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Written By Craig SmithTuesday, 08 January 2008
Back during Campus Equity Week 2007, we were announcing, Academic Freedom Forums that were being held on campuses around the country to discuss AFT's new statement on academic freedom as well as the particular issue of academic freedom protections for contingent faculty--a particular focus of that report. You can read a wrap-up of some of those events in this month's AFT On Campus.
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Written By Craig SmithTuesday, 30 October 2007
Campus Equity Week is underway with various events around the country. As we have reported here, here, and here, AFT is sponsoring academic freedom forums around the country to discuss AFT's new academic freedom statement released yesterday.
We would be remiss if we didn't report on the academic freedom forum this coming Friday sponsored by the Portland Community College Faculty Federation/AFT along with Oregon COCAL and the OEA Contingent Faculty Caucus. Actually, it is a full day at PCC including not only the academic freedom forum, but also a legislative round table event. Looks like it will be a productive day for raising many of the issues faced by contingent faculty and will hopefully lay the groundwork for some more FACE action in Oregon in the upcoming year.
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Written By Barbara McKennaMonday, 29 October 2007
Today, the first day of Campus Equity Week 2007, AFT releases Academic Freedom in the 21st-Century College and University: Academic Freedom for All Faculty and Instructional Staff (pdf). A key focus of this new policy statement is the need for academic freedom protections for all faculty, including those without traditional tenure protections.
The statement was developed over the past year with the involvement of AFT Higher Education's program and policy council. As with other policy and best practices statements of the division, this one was distributed and widely discussed at the annual higher education issues meeting, which took place in Portland, Ore., in March. Comments and suggestions were incorporated into the final document.
Recently, for AFT On Campus, I asked the statement's primary author, Art Hochner, to talk about the context for this statement, which is the first formal statement the AFT has released on academic freedom. Hochner is president of the Temple Association of University Professionals/AFT and an associate professor of human resource management in the business school at Temple University.
Read the full interview after the jump.
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Written By Craig SmithThursday, 25 October 2007
Last week we reported on an Academic Freedom Forum lined up at Temple University. Here is another. This one is to be held at Suffolk Community College tomorrow, October 26th. For some background on this event, here is a piece by Cynthia Eaton of the Faculty Association of Suffolk Community College, first published in the union newsletter, The Word (pdf).
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Academic Freedom: All of Us or None of Us
by Cynthia EatonAccording to Wikipedia, the online open source encyclopedia, “academic freedom” refers to "…the freedom of teachers, students, and academic institutions to pursue knowledge wherever it may lead, without undue or unreasonable interference. At the minimum, academic freedom involves the freedom to engage in the entire range of activities involved in the production of knowledge, including choosing a research focus, determining what to teach in the classroom, presenting research findings to colleagues, and publishing research findings."
There. I did it. I cited Wikipedia as a source in a paper. Very controversial, especially since Wikipedia entries can be edited by anyone and since Wikipedia’s reliability and accuracy has been questioned.
I know that some SCCC faculty explicitly forbid students to even consider Wikipedia as a possible research source; they dismiss it as inappropriate, incorrect, or unacademic. Others allow students to cite Wikipedia but only if carefully balanced by citations from other sources, such as primary sources and peer-reviewed academic journals.
As a proponent of the open source movement, I happen to belong to the latter group, but I respect that my colleagues hold differing opinions. All faculty members at Suffolk have a contractually-guaranteed right to academic freedom, to determine how best to teach their subject matter. However, this does not mean that faculty can do anything they like in their classrooms—and understanding the boundaries of academic freedom can prove tricky.
Read the rest of Eaton's article after the jump.
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Written By Craig SmithWednesday, 17 October 2007
One result of the current trends academic staffing is that a very large portion of the higher education instructional workforce does not have any academic freedom protections. Couple this fact with the ongoing political and ideological attacks being aimed at faculty and instructors and it is quite easy to imagine contingent faculty feeling fairly exposed when broaching anything controversial in the classroom. One upset student can often be the first step to "non-renewal."
Of course that is neither good for faculty members nor for students. Faculty should have academic freedom to pursue knowledge and push students to broaden their perspectives regardless of the faculty members employment category. However, we know this is typically not the case. So this Campus Equity Week and beyond, AFT locals around the country are holding Academic Freedom Forums to discuss the state of academic freedom on their campus with a particular focus on the issue of how academic staffing trends impact academic freedom. We will be letting our readers here at FACE Talk know about those events and report on their outcomes. So let's get started.
Going to be in Philly on November 2? Then stop in on the forum at Temple University which is part of the Dissent in America series. Details after the jump.
