Part-time faculty members at the University of Rhode Island voted in favor of forming a union last week. They’ll be represented in collective bargaining by the campus chapter of the American Association of University Professors, which also represents full-time faculty members and graduate employees at URI. For more information, see an AAUP press release.
Meanwhile, in Canada, classes were canceled at Acadia University on Monday as faculty members and librarians went on strike for the second time in three years, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reports.
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3 Responses to Union News in Brief
deborahsilverman - March 12, 2011 at 6:39 pm
That education “involves meeting students on the ongoing and self-expanding social terrain that they share with their teachers, that is, as part of society and not momentarily apart from it” seems to be a profound insight by Professor Brown. Understood in this way, such a meeting of students and teachers is a process that is neither an over-involvement, in that it is proprietary or intrusive, nor an abandonment. The worst kind of abandonment in education would be to make that education ( or the student being educated) irrelevant.
quidditas - March 14, 2011 at 8:47 am
“Who Controls the Inputs?”
Well, who sets the admissions targets?
It seems to me that one productive benefit of linking full time tenured instructor pay and promotion firmly to learning and placement outcomes is that it will force a conversation between upper admin and faculty about admissions targets and standards.
For example, in the contest between hitting graduate admissions targets and enrolling students with a real chance of using (I’ll even set a low bar of 50/50) their degree in journalism in some remotely related writing or publishing career, tenured faculty have tended to opt for wrangling personal benefits out of upper admin while processing student debt servicers for Citibank over accurately assessing their admissions files as befits their role as professional gatekeepers. Same for many other fields.
If we’re going to talk the corporatization of the university, as faculty keep insisting they want to do (as a means of deflecting attention from their own part in all this), then at least get real about it.
I am, therefore, all for linking instructor pay and promotion to learning and placement outcomes–and not at all in favor of blaming the admitted customers, their parents, their communities, their roommates –or even Facebook– for conditions generated by the institutions themselves.
medwards12 - April 1, 2011 at 7:11 pm
Colleges have grown accustomed to using end-of-term standardized evaluations as a basis for both improving the quality of instruction and making important faculty career decisions. This system frustrates both students and instructors, providing neither with the feedback required to make necessary changes while classes are in session. A feedback-and-refinement process serves students, faculty, and administrators better by removing obstacles to learning, providing a means to rapidly improve delivery, and cutting evaluation costs. A fully developed Web-based evaluation system serves colleges better by providing information more quickly and clearly and shifting the definition of quality instruction and improvement from “getting high scores” to “using student feedback to facilitate change.” By taking these steps, schools can begin to mine the vast potential of technology-driven evaluation to improve teaching and learning.