University Politics - universities as a public good

please sign Open Letter to NC Supreme Court re: Ginsberg vs. NCSU

2012-01-24T02:06:00.000-08:00

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

At North Carolina State University (NCSU), shortly after Dr. Terri Ginsberg made supportive political comments at a screening of a Palestinian film in 2007, she went from being the favored candidate for a tenure-track position to being denied even an interview. Her efforts at redress were summarily rejected by NCSU and two courts. A jury should be permitted to decide whether NCSU's real reason for firing Dr. Ginsberg was its hostility to her political views, but this legal right has been denied. We urge the Supreme Court of North Carolina to review Dr. Ginsberg's case and to reverse the lower courts' decisions to dismiss it. On this basis, faculty at NCSU and elsewhere may finally exercise their legal right to academic speech on the topic of Palestine/Israel and, as such, to their full human rights as scholars, teachers, and intellectuals in the academic community.

To support this request to the NC Supreme Court, we invite academic faculty and students worldwide to sign our Open Letter as an e-petition at this URL:
http://www.gopetition.com/petitions/open-letter-to-nc-supreme-court-ginsberg-vs-ncsu.html

We expect to submit the Open Letter with all signatures received by February 7, though signatures received later would still be helpful.

You are also encouraged to send your own letter to:

Supreme Court of North Carolina
Clerk's Office
P.O. Box 2170
Raleigh, NC 27602-2170 USA

Thank you for your support,

British Committee for the Universities of Palestine (BRICUP) http://www.bricup.org.uk/
U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI) http://www.usacbi.org
Center for Constitutional Rights http://ccrjustice.org
Jewish Voice for Peace-Westchester http://www.facebook.com/pages/Jewish-Voice-for-Peace-Westchester-Chapter/201574026528540?v=info
WESPAC Foundation http://wespac.org/
Committee for Open Discussion of Zionism (CODZ) http://www.codz.org

Science-Policy conference

2011-11-26T07:04:00.000-08:00

Center for Values in Medicine, Science, and Technology conference on

Science-Policy Interactions and Social Values

at the University of Texas at Dallas

April 13-14th, 2012

Keynote Speaker: Kevin Elliott, University of South Carolina

The Center for Values in Medicine, Science, and Technology seeks proposals for papers and symposia for a conference to wrap up our 2011-2012 public lecture series on "Funded and Forbidden Knowledge: Science, Politics, and Cultural Values." The conference will be interdisciplinary, engaging the areas of science and technology studies, history and philosophy of science, science and technology policy studies, ethics and political philosophy, and science policy in exploring the interactions between science and policy-making, with special attention to the role of values in those interactions.

In these areas of scholarship, several categories of discussion concerning science and policy have emerged. Some focus on the role of science in the policy process, while others look at the inverse relationship of how politics influence scientific research. Some approach the topic in a very empirically grounded and particularistic fashion, while others take a normative approach and aim for general accounts. While there have been important interdisciplinary conferences in this area, the scholarship remains somewhat disjointed and piecemeal, whereas tackling the major issues in this area requires thinking across such boundaries. This conference will emphasize that the relationship between science and politics is mutually influential rather than unidirectional; it will emphasize the importance of normative or critical approaches that are also empirically grounded in the practice of science and realities of political institutions. We seek submissions that bring to the forefront issues of values in science-policy interactions.

Suggested topics (not an exhaustive list):

* Democratization of science
* Evidence-based policy
* Policy and the value-free ideal of science
* Forms of scientific and political representation
* Theories of scientific expertise
* Models of science advising
* History of science policy
* Lessons from environmental policy-making
* Scientific expertise and political advocacy
* Commercialization of science and the public good
* The aims of science and choice of research priorities
* Science and justice in political institutions
* Science, non-scientific views, and public reason
* Expertise and elitism in democratic deliberation
* Science and democracy in comparative and international contexts
* The influence of science on ethical values, and political ideals
* Obstacles to socially or politically responsible science

We're especially interested in proposals that cross the boundaries between already-established research programs.

Submissions
You should submit your proposal to http://tinyurl.com/ScienceValues2012

We welcome submissions of both individual paper proposals and proposals for symposia and other multi-participant panel formats. For contributed papers, please submit a 250-500 word abstract. For symposia and other multi-participant panels, submit an abstract up to 250 words describing the panel and descriptions of up to 100 words describing each participant's contribution.
Submissions are due January 5, and decisions will be announced by early February.
Send any questions to centerforvaluesutdallas [at] gmail.com

Organizing Committee
Matthew J. Brown, UT Dallas - Philosophy of Science
Richard Scotch, UT Dallas - Economic, Political, and Policy Sciences
Magdalena Grohman, UT-Dallas - Psychology
Sabrina Starnaman, UT-Dallas - Literary Studies

Program Committee
Heather Douglas, University of Waterloo - Philosophy of Science, Science Policy
Kevin Elliott, University of South Carolina - Philosophy of Science, Applied Ethics
Mark B. Brown, CSU Sacremento - Political Science
Jeremy Farris, Harvard Law School - Political Philosophy

To Know is Not Enough: Activist Scholarship, Social Change & The Corporate University

2011-11-10T15:26:00.001-08:00

The Rouge Forum @ AERA 2012
To Know is Not Enough: Activist Scholarship, Social Change & The Corporate University

www.RougeForumConference.org

Free Interactive Conference Open to All

Friday April 13, 2012
University of British Columbia,
Robson Square Campus
HSBC Hall
Vancouver, BC, Canada

The theme for the 2012 annual meeting of the American Education Research Association is “Non Satis Scire: To Know Is Not Enough.” It is laudable that AERA is promoting “the use of research to improve education and serve the public good” rather than the mere accumulation of research knowledge, but The Rouge Forum is interested in exploring what it means for scholars, and educators in general, to move beyond “knowing” to the pursuit of activist agendas for social change.

What happens when teachers and other academics connect reason to power and power to resistance?
How can academic work (in universities and other learning environments) support local and global resistance to global neoliberal capitalism?
How do we respond to the obstacles and threats faced as activist scholars?

The Rouge Forum @ AERA will bring together world-renowned scholars, teachers, community organizers, and other activists to discuss these questions and others related to activist scholarship, social change, academic freedom, and work in the corporate university as part of a one-day interactive conference at the Robson Square Campus of University of British Columbia in downtown Vancouver.

What is the Rouge Forum?

The Rouge Forum is a group of educators, students, and parents seeking a democratic society. We are both research and action oriented. We want to learn about equality, democracy and social justice as we simultaneously struggle to bring into practice our present understanding of what that is. We seek to build a caring inclusive community that understands that an injury to one is an injury to all. At the same time, our caring community is going to need to deal decisively with an opposition that is sometimes ruthless. RougeForum.com

Gigi Roggero on university factories and academia

2011-08-18T13:33:00.000-07:00

New book shows how universities in Europe and North American are run like factories and how this affects academic workers

New from Temple University Press:

The Production of Living Knowledge

The Crisis of the University and the Transformation of Labor in Europe and North America

Gigi Roggero

Translated and with a Foreword by Enda Brophy

Publication Date: September 20, 2011

214 pages, 5 1/2 x 8 1/4 "

Cloth 978-1-4399-0573-9 $69.50

How universities in Europe and North American are run like factories and how this affects academic workers

Evaluating higher education institutions—particularly the rise of the "global university"—and their rapidly changing role in the global era, Gigi Roggero finds the system in crisis. In his groundbreaking book, The Production of Living Knowledge: The Crisis of the University and the Transformation of Labor in Europe and North America (Publication Date: September 20, 2011), Roggero examines the university system as a key site of conflict and transformation within "cognitive capitalism"—a regime in which knowledge has become increasingly central to the production process at large. Based on extensive fieldwork carried out through the activist method of conricerca, or "co-research," wherein researchers are also subjects, Roggero's book situates the crisis of the university and the changing composition of its labor force against the backdrop of the global economic crisis.

Combining a discussion of radical experiments in education, new student movements, and autonomist Marxian (or post-operaista) social theory, Roggero produces a distinctly transnational and methodologically innovative critique of the global university from the perspective of what he calls "living knowledge."

In light of new student struggles in the United States and across the world, this first English-language edition is particularly timely.

Gigi Roggero is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Politics, Institutions, and History at the University of Bologna. He is a member of the editorial board of WorkingUSA, and the collectives Edu-factory and Uninomade and a regular contributor to Il Manifesto. He is the author of Intelligenze fuggitive: Movimenti contro l'università-azienda, and co-author (with Guido Borio and Francesca Pozzi) of Futuro anteriore: Dai "Quaderni Rossi" ai movimenti globali: Ricchezze e limiti dell'operaismo italiano.

For a Review Copy, please contact:

Temple University Press

Phone: 215-926-2154

Fax: 215-926-2141

Email: Gary Kramer

www.temple.edu/tempress

GREEK PUBLIC UNIVERSITY IS IN DANGER! PLEASE SIGN AND FORWARD PETITION

2011-08-03T06:00:00.000-07:00

[forwarded]:

Dear Colleagues,

As detailed below, Greek public universities are in danger of being demolished by the new higher education bill the government will propose to Parliament for voting within the next couple of weeks. Please help us stop the voting of the bill by signing the petition.

If you agree with the call that follows, please sign the petition and forward it to as many colleages as possible.

Judith Butler, Slavoj Zizek and Noam Chomsky have signed it, among others.

with many thanks and best wishes

[...]

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

To the international academic community

PUBLIC Greek Universities in Danger

In the last few years, a wave of ‘reforms’ within the European Union and throughout the world has subjected Higher Education to the logic of the market. Higher Education has increasingly been transformed from a public good and a civil right to a commodity for the wealthy. The self-government of Universities and the autonomy of academic processes are also being eroded. The processes of knowledge production and acquisition, as well as the working conditions of the academic community, are now governed by the principles of the private sector, from which Universities are obliged to seek funds.
Greece is possibly the only European Union country where attempts to implement these ‘reforms’ have so far failed. Important factors in this failure are the intense opposition of Greek society as well as the Greek Constitution, according to which Higher Education is provided exclusively by public, fully self-governed and state-funded institutions.
According to the existing institutional framework for the functioning of Universities, itself the result of academic and student struggles before and after the military dictatorship (1967-1974), universities govern themselves through bodies elected by the academic community. Although this institutional framework has contributed enormously to the development of Higher Education in Greece, insufficient funding and suffocating state control, as well as certain unlawful and unprofessional practices by the academic community, have rendered Higher Education reform necessary.
The current government has now hastily attempted a radical reform of Higher Education. On the pretext of the improvement of the ‘quality of education’ and its harmonization with ‘international academic standards’, the government is promoting the principles of ‘reciprocity’ in Higher Education. At the same time, it is drastically decreasing public funding for education (up to 50% decrease) which is already amongst the lowest in the European Union. New appointments of teaching staff will follow a ratio 1:10 to the retirement of existing staff members. This will have devastating results in the academic teaching process as well as in the progress of scientific knowledge.
The government proposals seek to bypass the constitutional obligations of the state towards public Universities and abolish their academic character.

The self-government of Universities will be circumvented, with the current elected governing bodies replaced by appointed ‘Councils’ who will not be accountable to the academic community.
The future of Universities located on the periphery, as well as of University departments dedicated to ‘non-commercial’ scientific fields, looks gloomy.
Academic staff will no longer be regarded as public functionaries. The existing national payscale is to be abolished and replaced by individualized, ‘productivity’ related payscales, while insecure employment is to become the norm for lower rank employees.
Higher Education will be transformed into ‘training’ and, along with research, gradually submitted to market forces.

The government proposals have been rejected by the Greek academic community. The Council of Vice-Chancellors and the Senates of almost all Universities have publicly called the government to withdraw the proposals and have suggested alternative proposals which can more effectively deal with the problems of Greek Universities. Despite this, the government proceeds with promoting its proposals, in confrontation with the entire academic community.
We appeal to our colleagues from the international academic community, who have experienced the consequences of similar reforms, to support us in our struggle to defend education as a public good. We fight, together with our British, French, Dutch, Italian, Spanish and other colleagues, for the respect of the academic tradition of the European universitas in current conditions.

We ask you to send electronically the appeal below, signed with your name and indicating your academic status and institutional affiliation, to the Initiative of Greek Academics (europeanuniversitas1@gmail.com) or sign online at http://www.petitiononline.com/mod_perl/signed.cgi?GRUNIV

The support of the international academic community will prove invaluable for the upcoming developments not only in Greek Universities but in respect to public European Higher Education as a whole.

Initiative of Greek academics

No confidence in the policies of the UK Minister for Universities and Science, David Willetts

2011-06-07T02:21:00.000-07:00

The following is from the ‘Campaign for the Public University’:

1) Both the Oxford and Cambridge campaigns for higher education have been in the news over the last week for their proposals for a vote of no confidence in the policies of the Minister for Higher Education, David Willetts. Oxford has also asked for national support for this campaign. You can join the campaign by following the link below and going to the 'Join Us' page. Their vote will take place on Tuesday 7th June and it would be helpful to get as many people signing up in support before then as possible.

http://www.noconfidence.org.uk/

2) Online petitions have also started at the Universities of Warwick and Goldsmiths. If there are any other petitions happening at other institutions, please get in touch with the Oxford campaign.

3) News emerged today of a new private institution established by the philosopher A. C. Grayling together with, what seem to be, a number of venture capitalists. This is the New College of the Humanities which will offer a predominantly humanities curriculum and will start admitting students in 2012-13. It is planning to charge £18,000 per year.

4) For a number of critical weblogs on this news, see the following articles:

http://publicuniversity.org.uk/2011/06/05/widening-access-for-the-rich-part-2-%e2%80%a6/

http://publicuniversity.org.uk/2011/06/05/the-new-school-for-privatised-inquiry/

http://infinitethought.cinestatic.com/

Ginsberg vs. NCSU. Support for Ginsberg sorely needed

2011-06-07T00:48:00.000-07:00

We have mentioned this case before (here). This time, we decided to reproduce the full letter from Terri Ginsberg and her Legal Team, as they urgently need support.

UP webmaster.

Dear Friends and Colleagues:

As you know, I have been involved over the past three years in waging a lawsuit against North Carolina State University (NCSU). The lawsuit contests the University's decision to dismiss me from my teaching position after it suppressed my speech and retaliated against me for my teaching and scholarship critical of Zionism and Israeli policy and supportive of the Palestinian liberation struggle. Since my dismissal from NCSU, I have sought redress from the University, first by exhausting all on-campus and local remedies, then by filing a constitutional lawsuit against NCSU and the larger University of North Carolina system of which it is a part.

I am writing you today, with great appreciation for your prior support, to ask you once again to help me continue my struggle. My case has been long and arduous. As of this writing, its combined Record runs more than 500 pages. As outlined on my case blog (http://ginsbergvsncsu.wordpress.com), the lawsuit entered litigation in December 2009. In May 2010, the parties underwent a mediation hearing mandated by the State of North Carolina; the University offered me a ridiculously small sum and no reinstatement, whereupon no settlement was reached. A week of depositions followed. When the discovery period ended, the case underwent a Summary Judgment hearing on October 25, 2010, for which the case was dismissed summarily, perfunctorily, without reason; the judge, Shannon Joseph, simply issued a boilerplate "decision" that basically "just says no."

In fact, NCSU admitted during deposition hearings that it suppressed my speech critical of Zionism and supportive of the Palestinian liberation struggle while I was under its employ as a visiting professor, and that it chose not to interview or hire me for a tenure-track position because of my scholarship focusing on Palestine/Israel, the Middle East, and the „Jewish.‰ Amazingly, the University claims that it has the right to suppress, refuse and reject on the basis of these considerations! Notwithstanding this admission and the fact that my attorneys presented a mountain of circumstantial evidence and were able to rebut NCSU's stated reasons for its actions against me, the judge ignored it all without explanation. By thus dismissing the case, Judge Joseph essentially decided that academic speech critical of Zionism and supportive of Palestinian, Arab and Muslim perspectives is not protected by the free speech provision (Article I, section 14) of the North Carolina Constitution.

In a few short weeks, my legal team, headed by Rima Najjar Kapitan (http://www.kapitanlaw.net/), will file an Appellate Brief with the North Carolina Court of Appeals, and an Appeal Hearing will be held subsequently, most likely in late August or early September. This appeal process is extremely important, for here is our opportunity to expose and contest Judge Joseph's irrational refusal to allow my case to be properly heard by a jury of my peers. We aim to ensure that I be given the fair hearing I deserve and that is my rightful due.

However, I cannot move forward without your continued support. While my legal team has been more than generous with their time, and firm in their commitment, litigation fees are unfortunately non-negotiable. Furthermore, since leaving NCSU, I have been un(der)employed and continue to seek gainful employment in the field of higher education. Under the circumstances, and recognizing the many other pressing issues which face our communities and require urgent support at this time, I must now ask once again for your help as we approach this crucial moment of our struggle.

If you are able to give, please kindly make your check payable to Kapitan Law Office, with "Ginsberg vs. NCSU" written on the comment line. The funds will be held in a client trust account until they are needed for litigation costs. All unused funds will be donated to a worthy Palestinian organization. Checks should be mailed to:

Rima Najjar Kapitan, Esq.

Kapitan Law Office, Ltd.

300 South Wacker Drive

Suite 1700A

Chicago, IL 60606 USA

Thank you in advance for your efforts, generosity, and continued support.

In appreciation and solidarity,

Terri Ginsberg and her Legal Team

Necessity, Choice and the Future of Universities

2011-03-29T01:23:00.000-07:00

by Tim May*

Conflicting strategies that internalise ambiguities are being perpetuated in universities. Academics receive communications from central management concerning the importance of engagement and knowledge transfer activities, whilst also being urged to target a narrow list of journals in ever more rapid timeframes in order to meet the next round of evaluation exercises.

Communications become disjointed. Tensions dominate in the translation of strategic direction through faculty and institutional structures to individual academics; all ably assisted by universities collecting enormous amounts of information that has no bearing upon the capacity for creating intelligence.

Wholehearted embrace of the current crisis as an opportunity is a familiar route. Along with a new modus operandi come disparaging backward glances at those who do not understand the apparent self-evidence of the new realities, as if history had no bearing upon the present. Within the context of the university as a whole, the effect is to further uncertainty concerning its social, economic and cultural purpose.

The potential to identify the distinctiveness of the university as an institution then diminishes and along with that goes its long-term viability. Paradoxically, in these seats of learning, there is little active engagement that challenges pre-conceptions and limited hierarchies of knowledge are perpetuated. Given the important role of universities in society as a challenge to short-termism, learning is the casualty.

The contemporary climate surrounding universities, defined by the idea of the free market and its penetration into knowledge-based institutions, has led to a significant shift in values. These have been exemplified in corporate re-branding, institutional restructuring and strategic orientation, as well as attribution of high value to particular forms of knowledge.

These shifts have re-cast what has been traditionally recognized as the university. However, just as there is no single history of the university, there is no single present. A variety of strategic responses exist that refract and mediate external values and lead to particular effects for the work that is performed within them.

University managers construct views of the position of their institutions and then mobilize differential resources to secure their reproduction. That, in turn, leads to an embrace of particular conceptions of what is required for ‘moving forward’. The apparent choice that comes with occupying such positions then evaporates in the face of necessity.

In wholesale translation of current conditions, we see higher education institutions subject to centralisation. The result is to sever, even more, the connection between purpose and process through a growing pre-occupation with organisational control for its own sake.

These external necessities are increasingly judged in terms of ‘business performance’ through extended regulatory systems, performance indicators and so forth, but not by reference to a public service ethic or set of well articulated and defensible professional values. Overall, institutions then move away from accountability based on common understandings of purpose, to narrow indicators of process-based performance.

The consequence is a separation between the production and dissemination of knowledge in its context through a whole series of attempts to determine the ‘how’ of practice through modes of surveillance that include workload balancing models. The overall result is that the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of knowledge is subsumed within the narrow confines of the measurability of ‘what’: external income generation, citation indexes, staff-student ratios; league tables and types of publication.

With full-scale translation we see universities increasingly modelling themselves in the images of businesses and operating as significant economic actors in their own right. Estates are then managed with profit and optimisation in mind, rather than the provision of places to furnish and support the institution’s cognitive requirements. New buildings are celebrated through allusion to ‘iconic’ status, but the reasons for their existence and the distinctive nature of the practices that will take place within them becomes of secondary consideration.

The external generation of finance is a tool to supplement reduction in the balance sheet, replacing any notion of civic responsibility, whilst economic output is translated into intellectual property and commodified through new organisational units that are designed to undertake activities called ‘knowledge transfer’ and ‘engagement’.