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Written By Craig SmithMonday, 01 October 2007
As part of the upcoming Campus Equity Week, Washington State Governor Christine Gregoire has signed a proclamation declaring October 31, 2007 to be "Adjunct and Part-time Faculty Appreciation Day" and calling on "all citizens to honor the thousands of adjunct and part-time faculty who teach in every university and in every technical and community college within [Washington] state." This has become a regular proclamation for the Governor of Washington State to make reflecting the ongoing legislative work that activists in the Evergreen State, including AFT Washington, have put into improving the working conditions of contingent faculty. And let me say right up front that getting a Governor or other powerful politician to make such proclamations and recognize these issues is significant and no easy task.
That said, I wonder what the impact of such a statement is on those it is intended to recognize. I imagine that reaction is mixed with some feeling very positive about the issue being raised at that level and others feeling like they might prefer better working conditions rather than a day honoring them. Of course, it doesn't have to be one or the other, but I do wonder. Thoughts?
Note: you can click on the image to make it large enough to read!
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Written By Craig SmithWednesday, 26 September 2007
The Adjunct Project at the City University of New York has started an interesting project for Campus Equity Week. They are putting together an "Equity Curricula." Nichole over at Adjunct Lifeline describe the project as:
lessons designed to be incorporated in classrooms in order to raise awareness among students and make a statement to our administration, as well as to accomplish real results.
Looks like an interesting idea that others might want to replicate on your campus.
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Written By Craig SmithFriday, 21 September 2007
Mark your calendars for Campus Equity Week 2007. If you aren't familiar with Campus Equity Week (CEW)--or Fair Employment Week (FEW) as our brothers and sisters in Canada call it--you should check out the new CEW 2007 website for details.
Campus Equity Week (CEW) is a week of action to call attention to the unfair working conditions of contingent faculty in higher education. CEW is a collection of local events locally conceived and is loosely coordinated by a national steering committee made up of activists and organizations including the AFT. Materials from previous CEW campaigns are available on the AFT Higher Education website and we will be updating that site soon with CEW materials that connect to the FACE campaign and also materials that focus on academic freedom.
We will be doing some regular updates on CEW here at FACE Talk, so if you have any news you want to share about CEW from your campus, let us know and we will also make sure the folks in charge of the CEW website know about it as well.
Tags: Craig Smith, Campus Equity Week
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Act Now to Protect The U.S. Department of Education proposed new rules to protect students and taxpayers from rip-off career education programs. But the rules need to be stronger. USA Today praised the Obama Administration for recognizing the problem, but called the proposal "feeble" and "too accommodating." The for-profit college industry and its highly paid lobbyists are fighting hard to weaken the proposed rules so exploitative schools can keep profiting off federal student aid. That's why the Obama Administration needs to hear from you!
Visit www.protectstudentsandtaxpayers.org to call for stronger rules, and please help spread the word! The time allowed for commenting is short, and early comments have the most impact, so please send in your comments today! |
At Harkin's request, the U.S. Government Accountability Office conducted an underground, "secret shopper" investigation and exposed instances of fraud at four institutions and deceptive practices at all 15 institutions it investigated. The GAO found that students are taking on tens of thousands of dollars in debt to attend these schools, and that the promises the colleges to them are making are hollow.
As we've reported on this blog all summer, the for-profit college mission is not first and foremost about education, it's about generating profits for shareholders.
As a result of these profit-driven practices, the U.S. Department of Education has proposed new regulations to ensure that students are getting their money's worth when they borrow large amounts to pay for programs that are supposed to lead to "gainful employment."
Some AFT affiliates are having firsthand experience with the incursion of corporate for-profit colleges in their regions. Michael Rosen, president of Milwaukee Area Technical College's Local 212, the AFT faculty union at the college, has been sounding the alarm in his city about the rapid installation of Everest College, a for-profit that has moved in just blocks from MATC.
Everest is part of Corinthian Colleges Inc., which appears to have some serious issues with its students being able repay their student loans.
Rosen's work caught the attention of Harriet Callier, a medical billing and records instructor at a school called High-Tech Institute, now renamed Anthem College by its corporate owner. She contacted him to express concerns about what she saw happening to the students she teaches. The current issue of AFT On Campus tells Callier's story-and also provides insight into how state agencies are responding to the need to monitor this booming industry.
