Tag: iuni

Striking News

On May 12, 2016, Professional Staff Congress (CUNY’s Faculty Union) voted to authorize a strike that has been anticipated for months. As most of us, if not all of us, are aware, CUNY faculty have been out of contract for five years and gone without pay raises in six years. This means that, though living costs in New York City have risen by 23%, professors are living with salary rates made for six years ago.

The strike, authorized by 92% of 10,000 faculty members, is designed to avoid the academic year, but the union’s president Barbara Bowen says it may extend into the fall.

The 2015-2016 school year has been a year of protests, and after a busy November, PSC decided to hold a strike-authorization vote, despite the fact that public-sector workers in New York are not legally allowed to strike. Now, several months later, there has been no talk of compromise and CUNY professors have finalized their decision to strike. It is unclear whether or not their off-season strike will qualify the union for a fine as of yet.

Though Cuomo has dropped his efforts to cut CUNY’s budget by a third, his lack of prioritizing CUNY employees is not only worrisome and disrespectful, it is harmful to the city and the state. CUNY has not been prioritized for some time, and this situation begs us to ask the question how much longer can the system be sustained without funding? How can a university run effectively when its best professors are considering jumping ship, or have already done so, for higher pay? If the city and state were not acknowledging the fact that CUNY’s lack of contracts are a problem before, I certainly hope they will now.

In short, this development does not shock me, but it does leave me with many questions. If CUNY faculty members are still on strike come the fall semester, what will this mean for CUNY’s students? What will it mean for professors unwilling to return to work before negotiations?

Ballesteros, Carlos. “CUNY Faculty Authorizes a Strike Vote.” The Nation, 30 November 2015. Web. 13 May 2016.

Brown, Sarah. “CUNY’s Faculty Union Votes to Authorize Strike.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 12 May 2016. Web. 13 May 2016.

Online Classes On the Line

In an Inside Higher Ed article titled “Equal Promises, Unequal Experiences,” author Carl Straumsheim brings the class action lawsuit now facing George Washington University to light. The article reveals that students who have taken online courses through GWU’s online degree program feel they have not received the quality of education promised them. Students claim that the materials posted were often cut off or blurry scans of textbooks and lecture slides without the commentary. They also say the faculty members assigned to advise students and teach through the online program were “consistently unresponsive.”

This article brings the discussions we have been having in our class to the front page. Are online programs working? Can they possibly be the future of higher education when they are having such a hard time becoming a part of the present? These classes have so much potential, yet from the experiences our own students have discussed to this article, online classes are falling short. The format seems to be the biggest issue. In both the article and our in-class discussions, students complain that course material is disconnected from knowledge. If the teaching methods of these courses improved beyond online texts and unresponsive professors, programs would likely have a much higher success rate.

The article reports that “a scheduling conference for the case is set for July 8.” It will be interesting to see what standards for online classes develop from court cases like this one.

Click’s Case

Communications Professor Melissa Click’s controversial case is making headlines once more after she has been fired from the University of Missouri, as reported in Inside Higher Ed and The Chronicle of Higher Education. In November of 2015, Click called for the forced removal of a student journalist from a protest on campus, violating several of the university’s faculty guidelines and calling into question the freedom of speech on campus. While these violations seem worthy of dismissal to many, whether or not Click’s firing is just is being called into question because of how the decision was made. Both articles describe the University of Missouri Board of Curators’ ruling as a violation of due process in the eyes of other faculty members.

If there was already an approved system in place for faculty review, why did the Board of Curators “ma[k]e one up as it went along,” in the words of Professor Ben Trachtenberg? Well, probably in part due to threats to reduce state budget, as reported by The Kansas City Star. The budget cut plan proposed by House Budget Chairman Tom Flanigan on February 23 of this year outlines $400,000 worth of salary cuts affecting Melissa Click, the chair of the communications department, and the dean of arts and science. An additional $7.6 million of proposed cuts would be aimed mostly at the president’s office and at (surprise, surprise) the Board of Curators. Two days after this plan was proposed, Melissa Click was fired.

As we have been discussing in class, every college today is essentially a business. When a traditional business’s financial backer doesn’t like what it sees, the backer threatens to pull its investment until a compromise can be made. That may be just what’s happening here in an astonishing game of “chicken,” but what does this say about the system of higher education as it stands? If these threats to funding are what caused, or even encouraged, the Board of Curators to make its final decision without following the university’s policy for the formal investigation of a professor, has the University bailed on its principles of defending a professor’s rights for the benefit of funding? Furthermore, now that Click has been fired, will Flanigan repeal his proposal? This seems unlikely to me, as Flanigan’s plan also included cuts of K-12 funds, but perhaps Click’s firing will serve to lessen the severity of the budget cuts. I will be interested to see what, if anything, comes of these recent developments in Missouri.