Category: Higher Education

REPOST: UC, CSU faculty send open letter to Trump on climate change

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By Robert Sanders via Berkely News (January 31, 2017) Amid rumors that President Donald Trump will soon pull out of the Paris climate agreement that former President Barack Obama signed last year, more than 2,300 faculty from California universities have signed an open letter to the Trump administration calling for sustained action on climate change and urging the president to honor the country’s commitment to reducing greenhouse gas emissions as set forth in the agreement.[…] Read the full letter below: An Open Letter to President Donald Trump and His Administration We the undersigned are calling on you, in the most urgent terms Read More …

Responding to Professor Watch List

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In response to the Professor Watchlist site that has emerged in recent weeks many campuses across the nation are responding with tactics modeled after the Notre Dame response. Below is a letter faculty at the University of Michigan are encouraging others to consider using or adapting: Dear Professor Watchlist, We, the undersigned faculty at the University of Michigan, write to request that you place our names, all of them, on Professor Watchlist. We make this request because we note that you currently list on your site two of our colleagues, Professor Juan Cole and Professor Susan Douglas, whose work is Read More …

Repost: Why Our Universities Must Provide Sanctuary to Undocumented Immigrants

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by Alecia Richards | On November 16, students at more than 80 universities, colleges and high schools nationwide staged walk-outs, sit-ins and rallies urging their administrations to protect immigrants at risk of deportation by the incoming Donald Trump administration. The nationwide protests, which took place under the banner of the hashtag #SanctuaryCampus, called on universities to join the ranks of cities that limit their cooperation with the Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).  [Read full article]

CUNY Rising

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A CUNY Rising Town Hall at Brooklyn Borough Hall is scheduled for Tue. Nov 22, 6 pm. It’s in support of the CUNY student Bill of Rights, see below. The CUNY Rising Alliance includes dozens of community and labor groups listed on the flier below. What we’re seeking to do is name the crisis of chronic defunding, first of all, and give students, alumni, and faculty a platform to address its impact. From James Davis

Michael Berube’s letter to Penn State’s President

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Dear President Barron, I am writing in response to your recent letter regarding the outcome of the presidential election. I applaud your reminder that we are “All In,” affirming “the value of a diverse and inclusive university.” We are, indeed, all in. But I am alarmed by your characterization of the election’s outcome: “I know that many of you are disappointed and disheartened with the outcome, while others see this as an opportunity to strengthen our great nation.” No doubt many Trump voters see the election in this way, and as a member of the Penn State community, I will Read More …

Rustling Signs, Loud Noises, and Progressive Possibilities

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On Monday, September 26, 2011, I, along with at least 3 other folks from the RT board, and 500 other members of our union, PSC-CUNY, descended on the CUNY Board of Trustees meeting to demand that the university adequately fund health care for adjuncts, who do more than half of the teaching on CUNY campuses. About 100 of us made it into the meeting room, where we stood silently in the audience holding paper signs urging CUNY to “DO THE RIGHT THING.” Early in the meeting, as CUNY Chancellor Matthew Goldstein was droning on about CUNY’s participation in various economic Read More …

“These Heroic Happy Dead”

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Watching with rising nausea the endless patriotic and militaristic boosterism surrounding the 9/11 memorials the other week, I thought ahead to later in the semester when, in my general education Introduction to Literature course, I’d be teaching a thematic section on war. One poem I’ve used often is “’next to of course god america i,” by e.e.cummings. (You can find it at: http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/eecummings/313 .) The first thirteen lines of this 1926 poem consist of words uttered at a graveyard by a politician or military bigwig on Memorial Day or some other patriotic occasion. The last line reads: “He spoke. And Read More …

Sleeping While Screening

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Often when we write about our teaching, we discuss what works well in the classroom. Today, however, I want to reveal a consistent problem, a disappointment really, that I have encountered when using documentaries in my basic writing classes at Kingsborough Community College: Too often when I screen documentary films in class, my basic writers fall asleep or otherwise disengage from the viewing experience in some obvious manner. At first glance, this problem might seem pretty mundane. After all, my students lead tiring lives and probably do need a chance to rest. But I don’t want to let my students Read More …

“New” Business Models for Higher Education: What, Me Worry?

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So I’m listening to Marketplace Money (Sept. 8), and hear host Bob Moon lament that “the lousy economy is causing colleges to keep raising their prices or lowering their quality,” or both. A “vicious, unsustainable cycle–until now.” But here’s commentator Kim Clark with an “example of something done right.” The something right is Clarkson University’s adaptation of Milton Friedman’s old idea to let some poor students in without tuition, and collect a surcharge on their later earnings instead. Clarkson is admitting a few go-getters, free, “in return for a 10-percent share of their start-ups.” It’s investing in two, this year; Read More …

B. Traven’s “Assembly Line”: Teaching Exploitation

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Yesterday I returned to teaching after four years of retirement.  I am teaching two sections of Writing Through Literature and using the excellent anthology Literature and Society (editors Pamela Annas and Robert C. Rosen, both of the Radical Teacher collective) which groups the literary genres of poetry, drama, fiction and non-fiction under such themes as Money and Work, War and Peace, and Varieties of Protest, making it considerably easier to teach literature from a progressive left prospective. Not having taught this course in well over fifteen years, I am curious if or how the political understanding of my students may Read More …