It’s time for Congress to pay attention to the abuse of adjunct faculty members, and the way their poor working conditions impact not only them, but their students, says a new report from the House Education and the Workforce Committee. While the report largely endorses previous studies on the subject, “The Just-In-Time Professor” document marks the first time Congress has so formally acknowledged a situation that adjunct activists have long deemed exploitative.
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by Colleen Flaherty, Inside Higher Ed.
Posted: January 24th, 2014, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
The American public higher education finance system is broken. States’ disinvestment in higher education in recent decades has driven tuition prices ever higher, placing us at the precipice of a college affordability crisis. The federal government’s investment in student aid is substantial, yet the productivity of these dollars is not maximized to make college affordable for all students attending the nation’s public colleges and universities. The end results are decreasing college affordability, increasing student debt, and a quickening state-to-student cost shift in who pays for a public college education.
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by Daniel J. Hurley, The Huffington Post.
Posted: January 24th, 2014, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
The adjunct problem is about the continued exploitation of a large, growing and diverse group of highly educated and dedicated college teachers who have been asked to settle for less pay (sometimes as little as $21,000 a year for full-time work) because the institutions they work for have callously calculated that they can get away with it. The adjunct problem is institutional, not personal, and its affects reach deep into our culture and society… it cynically manipulates the better angels of the human spirit – the desire to help and to share one’s interests and values, to cultivate meaningful relationships, to inspire, and to teach – in order to save a few bucks.
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by James Hoff, The Guardian.
Posted: January 24th, 2014, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
Sitting in on part of Wednesday’s meeting, Brown challenged regents to develop classes that require no “human intervention” and might expand the system’s reach beyond its student body. “If this university can probe into” black holes, he said, “can’t somebody create a course — Spanish, calculus, whatever — totally online? That seems to me less complicated than that telescope you were talking about,” referring to an earlier agenda item. After receiving pushback from UC provost Aimée Dorr, who delivered the presentation, that students are “less happy and less engaged” without human interaction, Brown said those measurements were too soft and he wanted empirical results.
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by Alexei Koseff, The Sacramento Bee.
Posted: January 23rd, 2014, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
In a rare gathering, University of California President Janet Napolitano, California State University Chancellor Timothy P. White and California Community Colleges Chancellor Brice W. Harris said they want to break through some of the walls set up by the state’s 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education, which established different roles and student enrollment criteria for each sector. Yet they also said they want to maintain the plan’s basic tenets… Brown, whose father, Pat Brown, helped form the plan as governor, said he wants more imaginative ideas to improve higher education, possibly forming new entities online or elsewhere. He did not offer specifics.
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by Larry Gordon, The Los Angeles Times.
Posted: January 22nd, 2014, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
The UC Office of the President’s budget for next year will remain flat but because of higher pension costs and other mandatory spending that will require cuts — in some areas, by up to 6.5 percent. Napolitano, who has led the system for less than four months, has said she plans to show the governor and state lawmakers that money invested in the system will be well spent. She said she had put an immediate cap on her office staffing and that travel expenses would be reduced.
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by Katy Murphy, The San Jose Mercury News.
Posted: January 22nd, 2014, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
Two weeks ago City Attorney Dennis Herrera’s team won a preliminary injunction in Superior Court preventing the dis-accreditation of City College San Francisco until the court case against ACCJC is settled. Last week Nancy Pelosi visited the Chinatown campus of City College of San Francisco (CCSF). She spoke out in support of CCSF and indicated she will be pushing for “the highest scrutiny” of the Accrediting Commission ACCJC because what they have done “just isn’t responsible.”
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by Rick Sterling, Beyond Chron.
Posted: January 16th, 2014, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
“Rather than a single, open network, we face a future where different networks offer different performance for different applications,” explained Michael Berman, vice president of Technology & Communication for California State University Channel Islands. “It’s not hard to imagine, for example, a commercial network that has Apple as a major sponsor and makes it harder to use an Android phone or vice-versa. Or, a network where the video for courses from the University of Phoenix or Coursera run quickly, but those from edX and your local community college run at slower speed and lower resolution.”
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by Dian Schaffhauser, THE Journal.
Posted: January 16th, 2014, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
The governor’s proposal, released last week, awarded the UC system an additional $142.2 million from the General Fund in 2014-15, a 5 percent increase from last fiscal year. Meeting with The Sacramento Bee’s Editorial Board, Napolitano did not explicitly call for more funds, but said: “We’ll have a discussion about what else can the university do and what other needs that we have.” “We all know state funding had to get slashed (during the recession). I can appreciate the difficult decisions that had to be made,” she added. “But we’ve leveled off now.”
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by Alexei Koseff, The Sacramento Bee.
Posted: January 15th, 2014, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
Q: Did you expect you would have protesters at your public appearances? A: I heard that it would happen. Nobody knew what the topic would be, per se, but that there would be protesters, that it’s part of the culture of the place. So I guess I’m getting used to it. Q: You were saying last month that this was a point of inflection for higher education. What exactly did you mean by that? A: I think it’s time to reinvigorate the partnership between the state and higher ed and the federal government and higher ed. … My predecessor had to make some really tough calls because the amount of aid was cut so substantially.
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by Katy Murphy, The San Jose Mercury News.
Posted: January 5th, 2014, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
