For-Profit Expansion: So What?
AFT Responds to East-West University's Union-Busting
2010 AFT Convention Roundup
The Changing Academic Workplace
Working Woman Survey
For-Profit Expansion: So What?
It's no secret that for-profit universities have been growing over the past decade. But is it something we should spend a lot of time worrying about? The answer to that is "yes." Whether it be the crushing debt that graduates of for-profit institutions rack up (and the high default rate), the disproportionate percentage of Pell Grants going to for-profit colleges, or the outrageously high salaries of CEOs of educational businesses, the growth of for-profit higher education presents plenty of reasons for concern. At the bottom of it all is our commitment to an affordable public system of higher education. New regulations are in the process of being issued that would curtail the most egregious abuses by for-profit colleges, but the broader questions surrounding the maintenance of an accessible system of higher education remain outstanding. With the Senate now investigating some of the more egregiously abusive practices in which for-profits engage, it's time to seriously examine how the for-profit sector is affecting the whole of our higher education system.
AFT Responds to East-West University's Union-Busting
Members of the AFT have stood up to support their brothers and sisters at Chicago's East-West University. The university has taken unprecedented steps to prevent adjunct faculty from exercising their democratic right to form a union, refusing to reappoint adjuncts for summer courses and only agreeing to rehire them for the fall after one-on-one interviews. In response, at the 2010 AFT convention in Seattle, delegates took up a special order of business that condemned East-West University's union-busting tactics and called upon them to cease the intimidation of their employees and permit a fair union election to go forward. AFT vice president and chair of the Higher Education program and policy council Sandra Schroeder said, "It was imperative that the AFT stand in solidarity with these faculty members and send a clear message to this administration that these tactics must cease and these workers should have the right to elect a union."
Additionally, AFT president Randi Weingarten has entered the fray, sending a letter to East-West University Chancellor M. Wasiullah Khan and Provost Madhu Jain that called them out for their intimidation efforts. Weingarten wrote, "Dismissing these faculty members from future appointments and requiring each faculty member seeking re-employment to submit to a one-on-one interview with the Chancellor can be seen as nothing short of retribution for organizing a union and intimidation of individual faculty members in an effort to stop the union election." You can read the full text of the letter here.
In addition to the special order of business mentioned above, delegates to the 81st AFT convention had a full program on their plates when they arrived in Seattle. President Weingarten, in her keynote address, urged AFT members to "save public education … not as it is today, or as we knew it in the past … but as we know it ought to be."
Delegates also heard a rousing call to action from AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka, which you can watch here.
On the business front, delegates passed several resolutions that will help advance our work in higher education. The AFT affirmed its commitment to high-quality higher education with a resolution on "Advancing Student Success in Higher Education." Delegates also resolved to promote and work toward the solutions proposed in our recent report on faculty diversity, including "engag[ing] in activities that promote the hiring and retention of faculty from underrepresented groups on their campuses [by, for example,] utilizing the AFT Faculty and College Excellence (FACE) campaign to promote better faculty jobs on campus through political advocacy and collective bargaining." Finally, AFT members voted to "Maintain the Momentum" of the FACE campaign, explicitly drawing the link between the equitable treatment of all faculty and the quality of higher education.
The Changing Academic Workplace
There has been a spate of news recently discussing disturbing trends in higher education. A study by the Delta Cost Project chronicles the ongoing disinvestment in higher education, noting that "The share of spending going to pay for instruction has consistently declined when revenues decline, relative to growth in spending in academic and student support and administration. This erosion persists even when revenues rebound, meaning that over time there has been a gradual shift of resources away from instruction and towards general administrative and academic infrastructure."
As a result of this disinvestment, another alarming trend has arisen: the outsourcing of academic work, which is examined in a Policy Matters brief from the American Association of State Colleges and Universities.
The Chronicle of Higher Education also has been publishing some news about the more quotidian aspects of campus life. It recently highlighted 97 "Great Colleges to Work For" and published an article discussing Vancouver (British Columbia) Community College as a model for providing an equitable and secure working environment for adjunct faculty. The Chronicle also discussed how the workday for tenure-line faculty has changed, pointing out the crushing imperative to publish while at the same time having to keep up with service and teaching commitments. Finally, the Chronicle examined one of the more mundane aspects of life on campus: office space. While we can certainly commiserate on some faculty members' dungeonlike campus quarters, it's important to note that the majority of faculty members don't even have any offices to complain about.
Our friends at Working America are currently in the field with their "Ask a Working Woman" survey, trying to suss out what challenges women face in the labor market and in the workplace. You can help them paint a complete picture by adding your experiences as a woman in the academic workplace, which presents challenges that are just as daunting as in any other sector of our economy. Why not take a few minutes to complete the survey?
