Jun 26 2009

The Unemployment ‘Depression and Anxiety Epidemic’ in the UK

Category: News,Online Publication — Bob Hanke @ 10:41 am

Why unemployment is no longer a political issue

By Brendan O’Neil (excerpted from Spiked, June 24, 2009)

This week I received an email from a group called ‘Redundancy Survival’, offering me the opportunity to buy an e-book that will help me cope if I am made redundant. The e-book is for ‘the average individual who is told their job no longer exists’ and who might be ‘in shock and suffering depression because of a lack of support’. The email quoted one worker who had been made redundant – ‘I didn’t know what to do at first and was like a rabbit in headlights’ – and encouraged the rest of us to try to avoid suffering a similar fate by coughing up some of our redundancy cash for its therapeutic e-book.

The email perfectly summed up today’s strange, muted response to the prospect of job losses and mass unemployment as a result of the recession. Unemployment in the UK rose to a 12-year high of 2.261million in April, and it is predicted to reach three million soon. The unemployment rate increased by 30 per cent in the first 12 months of the current downturn, compared with 22 per cent in the first year of recession in the 1990s and 29 per cent in the first year of the 1980s downturn (1). Yet there are no mass uprisings, no marches for jobs; instead there are atomised individuals apparently feeling like ‘rabbits in headlights’ and being offered advice on how to cope by the usual suspects of the therapy industry.

In the past, individuals thrown out of work or forced to take pay cuts might have had face-to-face meetings to organise some kind of resistance; today they receive advice on how to cope through that most individuated form of communication: the email. During earlier economic downturns, people were less interested in finding out how to ‘survive redundancy’ than in devising ways to overcome it – either by demanding their jobs back or marching for the right to work. Things have clearly changed, enormously. As Janet Street-Porter asked in typical shrieky fashion: ‘Why don’t we take to the streets over job losses?’ (2)

The truth is, unemployment is no longer a political issue. It is still a very severe problem for individuals and families, many of whom will have to find new ways to make ends meet and rein in their hopes and expectations. But it is no longer a politically galvanising issue, one that draws people together into a collective, conscious expression of anger. Having been perhaps the defining concerns of twentieth-century politics, today gainful employment, wage levels and living standards do not provoke political action or mass protest in anything like the same way. There are a number of reasons for this new, peculiar state of affairs.

To read the rest of this article, click here.


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Jun 20 2009

Strike of Education in Berlin

Category: News — Bob Hanke @ 12:26 pm

Bildungstreik 2009

by Claudia Bernardi & Anna Curcio (excerpted from Edufactory)

As a wave, several hundred of Berlin students blocked the city against the German ministers meeting today. The students have occupied first the Ministry of Finance, then the City Hall and the train station in Alexander Platz. The protest and the metropolis blockade are still going on.

On Wednesday, June 17th 260,000 kids, parents, students and researchers took to the streets of more than 70 Germany cities to protest the educational system, demanding more funding, better conditions of labour, a halt to the rise of university tuition fees, and a higher  quality of knowledge in a university where now students “learn anything”. In Berlin, a huge demonstration of 30,000 people started in Alexander Platz and arrived at Humboldt University: the place and symbol of the old model of the elite university has been invaded by students and symbolically covered by toilet paper.

These demonstrations are part of a week-long series of protests called BildungsStreik (strike of education), organized by universities and schools across Germany in the last months. “Selforganization to live and learn” and “Sabotage the factory of knowledge“ are some of the demands of students mobilized against the Bologna Process. Although it has failed, other universities are trying to apply Bologna Process in different part of the world, i.e. in US or South Asia. After the demonstration in Berlin, several direct actions took place in different parts of the city. A large group of students took possession again of the Villa BELL building inside Technische Universität, that the administrative bureaucracy removed from the students’ selfmanaging last year. This liberated space is now used to organize discussions about the future of mobilizations, free education and the process of hierarchization in the university.

Since Monday, several faculties of Freie Universität and Technische Universität have been occupied by students that are organizing selfmanaged activities and debates. Some of the students that are occupying the Faculty of Political Science of Technische Universität are part of the European anomalous wave, that all year long supported and spread the slogan “we won’t pay for your crisis”.

