The BFA board has agreed to sign on to the ReFund California pledge for public education, following a poll of the members that was overwhelmingly in favor. ReFund California is a coalition of public interest groups seeking to get Wall Street banks to pay for reinvesting in housing, public education, and other public services. The pledge on public education can be found here.
The Berkeley Academic Senate passes four resolutions rebuking Chancellor Birgeneau and the campus administration for poor management of student demonstrations that unleashed police on non-violent demonstrators. The Senate vote was overwhelming, 435-36, a mark of faculty outrage rarely seen on this campus. For reportage on the meeting and the vote, see: Daily Cal Contra Costa Times The Nation
The social movement known as Occupy Wall Street (OWS) is growing and raising issues of direct relevance to the faculty, students and staff of the University of California, including contracting opportunities and increasing debt loads for our students created by a system of privatized education and a refusal to provide high quality affordable public higher education. The Council of UC Faculty Associations, on behalf of all UC faculty, is making a petition supporting OWS available for UC faculty to sign. We urge you to read the petition and support it by clicking here. This petition was originally developed by faculty at Columbia and Barnard. For an excellent short article on this growing movement and how it relates to higher education, [...]
Eager to promote on-line education, the UC administration has lent itself $7 million for a pilot project that was supposed to be self-supporting! (Outside grants from the Gates Foundation did not come through). BFA’s Wendy Brown says why this is shameful, especially in a time of budget cuts. WBrown-UC Cybercampus Loan.4-18-11
Gov. Schwarzenegger nominated David Crane for the Board of Regents just before he left office in December 2010. The nomination is currently stalled in the Senate, opposed by Senator Leland Yee and others, but Governor Brown has yet to withdraw Crane and nominate a better candidate. Crane is outspoken opponent of public sector unions. He recently published an inflammatory editorial in the San Francisco Chronicle attacking collective bargaining rights for public employee unions, couching these rights as threats to public higher education and good governance. You can read and sign the petition here Please sign and distribute widely. Chris Rosen, co-Chair of BFA P.S. Senator Ted Lieu’s excellent rebuttal of David Crane Senator Ted W. Lieu (D-Torrance), Chair of the [...]
BFA board member Catherine Cole has prepared a sharp analysis of where we stand after a year of Operational Excellence — arguing that the point is not simply restructuring for efficiency, but being clear on the larger matter of what the university is and what it does. Operational Excellence “mid-semester evaluation”