NEIUPI

Our colleague, Susan Norwell, forwarded a link for KNO after she read the survey on textbook purchase. Students can acquire e texts at reduced cost. It may be an option for some of our students who don’t purchase hard copy.

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…

Great article from “Inside Higher Ed” that features the research conducted by our colleagues, Lisa Wallis, Mary Thill and Nancy Murillo.

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…

Jamie served as our lead negotiator when we switched from IBB to traditional bargaining…

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…

A positive ruling for our colleagues at UIC but it is only the first of attempts by their administration to block collective bargaining for UIC faculty.

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…