Practices are created which represent only highly selected facets of what an institution actually does on a daily basis. In terms of divisions of labour from the core functions of teaching, research and third mission activities, the efforts of making connections become an afterthought displaced within the organisation as a whole.

An analysis of different forms of values in these processes would require a degree of institutional reflexivity that is rare. Why? Because that would require a confidence among university managers in their capacity to engage in debate that is actually aimed at meaningful change based on recognition of constituent groups. Managerial prerogatives would then be open to contestation. Instead, we typically see ‘external’ individuals, usually consultants, brought in to advise on appropriate models for success, even though the knowledge they produce is actually based on learning from individuals within the organisation itself.

In the absence of a developed understanding - requiring recognition that the direct relation between position and control is a fantasy - the link between positioning and representation of the institution lies in a relationship between recognition, reward and promotion criteria as judged by those who do not have direct acquaintance with practice and its consequences.

Strategic managers – everyone is now ‘strategic’ - seek to represent universities in terms of economic relevance, but their internal dictates miss their mark without a clear understanding of occupational cultures, why they exists and how they operate. Yet to embark upon a sustained examination of this type means recognising that the object of control might just be the subject of institutional distinction.

Demands for flexibility then sit alongside those of standardization. Engagement between disciplines and between disciplines and institutions and the outside world is directly informed by structural and bureaucratic lines of accountability and management. Vertical (managerial control) and horizontal deadlock (professional cultures) emerge that limits the capacity for innovations to emerge out or across institutions, whilst preserving their sense of purpose and confidence in an otherwise fluid world.

Whilst there is no doubt that universities are facing profound changes, alternatives do exist to the narrowness of current thinking. The weight of effort is towards silencing these as if they were ‘idealistic’. The fear and anxiety that saturates these institutions is not well served by this myopia. An enlarged body of civic interests need to be involved in their futures and these are voices which have historically been excluded. Without this in place, we will return to a narrow elitism based on nothing more than a retreat to the past.

*) Tim May is Professor and Director at Centre for Sustainable Urban and Regional Futures (SURF), University of Salford, Manchester.

Rouge Forum 2011 (Chicago): Call for Proposals

2011-02-01T14:57:00.000-08:00

The Rouge Forum 2011: Call for Papers

Education and the State: A Critical Antidote to the Commercialized, Racist, and Militaristic Social Order

The Rouge Forum 2011 will be held at Lewis University. The University’s main campus is located in Romeoville, IL, which is 30 minutes southwest of Chicago, IL. The conference will be held May 19-22.

Proposals for papers, panels, performances, workshops, and other multimedia presentations should include title(s) and names and contact information for presenter(s). The deadline for sending proposals is March 22. The Steering Committee will email acceptance or rejection notices by April 1. The proposal formats available to the presenters are as follows:

Bringing together academic presentations and performances (from some of the most prominent voices for democratic, critical, and/or revolutionary pedagogy), panel discussions, community-building, and cultural events, this action-oriented conference will center on questions such as:

Transforming the notion of “saving public education” to one of creating education in the public interest, what does teaching and learning for a democratic society look like?

How do we educate the public and our youth to understand the implications of “saving public education” through corporate and militaristic practices, such as standardized examinations, zero-tolerance policies, charter schools, and corporate donations?

How will educational initiatives supported by the Obama Administration and many other politicians impact teachers, students, and communities across the US?

What does education for liberation look like compared to the more socially reproductive/dominating education we see in many of our nation’s schools?

What debts will future generations, including the students we may teach, carry because our financial, governmental, and military endeavors have not been concerned with public goods?

SUBMISSIONS
Proposal Formats

Individual Proposal: (45 minutes)
The Rouge Forum welcomes individual paper proposals, with the understanding that those accepted will be grouped together around common or overlapping themes, Presenters will have approximately 45 minutes to present or summarize their individual papers. Individual paper submissions will be considered for panels with the same topic/theme. If you would prefer to present your paper/research individually you should consider the alternative format proposal. A 300-500 word abstract of the paper will be peer reviewed for acceptance to the conference.

Symposium Proposal: (90 minutes)
Presenters are also welcomed to submit proposals for a symposium. A symposium is typically composed of a chair and discussant and three to five participants who present or summarize their papers. Each symposium is organized around a common theme. Each participant will have between 15 and 45 minutes to present their papers, depending upon the number of participants involved in the symposium. A 300-500 word abstract of the symposium will be peer reviewed for acceptance to the conference.

Panel Proposal: (90 minutes)
A panel discussion is another venue available presenters. A panel discussion is typically composed of three to six participants who discuss their scholarly work within the context of a dialogue or conversation on a topic or theme related to the conference theme. Typically, each panelist is given 10-15 minutes to discuss the topic, present theoretical ideas, and/or point to relevant research. A chair should be identified who introduces the panel and frames the issues and questions being addressed. In addition to the chair, we encourage (but do not require) organizers of panels to include a discussant who responds to the comments of the panelists. Individual proposal submissions will be combined into panels with the same theme/topic. A 300-500 word abstract of the panel discussion will be peer reviewed for acceptance to the conference.

Alternative Format and Special Interest Groups (90 minutes)
Alternative proposals that do not fit into the above categories, such as workshops, performances, video and multimedia presentations, and round-table dialogues, are encouraged. We also welcome proposals for the organization of special interest groups. A 150-250 word abstract of the panel discussion will be peer reviewed for acceptance to the conference.

Email proposals to conference coordinator Brad Porfilio porfilio16@aol.com, by March 22, 2011.

Additional information on Rouge Forum 2011 is available at rougeforumconference.org

Ginsberg vs. NCSU on academic freedom

2010-10-25T06:26:00.000-07:00

"Film studies professor Terri Ginsberg, similarly fired in 2008 by North Carolina State University (NCSU) in what she says was a punishment for her outspoken criticism of "Zionism, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and US Middle East policy," believes that institutionalized censorship on the Palestine-Israel issue in the academic realm is eerily reminiscent of the McCarthy era of the 1950s and '60s. "So many of the dynamics and methods of discrimination perpetrated against today's scholarly critics of Israel and US Middle East policy derive from and continue, in updated fashion, practices initiated and implemented during that shameful period," she says." (quote from this article: "Uphill battle for academic freedom in US universities", 11 January 2010])

See also "Terri Ginsberg, Former North Carolina State Adjunct Professor, Files Complaint" (Tuesday, October 20th, 2009), and for recent updates and more information about the ongoing legal case, Ginsberg vs. NCSU:

ginsbergvsncsu.wordpress.com

Workplace No 17 (2010): Working In, and Against, the Neo-Liberal State: Global Perspectives on K-12 Teacher Unions

2010-09-20T19:26:00.000-07:00

Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor No 17 (2010):
Working In, and Against, the Neo-Liberal State: Global Perspectives on K-12 Teacher Unions

Table of Contents
http://m1.cust.educ.ubc.ca/journal/index.php/workplace/issue/view/8

Articles
--------
Working In, and Against, the Neo-Liberal State: Global Perspectives on K-12 Teacher Unions: Special Issue Introduction
Howard Stevenson

Terminating the Teaching Profession: Neoliberal Reform, Resistance and the Assault on Teachers in Chile
Jill Pinkney Pastrana

Social Justice Teacher Unionism in a Canadian Context: Linking Local and Global efforts
Cindy Rottmann

Australian Education Unionism in the Age of Neoliberalism: Education as a Public Good, Not a Private Benefit
Jeff Garsed, John Williamson

“What’s Best for Kids” vs. Teacher Unions: How Teach For America Blames Teacher Unions for the Problems of Urban Schools
Heidi Katherine Pitzer

Gramsci, Embryonic Organic Intellectuals, and Scottish Teacher Learning Representatives: Alternatives to Neoliberal Approaches to Professional Development in the K-12 Sector
Alex Alexandrou

Pedagogy of Liminality? The Case of Turkish Teachers’ Union Egitim-Sen
Duygun Gokturk

Book Reviews
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Review of Industrial Relations in Education: Transforming the School Workforce
Merryn Hutchings

A Portrait of Authenticity: A Review of Carl Mirra’s (2010) The AdmirableRadical: Staughton Lynd and Cold War Dissent, 1945-1970. Kent, OH: Kent University Press
Adam Renner

Review of Union Learning Representatives: Challenges and Opportunities
Becky Wright

Review of How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation
Marisa Huerta

Review of Academic Repression: Reflections from the Academic-Industrial Complex
Leah Schweitzer

The Sociopathology of Everyday Business: A Review of The University Against Itself: The NYU Strike and the Future of the Academic Workplace
Jim Rovira

Review of The Rich World and the Impoverishment of Education: Diminishing Democracy, Equity and Workers’ Rights
Paul Orlowski

Technology and (Human) Rights: A Review of Human Rights in the Global Information Society
Stephen Petrina

Review of The Developing World and State Education: Neoliberal Depredation and Egalitarian Alternatives
Steven L. Strauss

Miscellany
--------
Connecting Teacher Unions and Teacher Union Research
AERA Teachers' Work/Teacher Unions SIG

Critical Education launches new series: A Return to Educational Apartheid? Critical Examinations of Race, Schools, and Segregation

2010-09-20T19:23:00.000-07:00

Critical Education has just published its latest issue at http://m1.cust.educ.ubc.ca/journal/index.php/criticaled. We invite you to review the Table of Contents here and then visit our web site to review articles and items of interest.

This issue launches the Critical Education article series "A Return to Educational Apartheid? Critical Examinations of Race, Schools, and Segregation", edited by Adam Renner and Doug Selwyn.

Thanks for the continuing interest in our work,

Sandra Mathison, Co-Editor
E. Wayne Ross, Co-Editor
Critical Education

Critical Education
Vol 1, No 7 (2010)
Table of Contents
http://m1.cust.educ.ubc.ca/journal/index.php/criticaled/issue/view/18

Articles
--------
A Return to Educational Apartheid?
Adam Renner, Doug Selwyn

Abstract: Series co-editors Renner and Selwyn introduce a special series of articles focusing on the articulation of race, schools, and segregation. Each of the articles in this series will analyze the extent to which schooling may or may not be returning to a state of educational apartheid.

A Separate Education: The Segregation of American Students and Teachers
Erica Frankenberg, Genevieve Siegel-Hawley

Abstract: Despite the obvious connection between the two, student and teacher segregation are rarely examined together. To help fill that gap, this essay explores what is known about the extent of interracial exposure for students and teachers in U.S. public schools. This article reviews evidence underscoring the paramount importance of school integration. A description of the legal landscape governing desegregation follows, as well as a discussion of why current patterns of racial isolation persist. The essay next describes the demographics and segregation of today's students and teachers. In particular, the essay focuses on the growing segregation of students of color, the lingering isolation of white students, and the ways in which the overwhelmingly white teaching force reinforces patterns of student segregation. We close with a discussion of the implications of these trends.

A video about the University Reform in Finland (and elsewhere)

2010-07-05T11:57:00.000-07:00

hello everybody! Here's a message from the edu factory list - it's at once sad and yet encouraging to see the determination to continue the struggle for universities for the common good. A story from Finland. Best wishes, Claus
- - -

Greetings all,

A little late to the party, but wish to acknowledge all about a video we made to a good, ambitious seminar held in United States in April, "Beneath the University". The video, and a presentation given by Juuso Tervo, describe the finnish university reform process, what we can learn from it and possible paths forward. E-mail me ( antti . jauhiainen AT gmail . com ) with any comments or ideas for co-operation and follow-up, would be glad to hear comments and ideas for the future.

The video is available here: http://vimeo.com/10778562

**
Speech for the Beneath the University -seminar in Minneapolis, April 9th 2010.

University reform in Finland, it's background, progress and current situation. We discuss what can be collectively done to overturn the disastrous effects that market driven, managerial reforms continuously impose on us and our communities. We end by collecting the themes we've discussed, and summarize some central issues we've learned through our struggle in Finland.

Full text available here: bit.ly/university_reform_in_finland

Our presentation was done to compliment a talk given by Juuso Tervo from Aalto University (former University of Art and Design).

Text from his talk available here: bit.ly/tervo_presentation_text

And his presentation slides: bit.ly/tervo_presentation_slides
**

In solidarity,
Antti Jauhiainen
Finland

Academic freedom lost - and found?

2010-05-15T12:28:00.000-07:00

There was a short article on academic freedom in the Times Higher Education on Thursday the 6th of May 2010. The article would have perpetuated some misconceptions on academic freedom (e.g., that it cannot be defined, or that it should not "give scholars the right to criticise the running of their own institutions"), had it not been for the detailed intervention of Terence Karran who made an extensive commentary just below the article, a comment I think is a must reading. Karran states that

"There are international differences in the interpretation of the concept, but most scholars of academic freedom agree it has four elements: two are substantive, and two are supportive. The first substantive element is research freedom (the right to choose the subject for research and the methodology used, and to publish and disseminate research findings). The second substantive element is the teaching freedom (including the right to determine the curriculum, the mode of teaching, the method of assessment, etc). The supportive elements are academic tenure and the right to participate in academic governance."

See Karran's commentary on the Times Higher Education site here (or a pdf copy here). In many countries, such as Denmark, there is an urgent need to promote a higher awareness of all the dimensions of academic freedom.

The other really useful knowledge: revalorising critique in the university

2010-03-21T06:10:00.000-07:00

The other really useful knowledge: revalorising critique in the university
by Sarah Amsler

After UK universities were subsumed into the newly formed Department of Business, Industry and Skills in June of last year, it seemed that few changes in academic life could be any further surprising. Until the Times Higher Education featured a hot-pink guide on ‘20 steps to increase your ranking – ways to rise in the league tables without breaking the bank’. Neither the wisdom of the rankings nor the belt-tightening rhetoric was out of the ordinary: performance indicators, league tables and the spectre of radical budget cuts have become the grit of academic life. The banks, of course, have already been broken. But the framing of this consequential and contested political agenda as a playful popularity contest again pushed the boundaries of belief.

The guidance seemed simple, almost commonsense: hire good researchers, give them autonomy and power, and keep them happy. They bring prestige, money and networks. And if they can be transformed into managers, they can shape institutional culture and extract high levels of productivity from others.

But there was a more troubling message is in this guidance, in Tip No. 6: ‘no pain, no gain’. You must cut losses and losers to win. While elite researchers, institutional managers and ambitious young scholars are poised to accept this agenda as common sense, it is argued, ‘it is unlikely that everyone else will’. The reason? ‘We all tend to prefer the status quo.’ Within this logic, alternative positions are impossible. You can play hard and win or lose fairly, or you can win at all costs and take out whoever is standing in the way. But you cannot stop to question the rules of the game and still be included, or seriously suggest that we might all play another.

The problem is that this is not an idiosyncratic narrative. It is part of the wider and increasingly hegemonic discourse that diminishes democratic processes, marginalises opposition to the transformation of universities into fully integrated economic and political enterprises, and legitimises the withdrawal of public funds from higher education. It goes to the top. After releasing a controversial blueprint for education reforms in late 2009 and threatening what now appear confirmed as radical incisions into many university budgets, Peter Mandelson has caricatured critics as ‘people who don’t like change’, who ‘don’t want reform’ and who embody a ‘desire to maintain the status quo’.

You can be either in or out now; either for a prefigured, market-oriented vision of ‘progress’, or charged with advocating anti-values of stagnation and mediocrity. To criticise present trends in higher education policy – the institutionalisation of political-economic ‘impact agendas’ for research, the rapprochement of industry and academe, the hypocrisy of ‘raising student expectations’ while simultaneous slashing their financial support, not to mention other problems of campus surveillance and academic freedom – means to take up a position of either mediocrity or ridicule that exists beyond legitimate recognition.

Speaking when you anticipate criticism is possible, if hard. But speaking into a conversation where your positions are already discredited is absurd. This is why the pre-empting of critique and diminishing of public debate are such effective forms of disciplinary power within UK universities today. Here, academics are increasingly beholden to external validation, as skills of self-valorization give way to endless rankings by public opinion surveys and performance indicators. The prohibitions on critique are also strategically disorienting, for many academics have been tooled to expect – however so naively – that it can be recognised as a value within the university itself.

But this power throws sticks and stones as well as names. It is political; anchored outside the discursive realm in the new performative regimes of legitimacy and economic regimes of value now being embedded across the sector. Fixed prerequisites of professional participation are being defined, imposed and monitored for compliance (or in the softer language of power, for performances of ‘cooperation’ and ‘commitment’). But the particular politics of these terms remain unsaid, and can thus be performed as democratic and in the interests of the imagined common good. For what self-respecting scholar could possibly oppose change, progress, flexibility or public and social engagement? The problem is framed as the solution to the ‘other’ problems created by an (imagined) autonomous and democratic educational system. It might be called Orwellian, if the concept was much less oldthink.

From any alternatively reasonable perspective, the question is not about whether one supports a generic process of social ‘change’, but rather how the articulation of alternatives becomes framed as a generalised objection to progress itself, and as a danger to the general will. The problem is the suppression of political spaces in which this framing might itself be contested. Despite the proliferation of localised conversations and committees, genuinely public spaces for dialogue, critique and opposition are negated by pre-emptive threats of misrecognition and marginalisation. And on a more material level, critique is quietened by internalised fears that in the competitive ‘race’ for rankings and institutional survival, with jobs and reputations on the line, now is ‘not the time’ for asking such questions.

Fortunately, this logic exposes its own ironic contradictions. By legitimising technologies of control that foreclose debate, plurality and democratic process from the bottom up, the fear of the alternatives is revealed, and the stakes of the game made clear. By working so visibly to justify the restoration of elite education and research, to integrate these fully into business and industrial productivity, and to minimise or eliminate opposition to the agenda, the programme is exposed as the political struggle it is rather than the meritocratic movement it claims to be. It is known that the ‘reforms’ now being imposed on universities are divisive, disreputable and unjust. For if the proposals are so obviously progressive, why would they be impeded by public debate? And if this re-visioning of the university is so widely compelling, why is there so urgent a need to reshape academics’ perceptions and behaviour? What and whose is this pain that must be suffered in order for whom to gain what? And although it is assumed to be self-evident, it must be asked – why?

This is a time for questioning and for critique. However, provided that people can muster the will to speak into the absurdity of a discourse of foreclosure, concern and resistance must develop into acts of reclamation. We need to reclaim the commons within the university, to establish it where it has never been, to clarify in which intellectual and professional values we should defend and which should be transformed, to articulate and build alternative relationships between universities and other social institutions, and subject all of this to ongoing public and professional scrutiny. These things must be asserted collectively, despite whatever sort of name-calling and marginalisation might ensue. It is probably not a task well-suited to anyone whose self-respect, professional identity or intellectual relevance imbricate with the ratings game, and it is not the sort of programme that can be summarised, as recommended in ‘Raise your game’, in a ‘simple list of key priorities’. But that’s okay. It could be really useful knowledge.

Links

BIS (2009) ‘New Department for Business, Innovation & Skills to lead fight against recession and build now for future prosperity’, online at: http://www.bis.gov.uk/bis-announcement. The department was created by combining the departments of Universities, Innovation and Skills, and Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform.

Goodall, A. (2009) ‘Raise your game’, Times Higher Education, 18-24 February, pp. 32-37 and online at: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=410392.

Thirft, N. (2010) ‘It’s now or never’, Times Higher Education, 4 March, p. 41.

BIS, Higher Ambitions: The Future of Universities in a Knowledge Economy, online at: http://www.bis.gov.uk/policies/higher-ambitions.

Morgan, J. (2009) ‘Defenders of the academy? More like the status quo, says Lord Mandelson’, Times Higher Education, 18-24 February, p. 8 and online at: http://www.bis.gov.uk/policies/higher-ambitions.

Dr Sarah Amsler
Lecturer in Sociology
Aston University
s . s . amsler [at] aston . ac . uk

Sign the petition Trust Researchers

2010-03-08T03:44:00.000-08:00

Dear friends and colleagues,
many of us feel that we spend too much time on proposal writing, project management, evaluation, and reporting.
As we have more important things to do, I have decided to sign the following declaration, which made a serious impression on me.

"The funding of European research should be based on trust and responsible partnering. Today researchers in Europe face a lot of red tape and cumbersome financial regulations. We are not against rules.
But we need to simplify.
Those who have signed this declaration ask the European Council of Ministers and the Parliament to simplify the administrative procedures and the financial provisions of European research funding."

