| Welcome to AFT's FACE Campaign |
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AFT's Faculty and College Excellence (FACE) initiative is a national campaign to reverse the crisis in instructional staffing at our nation's colleges and universities. Through organizing, legislative advocacy and collective bargaining, FACE is designed to achieve two goals simultaneously:
The campaign goals are designed to be phased in over time to ensure that there is no job loss for contingent faculty currently working at a college or university. For more information about the FACE campaign, read our Call to Action. |
- Ezra has a fun post up using an episode from The Office to demonstrate why the Employee Free Choice Act is such an important piece of legislation. Hey?! Have you signed the petition yet?
- Marc has the full schedule up for the annual meeting of the Coalition of Graduate Employee Unions (but if you are too busy doing your graduate work to get over to Yale, at least give yourself a break and check out Sisyphus' dissertation recipe).
- Meanwhile BendyGirl took notice of the historic new leadership here at AFT.
The first week of August is a time when I can take a breath and try to figure what lies ahead for the coming academic year before my family drags me away from the computer. The youngest child is distracted with a series of craft activities in town right now, the oldest is preoccupied with his master's thesis, the spouse with his textbook, and the grandparent with a new pile of mysteries. Campus is quiet with the end of the first summer session and the graduate students have some time before the next deadline, which will bring another pile of graduate theses I have to read (my summer job). My co-editor is back from vacation and has taken on the task now of arguing with thesis committee chairs over the state of their students' theses.
Hundreds of thousands of students graduated from high school, applied to college and completed their degrees in the time Congress took to pass the 1,158-page College Opportunity and Affordability Act of 2008 on July 31. The votes were 380-49 in the House and 83-8 in the Senate. The president is expected to sign the bill.
The bill, known as H.R. 4137, reauthorizes the Higher Education Act of 1965, which governs federal student aid and other important education policies. It expired in 2003 and had to be extended 13 times. Through it all, the AFT weighed in on those parts of the bill that members had identified as priority concerns-expanding students' access to college, protecting academic freedom, preserving institutional (and faculty) autonomy, and getting better data on higher education staffing.
Oftentimes I have doubts about how important the use of contingent faculty really is in the larger social context. After all, the general public seems completely unaware of what is happening on our colleges and we are working in an environment that has been portrayed in our culture as monastic, isolated, and separated from the larger community. And then this past June, I read in my local newspaper (the Ellensburg Daily Record) a piece by a retiring professor of Communications, Corwin King, comparing the faculty make up today and 30 years ago. And this got me thinking about how much money the city and county might be losing as the use of contingent faculty increases. Losses that should make local politicians take notice.
Here are a few items of interest (and a little fun) from around the all-giving internets over the last couple of days:
