In a nine-page report, the ACLU just slammed the Berkeley administration for trampling on the rights of two student protesters. And: Is the Minneapolis conference about this year's campus unrest the last act, or a prelude to even bolder action? Watch the live broadcast to find out.  There was a police confrontation at a sit-in yesterday and the Oakland schoolteachers are striking later this month. Stay tuned for the events of  May 1 through May 4.

The ACLU report relentlessly portrays an administration that overreacted and over-reached its authority, laying ludicrous charges (such as "attempting arson") for which the university had literally no evidence (nor could have, because no "arson" was attempted, duh), imposing punishment without due process (like, uh, being heard), devising strictures it had no right to impose, etc. Read all blistering nine pages here and sign the petition, if...

I wouldn't buy the iPad for me, but I'd certainly consider buying something like it for my son. Infants acquire the ability to point around ten months of age. With touch-screen interfaces, shortly thereafter most can interact with literacy programs designed for much older children.

About this time last year, when Emile was fourteen months old, we evaluated for his use the best options then available, the touch-screen netbook and the large HP TouchSmart 600, choosing the latter for screen size and interface quality. If the iPad had been available, we'd have given it a close look.

When I last wrote about electronic reading devices, I concluded that e-reading was here to stay--but so far none of the currently available e-reading options had pushed beyond travel & leisure use. Neither Kindle-type dedicated devices nor netbook apps had demonstrated their readiness for the prime time of...

In a surprise move today, President Obama fired all 5,000 Department of Education staff members, including Secretary Arne Duncan. "Education is a failed Cabinet office," he said. "We needed a clean sweep."

Spokespersons for the administration said the president was forced to act by a little-known federal law mandating the radical progressive de-funding of any office or department that fails to meet performance goals, whether or not they had sufficient funding to begin with.

"With less and less funding every year," sources observed, "it was just a matter of time" before a more draconian provision was triggered, requiring every staffer in the office to be fired, regardless of personal performance.

President Obama acknowledged the injustice of the law, observing that the law's provision permitting him to rehire only half of the mass-terminated staffers was "five times more severe" than...

A new survey conducted for the American Federation of Teachers adds confusion to the already muddled debate about the majority of faculty serving outside the tenure system. Ultimately the union is interested in a particular problem -- organizing -- for which in many states part-time status represents a legal boundary for the construction of bargaining units.

This legalistic definition of the group, and the "who's the market for our services" orientation makes perfect sense for AFT. But it's not a particularly good standpoint for analysis.

The problem is that the study focusses on part-time faculty to the exclusion of all the other major categories of non-track faculty, including full-time nontenurable, graduate students, post-docs, staff, etc.

This narrow focus skews the perception of what faculty serving nontenurably "want." We already know, for instance, that nearly 100 percent of...

Eric Lee's Labour Start clearinghouse for global labor news has just announced nominees for its first-ever award, Labor Video of the Year. Two of the five finalists are inspired by working conditions in higher ed. I think both are among the three likeliest to win.

My top choice is the clever, often hilarious series of 30-second spots produced for the three-month strike by the union representing 50% of the teaching faculty at Canada's York University, CUPE 3903. 

Eventually ended by an extraordinary legislative intervention, this legal job action was strongly supported by undergraduates and tenure-stream faculty, who joined the picket lines of contingent faculty and grad students at this leading research institution. 

Featuring extremely high production values and great writing, the videos use just a few frames to effectively communicate the hypocrisy of the a...

What's worse than David Horowitz's brand of right-wing drivel giving yellow journalism a bad name? A ghost-authored Horowitz sequel, padded with over 150 witless, tendentious summaries of courses that the compilers erroneously imagine will frighten middle America into hauling the faculty up the nearest telephone pole.

The current issue of American Book Review highlights their Top 40 Bad Books. Heading the list for me is One-Party Classroom: How Radical Professors at America's Top Colleges Indoctrinate Students and Undermine Our Democracy, by Horowitz and Jacob Laksin. Since I often can't make time to review excellent books, I don't usually waste pixels on bad ones. But one has to make an exception for the epic badness of Horowitz's failed hit job.

At least the first book in this series, The Professors, gave the "101 Most Dangerous Academics in America" something to brag about in their ...

I am the seed ground. I am a prairie that will stand
for much plowing. Terrible storms pass over me.
I forget. The best of me is sucked out and wasted.
I forget. Everything but Death comes to me and
makes me work and give up what I have. And I
forget.

It began with a handful of direct actions and refusals—bold occupations, sit-ins, a one-day strike and walkout, and a manifesto that fired the imaginations of students planetwide.

Today it is a mass movement, with marches and pickets across the country scheduled for Thursday's National Day of Action. The hope and the stories will keep coming all weekend. If you jump a bus for Sacramento, you might get a seat next to Etienne Balibar. If you try to enter the University of California at Santa Cruz campus—the epicenter of the movement—thousands of students and workers will be picketing every gate. Over a hundred major actions are...

In a draft article published to its website today, Scientific American blasts some of the junk analysis bedeviling mainstream higher-ed coverage and what passes for policy "thought" about academic labor. "The real crisis in American science education," the article concludes, "is a distorted job market's inability to provide [young scientists] careers worthy of their abilities." Bingo.

The piece turns around an apparent contradiction: half the policy analysis decries a "shortage" of U.S. scientists and engineers, and the other half claims an "oversupply" of persons with doctorates in science.

That doesn't make sense -- except when you understand that both camps are wrong.

There is no shortage of U.S.-trained scientists and engineers and there's no oversupply of persons with doctorates in science or any other field.

What's really happening is restructuring of the labor market from a...

Slow dissolve: Manhattan, 15 years ago. I walk a few blocks from my place on Third Street --  next to an anarchist squat, across from the NuYorican Poets Cafe -- to the headquarters of the Modern Language Association (MLA), then in Astor Place.

I explain the agenda of the Graduate Student Caucus (GSC) to the director of the association, Phyllis Franklin. We want MLA to educate the public about the majority contingent workforce.

Inspired by a California law that set 75 percent as a minimum standard for classes that should be taught by a full-time stable faculty, even in its community colleges, we want MLA to establish educationally sound full-time/part-time ratios in the disciplines it represents. 

We want the association to lobby for those standards with accreditation agencies and to urge the other big state governments like New York and Texas to follow California's lead.

We want MLA...

A guest post by Henry Giroux
x-posted: truthout.org

In 1977 I took my first job in higher education at Boston University. One reason I went there was because Howard Zinn was teaching there at the time. As a high-school teacher, Howard's book, Vietnam: the Logic of Withdrawal, published in 1968, had a profound effect on me. Not only was it infused with a passion and sense of commitment that I admired as a high-school teacher and tried to internalize as part of my own pedagogy, but it captured something about the passion, sense of commitment and respect for solidarity that came out of Howard's working-class background. It offered me a language, history and politics that allowed me to engage critically and articulate my opposition to the war that was raging at the time.

I grew up in Providence, Rhode Island, and rarely met or read any working-class intellectuals. After reading James...