If you would like to support this declaration as well, you can sign it at
http://www.trust-researchers.eu/ , which just takes 2 minutes of your valuable time. I hope this can move things ahead towards a science funding system that supports more science and less administration.

Thank you for considering this and best wishes,
...

Network of Struggles and Resistance

2010-03-02T15:12:00.000-08:00

from the edu-factory list:
To Build Up a Transnational edu-factory Network of Struggles and Resistance
Since its beginning, edu-factory has tried to be a place of political discussion and communication, a site of the free circulation of knowledge and networking at the global level. In the “double crisis” (i.e., the global economic crisis and the crisis of the university in ruins), the edu-factory list and web site have been enriched by communiqués from different collectives, news of university occupations and demonstrations, as well as proposals for political organization. In fact, on March 4th there will be a day of mobilization in universities across the United States (www.defendeducation.org); on the 11th and 12th of March there will be a European mobilization against the Bologna Process (bolognaburns.org) in Vienna; and, in general, many struggles are challenging the corporatization of the university all over the world.

Please find attached a flyer to read, improve, share, print, and diffuse. It is a text that is an open proposal: the construction of a transnational network of struggles. Please comment and add, in order to build up a common process of transnational discussion and organization. And please use and distribute the flyer, the 4th of March in US, the week after in Vienna, and everywhere there are struggles and conflicts.
edu-factory is not a logo: edu-factory is a common name for the resistance within and against the corporate global university.
_______________________________________________
edufactory mailing list
edufactory@listcultures.org
http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/edufactory_listcultures.org

Elements of British Press cause pressure upon academic freedom

2010-03-02T00:50:00.000-08:00

A strange story indeed. At 31 December 2009 you could read this in a Times Higher Education report by Professor Malcolm Grant:
"Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was arrested on Christmas Day for the attempted bombing of an aircraft on a flight to Detroit from Amsterdam. Had he succeeded in his mission, it would have been an act of terrorism causing mass murder on an appalling scale."
"What induced this behaviour remains a mystery. He has not emerged from a background of deprivation and poverty. He came from one of Nigeria’s wealthiest families. He was privately educated, and to a high level. He gained admission to University College London, where he studied mechanical engineering with business finance between 2005 and 2008, and was president of the UCL student Islamic Society in 2006-07."
"Elements of the British press have taken a different line. Mr Abdulmutallab studied at UCL, therefore he must have been “radicalised” at UCL; after all, according to The Daily Telegraph, “[e]ven though Abdulmutallab is not even a British citizen, he was still allowed to be elected president of the Islamic Society at [UCL]”. And more: “It is easy to imagine that the authorities at UCL took quiet pride in the fact that they had a radical Nigerian Muslim running their Islamic Society. You can’t get more politically correct than that. They would therefore have had little interest in monitoring whether he was using a British university campus as a recruiting ground for al-Qaida terrorists such as himself.”"
"This is quite spectacular insinuation. And without so much as a shred of evidence in substantiation. The Telegraph blog that follows the publication of this piece displays quite disturbing Islamophobia, anti-immigration rants and even postings calling for the bombing of UCL itself." (Link to Grant's whole article).

See the media release "UUK to establish working group following arrest of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab" of 06/01/2010 here.
And see the "Update on Universities UK academic freedom working group" of 26/02/2010 here.

Establishing academic standards

2010-03-01T06:42:00.000-08:00

A report from University World News by Gavin Moodie:
The privatisation of higher education in many countries has increased the financial incentive for institutions to compromise standards to maintain their viability. It has also led to the increased influence of institutions and their managers over lecturers and their academic decisions which were previously more strongly influenced by disciplinary norms and the expectations of the ‘invisible college’.
Full report on the University World News site

The erosion of academic freedom

2010-02-18T12:35:00.000-08:00

Have you seen this cover feature about academic freedom from Times Higher Education:

Leader: Rise up, freedom fighters
11 February 2010
By Ann Mroz
The cornerstone of the academy is the liberty to pursue ideas and knowledge without constraint. It needs vigilant defending (Read the story here)

"It's a rocky road ahead, and many predict that 2010 will be a "crunch year" for academic freedom. Lose it, and you have not just lost a freedom, you have lost the university."

A clear and present danger
11 February 2010
Many scholars feel that their freedom to question is in danger of being eroded or even lost. Zoe Corbyn examines the threat in the UK, while Christoph Bode and David Gunkel consider the state of affairs in Europe and America. (Read more here)

"Karran ... makes the point that two bulwarks of academic freedom are largely absent from the UK. Tenure (which basically ensured that an academic could not be sacked) was abolished in 1988, and the right of academics to engage in the governance of their institutions is all but non-existent."

How America's Universities Became Hedge Funds

2010-02-07T01:32:00.000-08:00

Have you seen this article by Bob Samuels from Huffington Post, January 28, 2010?
Quote:
"In August 2009, just one month after the state of California cut over a billion dollars from its higher education budget, the University of California (UC) turned around and lent the state $200 million. When journalists asked the UC president, Mark Yudof, how the university could lend millions of dollars to the state, while the school was raising student fees (tuition), furloughing employees, canceling classes, and laying off teachers, Yudof responded that when the university lends money to the state, it turns a profit, but when it spends money on salaries for teachers, the money is lost.

Welcome to the university as hedge fund world. In this strange new world, institutions of higher learning care more about interest rates than educational quality. In fact, Harvard cared so much about reducing the cost of borrowing money that it made several expensive credit default swaps, which resulted in a loss of hundreds of millions of dollars and the halting of an ambitious expansion plan. Not only did Harvard gamble on interest rates to support future construction plans, but it moved much of its endowment into high risk investments, and the result is that the world's wealthiest education institution is now claiming poverty."

Read more here...

Critical Education inaugural issue

2010-01-19T17:37:00.001-08:00

The Editorial Team of Critical Education is pleased to launch the inaugural issue of the journal.

Click on the current issue link at the top of the home page or the abstract and article links at the bottom of the page) to read "The Idiocy of Policy: The Anti-Democratic Curriculum of High-stakes Testing" by Wayne Au.

Au is assistant professor of education at Cal State University, Fullerton and author of Unequal By Design: High-Stakes Testing and the Standardization of Inequality (Routledge, 2009).

To recieve notification of new content in Critical Education, sign up as a journal user (reader, reviewer, or author).

Look for the initial installments of the special section edited by Abraham DeLeon titled "The Lure of the Animal: Addressing Nonhuman Animals in Educational Theory and Research" in the coming weeks.

criticaleducation.org

In Defense of Public Education And Against Privatization

2010-01-13T01:26:00.000-08:00

Call for International Day Of Action on March 4, 2010, In Defense of Public Education And Against Privatization

To all student, worker, and teacher organizations and activists worldwide:

A California statewide conference of over 800 education faculty, workers, trade unionists, students and community people on October 24, 2009 at the University of California Berkeley issued a call for a Strike and Day of Action on March 4, 2010 in defense of public education and against cuts, fee hikes, and layoffs.

A key component of this strike and struggle is the fight against the catastrophic privatization of public education system in California. But we know that this attack on education and public workers is a worldwide offensive. Thus there is a need for an international struggle to defend public education and social services and against funding for militarization and war.

We therefore ask organizations of workers, students, and teachers throughout the world to send solidarity statements and organize mobilizations on March 4 in defense of public education. Through international solidarity, we will win!

- The California Coordinating Committee
march4strikeanddayofaction@gmail.com
www.defendcapubliceducation.wordpress.com

Rouge Forum News, Issue 16—Call for papers

2010-01-10T21:49:00.000-08:00

Rouge Forum News, Issue 16—Call for papers—Deadline: April 1

The Rouge Forum News is an outlet for working papers, critical analysis, and grassroots news. Issue 16 feature articles will be focused on experiences with, pictures of, research regarding, and stories on PROTEST and RESISTANCE. Given the upcoming march in California on March 4, 2010 and the occupation of businesses (Republic Window) and schools (the New School in NY and several in the California system) over the last year plus, we invite your essays, poetry, photos and art that surrounds the theme of protest and resistance.

Along with these feature articles, we invite, as usual, other essays that treat the links between runaway capital, the rabid and rapid standardization of curriculum, the co-optation of our unions, the militarization of our youth, and the creep of irrationalism in our schools.

Review a book, talk about what lessons have worked in your school lately, play with theory, critique theory, give us some highlights on your research, write a poem, etc.

We are interested in work from academics, parents, teachers, and students: teachers at all levels, students in ANY grade, parents of children of any age.

We publish material from k-12 students, parents, teachers, academics, and community people struggling for equality and democracy in schools --- writing (intended to inform/educate, or stories from your classroom, etc.), art, cartoons, photos, poetry.

You can submit material for the RF News via email (text attachment, if possible) to Adam Renner at arenner@bellarmine.edu.

Download The Rouge Forum News Issue 15 here.

PLEASE SUBMIT BY APRIL1, 2010.

Thin knowing rules university management

2009-12-20T12:53:00.000-08:00

The latest issue (no. 106) of World University News, of December 20, 2009, has a report by Anthea Garman on "Marketisation, globalisation and universities", from a conference earlier in December at the South Africa-Nordic Centre (Sanord) on Inclusion and Exclusion in Higher Education.
Here, Professor Saleem Badat, Vice-chancellor of Rhodes University, said that to steer the university into the future "we need other principles, other co-ordinates and logics from those dominating the previous three decades". - "Universities hold the promise of contribution to justice, democracy and citizenship, but dealing with exclusion goes beyond access, it goes into institutional and academic cultures, into learning and teaching, into ideas, into the conceptions and the purposes of universities."

Here's a longer quote from the report:

Anthropologist Vigdis Broch Due from Bergen, who heads a poverty politics research group, approached the issue from a different point of view. Titling her keynote lecture "In praise of complexity" she called for an ethics of standing against the "seductions of simple-mindedness" in which a "dense reality is organised into an easily graspable reality by bureaucrats and policy-makers."
"Ideas shape the world," she reminded the intellectuals present, "and the world is simply, stubbornly complex. How can we understand the world without betraying complexity?" she asked.
She argued that what universities and scholars do best is to use "thick descriptions" (Clifford Geertz' words) to help societies understand the world they live in. "This should be at the core of our production and dissemination of knowledge and it runs counter to the current domination of the thin descriptions of current policies."
The drive to thin descriptions is because it is "easier and manageable", but the challenge for academics is to "insert the thick into the thin" because "thin knowing has a host of unintended consequences which is the bitter fruit of policy implemented through the last decade" in higher education institutions, she said.
"There is something reassuring about simple binaries such as 'men exploit, women are exploited'; a powerful need to distil social complexities into moral simplicities. But scholars and analysts should resist the overriding concern with categorisation," Broch-Due said.
"We cannot dislodge simplistic stories by arguing they are wrong, we must provide a better story, a more compelling story. This is also a question of pragmatics: how do we tell a better story?" she asked and then elaborated: the community of scholars must use the techniques of communication, talking to publics and across disciplines, writing and publishing in "many different genres".
The key to understand the world is in higher education, she concluded, "only higher education gives the key to complex thinking. It is impossible to divorce knowledge from the community of knowledge-making."
The key to understand the world is in higher education, she concluded, "only higher education gives the key to complex thinking. It is impossible to divorce knowledge from the community of knowledge-making."

Find Anthea Garman's report here.

Excellent Open Access Journals for Educators

2009-11-12T02:31:00.000-08:00

A message to our readers, kindly mailed to us by Amber Johnson:

We just posted an article, "100 Excellent Open Access Journals for Educators" (http://www.onlinecollege.org/2009/11/11/100-excellent-open-access-journals-for-educators/). I thought I'd drop a quick line and let you know in case you thought it was something you're audience would be interested in reading. Thanks!

Workplace #16: Academic knowledge, labor and neoliberalism

2009-11-11T16:01:00.000-08:00

The Editors of Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor are pleased to announce the release of Workplace #16—"Academic Knowledge, Labor, and Neoliberalism."

Check it out at: http://www.workplace-gsc.com

Table of Contents

Articles
Knowledge Production and the Superexploitation of Contingent Academic Labor
Bruno Gulli

The Education Agenda is a War Agenda: Connecting Reason to Power and Power to Resistance
Rich Gibson, E. Wayne Ross

The Rise of Venture Philanthropy and the Ongoing Neoliberal Assault on Public Education: The Eli and Edith Broad Foundation
Kenneth Saltman

Feature Articles
Theses on College and University Administration: A Critical Perspective
John F. Welsh

The Status Degradation Ceremony: The Phenomenology of Social Control in Higher Education
John F. Welsh

Book Reviews
Review of The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities
Desi Bradley

Authentic Bona fide Democrats Must Go Beyond Liberalism, Capitalism, and Imperialism: A Review of Dewey’s Dream: Universities and Democracies in an Age of Education Reform
Richard A. Brosio

Review of Capitalizing on Disaster: Taking and Breaking Public Schools
Prentice Chandler

Review of Pedagogy and Praxis in the Age of Empire: Towards a New Humanism
Abraham P. Deleon

Review of Cary Nelson and the Struggle for the University: Poetry, Politics, and the Profession
Leah Schweitzer

Review of Rhetoric and Resistance in the Corporate Academy
Lisa Tremain

Read the Workplace Blog: http://blogs.ubc.ca/workplace/
Join us on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=24374363807&ref=ts

Call for papers: Neoliberalism and public education

2009-11-06T11:32:00.000-08:00

CALL FOR PAPERS

Educational Studies Special Issue:
Neoliberalism and Public Education

Guest Editors: Richard D. Lakes & Patricia A. Carter
Social Foundations of Education
Georgia State University, Atlanta
Email: rlakes@gsu.edu

Increasingly neoliberal economic policies are transforming the delivery of
public education. In the current era of marketplace reforms the idea of
the public has been supplanted by a private ideology of risk management;
whereby, under individualization, students as consumers are taught
responsible choice strategies designed for competitive advantage in the
so-called new economy.

Under Keynesian economics, which held sway in the U.S., Britain, Canada,
and Australia from the 1930s to the Thatcher-Reagan era of the 1980s, the
public sought to ameliorate inequities stemming from race, class and
gender bias, but under neoliberalism the state has shifted to promoting a
meritocratic myth of governing the self. As old collectivities and their
support structures such as working-class labor and unions have begun to
disappear under advanced capitalism so too have their counterparts within
the school system.

In this special issue we seek manuscripts that explore the devolution of
public education under neoliberalism. We are interested in scholarly
papers that trouble the notion of risk in an educational environment of
competitive capitalism, the nature of specialized curriculums that are
devoted to social advantage, the ways in which schools have outsourced
services and privatized operations; and the assaults on teachers’ rights
through de-unionizing practices, the dismantling of seniority, and the
erosion of benefits. We are interested in case studies of neoliberal
designed school-based reforms as well as accounts of teaching about
neoliberalism in the social foundations classroom.

To submit manuscripts please use our online submission and review system
at Manuscript Central: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/heds

Be sure to include a note that your submission is for the Special Issue on
Neoliberalism and Public Education.

Deadline for manuscript submissions: June 1, 2010.

Research evaluation based on academic excellence or impact

2009-10-25T08:21:00.000-07:00

On a philosophy of science mailinglist (HOPOS), a U.K. based member recently wrote: "(...) I hope this is not an abuse of the list and I appreciate that this will be of interest primarily for UK based hopoi only. There is growing concern here over the inclusion of some form of societal 'impact' factor in the next research evaluation framework (upon which a considerable portion of our funding depends). Many science folk are 'up in arms' over this but of course it bites even harder for us arts types. Emulating a recent science and engineering petition James Ladyman and I have put a petition up on the 10 Downing St. website and if you feel anywhere nearly as strongly about this as we do, please sign up."
The link is: http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/REFandimpact/ The complete petition text:

We request the reversal of the Research Councils and HEFCE policy to direct funds to projects whose outcomes are determined to have a significant ‘impact’. The arts and humanities do have such an impact, but it is typically difficult if not impossible to judge this in the short-term. Academic excellence is the best predictor of impact in the longer term, and it is on academic excellence alone that research should be judged. ‘Users’ who are not academic experts are not fit to judge the academic excellence of research any more than employers are fit to mark student essays. The UK is renowned for its creative industries. But the roots of creativity in the intellectual life of the nation need sustained support and evaluations based on short-term impact will lead to less impact in the long-term. We also request the abandonment of plans to merge subject panels based on spurious claims of disciplinary and methodological similarities. Merging panels in most cases would undermine both methodological integrity and disciplinary identities and undermine the world class research that the UK currently produces.

A French reader suggested an international reaction against this kind of research evaluation, and the petition was also mentioned at a french site "Sauvons la recherche":
http://www.sauvonslarecherche.fr/spip.php?article2916

Challenging Orthodoxies: Critical Governance Studies at Warwick

2009-10-21T15:03:00.000-07:00

The inaugural Critical Governance Studies conference will be held at the University of Warwick on 13th and 14th December 2010.
The objective of the conference is to bring together scholars and activists challenging orthodoxies and developing critical approaches to the study of governance. We believe it is timely to hold an event such as this, which at a moment of crisis and discontent, has the potential to establish critical governance studies as a recognized milieu in the social sciences. The conference will be cross-disciplinary and based on themes that might include, among others, critical approaches to the governance of citizens, space, money, networks, science and the university. We are delighted that Professor Nancy Fraser has agreed to be keynote speaker.

Please circulate this information to relevant contacts and networks and contact yvonne.field@wbs.ac.uk or 02476 574688 if you:
a. are interested in attending the conference and would like further information
b. would be interested in running a conference stream. If so, please state what you have mind.

[see also: www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/wbs/projects/orthodoxies]

Call for manuscripts: Critical Education

2009-09-11T12:34:00.001-07:00

Critical Education is an international peer-reviewed journal, which seeks manuscripts that critically examine contemporary education contexts and practices. Critical Education is interested in theoretical and empirical research as well as articles that advance educational practices that challenge the existing state of affairs in society, schools, and informal education.

Critical Education is an open access journal, launching in early 2010. The journal home is criticaleducation.org

Critical Education is hosted by the Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy at the University of British Columbia and edited by Sandra Mathison (UBC), E. Wayne Ross (UBC) and Adam Renner (Bellarmine University) along with collective of 30 scholars in education that includes:

Faith Ann Agostinone, Aurora University
Wayne Au, California State University, Fullerton
Marc Bousquet, Santa Clara University
Joe Cronin, Antioch University
Antonia Darder, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
George Dei, OISE/University of Toronto
Stephen C. Fleury, Le Moyne College
Kent den Heyer, University of Alberta
Nirmala Erevelles, University of Alabama
Michelle Fine, City University of New York
Gustavo Fischman, Arizona State University
Melissa Freeman, University of Georgia
David Gabbard, East Carolina University
Rich Gibson, San Diego State University
Dave Hill, University of Northampton
Nathalia E. Jaramillo, Purdue University
Saville Kushner, University of West England
Zeus Leonardo, University of California, Berkeley
Pauline Lipman, University of Illinois, Chicago
Lisa Loutzenheiser, University of British Columbia
Marvin Lynn, University of Illinois, Chicago
Sheila Macrine, Montclair State University
Perry M. Marker, Sonoma State University
Rebecca Martusewicz, Eastern Michigan University
Peter McLaren, University of California, Los Angeles
Stephen Petrina, University of British Columbia
Stuart R. Poyntz, Simon Fraser University
Patrick Shannon, Penn State University
Kevin D. Vinson, University of the West Indies
John F. Welsh, Louisville, KY

Online submission and author guidelines can be found here.

Tenure's Value ... to Society

2009-09-07T08:01:00.000-07:00

Someone on the edu-factory email list brought my attention to the article Tenure's Value ... to Society from Inside Higher Ed (here): "This is an interesting finding on tenure, the main mechanism of job security in US academia. Recent studies show that 40% of teaching faculty in US public universities are not tenure-track." Quote from Scott Jaschik's report:

"A judge ruled last week in Colorado that not only is tenure a good thing for the professors who enjoy it, it is valuable to the public. Further, the court ruled that the value (to the public) of tenure outweighed the value of giving colleges flexibility in hiring and dismissing. That is a principle that faculty members say is very important and makes this case about much more than the specific issues at play.
While noting "countervailing public interests" in the case, the judge wrote that "the public interest is advanced more by tenure systems that favor academic freedom over tenure systems that favor flexibility in hiring or firing." The ruling added that "by its very nature, tenure promotes a system in which academic freedom is protected" and that "a tenure system that allows flexibility in firing is oxymoronic.""

More here: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/06/08/metro.