It's a changing terrain, notes Wisconsin Educational Approval Board (EAB) school administration consultant Patrick Sweeney. He pointed On Campus to some of the public record correspondence between the EAB and Callier's employer, High-Tech Institute. Sweeney describes a visit to the school by EAB representatives as "frustrating and disappointing" because it "revealed a multitude of institutional problems consistent with all of High-Tech's past problems, as documented in many student complaints to the EAB."
He also shared letters that illuminate the curriculum model used by the University of Phoenix and other for-profit chains, which is designed to keep new students enrolling and taking courses, but is significantly less concerned with student success. As Sweeney notes in his letter:
In the Phoenix business model few adults who start their programs will survive through graduation. ... But, it's okay. ... In [this] model, the large number of enrollment counselors with strictly measured metrics for calls per day, new enrollments, and retention into the second week of the second course secures a steady stream of new enrollees."
In short, it's a model that works well to keep federal financial aid dollars and private loans fueling the bottom line of the business, but not one that works so well for the faculty and students.
| Read the Wisconsin Educational Approval Board's letters to High Tech Institute and University of Phoenix: |
Shortly after the California State Senate passed ACR 138 last week, the State Assembly reaffirmed its earlier vote necessary for the bill's final passage. The resolution, which expresses the intent of the California Legislature that part-time faculty at California's community colleges are provided with equitable pay and benefits and that the state's community colleges have 75% of their faculty on the tenure track, was sent to the Secretary of State for distribution to the state's community college districts.
We want to congratulate all of the activists who were instrumental in making academic staffing a legislative priority in California, and we hope that this resolution will serve as a catalyst for community college administrators and faculty working together to implement a long-term strategy for implementing an equitable and sustainable staffing structure to serve the needs of California's students.
Ah, late August, where summer begins to fade into autumn and our minds turn to... the latest round of college rankings. The Chronicle of Higher Education has a special report this week on educational quality at institutions of higher education, and as part of it, they include this nifty interactive graphic that allows you to see what criteria six of the most well-known college ranking guides use as their rubric for evaluation.
Scanning through the 30 criteria that are listed, it's striking how little attention is paid to faculty and teaching as a factor. Only two of the ranking systems (USN&WR and Kiplinger) attempt to show the gradations within the faculty rank (and only factor in the number of faculty working "full-time," a measure which we've seen is suspect and doesn't fully capture the differences between tenure-line and NTT faculty). One (USN&WR) examines faculty compensation, again without reference to the differences in pay for adjuncts. And USN&WR is alone in including instructional spending per student.
Now, I suppose that picking apart the annual college ranking guides is like shooting fish in a barrel, but it seems odd to me that these ranking guides wouldn't focus on what undergraduates are expecting in college: high quality instruction from faculty. Given that more and more research is showing that faculty (be they tenure-line or adjunct) engagement with their institution is linked with better student outcomes, wouldn't it make sense to include the state of an institution's faculty in any assessment of a college?
Just a quick update to let you all know that a bit of good news has emerged today. California's community colleges have just decided to end their controversial deal with Kaplan University that would have allowed students who could not access introductory courses at their local community colleges to instead take Kaplan's courses for—get this—ten times the price.
Earlier this year, Kaplan swooped in to ink the deal with California when they realized that its 112 community college system was severely overcrowded thanks to the economic recession and years of disinvestment on the part of the state. Students who were not able to get into required intro courses necessary for completing their programs were now able to access the equivalent course at one of Kaplan's schools for $216 per credit hour—just a little pricier than the $26 per credit hour they were used to paying at the community college.
Thanks to the fact that transfer agreements between Kaplan and many of the community colleges never materialized and the bad press that for-profit education has gotten in the past several months, California made the decision to nix the deal. For-profit education has one less avenue through which to exploit the students who need the most.
There's big news on academic staffing from the Golden State today. Yesterday, the California State Senate passed Assembly Concurrent Resolution 138 by a vote of 23-11. ACR 138, you may recall, expresses the intent of the California Legislature that part-time faculty in the California Community Colleges receive pay and benefits equal and proportionate to that of tenured and tenure-track faculty and that the state's community colleges increase their percentage of their faculties that are tenure-line to 75%. Due to a technicality, the resolution needs to be re-approved by the State Assembly, which previously passed it in June of this year.
Yesterday's vote came after an emotional presentation by Senator Joe Simitian, who related an anecdote of meeting a harried waiter who was waiting tables so that he could afford to engage in his real passion - teaching philosophy at three of California's community colleges.
We'll keep you updated as ACR 138 makes its way
towards its final passage, and congratulations to the activists in California who are working
so hard to bring the inequities plaguing the academic staffing structure to
light and are pushing their legislature into action!
