarated by the deafening emotional force of the students, union members, and just plain decent citizens chanting in the capitol rotunda (“Whose house? Our house!”). Entire families, parish groups, scout troops, and tribal councils gathered in unprecedented numbers, day after day, in the snow and wind outside the building to reinforce the message to the legislature: this is what democracy looks like.

And, like so many others from the academy and from the labor movement who have written about these weeks of muscular union visibility, I hoped, and continue to hope, that “Wisconsin” will represent an irreversible moment, a moment when the labor movement began to actually move again, as unions, certainly, but also as an essential component in broader struggles for justice. The various unions in the public and private sectors have all too often been moribund, or at best reactive, since the 2008 election.

Read more at the AAUP’s Academe Online…

One Big Faculty Union

July 13, 2011
A state judge ruled Tuesday that the University of Illinois at Chicago does not have the right to block a faculty union from representing both those on the tenure track and adjuncts.

While the university plans to appeal, and the case is far from over, the ruling rejected the major arguments put forward by the university and largely accepted those offered by the union. The decision found no ban in Illinois law to common organizing and rejected the university’s argument that the interests of the tenured and non-tenure-track faculty members were too different for them to organize together.

Read more at Inside Higher Ed…