Critical Education: New journal to officially launch in early 2010

2009-07-20T10:59:00.001-07:00

Critical Education is a new international peer-reviewed journal, which seeks manuscripts that critically examine contemporary education contexts and practices. Critical Education is interested in theoretical and empirical research as well as articles that advance educational practices that challenge the existing state of affairs in society, schools, and informal education.

Critical Education is an open access journal and uses the Open Journal Systems management and publication platform, which was developed by the Public Knowledge Project at Simon Fraser University to expand and improve access to research.

Critical Education is hosted by the Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy at the University of British Columbia and edited by Sandra Mathison, E. Wayne Ross and Adam Renner.

Mathison, Ross, and Renner have extensive experience as educators, researchers, and academic journal editors in the United States and Canada.

Mathison is currently Editor-in-Chief of New Directions in Evaluation. She is also editor and author of several books including Encyclopedia of Evaluation, The Nature and Limits of Standards-Based Reform and Assessment, Battleground Schools and most recently Researching Children's Experiences.

Ross co-edits Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor and Cultural Logic and is former editor of Theory and Research in Social Education. His books include Neoliberalism and Education Reform (winner of the 2009 Critics' Choice Award from the the American Educational Studies Association), Education Under the Security State, The Social Studies Curriculum, and Image and Education, among others.

Renner is an Associate Professor in the School of Education at Bellarmine University in Louisville, KY. As well, he serves as the Director of the Interdisciplinary Core in the Bellarmine College of Arts and Sciences. Once a high school math teacher, Renner received his Ph.D from the University of Tennessee in Cultural Studies. He teaches courses on social difference, social justice, globalization, international service learning, and general pedagogy.

Renner's research interests are tightly connected to the courses he teaches. He has published in such venues as the Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, Educational Studies, the International Journal of Learning, and Intercultural Education, among others. He is the editor of The Rouge Forum News.

Additionally, among many invited lectures, he has delivered more than forty papers at professional conferences in the US, Canada, Mexico, and Jamaica. Since 1998, Adam has coordinated an international partnership which pairs students and faculty from the US with educational and health workers in Montego Bay, Jamaica.

In the coming weeks and months Critical Education will be announcing additional members of the Editorial Team as well as members of the Editorial Collective.

Our aim is to officially launch the journal in early 2010.

For more information visit the journal's website.

Higher education is a public good, not a service

2009-07-12T07:41:00.000-07:00

150 governments agree that higher education is a public good, not a service. See the lead article of the last issue of the World University News!
- quotes:
"UNESCO held its second World Conference on Higher Education in Paris last week. The biggest event on the global higher education calendar since the first world conference in 1998, the four-day meeting attracted 1,200 delegates from 150 countries. They debated current and future issues in higher education in the areas of social responsibility, access, equity and quality, internationalisation, regionalisation and globalisation, and learning, research and innovation. There was also a special focus on Africa. As the official media representative at the conference, University World News covered all the key events." (...)
"The 'public good' debate followed numerous political squabbles over the "commodification" of higher education. At its heart is the wish by several developed countries to export educational provision without facing barriers to entry in foreign markets. They have pushed other countries to sign into effect education's inclusion in GATS, which would allow private providers to set up freely in those countries.
Developing countries fear their governments will be constrained from regulating higher education. For instance, there has been concern that governments would be required under GATS to subsidise foreign education providers on the same basis as they fund local public universities or violate GATS anti-discriminatory clauses." (...)
"Use of the words 'public good' appeared in the first draft communiqué published on 26 June. It was replaced with 'public service' in the second draft - which also shunted the section on social responsibility in higher education down the list of themes - and then popped back up again in the final communiqué as the very first point: "Higher education as a public good is the responsibility of all stakeholders, especially governments," the communiqué says.
Minister after minister supported this stance and, sources said, India was insistent on this in the drafting group. India does not currently allow foreign higher education providers but the current government will present a bill to parliament to allow them in under certain conditions, an Indian delegate told the conference." (...)
"Speaking on behalf of the Latin American and Caribbean group within UNESCO, Argentina's Minister for Education Juan Carlos Tedesco said: "We have to stress the idea that education and knowledge is part of the public good which each and every citizen has a right to.""

Making the University Safe for Intellectual Life in the 21st Century

2009-06-11T12:23:00.000-07:00

In connection with Warwick’s Festival of Social Science next week, Steve Fuller has started a blog called ‘Making the University Safe for Intellectual Life in the 21st Century’. Fuller: "I will be posting entries during the week and perhaps afterward. Your comments and responses are welcomed, since we are having a lively discussion here about the future of the university as an institution. I’m sure many of you are having similar discussions as well." - Welcome to our new blog sister in arms! You can see Fuller's first entry here: blogs.warwick.ac.uk/swfuller/

New work on academic freedom

2009-06-07T01:56:00.000-07:00

Being in contact with Terence Karran from the University of Lincoln, a member of this blog's network, I find it highly relevant to tell about some of his recent work. He has been invited by Ingrid Stage, president of Dansk Magisterforening to appear as a guest speaker at the DM conference on university governance and freedom of research on 11th June, 2009, at DM’s premises Nimbusparken 16, Frederiksberg, in Copenhagen.

Karran's research work into academic freedom has continued and he has a paper in the June 2009 edition of the British Journal of Education Studies entitled, "Academic Freedom in Europe: Reviewing UNESCO’s Recommendation”. He wrote this paper to update and extend the analysis of his previous paper [“Academic Freedom in Europe: A Preliminary Comparative Analysis” published in the UNESCO/IUA journal Higher Education Policy in 2007] to include all the new EU states, and also to answer criticisms made by the Danish Education Minister, Helge Sander, that his previous paper did not relate directly to the parameters laid out in the 1997 UNESCO Recommendation. The June 2009 edition of the BJES focuses specifically on academic freedom, and to mark the publication of this special edition of the journal, the Society for Educational Studies hosted a special seminar on “Understanding Academic Freedom” at the Rothermere American Institute, at the University of Oxford on 20th May, at which the contributors to the special edition, addressed the question ‘How is academic freedom understood in the 21st Century?’ Karran shared the panel at Oxford with his fellow contributors, Roy Harris (Emeritus Professor of General Linguistics, University of Oxford), Steve Fuller (Professor of Sociology, University of Warwick) and Dennis Hayes (Visiting Professor, Oxford Brookes University). Interestingly , it seems that ensuring protection for academic freedom is as important a topic at Oxford as it is in Denmark!

In addition, Karran's articles entitled "Academic Freedom: In Justification of a Universal Ideal" and "Academic Freedom in Europe: Time for a Magna Charta?", has just been published in the May 2009 edition of Studies in Higher Education and the June 2009 edition of the journal Higher Education Policy, respectively. These articles follow on from the conclusion of his previous 2007 article on academic freedom in the journal Higher Education Policy, in which he stated: "Further work is therefore required ... first, a succinct yet inclusive and coherent working definition of academic freedom is needed for Universities in the EU nations, derived from, and built on, their historic commitment to this principle. Second, and more importantly, the reasons justifying academic freedom need to be voiced clearly and loudly." The working definition for academic freedom specified in the article in Higher Education Policy goes beyond traditional discussions of academic freedom by specifying not only the rights inherent in the concept but its necessary limitations and safeguards which could form the basis for a European Magna Charta Libertatis Academicae. Clearly, the adoption of such a document by the EUA and the national academic professional associations would do much to raise the salience and awareness of academic freedom within Europe's universities. The article in Studies in Higher Education examines the justification for, and benefits of, academic freedom to academics, students, universities, and the world at large, and provides a powerful, evidence based, justification for the preservation of the concept of academic freedom in the universities of Europe and world wide.

You can see these articles in their journal contexts here:
• www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/118492626/home
• www.palgrave-journals.com/hep/journal/v22/n2/index.html
• www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a909274277~db=all~order=pubdate

and I guess that if you don't have free access to these journals via your local library, Karran would kindly forward you pdf offprints.

New home, new outlook, new publishing system for Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor

2009-06-03T12:26:00.000-07:00

Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor

The Editorial Team of Workplace is proud to announce the journal's new home, new outlook, and new publishing system!

We encourage you to browse the Workplace open journal system, submit a manuscript, or volunteer to review http://m1.cust.educ.ubc.ca/journal/index.php/workplace/index. We also welcome proposals for Special Issues; if you have an idea or have assembled a group of scholars writing on higher education workplace activism and issues of academic labor, send us a proposal.

Current preprints include:

John Welsh's "Theses on College and University Administration" and "The Status Degradation Ceremony." As a whole, both feature articles challenge scholars to rethink the administration of higher education and how we frame research into this process http://m1.cust.educ.ubc.ca/journal/index.php/workplace/issue/current.

"The Education Agenda is a War Agenda: Connecting Reason to Power and Power to Resistance" by Rich Gibson & E. Wayne Ross

Reviews by Richard Brosio and Prentice Chandler

Thank you and please forward this invitation to colleagues and networks.
--
Stephen Petrina & E. Wayne Ross, Co-Editors

Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor
Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy
University of British Columbia
http://m1.cust.educ.ubc.ca/journal/index.php/workplace/index

The Rouge Forum News - Call for Submissions (Issues 14 & 15)

2009-05-01T13:39:00.001-07:00

Rouge Forum News, Issue 14: Call for papers

The Rouge Forum News is an outlet for working papers, critical analysis, and grassroots news. Issue 14 of the RF News will be dedicated to papers delivered at the Rouge Forum Conference at Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti, MI.

Conference presenters, if you would like your paper to be considered for Issue 14, please send your essay to Adam Renner at arenner@bellarmine.edu by June 15, 2009.

Rouge Forum News, Issue 15: Call for papers

The Rouge Forum News is an outlet for working papers, critical analysis, and grassroots news. Issue 15 will be dedicated to our persistence in providing links between runaway capital, the rabid and rapid standardization of curriculum, the co-optation of our unions, the militarization of our youth, and the creep of irrationalism in our schools.

We are interested in work from academics, parents, teachers, and students: teachers at all levels, students in ANY grade, parents of children of any age.

Something small, something big, something serious. It is the stories we get from people like you that make the RF News what it is. If you have a story to share, but would like to protect your identity, use a pen name. Pen names are ALWAYS welcome!

We NEED Art! Songs! Poems! Editorial cartoons! Links to online videos or other material!

We are looking for narratives, as well as research, and the interplay between research and practice which focuses on the economy, curriculum, unions, etc. If you have a story to tell, some research to share, a book to review, we'd love to see it (and share it).

We publish material from k-12 students, parents, teachers, academics, and community people struggling for equality and democracy in schools—writing (intended to inform/educate, or stories from your classroom, etc.), art, cartoons, photos, poetry. You can submit material for the RF News via email (text attachment, if possible) to Adam Renner at arenner@bellarmine.edu. PLEASE SUBMIT BY AUGUST 15, 2009.

See Issue 13 of the Rouge Forum News. All past issues at available here.

CFP: Working In, and Against, the Neo-Liberal State: Global Perspectives on K-12 Teacher Unions

2009-03-24T10:29:00.000-07:00

Call for Papers:Working In, and Against, the Neo-Liberal State: Global Perspectives on K-12 Teacher Unions

Special Issue for Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor

The neo-liberal restructuring of national education systems is a global phenomenon and represents a major threat to the possibility of a democratic, public education committed to meeting the needs of working class and oppressed groups. Teacher unions, across the world, despite all the attacks on them, represent perhaps the most formidable obstacle to neo-liberal restructuring. Teachers remain highly unionized and although they have suffered many setbacks in recent years, their collective organizations generally remain robust.

Despite the significance and importance of teacher unions they remain largely under-researched. Mainstream academic literature on school sector education policy often ignores teacher unions, even in cases where scholars are critical of the market orientation of neo-liberal reforms. Two recent exceptions to this tradition are the contributions of Compton and Weiner (2008) and Stevenson et al (2007). The strength of Compton and Weiner’s excellent volume is the breadth of international perspectives. However, individual chapters are largely short ‘vignettes’, and the aim is to offer fairly brief and readable accounts, rather than detailed and scholarly analysis. Stevenson et al offer a series of traditional scholarly articles, although the emphasis is largely on the Anglophone nations (UK, North America, Australasia), and the collection fails to capture the full breadth required of an international perspective. In both cases, and quite understandably, these contributions were not able to take account of the seismic developments in the world capitalist economy since Autumn 08 in particular. These developments have significant implications for the future of neo-liberalism, for the development of education policy in nation states and for the policies and practices of teacher unions. There is now a strong case for an analysis of teacher unionism that is detailed, scholarly, international and able to take account of current developments.

This special section of Workplace will focus on the ways in which teacher unions in the K-12 sector are challenging the neo-liberal restructuring of school education systems in a range of global contexts. Neo-liberalism’s reach is global. Its impact on the restructuring of public education systems shares many common characteristics wherever it manifests itself. That said, it also plays out differently in different national and local contexts. This collection of papers will seek to assess how teacher unions are challenging the trajectory of neo-liberal reform in a number of different national contexts. By drawing on contributors from all the major world continents it will seek to highlight the points of contact and departure in the apparently different ways in which teacher unions interface with the neo-liberal agenda. It will also ensure that analyses seek to reflect recent developments in the global capitalist economy, and the extent to which this represents threat or opportunity for organized teacher movements.

Compton, M. and Weiner, L. (2008) The Global Assault on Teachers, Teaching and their Unions, London: Palgrave.

Stevenson, H. et al (2007) Changes in Teachers’ Work and the Challengs Facing Teacher Unions. International Electronic Journal of Leadership for Learning. Volume 11.

Submissions
Contributions to Workplace should be 4000-6000 words in length and should conform to MLA style. If you are interested, please submit an abstract via Word attachment to Howard Stevenson (hstevenson@lincoln.ac.uk) by 31st July 2009. Completed articles will be due via email on 28th December 2009. All papers will be blind peer-reviewed.

Rouge Forum Conference 2009—Education, Empire, Economy & Ethics at a Crossroads (conference schedule)

2009-03-19T10:14:00.000-07:00

The schedule for the Rouge Forum Conference 2009—Education, Empire, Economy & Ethics at a Crossroads—is now online. Check out the great speakers, sessions and events for the meeting at Eastern Michigan University, May 15-17.

Check out all the details for the conference at RougeForumConference.org

Call for Manuscripts: Academic Labor and Law

2009-02-27T13:17:00.000-08:00

CFP: Academic Labor and Law
Special Section of Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor
Workplace Blog

Guest Editor: Jennifer Wingard, University of Houston

[Note: Articles on Academic Labor and Law issues in contexts beyond the USA are welcomed]

The historical connections between legislation, the courts, and the academy have been complex and multi-layered. This has been evident from early federal economic policies, such as the Morell Act and the GI Bill, through national and state legislation that protected student and faculty rights, such as the First Amendment and affirmative action clauses. These connections continue into our current moment of state and national efforts to define the work of the university, such as The Academic Bill of Rights and court cases regarding distance learning. The question, then, becomes whether and to what extent the impact of legislation and litigation reveals or masks the shifting mission of the academy. Have these shifts been primarily economic, with scarcities of funding leading many to want to legislate what is considered a university education, how it should be financed, and who should benefit from it? Are the shifts primarily ideological, with political interests working to change access, funding, and the intellectual project of higher education? Or are the shifts a combination of both political and economic influences? One thing does become clear from these discussions: at their core, the legal battles surrounding higher education are about the changing nature of the university –the use of managerial/corporate language; the desire to professionalize students rather than liberally educate them; the need to create transparent structures of evaluation for both students and faculty; and the attempt to define the types of knowledge produced and disseminated in the classroom. These are changes for which faculty, students, administrators, as well as citizens who feel they have a stake in higher education, seek legal redress. This special section of Workplace aims to explore the ways in which legislation and court cases impact the work of students, professors, contingent faculty, and graduate students in the university. Potential topics include but are not limited to:

* Academic Freedom for students and/or faculty
o Horowitz’s Academic Bill of Rights
o Missouri’s Emily Booker Intellectual Diversity Act
o First Amendment court cases concerning faculty and student’s rights to freely express themselves in the classroom and on campuses
o Facebook/Myspace/Blog court cases
o Current legislative and budgetary “attacks” on area studies (i.e. Queer Studies in Georgia, Women’s Studies in Florida)
* Affirmative Action
o The implementation of state and university diversity initiatives in the 1970s
o The current repeal of affirmative action law across the country
* Benefits, including Health Benefits, Domestic Partner Benefits
o How universities in states with same-sex marriage bans deal with domestic partner benefits
* Collective Bargaining
o The recent rulings at NYU and Brown about the status of graduate students as employees
o State anti-unionization measures and how they impact contingent faculty
* Copyright/Intellectual Property
o In Distance Learning
o In corporate sponsored science research
o In government sponsored research
* Disability Rights and Higher Education
o How the ADA impacts the university
* Sexual Harassment and Consensual Relationships
o How diversity laws and sexual harassment policies impact the university
* Tenure
o The Bennington Case
o Post 9/11 court cases

Contributions for Workplace should be 4000-6000 words in length and should conform to MLA style. If interested, please send an abstract via word attachment to Jennifer Wingard (jwingard@central.uh.edu) by Friday, May 22, 2009. Completed essays will be due via email by Monday, August 24, 2009.

Update on Rouge Forum 2009: Education, Empire, Economy, & Ethics at a Crossroads

2009-02-26T12:57:00.000-08:00

Update on Rouge Forum 2009

Education, Empire, Economy, & Ethics at a Crossroads
May 15-17, 2009
Eastern Michigan University
Ypsilanti, MI

(Ypsilanti is located in southeast Michigan, 15 minutes from the Detroit Metropolitan Airport, 35 miles west of Detroit, and 8 miles east of Ann Arbor, which is home to the University of Michigan.)

Keynote Speakers/Performances:

Staughton Lynd has agreed to be a keynote speaker at the conference. Staughton Lynd is a legendary peace and civil rights activist, historian, lawyer, and organizer. Lynd directed the Mississippi Freedom Schools in the summer of 1964, taught history at Yale University and Spellman College and has been an organizer and worker rights attorney in Youngstown, OH for over thirty years. His books include Rank and File, Lucasville, and the recently published memoir Stepping Stones.

Greg Queen, 2008 recipient of the NCSS Defense of Academic Freedom Award will also provide a keynote address and we expect to identify another keynote speaker soon.

We anticipate an exciting "Adventures in Live Art" public performance from artist Billy X. Curmano. Curmano will also conduct a workshop at the conference ("Changing Culture with Art: Creativity of the people, for the people and the planet").

As you can see, the conference is shaping up well and promises to be an excellent experience by providing a space to examine, critique, and outline future directions in response to the dismal times we currently face. We have a number of great proposals already and will be accepting more for another few weeks.

REMEMBER: One of the main reasons people have cited for coming to previous conferences is the friendship and collegiality they have discovered in a group that draws together many different views, all of them critical and incisive—people worth meeting again and again.

There is still time to submit proposals for presentations/performances (deadline March 15).

For more details visit the conference web site or email conference coordinator Joe Bishop (joe.bishop@emich.edu).

Changing Universities: Governance, Relevance, Performance

2009-02-09T00:39:00.000-08:00

CALL FOR PAPERS
International Conference on
Changing Universities: Governance, Relevance, Performance
29 September – 2 October 2009
Istanbul, Turkey

Over the last couple of decades or so, higher education systems and, in particular, universities have become, notably in Europe as well as elsewhere, targets of attention and debate for change and reform. A host of external factors have been at play in shaping the discourses and actions with regard to changing universities. Within Europe, for example, policy statements such as the Bologna Accord, the Berlin Communiqué and the Lisbon Declaration have called for major reforms and re-orientations in higher education as a part of the broader vision of creating a European knowledge society. This has also been linked with expectations that universities should serve as engines of economic growth and national as well as regional competitiveness in the global marketplace. Concerns have therefore been expressed with regard to the relationships of universities with their external environments and the society at large. Business representatives have been demanding closer university-industry ties and research more relevant to their needs. Likewise, pressures have been mounting on providing education that is more responsive to the needs of the labour market. State authorities have joined in endorsing these demands. Moreover, these kinds of pressures have been coming at a time when public funding has been increasingly constrained and universities have been guided towards obtaining other sources of funds, leading, in some countries at least, to the encouragement of privately funded institutions. Concomitantly, there has been a greater concern with resource allocation to and within universities as well as their efficient use, resulting also in a broader discourse on and ensuing polices with respect to issues about accountability.

