mortiz055

There may be one benefit of Republican downgrades of the University of Wisconsin system in recent years: insight into the kind of public colleges that austerity and # faketenure will create.  At the system's Stevens Point campus, the administration has used an induced budget deficit to propose the closure of thirteen arts, humanities and social science departments,  whose savings are to fund the expansion or creation of majors that seem more directly connected to existing jobs. UW's modified tenure rules allow the firing of tenured faculty when their lines are needed for other higher priority programs , so faculty layoffs are likely as the main source of any budgetary savings.  The result is to be the conversion of the humanities into service units for vocational majors. This idea of the humanities as service providers of basic skills may sound strange to people acquainted with the riches of literary history, philosophy and multiple languages--or who assume that pol...

by Akos Rona-Tas, Professor of Sociology, UC San Diego Between 2013 and 2015, the University of California, has signed a series of contracts with the consumer credit agency Equifax . It has outsourced our employment verification to Equifax Workforce Solutions (TALX until 2012), a subsidiary of Equifax. UC employees in the past could receive an employment verification letter from their campus, most recently through their At-Your-Service Online (AYSO) site. Though this option is still available, employment verification (often requested for bank loans or by prospective employers) will soon be handled at all campuses through Equifax’s web site: The Work Number (TWN) . Currently, all but two University of California campuses participate in the outsourcing. UC Santa Cruz and UC Berkeley are supposed to join the other campuses in the near future. There are at least three reasons that this is cause for serious concern. The first has to do simply with data security . Recent security breache...