mortiz055

As part of their negotiations with the university, UC librarians requested that the University formally acknowledge their claim to academic freedom .  UC-AFT reports that UC refused, indicating that " Academic freedom is not a good fit for your unit ."  They furthermore report that the university negotiators claimed that the right was tied to the instructor of record for faculty and for students when they were in the classroom. I have been told that the University has also indicated that they had conferred with both senate faculty and the AAUP about their position.  I haven't been able to find any indication that there was formal Academic Senate discussion of this issue and both CUCFA and CA-AAUP have explicitly rejected the University's position in a joint statement . The University negotiators' position is foolish at best and absurd at worst.  The AAUP and the Association of American Colleges and Universities (to which all UC campuses aside from UCSF belong) ha...

I yearn to return to my beloved topic of truth and fantasy in university budgeting.  But last week it was impossible to avoid the Ronell affair.  There's all sorts of good (and terrible) stuff out there.  The Daily Mail ?  Et tu New Zealand? ( photo credit ).  More links below--though I won't link to the trolling of Ronell's non-condemners, some of which sounds like it was written by a GRU cyberwarfare unit.   The Ronell case has become for me a case study of the interaction between perm-austerity in the academic humanities and graduate student mental health.  It questions the existence of graduate student academic freedom.  It also shows a systemic failure of faculty governance that, in spite of everybody's pessimism, needs to be fixed. For anyone just back from deep vacation (or not in the humanities): Avital Ronell is a prominent professor of German and Comparative Literature at NYU.  One of her former graduate students, Nimrod Re...

August 19, 2018 I can only speak for myself since the signatories of the letter addressed to the NYU administration regarding the sexual harassment charges brought against Avital Ronell are not a group with a single view, and different authors helped to craft the draft version of the letter that appeared online without our consent.  When the signatories learned that termination of employment for Ronell was under consideration by NYU, we were bewildered by the severity of this possible sanction.  We understood she was accused of conducting a “romantic friendship” and that her emails had been scrutinized for evidence of a sexual relationship.   Our aim was not to defend her actions – we did not have the case in hand – but to oppose the termination of her employment as a punishment. Such a punishment seemed unfair given the findings as we understood them.  In hindsight, those of us who sought to defend Ronell against termination surely ought to have bee...

This spring and summer, the Chronicle Review  has published a series of faculty essays that agonize over the fate of the university in general and of the humanities in particular.   In itself, this is a good thing.  The university does need to redefine its destiny, and yet the policy world is doing this without faculty voices.  But our work needs to be better.  Last week's entry is a case in point.  I mean a piece by Adam Daniel and Chad Weldon called  "The University Must Be Defended."  It's a retort to responses to the authors' initial essay at the end of July, "The University Run Amok!"    In that first piece the authors have an important core point: The university is what it is today, in part, because of the atrophy of other public institutions, which has left universities to fill a widening void. Higher education is in a precarious position; so too is the American republic. In order not just to save themselves but to fulfill the...