Altogether these kinds of pressures have resulted in the introduction of new policies and reform initiatives in the last two decades or so, though their timing, scale and pace has been variant across countries. National and organizational level governance systems have been altered, in some cases a number of times. New evaluation schemes have been introduced for assessing organizational, departmental and individual performance. Funding systems have been revisited, quite often in ways that not only attempt to make them performance-based but also to promote and encourage the acquisition of external funds. That these kinds of changes and the responses to them have and are being played out in institutionalized organizational fields has motivated not only practical but also academic interest in their implementation and outcomes. Likewise, that they have been internationally widespread, quite often with some reference to and justification based on North American models has generated debate around convergence as opposed to divergence sustained in many ways.

The above issues have been addressed for the last year or so within a project entitled MEHEM (Mapping European Higher Education Models), funded by the European Union and carried out by scholars from Sabanci University (Turkey), Oxford University (UK), University of Siena (Italy) and Uppsala University (Sweden) together with collaborators from Germany, France and Spain. The Istanbul Conference is organized as a part of this project and aims to bring together researchers from a broader range of institutions and countries with interests in the changes that have been taking place over the last couple of decades at universities, nationally, regionally and internationally. Papers are invited therefore on the following topics, though not exclusively limited to them, as submissions pertaining to related themes will also be considered:

• Changes in government regulation of higher education fields and universities.
• Changes in the composition of organizational level governing bodies and the selection of university leaders
• Changes in funding, particularly the degree to which market solutions is being introduced.
• Changes in the selection and promotion of faculty.
• The changing nature of university-industry relationships and their implications for the structuring and administration of universities.
• The implications of the increasing use of evaluations and rankings for higher education and universities.
• The implications of the changes that have been taking place on the structure of higher education fields and the role of universities with respect to the construction of national and international elites.

Both conceptual and empirical papers are invited. Empirical papers could be case studies of individual or a small number of organizations as well as larger scale quantitative investigations. Comparative research would be particularly welcome. One additional aim of the conference is to provide a platform for the production of an edited book.

Abstracts of around 500 words should be submitted through the MEHEM website (www.mehem.org) latest by 31 May 2009. Authors will be notified about acceptance latest by the end of June. Some funds are available to cover travel and lodging expenses. Please do indicate any needs for funding when submitting your abstract.

Organizers
Behlül Üsdiken, Sabanci University, Turkey
Lars Engwall, Uppsala University, Sweden
Carmelo Mazza, Grenoble EM, France
Paolo Quattrone, University of Oxford, UK
Angelo Riccaboni, University of Siena, Italy

See also this cfp here.

Learn about Comparative Critiques of the Neoliberal University

2009-01-26T13:50:00.000-08:00

PhD students and researchers are welcome to apply for admission to our PhD
summer course on the topic of Comparative Critiques of the Neoliberal University.

More information about this course is found at: www.sv.uio.no/oss/courses2009.html

The full course outline is found here: www.sv.uio.no/oss/slaughter.html

Course objectives:
Given global market failures, the time is right to reconsider universities‚ relation to the market. Market fundamentalism assumes that universities must act entrepreneurially on a variety of fronts because a successful nation must have a technically educated workforce, science that emphasizes patents, spin off companies that create high technology products, which in turn create high paying jobs and a prosperous citizenry. Governments are expected to invest in science and engineering; students and their families are expected to pay more for higher education that will give graduates an advantage in the knowledge economy.
These relatively unexamined 'win-win' assumptions have guided policies and practices in neoliberal states and trading blocks.
This course will re-examine these policies and look at how they have played out in practices in countries around the world, with emphasis on the classic policy questions: who benefits, who pays? The course will focus to some degree on the United States because it is so highly marketized, and provides rich lessons about the problems of academic capitalism. However, readings will also cover the European Union, as well as specific European countries, and higher education in global context. The course will contribute to students‚ understanding of current policies and stimulate creative approaches to future policy development.

Location for the course is: Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Oslo, Norway
Time period: 27 - 31 July 2009.

Course lecturer is: Sheila Slaughter, Louise McBee Professor of Higher
Education, Institute of Higher Education, University of Georgia, USA

Dreaming of public universities for the public

2009-01-14T02:26:00.000-08:00

“Many of us who labour in the university do so because we believe (or hope) that it is somehow different than working for exploitative corporations. In the US, the ideal that citizens should receive free education – further extended through land-grant initiatives of the late 1800s that granted states federally controlled land for the express purpose of building universities to give access to and teach all citizens practical arts and the classics – allows us to believe that public universities are indeed for the public, and based on the mission of providing knowledge and resources for the public good. However, even those of us organizing during the strike quickly realized that mantras of ‘Keep the University of Minnesota Public’ were misguided as the University of Minnesota and most public institutions have never really been public and have systematically excluded groups. A liberal arts education, even in the paradigm of land-grant institutions, has always been defined as the knowledge of elites, thus we cannot continue thinking about the university as an idealistic space, or that there is something that we nostalgically want to return to. We cannot continue to fetishize the roles of students and faculty as pursuers of knowledge when it is clear that knowledge has a price and is marketed as a product. Clearly, we must redefine the space of the university, our labour, and the relations between workers. These are the parameters to build solidarity: all as workers differently situated in the same economic/factory system.”

- quote from:
Amy Pason “We Are All Workers: A Class Analysis of University Labour Strikes”, Ephemera, volume 8, number 3 (august 2008) (pdf file for article),
- an article in the new issue (8.3) of ephemera: theory & politics in organization entitled 'University, Failed' -- just released at www.ephemeraweb.org.
Quote:
This issue is a call to discussion regarding the modern university, and what we seek to achieve with it is to highlight the discussions already taking place within the university, and to spurn on some new ones. Yet, as the entrance to today's Humboldt University tells us, such interpretation is not enough. What counts is change. Such change cannot, we believe, be achieved solely by the university itself. This insight creates huge challenges for other issues and interventions regarding the university of tomorrow: to open the discussion to other shareholders and constituencies within the knowledge factory, to pave ground for other residuals, where a university may take place.
Where are these places? And what do 'the people' – the students, the politicians, the medias, the immigrants, the elderly, the people – want with the university? Underneath the seductive toasts and touching speeches that the university enjoys again and again, unmistakable signs of mistrust secrete. A dialogue about this mistrust (which dwells well, also, within the university itself) may be what lies ahead, meshed up with the ongoing grand failure of the university.
Journal’s special issue site; download the whole special issue.

HUNGARY: University rankings rejected

2008-12-05T00:15:00.000-08:00

Writer: Nick Holdsworth
Date: 30 November 2008
Competitive university rankings have been rejected as an effective means of informing people about differing standards in higher education. A conference attended by delegates from European university and standards setting associations in Budapest last week agreed that rankings had "perverse effects".
See full story here

Call for Proposals: Rouge Forum 2009—Education, Empire, Economy & Ethics at a Crossroads

2008-11-12T07:03:00.000-08:00

Rouge Forum Conference 2009

http://www.rougeforumconference.org/

CALL FOR PROPOSALS

Education, Empire, Economy & Ethics at a Crossroads

Eastern Michigan University
Ypsilanti, MI

May 14-17, 2009

The theme for the 2009 Rouge Forum Conference is: “Education, Empire, Economy & Ethics at a Crossroads: What Do We Need to Know and How Can We Come to Know It?”

Bringing together academic presentations and performances (from some of the most prominent voices for democratic, critical, and/or revolutionary pedagogy), panel discussions, community-building, and cultural events, this action-oriented conference will center on questions such as:

✴What is the nature of the crossroads, where do the different paths lead, what are our choices and how do we implement them?

✴What does education for liberation look like compared to education for empire? Class struggle?

✴Are we at a turning point in history? Has the rightward shift stopped or will the economic crisis push the ruling class towards fascism?

✴What are the implications of 2008 election ballot initiatives?

✴How do education, empire, economy, ethics, and democracy intersect in classrooms and schools?

✴How do we learn and teach to get from where we are to where we need to be?

✴How can we educate to liberate ourselves from the impact of empire? OR, How are we teaching to push back the imperializing of our classrooms?

✴How do we stand up for the correctness of our ideas?

✴How does change happen (individually, within a school, within a district)?

✴What support, what conditions facilitate teachers being willing to take the step towards correct action?

To learn more about the conference, please contact any of our conference organizers:

Joe Bishop (joe.bishop@emich.edu)
Greg Queen (rumbagarden@ameritech.net)
Adam Renner (arenner@bellarmine.edu)
Wayne Ross (wayne.ross@ubc.ca)
Rich Gibson (rgibson@pipeline.com)

Submissions:

Review of Paper Proposals treating any of the above questions will begin 1 February 2009. Please send a 250-500 word proposal to Joe Bishop (joe.bishop@emich.edu), describing your work/project/manuscript, how it connects to one of the conference questions, and what participants might take away from attending your session. Classroom teachers and students are strongly encouraged to send their proposals.

Performance Proposals should also be forwarded to Joe Bishop (joe.bishop@emich.edu) by December 15, 2008. Please describe your art/performance and how it may relate to the conference topic/questions.

New Issue Announcement: Workplace #15 (Mental Labor Issue)

2008-11-03T17:07:00.000-08:00

The editors of Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor are proud to announce our latest issue, which is now available online at http://www.cust.educ.ubc.ca/workplace/. The issue begins with a special “Mental Labor” section, which was generously compiled and guest edited by Steven Wexler. We express our heartiest gratitude to him, as well as to web designers Stephen Petrina and Franc Feng.

The lead section includes:

(I’m)Material Labor in the Digital Age
by Steven Wexler

Autonomy vs. Insecurity: The (Mis)Fortunes of Mental Labor in a Global Network
by David B. Downing

Extreme Work-Study, or, The Real “Kid Nation”
by Marc Bousquet

From the *Grundrisse* to *Capital* and Beyond: Then and Now
by George Caffentzis

Ideology and the Crisis of Capitalism
by Thomas A. Hirschl, Daniel B. Ahlquist and Leland L. Glenna

Gender, Contingent Labor, and Our Virtual Bodies
by Desi Bradley

Our regular segment of “Feature Articles” contains the following:

Capitalism, Audit, and the Demise of the Humanistic Academy
by Charles Thorpe

Troubling Data: A Foucauldian Perspective of “a Multiple Data Source Approach” to Professional Learning and Evaluation
by Mark C. Baildon

And our “Book Reviews” section, edited for the final time by William Vaughn, features four new entries:

*Pedagogy and Praxis in the Age of Empire: Towards a New Humanism*
Reviewed by Dana Carluccio

*Taking Back the Workers’ Law: How to Fight the Assault on Labor Rights*
Reviewed by William Vaughn

*Three Strikes: Labor’s Heartland Losses and What They Mean for Working Americans*
Reviewed by Philip Eubanks

*Teachers as Owners: A Key to Revitalizing Public Education*
Reviewed by William Vaughn

The editors are extremely thankful to William Vaughn for years of fine work with the Book Reviews, and we are sorry to see him go. We are pleased to report, however, that Steven Wexler will take on the role of reviews editor in the coming issues.

Thank you for your continuing support of the journal, and please keep *Workplace* in mind as a venue for your future scholarship. Send submissions to cscarter@ou.edu or wayne.ross@ubc.ca.

Solidarity,

Chris Carter
Wayne Ross
Stephen Petrina
Co-editors, Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor

Free inquiry at risk: universities in dangerous times

2008-10-05T06:09:00.000-07:00

On October 29, 30 and 31, Social Research, the journal of The New School for Social Research in New York City, will host Free Inquiry at Risk: Universities in Dangerous Times in commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the founding of the University in Exile at The New School. This three-day conference will feature leading scientists, academics, and university presidents in public dialogue about the trends facing universities around the world that put academic freedom and free inquiry at risk. The keynote event will be on 30 October at 6:00PM at which Aryeh Neier, President, Open Society Institute, will talk with endangered scholars from Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, Belarus and China.
More information at www.newschool.edu or email socres [at] newschool.edu

Adjuncts Fight Back Over Academic Freedom

2008-10-03T12:24:00.000-07:00

"Steven Bitterman was on his way to teach a course in Western civilization at Southwestern Community College last fall" ... "he got a telephone call from one of the college's vice presidents, saying he had been fired. Three students, the vice president told Mr. Bitterman, were offended because he had told his class that people could more easily appreciate the biblical story of Adam and Eve if they considered it a myth." ...
"The American Association of University Professors is also paying more attention to the academic freedom of professors who work off the tenure track. Such instructors now make up nearly 70 percent of the nation's professoriate. The instructors who have been fired typically have been terminated after discussing hot-button issues: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, religion, and homosexuality, for example."
Read full story in Chronicle of Higher Education here

DENMARK: Academics sign up to protest

2008-08-31T12:45:00.000-07:00

by Ard Jongsma
Danish academics are collecting signatures to convince Science Minister Helge Sander that opposition to the current education law is, in their words, “no sectarian craving from a dissatisfied minority…but has a broad basis of support among Danish students and researchers”.
Full report on the University World News site

AAUP Completes Dream Team

2008-08-29T02:21:00.000-07:00

"Gary Rhoades, who transformed our understanding of the professoriate with the publication of Managed Professsionals and Academic Capitalism in the New Economy, will join Cary Nelson at the helm of the AAUP in January. As director of the Institute for the Study of Higher Education at the University of Arizona, he is already a leading international authority on the complex of issues most pressing for AAUP: the assault on faculty culture by administration via the forced introduction of academic-capitalist values and practices; deprofessionalization and casualization; and the complex global-economic relations between state, market, and campus actors."
— read the story in Chronicle of Higher Education:
http://chronicle.com/review/brainstorm/index.php?id=753

North Carolina State U undermines academic freedom of film scholar

2008-08-18T10:41:00.001-07:00

For the Naitonal Project to Defend Dissent and Critical Thinking in Academia

Defendcriticalthinking.info

TAKE ACTION AGAINST YET ANOTHER ATTACK ON ACADEMIC FREEDOM

As you know, since 9/11, the right has ramped up its attack on academics who dare to dissent from the U. S. occupation of Iraq and its policy in the Middle East more generally. Neo-McCarthyite groups like the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, Students for Academic Freedom and the David Project have published lists of “disloyal” faculty and scurrilous reports on allegedly "anti-American" courses dealing with U.S. imperialism, Islam and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Respected scholars who study and write about such subjects -such as Norman Finkelstein-- have been denied tenure solely on the basis of their politics. Others, like Ward Churchill, have had tenure summarily stripped from them.

In similar instances, applications for tenure have been seriously threatened (Nadia Abu El-Haj: Joseph Massad) and books and their publishers have been targeted for censorship (i.e. Joel Kovel’s book “Overcoming Zionism” and University of Michigan Press). Now, the assault on academic freedom has effected yet another critical scholar: Terri Ginsberg, a Ph.D. in Cinema Studies from NYU and an authority on Israeli and Palestinian film.

Last fall, Terri was hired to a one year, non-tenure track position in Film Studies at North Carolina State University (with the possibility of renewal). As part of her teaching responsibilities, she offered advanced courses on film and media treatment of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and on the political aesthetics of Holocaust film (the subject of her recent book) ; she was also charged with helping to program a Middle Eastern film series.

Unfortunately, as Terri details in a grievance she filed with the NCSU Faculty in March 2008, the director of the film studies program and the director of the Middle East studies program at NCSU made a number of administrative decisions in the course of the past year that flagrantly violated Terri’s academic freedom.

To begin with, they limited her involvement in the film series which she had been hired to curate, and criticized the introduction she gave at a screening of the Palestinian film “Ticket to Jerusalem” as biased and overly political. Moreover, the director of the film studies program refused to purchase many of the materials Terri had requested for her Palestine/Israel film and media course and submitted her evaluation of Terri’s teaching prematurely. All of this culminated in her contract not being renewed for the upcoming academic year.

The grievance Terri filed with the NCSU Faculty alleged violations of her First Amendment and equal opportunity rights under the University Code. Despite a recommendation from the NCSU Faculty Chair that her case be given a full hearing, NCSU Chancellor James L. Oblinger summarily dismissed her petition on the grounds that it was filed “too late” and that Terri was no longer a university employee. To make atters worse, the AAUP-- who had been helping Terri with her case-- informed her in
the wake of Oblinger’s decision that they would no longer provide her with assistance. (For more information about the facts of Terri’s case, read the following article:
http://media.www.technicianonline.com/media/storage/paper848/news/2008/07/17/News/Professor.Claims.Unprotected.Speech-3391733.shtml)

In response to this outrage, people from around the world have been inundating NCSU with letters demanding that the Chancellor and the Board of Trustees allow Terri’s grievance to go forward. An online petition has been started that requests that NCSU consider Terri’s case and asks the AAUP to give her the support she deserves.

Please take a few minutes to help Terri in this fight. First, add your name to the petition of support drafted by Academics for Justice (AcademicsForJustice.org):
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/Protect-Academic-Freedom

Second, send e-mails and make phone calls to D. McQueen Campbell, chair of the NSCU Board of Trustees, andD. McQueen Campbell, Chair NCSU Board of Trustees
tele: 919-515-2195
fax: 919-831-3545
trustees@ncsu.edu

Dr. Larry A. Nielsen, NCSU Provost &
Executive Vice Chancellor
larry_nielsen@ncsu.edu
tele: 919-515-2195
fax: 919-515-5921

Online campaign to help Gaza's students reach their studies abroad

2008-08-12T08:58:00.001-07:00

Currently, hundreds of Palestinian students are trapped in the Gaza Strip - unable to reach the universities around the world to which they have been accepted. Since June of 2007, Israel has imposed a closure on the Strip, violating the right to freedom of movement and other rights for which freedom of movement is a pre-condition, such as the right to access education.

Faced with pressure from world leaders outraged over the ban, Israeli officials declared recently that they would allow exit for just a few dozen students in Gaza holding "recognized scholarships" as a gesture to "friendly countries" but will continue to prevent hundreds of other students from reaching their studies. With each passing day, Gaza's most talented young people risk losing their places in universities abroad - and losing their chance to pursue their dreams of building a better future in the region.

Further information on this issue is available in Gisha's report issued in June 2008 and in Gisha's July 2008 Power Point Presentation.

With the new academic year fast approaching, Gisha - Legal Center for Freedom of Movement is working to persuade Israeli authorities to cancel the ban on students leaving the Gaza Strip and to allow Gaza's students to reach their studies abroad. One of the ways we are doing so is via a new internet campaign, in which banners featuring the students (see an example of one which I've attached below) are passed along through mailing lists and posted on blogs. Clicking on the banner then leads to the campaign's minisite: www.trappedingaza.org, where visitors can send a message to Israeli leaders in support of the right of Palestinian students in Gaza to reach their studies.

Free Inquiry at Risk

2008-08-11T05:19:00.000-07:00

Social Research: An International Quarterly of the Social Sciences
exchanges advertisement with
Journal of Research Practice

-- Please share this in your academic/research network --

A Social Research Conference at The New School
FREE INQUIRY AT RISK: UNIVERSITIES IN DANGEROUS TIMES
Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, October 29, 30, and 31, 2008

Join us as a group of experts discuss trends that are reshaping universities around the world. What are the benefits and what are the risks to the universities' core values of academic freedom and free inquiry as they navigate rapid globalization, international collaborations,
massification, corporate partnerships, and growing franchises. This conference commemorates the 75th anniversary of The New School's University in Exile, founded as a haven for European scholars rescued from the ravages of fascism.

John L. Tishman Auditorium, 66 West 12th Street, NYC
Full conference $30, $10 per session (Students are free)

Roberta Sutton
Conference Coordinator
The New School for Social Research
65 Fifth Avenue, 375 New York, NY 10003
P: (212) 229-5776 x 3121 F: (212) 229-5476
E: SocRes@newschool.edu W: http://www.socres.org
Please visit Free Inquiry at Risk: Universities in Dangerous Times at
http://www.newschool.edu/FreeInquiry
--
The journal, Social Research has provided a link to JRP on its Web site: http://www.socres.org/freeinquiry/links.htm In return, the Journal of Research Practice has provided a link to their "Free Inquiry" conference on the JRP home page: http://jrp.icaap.org/index.php/jrp
D. P. Dash, Editor, Journal of Research Practice (JRP) http://jrp.icaap.org/

Academic Tenure Under Threat in Ireland

2008-07-26T17:04:00.000-07:00

Higher Education in Ireland is provided by universities, institutes of technology and colleges of education. There are seven universities in Ireland. The institutions of higher education are publicly funded institutions with some institutional autonomy and receive about 90% of their income from state funds. Although they are autonomous institutions, the universities' duties and responsibilities are laid down by the Universities Act 1997. They are also monitored by a statutory body, the Higher Education Authority (HEA), which allocates the funding coming from the state.

