By Alison Phipps. Laddism is at home in the callous environment of market-driven higher education, argues, Alison Phipps, who offers advice to universities on how to root it out. More...
19 octobre 2014
19 octobre 2014
UK science: look at the state we're in
By . Briefings published today by the Campaign for Science and Engineering highlight science policy issues that should be debated vigorously before next year’s election. More...
19 octobre 2014
Welsh minister amends bill over academic freedom fears
By . Welsh government ministers have offered reassurance over academic freedom as new powers for the country’s university funding council are debated. More...
18 octobre 2014
Changing minds
By Emily Hewett. Across the OECD an estimated 20% of the working-age population suffer from mental ill-health, and the social and economic impacts of this burden of illness are huge, according to the OECD’s recent publication Making Mental Health Count. Together, the direct and indirect costs of mental ill-health can exceed 4% of GDP across the OECD, driven by expenditure on medical needs and social care costs, as well as higher rates of unemployment and more absences from work. According to OECD’s Sick on the Job report, people with severe mental illness are 6 to 7 times more likely to be unemployed, while those with a mild-to-moderate illness are 2 to 3 times more likely to be unemployed. More...
18 octobre 2014
Noam Chomsky: Thinking like corporations is harming American universities
By Jeannie Rea (NTEU National Office). Australian universities are increasingly precarious places to work. Apart from constant restructures and job losses, four out of five new jobs in the last decade are contract or casual. Over 80% of teaching-only jobs are casual and over 80% of research-only jobs are fixed term contract.
NTEU is holding a National Conference on Insecure Work on 19 -20 November 2014 in Hobart. All NTEU branches will be sending delegates. Contact your branch for more information. You can also participate in the conference via live stream. Visit the conference website for details.
These are international trends. Here is an edited transcript of a speech by Noam Chomsky recently to a gathering of members and allies of the Adjunct Faculty Association of the United Steelworkers in Pittsburgh.
On hiring faculty off the tenure track
That’s part of the business model. It’s the same as hiring temps in industry or what they call “associates” at Walmart, employees that aren’t owed benefits. It’s a part of a corporate business model designed to reduce labor costs and to increase labor servility. When universities become corporatized, as has been happening quite systematically over the last generation as part of the general neoliberal assault on the population, their business model means that what matters is the bottom line.
The effective owners are the trustees (or the legislature, in the case of state universities), and they want to keep costs down and make sure that labor is docile and obedient. The way to do that is, essentially, temps. Just as the hiring of temps has gone way up in the neoliberal period, you’re getting the same phenomenon in the universities.
The idea is to divide society into two groups. One group is sometimes called the “plutonomy” (a term used by Citibank when they were advising their investors on where to invest their funds), the top sector of wealth, globally but concentrated mostly in places like the United States. The other group, the rest of the population, is a “precariat,” living a precarious existence.
Read more at http://www.alternet.org/education/chomsky-thinking-corporations-harming-american-universities. More...
16 octobre 2014
Managing Cause and Effect: How Committing to the Internet of Everything Can Help Institutions Scale
By Ian Temple - EvoLLLution. Then: We used to have alignment between funding, business and execution models. There was ample funding via the GI Bill and federal and state appropriations. While European nations were educating their aristocracy, America was educating its populous. We had a healthy middle class, our economy was the envy of others, America was on a roll and education played a central role. More...
15 octobre 2014
Mass. education leaders set sights on boosting college graduation rates
By Matt Rocheleau. A group of leading education officials and organizations in Massachusetts will unveil a new push Wednesday to improve local college graduation rates.
The College Success Campaign boasts nearly three dozen collaborators — a mix of executives, administrators, and teachers from public, private, and charter K-12 schools, colleges, businesses, nonprofits, and community organizations from across the state — and is seeking to recruit others. More...
15 octobre 2014
There Is No Such Thing As A Free College Education
By Christopher Denhart. Following Wednesday’s decision to overturn tuition and fees in Lower Saxony, Germany, all universities will now be tuition free. According to The Times, Europe, Germany will now be 100% free of charge to students, national and international, as political figures call tuition fees “socially unjust.” More...
15 octobre 2014
College completion is the best default aversion
By Clare McCann. Last month, the U.S. Department of Education released data showing the share of borrowers at each institution of higher education that defaulted on student loans within three years of entering repayment. Most of the press coverage has focused on the 21 schools that exceeded the default rate set by Congress (30 percent for three consecutive years or 40 percent in any one year), and will likely be cut off from federal financial aid. These schools are the very worst of the worst, failing the default rate test even after some controversial fiddling with the numbers by the department. More...
15 octobre 2014
The Reader Has No Clothes
By Barbara Fister. Chances are, you've heard the troubling news that the new version of Adobe Digital Editions is a privacy train wreck. Nate Hoffelder broke the news at The Digital Reader. The two key issues (apart from the fact that this software transmits an awful lot of data to the mothership about what exactly you are reading, including which pages you read and at what IP address) is that it hunts for all of the ebook files on your reading device and sends information about them to Adobe. Read more...
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