City College of San Francisco submitted a letter this week requesting a review of the decision to terminate the school’s accreditation next year. CCSF officials now have until mid-August to explain why they believe a review of the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges’ decision should be granted… There are only four criteria that a review can based on: error or omissions on the part of the visiting accreditation team’s evaluation, bias or prejudice by the team, an error in evidence submitted, or that the commission’s decision was not supported by evidence. Once submitted, the commission will take 30 days to review the materials and determine if the claims are warranted. CCSF officials cannot request an appeal until a ruling on the review is made.

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by Andrea Koskey, The San Francisco Examiner.

Posted: August 2nd, 2013, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

After years of discussion, the University of California’s Academic Senate has adopted an open-access policy that will make research articles freely available to the public through eScholarship, California’s open digital repository. The new policy, to be phased in over the next few months, applies to all 10 of the system’s campuses and more than 8,000 tenured and tenure-track faculty members. It will affect as many as 40,000 research papers a year, the university said in a statement announcing the news. Faculty members can opt out or ask that their work be embargoed for a period of time, as many journal publishers require.

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by Jennifer Howard, The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Posted: August 2nd, 2013, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

A controversial California bill to pass off untold thousands of state college students to nontraditional providers of instruction, some of them for-profit or unaccredited, is dead for now. The bill, unveiled in March by a powerful California lawmaker, initially would have required the state’s 145 public colleges and universities to grant credit for low-cost online courses offered by outside groups, including for-profits companies, among them the providers of massive open online courses, or MOOCs. The legislation was the subject of massive media coverage, with many citing it as evidence that traditional higher ed models were doomed. The plan’s chief backer, Democratic State Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, is no longer trying to advance the measure and will not do so until at least August 2014.

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by Ry Rivard, Inside Higher Ed.

Posted: August 1st, 2013, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

The University of California spent $11.22 billion on its payroll last year, up 6 percent from the year before, according to figures released Wednesday. Total pay to faculty rose by about 4 percent, while pay to nonacademic staff and management rose by 7 percent. Between 2006 and 2012, the system’s payroll grew more than 35 percent… UC officials attributed the 2012 increased spending on salaries to growth in student enrollment, research activity and the size of its workforce. “There were no general pay increases,” said UC spokeswoman Dianne Klein. “The amount of pay did increase by 6 percent but this was largely from the medical enterprise.”

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by Laurel Rosenhall and Phillip Reese, The Fresno Bee.

Posted: August 1st, 2013, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

This fall, for the first time, the nation’s largest public university system will offer the option of online courses to all of its students, using digital technology to overcome pervasive space shortages in real-world classrooms. A program revealed Wednesday by the 23-campus California State University includes more than 30 courses approved systemwide, from Elementary Astronomy to the History of Rock and Roll… CSU’s new cross-campus course option is just the kind of experiment Gov. Jerry Brown has been prodding California’s public colleges and universities to try, arguing that smart use of technology could help more students get into and through college. It was funded from $17 million in state money originally earmarked for online education, Uhlenkamp said.

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by Katy Murphy, Inside Bay Area.

Posted: July 31st, 2013, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

The right of faculty members to speak out on matters affecting their colleges and universities has long been viewed as central to the way academic freedom and shared governance are supposed to work in American higher education. The University of California Board of Regents affirmed that right this month with an amendment to the system’s “Statement on the Professional Rights of Faculty.” In so doing, the board sought to undercut the impact of a 2006 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that has been used in some cases to question the faculty right to speak out on institutional governance. The new language states that faculty members have the “freedom to address any matter of institutional policy or action when acting as a member of the faculty whether or not as a member of an agency of institutional governance.”

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by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed.

Posted: July 29th, 2013, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

You don’t have to ask where you’ve heard this before, because you hear it all the time. Every new technology is hyped as a world-changer and life-changer — just last year, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan was urging that every schoolchild have a laptop, because in the near future, textbooks would be a thing of the past. As I observed at the time, this was education as seen through the eyes of Apple Inc., not through the eyes of genuine educators… if university administrators think the online model will allow them to save money, say, by employing fewer or less-qualified teachers, without sacrificing the quality of the education they provide, they’ve been hoodwinked. That’s the danger of believing promises of a pedagogical revolution when they’re purveyed by companies with something to sell.

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by Michael Hiltzik, The Los Angeles Times.

Posted: July 26th, 2013, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

Police say they’ve arrested about 25 University of California health care workers who staged a sit-in that has closed an intersection, causing traffic backups during rush hour at the Los Angeles campus… The union says the workers are protesting stalled contract talks for 12,000 of the university system’s patient care technical workers.

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by staff, The Sacramento Bee.

Posted: July 26th, 2013, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

When adjuncts push to unionize, they typically want better pay, better benefits (or any benefits if they don’t have them) and job security. With unionization drives spreading, a key question is: Does collective bargaining yield meaningful gains? The results of numerous initial contracts suggest the answer is “Yes.” Negotiations on first contracts can take six months or more, but gains in those contracts frequently include significant pay increases and other, non-financial benefits.

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by Colleen Flaherty, Inside Higher Ed.

Posted: July 26th, 2013, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

The former police officer who pepper-sprayed students during an Occupy protest at the University of California, Davis is appealing for worker’s compensation, claiming he suffered psychiatric injury from the 2011 confrontation. John Pike has a settlement conference set for Aug. 13 in Sacramento, according to the state Department of Industrial Relations’ website. Pike was fired in July 2012, eight months after a task force investigation found that his action was unwarranted.

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by staff, The Huffington Post.

Posted: July 26th, 2013, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.