About 80% of the academic staff in Ireland hold permanent tenured positions. All full time academic staff are officers of the state and tenured in the sense that they can not be fired without a serious cause, such as incompetence or outrageous conduct. In this sense, job security can be considered high (for instance, compared to the UK where only about 55% hold permanent contracts and there is no tenure). The academic staff who are not protected by tenure are primarily those who are in fixed term or temporary employment. In recent years, there has been an increase in the numbers of academics who are employed on non permanent conditions.

The first appointment to an academic position at an Irish university usually is at the level of lecturer. Lecturers need a PhD degree and preferably publications of high quality. Permanent positions of lecturer start with a probationary period of 12 months. At the end of this period, the promotion committee (invariably made up of senior officers of the university together with four elected academic staff representatives) decides on whether to award tenure or extend the probation period. A positive evaluation requires satisfactory performance of lecturing and other duties, evidence of interest in the pursuit of research and scholarship, and contribution and interest in the departmental development. Upon completion of satisfactory probation, the lecturer is granted tenure

Nowadays lectureships are often temporary - one, three or five years. Many new temporary jobs of one year have emerged because of government funding of temporary positions through the Programme for Research in Third Level Institutions (PRTLI), Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) and the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences (IRCHSS): they award funding which includes money to pay for replacement lecturers.

In February 2007, the HIGH COURT in Dublin, Ireland adjudicated on a case involving the interpretation of academic tenure and in particular, Article 5.1. of a controversial Statute of one of its seven Universities, Dublin City University (DCU). The DCU Statute 3 declared

“The tenure of officers of the university shall be such tenure as is conferred on each such officer in his or her individual contract with the university”.

As all DCU contracts of employment are legally constructed to allow the University to unilaterally terminate any contract by the giving of three months notice without cause or reason, the outgoing President of the University, Ferdinand Von Prondzynski, (an academic and employment lawyer by training) believed he could overcome the legal requirements of Universities Act, 1997 Section 25 (6) to "provide for academic tenure" by crafting this wording to stand up to legal scrutiny.

In the case, the Court addressed the question of the meaning of the word “tenure” as used in s. 25(6) of the University Act, 1997. The judge declared that the term as used must go further than a mere specification of the terms of employment. As pointed out a university already has (under subs. (3)) an entitlement to fix the terms and conditions of all employees (including officers). If the obligation to provide for tenure merely meant, as argued by DCU, an obligation to provide for the terms and conditions of employment so far as the length of that employment was concerned, then it would be a redundant obligation as that obligation is already covered by subs. (3). He concluded that the Oireachtas (Irish Parliament) must have used the term “tenure” to mean something more than simply delineating terms and conditions as to the length of employment.

He was also satisfied that the term “tenure” brings with it an obligation to give a greater degree of permanency to the status of officers of a university, than would be the case in circumstances where, as a matter of contract, such officers could have their contract terminated on three months notice. He was also satisfied that the purported specification of tenure by a University Statute by reference to contracts of employment which, on the facts, provide for termination on three months notice, was an invalid exercise of the undoubted entitlement of the university to specify tenure.

The President of DCU appealed the judgement and the Case is now heading to the Supreme Court in Ireland for a further definitive ruling. The outcome of the Supreme Court hearing will have major implications for academic staff and academic tenure in all Irish universities but a hearing and judgment will take some time.

Journals under Threat : A Joint Response from HSTM Editors

2008-07-21T02:35:00.000-07:00

We live in an age of metrics. All around us, things are being standardized, quantified, measured. Scholars concerned with the work of science and technology must regard this as a fascinating and crucial practical, cultural and intellectual phenomenon. Analysis of the roots and meaning of metrics and metrology has been a preoccupation of much of the best work in our field for the past quarter century at least. As practitioners of the interconnected disciplines that make up the field of science studies we understand how significant, contingent and uncertain can be the process of rendering nature and society in grades, classes and numbers. We now confront a situation in which our own research work is being subjected to putatively precise accountancy by arbitrary and unaccountable agencies. Some may already be aware of the proposed European Reference Index for the Humanities (ERIH), an initiative originating with the European Science Foundation. The ERIH is an attempt to grade journals in the humanities – including “history and philosophy of science”. The initiative proposes a league table of academic journals, with premier, second and third divisions. According to the European Science Foundation, ERIH “aims initially to identify, and gain more visibility for, top-quality European Humanities research published in academic journals in, potentially, all European languages”. It is hoped “that ERIH will form the backbone of a fully-fledged research information system for the Humanities”. What is meant, however, is that ERIH will provide funding bodies and other agencies in Europe and elsewhere with an allegedly exact measure of research quality. In short, if research is published in a premier league journal it will be recognized as first rate ; if it appears somewhere in the lower divisions, it will be rated (and not funded) accordingly.

This initiative is entirely defective in conception and execution. Consider the major issues of accountability and transparency. The process of producing the graded list of journals in science studies was overseen by a committee of four (the membership is currently listed at http://www.esf.org/research-areas/humanities/research-infrastructures-including-erih/erih-governance-and-panels/erih-expert-panels.html). This committee cannot be considered representative. It was not selected in consultation with any of the various disciplinary organizations that currently represent our field such as BSHS, HSS, PSA, SHoT or SSSS. Only in June 2008 were journal editors belatedly informed of the process and its relevant criteria or asked to provide any information regarding their publications. No indication has been given of the means through which the list was compiled ; nor how it might be maintained in the future.

The ERIH depends on a fundamental misunderstanding of conduct and publication of research in our field, and in the humanities in general. Journals’ quality cannot be separated from their contents and their review processes. Great research may be published anywhere and in any language. Truly ground-breaking work may be more likely to appear from marginal, dissident or unexpected sources, rather than from a well-established and entrenched mainstream. Our journals are various, heterogeneous and distinct. Some are aimed at a broad, general and international readership, others are more specialized in their content and implied audience. Their scope and readership say nothing about the quality of their intellectual content. The ERIH, on the other hand, confuses internationality with quality in a way that is particularly prejudicial to specialist and non-English language journals. In a recent report, the British Academy, with judicious understatement, concludes that “the European Reference Index for the Humanities as presently conceived does not represent a reliable way in which metrics of peer-reviewed publications can be constructed.” Such exercises as ERIH can become self-fulfilling prophecies. If such measures as ERIH are adopted as metrics by funding and other agencies, then many in our field will conclude that they have little choice other than to limit their publications to journals in the premier division. We will sustain fewer journals, much less diversity and impoverish our discipline.

Along with many others in our field, this Journal has concluded that we want no part of this illegitimate and misguided exercise. This joint Editorial is being published in journals across the fields of history of science and science studies as an expression of our collective dissent and our refusal to allow our field to be managed and appraised in this fashion. We have asked the compilers of the ERIH to remove our journals’ titles from their lists.

Neil Barton (Transactions of the Newcomen Society)
Robert Fox (Notes & Records of the Royal Society)
Michael Hoskin (Journal for the History of Astronomy)
Nick Jardine (Studies in History and Philosophy of Science)
Trevor Levere (Annals of Science)
Bernie Lightman (Isis)
Michael Lynch (Social Studies of Science)
Peter Morris (Ambix)
Iwan Rhys Morus (History of Science)
Simon Schaffer (British Journal for the History of Science)

[editorial note: the protest can be read on this site: http://www.sauvonsluniversite.com/spip.php?article591 (as of July 16, 2008)]

Students around the world are struggling

2008-07-11T02:08:00.000-07:00

Students around the world are struggling against neoliberal reforms and the privatisation of education right now.

In 2007 alone students in over 30 countries staged partly massive protests against exploding tuition fees and turning of universities into business and corporate entities.
Check out this list of protests:
fading-hope.blog-city.com/international_student_protests_2007.htm

A truly democratic society needs emancipated citizens. And for that we need emancipating - instead of privatised and commercialised - education!
The following Group is for Free and Emancipating education worldwide. Join the “International Students Movement for Free and Emancipating Education”:
www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=24722765003

If we unite in our struggle against the commercialisation of education, then we stand a chance!

Demos debate: Is public science a public good?

2008-04-07T12:41:00.000-07:00

Is public science a public good? - A debate on the future of university
science

Thursday, 15th May 2008, 4pm- 6pm

Portcullis House, London, SW1A 2LW

Panellists:

* Philip Moriarty, Professor of Physics, University of Nottingham
* Ben Goldacre, writer of the Guardian's Bad Science column
* Terence Kealey, Vice Chancellor, University of Buckingham
* John Pethica, Chief Scientist, National Physical Laboratory
* Phil Willis MP, Chair, Innovation, Universities and Skills Select Committee
* Ian Gibson MP, Member, Innovation, Universities and Skills Select Committee
* Jack Stilgoe, Demos

Should we be worried about companies funding university science? Does it
boost innovation or poison science and blacken our ivory towers? Should
science aim to change the world or fuel the economy? Join us for a
debate on the future of science in universities.

This event is hosted by Ian Gibson MP and Phil Willis MP, with the
support of the Institute of Physics.

Spaces are limited. RSVP to science [at] demos.co.uk

Demos
Building everyday democracy
www.demos.co.uk
to subscribe to free email updates:
www.demos.co.uk/emailupdates
weblog:
www.demosgreenhouse.co.uk

Call for Papers: Universities and Corporatization

2008-04-07T09:24:00.000-07:00

New Proposals: Journal of Marxism and Interdisciplinary Inquiry
http://newproposals.blogspot.com/
http://www.newproposals.ca

Call for Papers for Volume 2, Issue 1.

The Editorial Collective invites submissions for Volume 2 of New Proposals.
We encourage the submission of papers that take a politically engaged
stance. We are interested in full length articles (3,000 to 5,000 words) as
well as shorter commentaries (up to 2,500 words).

Papers should be no more than 3,000 - 5,000 words. References and citations
are to be kept to the minimum required to advance your argument. Articles
can be based in original research, synthetic reviews, or theoretical
engagements. We look forward to -in fact expect- a diversity of
perspectives and approaches that, while they may disagree on the
particulars, they will share with the Editorial Collective a commitment to
an engaged scholarship that prioritizes social justice.

New Proposals is a transnational peer-reviewed journal hosted at The
University of British Columbia in collaboration with the UBC Library
Journal Project.

Call For Papers, Volume 2, Issue 2 (Fall 2008)

Universities and Corporatization

What is the role of the university and the meaning of education at the
beginning of the twenty first century? How are corporate money, influence
and ideology shaping the face of the university? How do crushing debt loads
constrain student choices and shape the kind of education they seek and
receive?

Over the past few decades, people in many countries have experienced a
steady corporatization of their universities. University administrations
are increasingly structured on a corporate model and academic success is
defined by profit. For this upcoming special issue of New Proposals, we are
interested in articles and commentaries that analyze this situation in
different countries and regions. We welcome contributions that ask the
following kinds of questions: How is the privatization of the university
expressed and experienced in diverse settings? How do ‘audit culture’
governance systems exacerbate bureaucracy and influence the allocation of
resources? Has the debate about this issue been framed differently in the
case of public versus private universities? To what extent have faculty,
staff, and student unions and organizations intervened? How have public
intellectuals responded to this issue in different countries in the past
and present? Have various countries and different systems of education been
more or less successful in resisting this corporate model?

For this special issue, we welcome shorter commentaries (up to 2,500 words)
as well as full length articles. In particular, we are interested in essays
that develop a comparative perspective.
________________________________________________________________________
New Proposals: Journal of Marxism and Interdisciplinary Inquiry
http://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/newproposals

Freedom of inquiry

2008-04-06T11:46:00.000-07:00

University World News this week introduces a new fortnightly column reporting on how academics in countries around the world endure attacks on their freedom to conduct research, to speak out publicly on political and social issues, and to teach students through their own example how to become independent-minded.

The articles can be found on www.universityworldnews.com

The Perils, Rewards and Delusions of Campus Capitalism

2008-03-14T03:26:00.000-07:00

From a review of:
Science for Sale: The Perils, Rewards and Delusions of Campus Capitalism
by Daniel S. Greenberg
University of Chicago Press

reviewed by: Michael M. Crow
“Daniel Greenberg is widely considered the premier journalist of science policy, having written extensively on the subject over the course of its 60-year evolution in the United States. Science for Sale is his latest offering. It provides an intriguing, if idealistic, review of the issues surrounding the funding of science in the twenty-first century. Greenberg posits that science was once, and should be again, driven by the pure curiosity of scientists and not by motives influenced by the stress of external funding and the negative forces of capitalism. Unfortunately, science past did not really exist in the way he spends so much time describing in the book.
Greenberg’s idyllic views — in particular that the academic scientist and the university are best motivated by curiosity alone — are interesting. But they run counter to history, to how organizations operate and, perhaps most importantly, to the understanding that ‘the university’ itself is an idea, not an ideal or an ideology.” (...)

Comment to the review in:
NATURE, Vol 452, 13 March 2008
How academic corporatism can lead to dictatorship

SIR — Michael Crow’s Book Review of Daniel Greenberg’s Science for Sale (Nature 449, 405; 2007) calls for a response because it reflects a worsening philosophical divide in US academia between those who regard universities as analogous to corporations and think they should be run that way (mostly career administrators) and those who see universities as primarily intellectual enterprises governed by academic core values (mostly line faculty). Asserting that the university is an idea — not an ideal or an ideology — Crow, who is president of Arizona State University, plays down or ignores most of the dangerous consequences of campus capitalism.

Faculty members would generally hold that universities represent ideals as well as ideas. These are manifest in a value system that is among the first casualties of academic corporatism. Derived from political corporatism, academic corporatism is an administrative strategy that is antithetical to the spirit that academics hold dear — including openness, transparency, collegiality, meritocracy, rule-governed procedures, balanced curriculum, a level playing field for probationary faculty and participation by faculty in governance. Like its political counterpart, academic corporatism often results in dictatorships, with ideas originating only from the top and nothing going the other way. Academic assemblies, unions and senates are eviscerated, neutralized or eliminated altogether. Faculty members are disenfranchised. There is a chilling effect on free speech and the notion of an open marketplace for ideas. This can wreak havoc with a university’s curriculum, jeopardize its intellectual and educational missions and compromise its future. As former Harvard president Derek Bok said: “The end to which this process could lead is not a pleasant prospect to behold.”

G. A. Clark
Department of Anthropology, School of Human Evolution and Social Change, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona 85287-2402, USA

Threatening academic freedom at European University at St Petersburg

2008-03-02T13:52:00.000-08:00

"Part of the Putin government's long-term campaign to consolidate an increasingly tight system of authoritarian control, while maintaining some of the outward forms of representative democracy and constitutional government, has been a systematic and wide-ranging effort to shut down, suppress, or marginalize independent institutions, organizations, and associations - especially, though not exclusively, those with any western or other international ties." writes political sociologist Jeff Weintraub on his blog February 22. "So far, this campaign has largely spared the academic world. But that is no longer the case. The European University in Saint Petersburg has been the object of strident public attacks, and now it has been shut down on the basis of what looks to everyone like a transparently fraudulent pretext." (see his follow-up).

David Pescovitz made this comment of February 26: "Late last year, the European University at St. Petersburg in Russia launched a project to study how elections in Russia could be protected from rigging. That line of inquiry pissed off Russian President Vladimir Putin. Feeling the Kremlin's thumb, the university's academic council killed the project on January 31. Yet just two weeks later, the St. Petersburg court shut down the school as a "fire risk." Coincidence? Unlikely. And now today, it's come out that the university has lost its license to operate. The Rector of the school says that if it isn't granted a new license within a month, the institution will be closed for good. A dear friend of mine, who emigrated from Russia in the 1980s, comments that this whole situation "is becoming so reminiscent of the old Soviet Union.""

Toda you could read at EUSP's own website, "On February 22, the EUSP signed a contract with the “Institute of Economics and Finance” to provide the EUSP with the premises necessary to conduct education until July 1 of this year. The premises meet all requirements of the State Fire"; and a press release of February 27 stating "There are no teaching activities in the University due to the suspension of the license. "

Founded in 1994, the European University at St Petersburg is one of Russia's top universities, with close links to leading higher education institutions in the UK and US. Launched at the initiative of St Petersburg's liberal mayor Anatoly Sobchak, the graduate university is known for its progressive views and western-educated teaching staff. It currently has 120 Russian graduates and 10-15 western students studying for an MA in Russian studies. Uniquely, the university attracts students from Europe to study in Russia. Its aim is to integrate Russian scholarship with scholarship in Europe and America, at a time when Russian scholarship is becoming increasingly isolated from the west.

Knocked by the market mechanisms

2008-02-23T08:03:00.000-08:00

I almost laughed when Amazon knocked at my inbox with this ad:

We've noticed that customers who have purchased or rated "University, Inc.: The Corporate Corruption of American Higher Education" by Jennifer Washburn have also purchased "Strategic Financial Challenges: New Directions for Higher Education" by Lucie Lapovsky. For this reason, you might like to know that "Strategic Financial Challenges: New Directions for Higher Education" will be released on March 7, 2008. You can pre-order yours by following the link below.

Hey, I’m not interested in being strategic about financial challenges, I thought. Yet, I was tempted to take a look, but the Amazon page for that book didn’t reveal much. I went to another book by Lapovsky - Roles and Responsibilities of the Chief Financial Officer: New Directions for Higher Education - and read its description:

With demands for improved quality, increasing competition for state and federal funds, and the challenges of integrating technology into the curriculum, higher education faces greater economic uncertainties than ever before. The chief financial officer (CFO) of any higher education institution stands squarely in the middle of this maelstrom. This issue of New Directions for Higher Education offers CFOs proven strategies for balancing the operating and capital budgets, maximizing net enrollment revenues, containing costs, planning for the resource needs of technology, identifying and managing risks, and investing the endowment wisely. The contributors discuss how CFOs can build positive relationships with key players in the campus’s financial planning and budget, including admissions and financial aid staff, state legislatures, and the board investment committee.

Gosh, I’m happy not being a CFO! What kind of job is this? Let’s make a cause for crisis psychology for traumatised CFOs having hard times building “positive relationships with key players in the campus” when the faculty withdraw when market mechanisms threaten to knock-out academic expertise in university governance.

Knowledge as a public good implies Open-access

2008-02-22T12:51:00.000-08:00

In the post "Access and Taxes" to a new interesting blog Knowledge Rules, John Willinski, a Stanford professor of education, discusses open-access policy and its potential impact on the public use of knowledge. Willinski is concerned with both the public service question and current changes in scholarly communication when the universities are in a position to direct endowment earnings toward greatly increasing access to the very body of knowledge they produce:

"Access to this body of knowledge could mean anyone could add high-quality, easily accessible references to such public services as Wikipedia and MIT’s highly celebrated Open Course Ware with its course syllabus and instructional materials. It would alter the balance between sound and questionable information online, and serve, in this way, the larger world of interested scholars and dedicated amateurs, concerned parents and social activists, high school teachers and other professionals, policy-makers and, yes, lobbyists. Does free access to research and scholarship sound too far-fetched, [...] ?"

Rethinking the University after Bologna

2008-02-19T05:56:00.000-08:00

On December 12-13 2008 the University Centre Saint-Ignatius Antwerp (UCSIA) organizes a two-day international conference in Antwerp, Belgium:

Rethinking the university after Bologna:
new concepts and practices beyond tradition and the market.

The conference will address several issues. First it wants to examine why we should look for alternatives at all. To do that, it identifies problems not only just in the entrepreneurial model, but also in the ‘old’ or traditional model it replaces. Second it then wants to look for new ways of organizing, practicing and conceptualizing university life. It will look for alternatives in different directions: new practices inside the university as well as practices outside the institution and practices at the borders, which may inspire university institutions.
In the framework of this conference, UCSIA holds a general call for papers/workshops. We accept paper/workshop proposals on the following topics:
· What are the possible dysfunctions of both the traditional models and the entrepreneurial alternative of universities?
· Why should we look for alternative models of higher education and research?
· What are the side effects of the entrepreneurial university?
· What are the consequences of commercialising higher education?
· Are there trade offs between accountability and academic freedom?
· What are the alternatives for non-institutionalised universities?
· What is the future for new open source movements, open access systems and open educational resources?
· How promising are new organisational alternatives for higher education and academic research?

Proposals should be submitted in English the latest by April 15th 2008 to sara . mels @ ua . ac . be

More information (cfp, programme etc), see conference website:
http://www.ucsia.org/main.aspx?c=*UCSIA2&n=61857&ct=60273

Denmark – a spearhead of political research management

2008-02-10T02:54:00.000-08:00

A chain of legislation, minimized economy and chains of contractual obligations has provided the government with powerful tools by which to steer the Universities. On the top of it Danish politicians has legislated against freedom of research…
by Jørgen Øllgaard

The University is the foundation stone of democracy. Ideally, it is an institution wholly independent of political and economic interests, whose scholars strive to uncover scientific truths in accordance with their professional and objective convictions. Scholars should be free to voice criticism, to play the Devil’s Advocate, to speak out against those in power without risking their livelihoods.
None of this is the case in Denmark, the only country to have legislated against freedom of research. While the Danish University Law (§ 17, subsection 2) states that the choice of scientific method remains at the hands of the individual scholar, he or she is by no means necessarily sovereign in selecting the research topic, this being the case only where scholars have not been directed to carry out other research or perform contractual tasks. Moreover, research must be carried out within the research-strategic framework of the department. Line managers are thus able to freely dictate the kinds of research work scholars are to undertake. Clearly, this has little to do with freedom.
In practice, little ever surfaces about such dictates, mainly because scholars are reticent about voicing dissent in public for fear of jeopardising career opportunities. Basically, scholars simply tend to adjust after negotiation. Arguments along the lines of staff doing wise to stick to departmental research strategies defined at managerial level are usually quite effective. This is a form of discreet research management, fostered by strategies financially supported by government and implemented partly in the form of so-called ‘public authority tasks’ which universities now are obliged to carry out for government.
The so-called ’merger law’ of 2007 for Danish - the ‘Fusion-university law’ - is a remarkable demonstration of the managerial wishes of government. With an attention to detail quite unprecedented internationally, universities are now regulated harshly and have little freedom to manoeuvre. The legislation should not be seen in isolation from a whole series of initiatives: the merger law, developmental contracts, accrediting procedures and public authority tasks all are part of a chain of contractual obligations combining together to provide government with powerful tools by which to manage the scholarly activities of universities.
Denmark is in that way a European spearhead regarding political research management and a horror-scenario for others – and no doubt that there are research politicians and administrators in other countries that would like to copy the Danish model. In Europe, Danish politicians are those most likely to use university research as an instrument to support national industry and governmental bodies (and regarding the Barcelona & Lisbon objectives, which state that European universities need to improve innovation, business partnerships and so on in order to compete with the US and Asia). It is a small country with a well organized welfare-state, that allows politicians to steer research policy down to the last detail. In that way the Danish system has adapted some of the thinking of the east-communist 5-year-plans. The Danish politicians have the structure and the instruments to control university activities strategically with a hard hand – and do use it.

The 5 characteristics of the Danish system:

1. The universities’ system of government has been established by detailed legislation: Top-down control with supreme power in the hands of appointed managers and no contributory influence for faculty, who no longer have the power to elect department heads.
Seen in an international context, the recent Danish University Act is a remarkable piece of legislation in terms of the number of legal dictates, its facilitation of centralised management and the minimal degree of collegiate influence it accords to faculty. The Act introduced “politicised” executive boards with external majorities and external chairmen, as well as appointed vice-chancellors and faculty and department heads. The board is approved by itself; it appoints vice-chancellors, who appoints deans who appoint heads of department.
In Denmark, power is concentrated solely in the hands of the board and the vice-chancellor. The traditional supreme governing body, the Senate (konsistorium) has been abolished and replaced by what is termed an “Academic Council”, which has no power in any matter of significance. Whether or not economic or strategic priorities are to be put to the Council is purely a matter for the discretion of the vice-chancellor and heads of faculty, but the Council itself has no formal or practical influence. This kind of concentration of power is wholly particular to the Danish system, Academia being firmly established in other countries (apart from certain restrictions in the Netherlands and Canada) by way of ‘collegiate academic contributory influence’ involving genuine instruments of power, ‘collegiate organs’ being accorded decisive authority in decision-making processes.
At the same time, the index reveals that Danish academics have little or no influence on the appointment of department heads (this is also the case in Spain, Portugal and Romania).
(In comparison the Danish conditions are the worst in views of academic freedom and influence, if one uses UNESCO-criteria as Terence Karran's report "Academic Freedom in Europe: A Preliminary Comparative Analysis" (2007, in Higher Education Policy 20: 289–313 [pdf]).

2. Contract policy: Universities are legally obliged to enter into contract with the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Technology as regards establishing strategic objectives, success criteria, research priorities, study programmes, etc.
Denmark is clearly out on its own insofar as universities now are obliged by law to enter into ‘achievement contracts’ with government allowing state powers to directly impose upon universities strategic objectives, success criteria, research policies, study programmes, teaching courses and so on. This kind of politicisation has no parallel in the UK, Sweden or Norway (again, for some countries this is left unspecified).

3. After a fusion of Universities there are now 8 Universities altogether. In the same manoeuvre Government research institutes were merged with the universities as per January 1 2007, committing the universities to carry out ‘commissioned research’ tasks. The Minister is furthermore empowered to impose upon universities particular assignments such as the preparation of scientific reports or monitoring tasks concerning e.g. environment issues, food standards, etc.
Governmental bodies can impose upon universities government research tasks, so-called “public authority tasks”/commissioned research for government ministries and related institutions. Moreover, the Minister for Science, Technology and Innovation can direct universities to carry out commissions for government ministries in cases of ‘particular public importance’, for example relating to the environment, food, agriculture and fisheries and so on.
Danish universities have become ‘fusion universities’, forced to fusion with former Commissioned Research-bodies and so operate in fields sometimes ‘politicised’. The assimilation of government research to universities will likely result in the dismantling of free research principles, universities being directly or indirectly obliged to perform commissioned research for public authorities. Even if these kinds of ‘special assignments’ may be confined to a limited number of research units, this obviously does little to alter the fact that university faculty will have be called upon to carry them out, a fact which cannot but negatively affect free research. Traditionally, such work does not fall under the auspices of the independent university - Danish universities are losing their independence of government and the political system, leaving their definition as universities entirely in jeopardy.

4. Restricted freedom of research (choice) for the individual: The Academics has no freedom of choosing subject, but has freedom of ‘theory and method’. This limitation is sophisticated as academics can be directed by department heads to perform certain research activities, and therefore not be able to choose research field by themselves.
It is also limited in another way, as where the head has not instructed such imposition, the researcher choice are limited to “freely conduct scientific research within the bounds of the research-strategic framework laid out by the University”, the latter being specified in the Achievement Contract drawn up with the Ministry. This means that if a university has not mentioned a researchers specific field in its strategic framework, the head of department can prohibit activity in alternative fields.
(To be fair, the public has no knowledge of conflicts on the limitations until now; no researcher dares to make it public as whistleblowing will make your position to the head and leadership impossible. When you for instance hear about conflicts as a journalist, the involved researcher don’t want you to write about it).

5. All the other initiatives are supported by a large redistribution of research money. The governmental plan is to ‘invite to competition’, which in liberal terms means that there has to be more sound competition between institutions and researchers - and in political terms means that the politicians can delegate the research money, where they want them to go. The basic grants for the universities have (roughly) been frozen at the same level for years. The pools for free research without specific conditions or terms (under the Free Research Council) has declined. In the same time pools for strategic research or innovation has increased more than 50 percent the last 5 years. Collaboration with private partners or industry is rewarded. This means the politicians have selected specific research themes in science, medicine or technology. And this means that the researchers have to run for the money in specific fields – which is a sophisticated way of disciplining the scientific world.

Behind these moves lies a concerted strategy to turn Danish universities into national instruments of business and government.
It is a big mistake to minimalize these drastic reforms to a result of the evil hand of an ultra-rightwinged government (of Anders Fogh Rasmussen). What is paradoxical is that the most vociferous protests have come from executive board chairmen (typically former captains of industry). They were seemingly appointed under the impression that they were to be operating with certain degrees of freedom, whereas in actual fact the politicians have simply increased the political-administrative control. Protests from rank-and-file academics are few and far between: critics, who are typically anonymous, claim they have been “bullied into silence” (which make journalism on the subject very difficult, I can tell from personal experience).
In parliamentary terms what is interesting is that on all these drastic reform measures there is wide consensus in the Parliament (Folketinget), only the smaller leftwing parties having remained sceptical. The Social Democrats aggrees, they are busy trying to employ a soft-line, Blair-like profile. For the Social Democrats, research policy has always been about technology policy, technical innovation and creation of new (industrial) jobs as prime motors of economic growth. And they are highly cognisant of the fact that a high-profile ‘support academic freedom’ platform is hardly going to bring in the votes from the broad population.

(See international comparison: www.forskerforum.dk/downloads/ff-203.pdf)

Jørgen Øllgaard (joe@dm.dk) is a sociologist and journalist. He is editor of FORSKERforum (www.forskerforum.dk), the monthly magazine for employees at Danish Universities.

Resisting the University (Conference at University of British Columbia, March 3-7, 2008)

2008-02-04T16:06:00.000-08:00

Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada is hosting a Week of Resistance! We'll be discussing the privatization and commodification of education with an anti-military, anti-gentrification and direct-action bent! Join us if you're a student activist, a wanna-be student activist or simply intrigued by student activism and open to learn more about it! This conference is open to everyone as the issues explored are consequential for society at large.

email sds.ubc@gmail.com to get involved.

bookface group: http://ubc.facebook.com/event.php?eid=20667840135&ref=nf

SCHEDULEOF EVENTS:
MONDAY:
12-2 p.m. -- Opening Ceremony:
Keynote: DAVID NOBLE - “From Whining to Winning: Winning the Battle with the University—Dummy Corporations and all!”
David Noble is one of Canada’s most famous professor-activists. He’s currently a history professor at York University. He’s flying all the way out here to share his experiences fighting the Corporate University – and winning!

5-7 p.m. -- "Military-free UBC" panel
SDS Tacoma, UVIC anti-military recruiters and more discussing anti-military strategies on campus and what you can do about it!

TUESDAY:
12-2 p.m. -- "Labour and Corporatization of Campus" panel
The issue of rising sessesional instructors, the connection between labor and race and the CocaCola bastards on campus will be addressed all in one sitting!
Presenters: Petra Ganzenmueller (sessional instructor—CAUT); Larry Ngoma (CUPE and issues of racism); Stefanie Ratjen, AMS VP external elect (tuition fee increases); Steven Klein, SDS (history of Coca-cola contracts on campus).

More to Come!

WEDNESDAY:
12-2 p.m. -- "Unschooling Oppression" panel
Alternative models of education will be explored!
Presenters: Representatives from colour school, Indigenous free school, Windsor House, Bruce Baum.

5-7 p.m. --"Deconstructing ‘Progress’: Housing, Gentrification and Olympic Resistance" panel
No to the gentrification of the University/City!
Presenters: Gord Hill (No 2010 coalition), professor Chris Shaw (2010 Watch), Margaret Orlowski (Students for a Democratic Society), and Tom Malenfant (Anti-Poverty Committee)

THURSDAY:
12-2 p.m. – “Demystifying the Power Structure at UBC” panel + Lunch
Ever wondered what the fuck the AMS, BoG, Student Council, Resource Groups, GSS, AUS, and billions of other acronyms stand for? This is a student-directed workshop aimed at unmasking the power structure at UBC! Shit you actually need to know if you are a UBC student.
Lunch Will be Served!

5-7 p.m. -- “History of Activism at the University" panel
Come listen to UBC and SFU activists from the APEC period and before! Let’s integrate the older narratives with the new ones and make the interconnections. Awesome workshop for any current or wanna-be activist!

FRIDAY:
12-2 p.m. March in solidarity for International Women's day!

3-5 p.m. -- Closing Keynote: DENIS RANCOURT – “Anarchism in Academia Now!”
Radical professors are needed to indoctrinate progressive students. Anarchist professors are needed to make sanity. If they’re not trying to stop you, then you’re not making a difference.
Denis G. Rancourt is a physics professor, environmental researcher, activist, and anarchist teaching at the University of Toronto.
http://www.science.uottawa.ca/~dgr/

7-11pm -- RHIZOME CAFé (317 East Broadway)
Fundraiser, celebration of student art, music and resistance; entrance by donation

Full list of panel speakers and more activities on the way!

Canadian "Academostars"

2008-02-02T11:51:00.001-08:00

The Globe and Mail (Canada's national newspaper) ran a long feature in today's edition on the "academostars" in Canadian universities, titled "We Will Rock U". The article describes the rock star-like attention a few academics are garnering and the millions of dollars that Canadian universities are paying out to lure these academostars (and the profits they generate) to their campuses.

The corporate university atmosphere blends nicely with the entrepreneurial approach of most academostars, which is bad for higher education in public interest. Jim Turk of the Canadian Association of University teachers says in the article: “Increasingly, the federal government is acting in a manner consistent with the private-sector approach." Turk points to the 2,000 Canada Research Chairs endowed by Ottawa at a cost of $300-million a year to help universities arrest the brain drain of their top academics and attract big names to Canada from the rest of the world: “Only 20 per cent of the chairs are in the social sciences and humanities, even though half of our students study in those areas and half of our faculty teach there.”

Thomas Homer-Dixon, a political scientist who wrote about the academic star system in The Ingenuity Gap—and has now become a (reluctant?) academostar, having recently been poached from his post as George Ignatieff Chair of Peace and Conflict Studies at U of Toronto to help create Balsillie School of International Affairs at the U of Waterloo (drawing on a $33-million donation from BlackBerry pioneer James Balsillie)—believes the phenomenon is "a reflection of the Americanization of the Canadian academic world. "

But it's not really "Americanization" at all, even though "academostars" started making headlines in The New York Times way back in 1997 and The Minnesota Review famously devoted its 2001 volume to the topic. Rather, as Canadians are sometimes wont to do, they characterize a disagreeable phenomena into an American cultural export when, in fact, it is a global economic trend that just happens to have swept the US prior to moving north of the border.

[Another example of this confusion in education is the test-driven bureaucratic accountability movement in elementary and secondary schools, which transformed US schools into test prep factories as the result of neoliberal thinking applied to education policy. As the testing craze invades the Canada, many people see it as an "American" pheonomenon, rather than a global economic phenomenon. And it's important to note that this same accountability movement is creeping into North American colleges and universities.]

The problem, of course, is that the when academostars (or accountability movements) are misunderstood as mere cultural phenomenon rather than the outcome of the neoliberalism applied to the education sector, critical analyses are likely like to miss the mark.

The complete article from The Globe and Mail can be accessed here.

Academic Freedom Symposium at DePaul

2008-01-24T01:45:00.000-08:00

January 20, 2008
Media Contact: Daniel Klimek
T: (773) 817-1291 E: Dpk24g@gmail.com
Web: http://www.academicfreedomchicago.org

Academic Freedom Symposium at DePaul: PROMINENT SCHOLARS TO LECTURE at DEPAUL UNIVERSITY

1-2 February 2008
Lincoln Park Student Center - 2250 N. Sheffield Ave. Chicago, IL

CHICAGO, IL – CHICAGO, IL – In light of the controversial tenure denials of eminent Middle East scholar Norman G. Finkelstein and International Studies professor Mehrene Larudee earlier last year at DePaul University, prominent scholars from across the country are coming together for a two-day conference at DePaul, on February 1-2, to lecture about the threats facing academic freedom and Middle Eastern studies at universities. In addition to DePaul's cases, the efforts to silence scholars such as John Mearsheimer (University of Chicago) and Stephen Walt (Harvard University), and the tenure controversies of Nadia Abu El-Haj (Barnard College) and Joseph Massad (Columbia University) have all inspired the conference, which seeks to protect as well as preserve academic freedom through honest and informed debate.

The event is hosted by the DePaul Academic Freedom Committee, and co-sponsored by the DePaul University International Studies Program, the Peace Studies Program, the History Department, and the Department of Philosophy*
*DePaul University is not sponsoring this event, only the listed departments and programs

The Academic Freedom Committee is still accepting a call for papers to be submitted by professors or students for the two-day conference. For more information, please visit http://www.academicfreedomchicago.org

The event is to be held at the Lincoln Park Student Center 2250 N. Sheffield Ave., at DePaul University in Chicago, Illinois.

------------

Academic Freedom Syposum
Feb 1-2, 2008
DePaul University, 2250 N. Sheffield Ave., Chicago, IL

Event schedule:

Day 1 - FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 1, 6:00pm -9:00pm

Introduction with Keynote Speaker – 6:00 pm
Sara Roy, Harvard University political economist

The Role of the Activist Professor – 7:00 pm
Featuring Panelists:
- Bill Ayers, Professor, College of Education, University of Illinois – Chicago
- Ken Butigan, author, professor and peace activist
- Robert Jensen, Professor, School of Journalism, University of Texas
- Marcy Newman, Visiting Professor, Center for American Studies and Research, American University of Beirut; Fellow, Initiative for Middle East Policy Dialogue

Day 2 – SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 2, 11:00 am – 7:00 pm

Academic Freedom and the Way Forward – 11:00 am
Featuring Panelists:
- Mark Ellis, University Professor of Jewish Studies and Director of the Center for Jewish Studies at Baylor University
- Peter Kirstein, Professor, Department of History, Saint Xavier University
- Joel Kovel, Distinguished Professor, Department of Social Studies, Bard College

Paper Presentations – 2:00 pm
Documentary Film presented by
Landrum Bolling, Director, Mercy Corps

Academic Freedom and Middle East Studies – 5:00 pm
Featuring Panelists:
- As’ad AbuKhalil, Professor, Department of Politics and Public Administration, California State University
- Juan Cole, Professor, Department of History, University of Michigan
- Peter Novick, Professor (Emeritus), Department of History, University of Chicago

For more information, visit us at http://www.academicfreedomchicago.org

(video) All intellectuals are workers; and all workers are intellectuals

2008-01-21T21:17:00.000-08:00

Part 1 and Part 2 of my interview with Adolph Reed (poli sci, U Penn) and US Labor Party. Also see "Play PhD Casino" and "Faculty on Food Stamps."

Marc Bousquet
http://howtheuniversityworks.com
http://www.youtube.com/MarcBousquet

Fearmongering neoliberalism

2008-01-21T10:00:00.000-08:00

In an op-ed for today's Globe and Mail newspaper ("Canada's National Newspaper"), Indira Samarasekera, president of the University of Alberta, offers up an excellent example of the neoliberal propaganda aimed at opening up universities for exploitation by coporations.

Indeed, Samarasekera argues that the fate of not only universities, but of the national economy rides on public higher education resources being turned over to multinational corporations such as Intel, Exxon Mobil, Chevron, GlaxoSmithKline and BP.

The bargain is that these corporations invest "millions in basic and applied research in return for greater access to university laboratories and expertise," but Samarasekera studiously avoids any analysis of this equation.

Using the USA and India has examples of where "highly flexible, collaborative partnerships, have changed how postsecondary institutions and multinational conglomerates…work together," she argues that Canadians must follow the lead of these "most vibrant and diversified economies" to break down the barriers between industry and academe.

Samarasekera's key tactic is fear mongering about the Canadian economy, which she ironically admits is strong, but this fact seems not to affect her "logic":

But in today's ruthless global marketplace – where our competitors are leaping ahead of us through innovative policies and edgy entrepreneurial partnerships – we must quickly and strategically increase our competitiveness, productivity and innovation or risk being left behind.

Indeed, in spite of the strength of the Canadian economy, we are losing our competitive edge, failing to significantly improve productivity. Compared with our competitors, Canada has too few innovators, and too little entrepreneurial drive to bring our own ideas to market.

Samarasekera presents the fundamental (neoliberal) purpose of public research universities as: "Translating [university] research into commercially viable products" which is, of course, a "processes is best handled by expertise found in business."

Partnerships are the order of the day; The U.S., like India, is breaking down barriers between industry and academe. Now Canada must step up

INDIRA SAMARASEKERA

President and vice-chancellor of the University of Alberta

21 January 2008

The Globe and Mail

A15

English

UC at Berkeley and BP

2008-01-19T08:48:00.000-08:00

"In February 2007, BP (British Petroleum) announced plans with the University of California (UC) at Berkeley, in partnership with the University of Illinois and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, to lead the largest academic-industry research alliance in U.S. history."

"For a relatively small financial contribution, BP appropriates academic expertise from a leading public research institution, founded on 200 years of social support, to maximize its return on energy investments. These investments, in turn, are focused primarily on promoting the market for biofuel, the newest darling of those in power who stimulate change while maintaining "business as usual." (...) this case represents a new twist in the combination of debunked science, ecological imperialism, and the sophistry of "sustainable development.""

"The benefits to BP include access to leading scientists and laboratories, first rights for patent negotiations, and the rubber stamp of academia and science on its new projects. The benefit for the university is purely financial, though at least one third of the money goes to BP's own private projects on campus. The benefit for the public is hard to find. Politicians, university officials, and pro-market pundits laud this public-private partnership, while those critical of the "prostitution" of the university, including experts on biofuels' social and environmental impacts, are marginalized. This is not surprising given the undemocratic nature of the process whereby the details of the deal were negotiated without any public input."

Read the full report "Biofuels, BP-Berkeley, and the New Ecological Imperialism" by Hannah Holleman and Rebecca Clausen (backup here).

Special reports on academic freedom

2008-01-14T12:27:00.000-08:00

University World News (no. 0011 of January 13, 2008) has released a special issue on academic freedom around the world:

Academic freedom is under threat in many nations around the world. Yet, as the Canadian Association of University Teachers says, post-secondary educational institutions serve the common good of society by searching for and disseminating knowledge, truth and understanding – and by fostering independent thinking and expression among academic staff and students. “Robust democracies require no less. These ends cannot be achieved without academic freedom,” the union declares. In this special series of reports, our correspondents discuss the situation in their countries.

See http://www.universityworldnews.com/topic.php?topic=SpecialReports

- Read for instance Ard Jongsma's report from Denmark on the debate about Terence Karran's comparative study of academic freedom 23 European countries, and Karen MacGregor's telling article on "SOUTH AFRICA: Freedoms gained now being lost".

(video) In the US: Faculty on Food Stamps

2008-01-07T09:25:00.001-08:00

Despite wildly erroneous impressions worldwide and by the corporate news media to the contrary, the overwhelming majority of American faculty are neither well-paid nor secure in their positions. Graduate students and precarious faculty do 3/4 of the teaching, frequently for around US$15,ooo a year. In most disciplines, the majority of persons earning these wages are women. On the same campuses, however, there are plenty of persons earning well over US$1oo,ooo. These individuals are generally overwhelmingly men: administrators, union-busting lawyers, sports coaches, and faculty in male-dominated disciplines such as business and engineering.

See the 5-minute video "Faculty on Food Stamps" at http://howtheuniversityworks.com

Welcome to our new blog

2008-01-01T13:15:00.000-08:00

Fight Academic Capitalism!
- Welcome to the blog Universities as a public good

Academic capitalism is the involvement of universities - professors, teachers, faculty leaders - in market-like behaviors. This has become a key feature of higher education, not only in the United States and Europe but world-wide. These institutional practices are detrimental to academic freedom, free inquiry and a university system that serves the whole society as a public good.

This blog is made to contest and challenge the increasing dominance of the academic capitalist knowledge regime over a more classic public good knowledge regime that values knowledge as a public good to which citizenry has claims. Norms such as communalism, universality, free flow of knowledge and organized skepticism are associated with the public good model, and even though they as norms may never fully be realized, they govern behavior and help securing academic freedom.

We urge academic faculty and professionals to engage more deeply in shaping and controlling both academic work and the relationship between the institution and the marketplace. There is a growing need to “republicize” colleges and universities, that is, to reaffirm the university’s public purposes and financing. Help the universities to restore a more healthy balance between the two knowledge regimes.

Theoretical inspiration (at least so far - more to follow!) for this group:
Gary Rhoades and Sheila Slaughter: "Academic Capitalism in the New Economy: Challenges and Choices". American Academic 1 (1) - June 2004. (Can be downloaded here:
http://www.aft.org/pubs-reports/american_academic/issues/june04/Rhoades.qxp.pdf)

See also:

Terence Karran (2007): "Academic Freedom in Europe: A Preliminary Comparative Analysis". Higher Education Policy 20: 289–313. (abstract and html version; download pdf file).
a related global project: Edu-factory, www.edu-factory.org
a Danish science policy blog Forskningsfrihed?
The Corporate Corruption of Higher Education: part 1 (in the USA), part 2 (in UK), both from the Improbable Science blog.
The lists of literature for this blog.

If you like to be informed about major news, events, calls for papers, or important discussions on the blog, you can receive the blog's newsletter: Sign up or off by emailing vikingtegn@gmail.com

From the staff and students of The University of Paris VIII Vincennes-Saint Denis

2008-01-01T13:12:00.000-08:00

This post is forwarded from the edu-factory list and can also be seen at the Crafting Gentleness blog.
- - -
I'm passing this along from a friend at paris VIII involved in the
recent actions against the LRU there, and the subsequent effort to
reinvent the university taking place among the students and faculty...

for some more info (mostly in french) see
http://universiteparis8engreveactive.org/

-john

For seven weeks, a massive movement has been growing within the French
University system, uniting professors, students and staff in a struggle
against Sarkozy's new university reform law, the law concerning the
"Liberties and Responsabilities of the Universities" (LRU).

The University of Paris VIII Vincennes-Saint Denis, with the support
of University administration and personnel, has been on "active
strike", offering alternative classes and workshops open to all. Today
the movement is at a turning point, revealing the depth of the crisis.

In most of the French Universities, with the exception of our own due
to this administrative support, riot police are present on the
campuses and their buses line the surrounding streets. Aided by
private "security" guards, the riot police have entered the campuses
in order to violently break the strikes, occupations and picket lines.
Plainclothes police patrol the corridors. During the protests,
students have been targeted, beaten and arrested, sometimes resulting
in major injuries. Some of the University presidents are therefore
closing the campuses preventatively, while others call upon such
public or private "forces of order", and create a climate of
fear. Despite this situation we are confronted with a near-total media
blackout, as to the movement's size and its demands (the abrogation of
the law LRU), as well as the violent repression, due to the fact that
the dominant media are friendly with the government.

The law LRU was adopted by Parliament on August 10, 2007, in the
height of the summer vacation, without consulting the university
community. It attacks the foundations of the French University system
as a public institution with a scientific and cultural
mission. Although the system is arguably far from perfect, it has
remained an institution of higher learning that is accessible to all,
without entrance examinations or elevated tuition.

This law imposes the logic of the market onto the Universities, on
many levels. It forces them into competition with one another for
students, financing and prestige, thus turning them into enterprises
and creating a classist hierarchization between campuses. The few
democratic administrative structures that currently exist will
disappear, centralizing power in the hands of the president and a
board that will include representatives from private firms. Professors
and staff will be threatened with job insecurity, with the new
possibility of hiring adjuncts and temporary workers. Even the
academic departments are forced to compete with one another for
students and financing, allowing private interests to help determine
course content, and offering classes in function of the needs of the
current job market. The door is opened to elevated tuition. Students
thus become clients, and the university an enterprise. We believe that
a democratic society needs public universities whose mission it is to
develop the critical spirit of all citizens, and that access to the
university is a fundamental right for all. This is why our movement is
essential for the future of the University, in France and beyond.

We are therefore calling upon you to ask for your solidarity and
support, by inviting you to take part in our movement. At the
University of Paris VIII Vincennes-Saint Denis, a university with a
radical history and situated in the richly diverse North-eastern
suburbs of Paris, we have set up an "open university". We would like
to invite you to come and lead a workshop, consisting in giving a talk
and opening up a debate. Your work has inspired us and we have taken
it seriously; we therefore invite you to come and put it into practice
with us. Together we can discuss issues relating to the University
even beyond the abrogation of the LRU. Your particpation would be a
great help to our movement, which is in need of exterior support.

We thank you very much, and greatly hope to receive your positive
response.

Sincerely,

The collective of students, professors and staff of the University
Paris VIII Vincennes-Saint Denis

Rethinking the University

2008-01-01T03:22:00.001-08:00

Rethinking the University: Labor, Knowledge, Value
April 11-13, 2008
University of Minnesota
Deadline for Submissions: January 15, 2008

The university is in crisis. This crisis, evident in the everyday transformations of higher education, is made most visible during moments of labor struggle. Like universities across the world, the University of Minnesota has recently experienced an explosion of labor struggles, themselves symptomatic of the tendencies existing in this increasingly neo-liberal institution. Unfortunately, our struggles have been hampered by an intellectual and organizational lag, which has made it difficult for us to adequately respond to these crises. As a result, at key moments we have been unable to rethink fundamental assumptions about the university and, as a result, have fallen back on idealist notions of a university somehow removed from the world, have reproduced the language of an already existing "public university," and have sought comfort in legislative and institutional remedies.

It is because of the need to radically rethink our political strategy that we invite you to join us in the project of rethinking the University of Minnesota as well as the concept of "the university" itself. It is our belief that a militant struggle over higher education requires a militant rethinking of the languages, organizations, and foundational assumptions upon which the battle over higher education takes place. To this end, we want to collectively think about questions such as:

What is the role of the university in the production of value within contemporary capitalism? What is the relationship between academic labor and various other forms of labor at the university?
How can we reconsider the status of academic knowledge, research, and pedagogy in this context?
How can we remake universities as agents for changing this context?
What forms of university governance, collectives, and subjectivities would best facilitate projects for constituting the common world that we desire?
The purpose of this inquiry is not only to produce critique, but also to generate sites of resistance and viable alternatives to the corporate university.

As such, we invite diverse responses to these questions including collaborative works, workshop presentations, and art (e.g. photo-essays, performance art, and film/video pieces), as well as traditional essay presentations. In addition to presentations that engage the problem of the university in late capitalism more generally, we also invite presentations that treat the specific case of University of Minnesota. We hope to put into conversation workers of all types: university staff, artists, lecturers, union organizers, students, professors, and community activists, all of whom have a stake in shaping the future of the university.

Potential topics might include (but are not limited to):

radical pedagogy
corporate funding, branding
labor organizing in the university
students as consumers
intellectual property
immaterial labor
student and faculty activism
issues of access
class, gender, and race
casualization of labor
histories of the university

Please send questions and submissions (up to 500 word abstracts, workshop, or project proposals) to: morgan_adamson@yahoo.com

- forwarded from:
_______________________________________________
edufactory mailing list
edufactory@listcultures.org
http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/edufactory_listcultures.org

Book list

2000-01-15T07:02:00.000-08:00

[Preliminary list. Suggestions for more entries are welcome.]

John Nixon, 2008: Towards the Virtuous University: The moral bases of academic practice. New York & London: Routledge.
["A good university is invariably assumed to be one which is managerially effective in terms of its economic efficiency, and is judged in terms of entrepreneurialism, self-promotion and competitive innovation. This book argues that in the majority of institutions, these goals are being pursued to the exclusion of academic excellence and public service. It proposes that there is a marked lack of intellectual leadership at senior management level within HE institutions and that academic workers must assume responsibility for the moral purposefulness of their institutions. This will not be a retreat into the old values of an elitist 'ivory tower', but a rejection of the current deeply stratified university system which prematurely selects students for differentiated institutional streams."]

Henry Etzkowitz, 2007. MIT and the Rise of Entrepreneurial Science. London: Routledge.
[“a timely and authoritative book that analyses the transformation of the university's role in society as an expanded one involving economic and social development as well as teaching and research. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology invented the format for university-industry relations that has been copied all over America and latterly the rest of the world. This excellent book shows that the ground-breaking university-industry-government interactions have become one of the foundations of modern successful economies.”]

David B. Resnik, 2006: The Price of Truth. How money affects the norms of science. Oxford University Press.
["Unbridled pursuit of financial gain in science can undermine scientific norms, such as objectivity, honesty, openness, respect for research participants, and social responsibility. Resnik examines some of the important and difficult questions resulting from the financial and economic aspects of modern science. How does money affect scientific research? Have scientists become entrepreneurs bent on making money instead of investigators searching for the truth? How does the commercialization of research affect the public's perception of science? Can scientists prevent money from corrupting the research enterprise? What types of rules, polices, and guidelines should scientists adopt to prevent financial interests from adversely affecting research and the public's opinion of science? "]

Seth Shulman, 2006: Undermining Science. Suppression and Distortion in the Bush Administration. Berkeley: University of California Press.
[Shulman, an investigative journalist, shows how the Bush administration has systematically misled Americans on a wide range of scientific issues affecting public health, foreign policy, and the environment by ignoring, suppressing, manipulating, or even distorting scientific research. It is the first book to focus exclusively on how this issue has played out during the Presidency of George W. Bush and the first to comprehensively document his administration's abuses of science. It covers: * The Bush administration's abuse and misuse of science in areas including stem cell research, AIDS prevention, environmental protection, the Iraq war, the teaching of evolution, and global warming; * The administration's use of political litmus tests in selecting administrators for science-based agencies and in selecting scientists on federal advisory committees; * The dangerous consequences of the Bush administration's war on science for the caliber and integrity of the nation's scientific research. ]

Dan Agin, 2006: Junk Science. How politicians, corporations, and other hucksters betray us. New York: Thomas Dunne Books.
[on government, industry, and faith groups that twist science for their own gain. (...) Agin offers a response – a stinging condemnation of the egregious and constant warping of science for ideological gain. In this provocative, wide-ranging, and hard-hitting book, Agin argues from the center that we will pay a heavy price for the follies of people who consciously twist the public's understanding of the real world. (...) exposes the data faking, reality ignoring, fear mongering, and outright lying that contribute to intentionally manufactured public ignorance. Book sections: 'Buyer Beware' (genetically modified foods, aging, and tobacco companies)--'Medical Follies' (chiropractics, health care, talk therapy)--'Poison and Bombs in the Greenhouse' (pollution, warfare, global warming)--'Religion, Embryos, and Cloning'--'Genes, Behavior, and Race'.]

Chris Mooney, 2005. The Republikan War on Science. New York: Basic Books.
["Mooney uses interviews and old-fashioned document-digging to explain how, over two decades, right-wing politicians built institutions designed to discredit working scientists; how some energy companies have allied themselves with powerful Republicans (...) to block or reverse U.S. steps to curb global warming; and how the present administration defies expert consensus on climate change, on mercury pollution, even on how to read statistics. Mooney tracks Bush White House efforts to spread misinformation about stem cells; the work of religious right regulators (...) in restricting access to birth control; and the attempts of the Discovery Institute (and other think tanks linked to the Bush base) to fight the teaching of evolution. In the past five years, many formerly apolitical physicists, biologists and doctors have come to believe there is a "pattern" of science abuse under Bush, a push back against the methods of science itself. (...) Mooney's very readable, and understandably partisan, volume is the first to put the whole story, thoroughly documented, in one place." (Amazon)]

Jennifer Washburn, 2005: University, Inc.: The Corporate Corruption of American Higher Education. New York: Basic Books.
["Washburn's coup de grace is to show that even private industrial leaders and economic pragmatists like Alan Greenspan have begun to criticize the decline of traditional liberal arts education and the rise of the corporate university as economically and socially disastrous. Washburn offers a few modest and thoughtful prescriptions for saving higher education, but this book is more likely to be read for the illnesses it lucidly diagnoses." (from Amazon)]

Goger L. Geiger, 2004: Knowledge and Money: Research Universities and the Paradox of the Marketplace. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.
[“Market forces have profoundly affected the contemporary research university's fundamental tasks of creating and disseminating knowledge. They arguably have provided American universities access to greater wealth, better students, and stronger links with the economy. Yet they also have exaggerated inequalities, diminished the university's control over its own activities, and weakened the university's mission of serving the public. Incorporating twenty years of research and new data covering 99 research universities, Knowledge and Money explains this paradox by assessing how market forces have affected universities in four key spheres of activity: finance, undergraduate education, primary research, and participation in regional and national economic development. --The book begins by chronicling how universities have enlarged revenues by optimizing tuitions, and how they have managed these funds. It reveals why competition for the best students through selective undergraduate admissions has led to increased student consumerism and weakened university control over learning. The book also explains why research has become an increasingly autonomous activity within the university, expanding faster than class instruction or faculty resources. Finally, it shows how the linkage of research to economic development has engendered closer ties with industry and encouraged the commercialization of knowledge.”]

Sheila Slaughter & Gary Rhoades, 2004: Academic Capitalism and the New Economy. Markets, State, and Higher Education. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. ["higher education scholars Slaughter and Rhoades detail the aggressive engagement of U.S. higher education institutions in the knowledge-based economy and analyze the efforts of colleges and universities to develop, market, and sell research products, educational services, and consumer goods in the private marketplace. Slaughter and Rhoades track changes in policy and practice, revealing new social networks and circuits of knowledge creation and dissemination, as well as new organizational structures and expanded managerial capacity to link higher education institutions and markets. They depict an ascendant academic capitalist knowledge/learning regime expressed in faculty work, departmental activity, and administrative behavior. Clarifying the regime's internal contradictions, they note the public subsidies embedded in new revenue streams and the shift in emphasis from serving student customers to leveraging resources from them."]

Derek Bok, 2003. Universities in the Marketplace. The Commercialization of Higher Education. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
["Is everything in a university for sale if the price is right? In this book, one of America's leading educators cautions that the answer is all too often "yes." Taking the first comprehensive look at the growing commercialization of our academic institutions, Derek Bok probes the efforts on campus to profit financially not only from athletics but increasingly, from education and research as well. (...) He discusses the dangers posed by increased secrecy in corporate-funded research, for-profit Internet companies funded by venture capitalists, industry-subsidized educational programs for physicians, conflicts of interest in research on human subjects, and other questionable activities."]

Bill Readings, 1996. The University in Ruins. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. ["Readings situates his discussion of the modern university in the context of decades of debate over the role of education in the 20th century. He draws on Kantian ideals of the university as a unit dedicated to a single agenda to demonstrate how the modern university's pursuit of "excellence" is a meaningless search. In fact, the very idea of "excellence" is devoid of meaning, he argues, merely a rallying cry to unite the academic troops as bureaucratic administrations attempt to keep their universities financially sound. Once the university was the repository and defender of national culture, but now it is an institution whose decline coincides with the rise of postmodernism."]

Academic trade unions and professional associations

2000-01-02T06:04:00.000-08:00

List of trade unious for academics

Canada:

CAUT - Canadian Association of University Teachers / Association canadienne des professeures et professeurs d’université.
OCUFA - The Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations

Denmark:

DM - en fagforening for højtuddannede (The Danish Association of Masters and PhDs. DM is a traditional trade union as well as a professional association for people with a university degree).

Finland:

Finnish Union of University Professors (Professorernas yrkesmässiga förbindelselänk och arbetsmarknadsorganisation)

Norway:

Forskerforbundet (The Norwegian Association of Researchers (NAR) has close to 16 000 members, making it Norway's largest and leading trade and special interest organisation for employees in research, higher education and cultural heritage work)

Sweden:

SULF (Sveriges universitetslärarförbund: universitetslärarnas, forskarnas och doktorandernas fackliga och professionella organisation)

USA:

AAUP, The American Association of University Professors (AAUP's purpose is to advance academic freedom and shared governance, and to ensure higher education's contribution to the common good)

Please add more links: Send us a link to your own country's academic trade union or professional interest organization! Mail to universitypolitics [at] gmail.com

Bibliographies on specific topics

2000-01-01T07:52:00.000-08:00

Academic Freedom:

Terence Karran's comprehensive bibliography on academic freedom has been updated and extended. The new 2009 version, which has over 1000 entries, is freely downloadable as a pdf from: eprints.lincoln.ac.uk/1763/

Reports & other documents

2000-01-01T07:17:00.000-08:00

List:

Statement by IAU (International Association of Universities) from 1998 on Academic Freedom, University Autonomy and Social Responsibility, http://www.unesco.org/iau/p_statements/af_statement.html

The 1997 UNESCO Paper which contains the "Recommendation concerning the Status of Higher-Education Teaching Personnel" http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=13144&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html (can also be seen (in pdf) as part of the 1997 Resolutions volume here in our archive). — [Full reference: UNESCO (1997): Records of the General Conference, Twenty-ninth Session Paris, 21 October–12 November 1997, Volume 1 Resolutions, Austin, Paris: UNESCO, pp.26–36.]
Here is a Wikipedia article on the recommendation.

Articles

2000-01-01T07:13:00.000-08:00

Debate and commentary

Oxford Magazine No. 291 (Noughth Week Michaelmas Term 2009): papers on academic freedom by: Tim Horder, Robert Post, Ingrid Stage, Terence Karran, Roy and Harris, G.R. Evans.

Analyses, Science studies, Scholarship

AAUP Journal of Academic Freedom
Terence Karran (2007): "Academic Freedom in Europe: A Preliminary Comparative Analysis". Higher Education Policy 20: 289–313. (abstract and html version; pdf file).

Encyclopaedic

Wikipedia articles on: Academic Freedom; For-profit school; Private university; Public university; University.