On Tuesday, June 16th students occupied the administrative buildings of Technische Universität, the university where a huge attack on the free spaces selfmanaged by students is taking place. Today other events are coming: the symbolic “bank robbery action“ in LosAngeles Platz and a meeting, with members of Edu-Factory Collective, about the crisis of the university and the connection of global struggles in the occupied spaces of Villa BELL Building.

On Friday, June 19 all the German ministers will meet in Berlin to commemorate the anniversary of Bologna process, but surely there ‘s nothing to celebrate!

More news in English from Deutsch Welle: Click DW-World.de

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May 14 2009

Recession Fallout and the New Salary Reinvestment Movement

Category: News — Bob Hanke @ 3:54 pm
Universities start to feel pinch
Schools cancel courses, scrap teaching positions, even disconnect phones to reduce costs
By Louise Brown (excerpted from the Toronto Star, May 14, 2009).

The recession has cost the University of Toronto law school two dream hires; professors whose job interviews the school cancelled abruptly last month because of a $2.5 million shortfall in its endowments.

What makes it worse to Dean Mayo Moran is that one already has been snapped up by a U.S. school.

“They were two great Canadians; one a specialist in international development and the other in health –” Moran stops herself before saying too much about who they were, because of confidentiality and just a little embarrassment.

“It doesn’t matter how spectacular they were – and they were terrific – but we couldn’t justify hiring them,” said Moran, who is scrambling to cut costs without touching the $2 million in aid so many students use to help pay the $20,000 tuition.

And so, for the first time, the world-renowned faculty will run a deficit the university will have to cover.

It seems even the Ivory Tower, hailed as a refuge from the storms of the marketplace, is having to batten the hatches in this economy.

At York University, where all departments have been told to chop 3.5 per cent from their budgets for each of the next three years, law Dean Patrick Monahan has postponed a search for two new professors; one a leading scholar in human rights, and another to fill a retirement.

“It’s not something we like to do, but if you have to make 3.5 per cent in cuts over the next three years, it’s very challenging,” said Monahan, noting he may have to chop the number of courses offered to upper-year students.

The recession also has prompted York to scrap small niche “majors” such as Russian Studies (which drew only two new students this year), cancel one of two Canadian studies programs and a small cultural studies stream of fine arts.

On a less lofty plane, York has cut office cleaning from every day to twice a week, is urging staff to curb BlackBerry use and may consider getting rid of professors’ clunky old land lines that get used so little in the era of email.

To read the rest of this story, click here.

NYU Applauds John Sexton’s $1 Salary

(excerpted from Take Back NYU!, May 13, 2009)

Our preemptive congratulations to New York University’s John Sexton on his expected announcement that the president will take a symbolic salary in the amount of $1 per year until the current fiscal crisis in academia ends. As the largest private university in the world, this move will send a strong signal to the NYU community, as well as colleges and universities around the country. NYU is committed to do everything in its power to remain a vital institution in the intellectual life of New York City. This sacrifice demonstrates the university’s outstanding commitment to research, learning, and preparing the next generation of scholars and leaders.

“If we are to maintain both the extraordinary academic momentum of recent years and the financial stability of our University, we will have to be particularly nimble and creative, ” writes Sexton. This announcement serves as proof of the creativity, innovative thinking, and commitment to learning that has made NYU famous throughout the world.

This is not merely a symbolic action, and the president’s $850,000 contribution is only the most visible in a groundswell of material support to be shown by administrators and stewards of the institution. In response, Provosts, Vice Presidents and Deans are likewise expected to unanimously announce temporary salaries of $22,000 per year. This amount is equivalent to what the university’s estimated cost of room, board and transportation in calculating stipends to teaching assistant in the New York City area. In order that this move does not disrupt the vital business of our university, these administrators will retain their subsidized housing in Manhattan and work-related expense accounts.

To read more about the salary reinvestment movement, click here.

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May 02 2009

May Day Special on Surviving the Meltdown

Category: News — Bob Hanke @ 10:18 am

This special is for you to broadcast on public transport. Spread the word and check out the whole project at Interference Radio.

Apr 27 2009

Report Back from U.S. Conference of the Network for Academic Renewal

Category: News — Bob Hanke @ 5:45 pm

After the Crash, Scholars Say, Higher Education Must Refocus on Its Public Mission
By David Glenn (excerpted from the Chronicle of Higher Education, April 17, 2009, Volume 55, Issue 32, Page A10)

The economic crisis weighed on the minds of the 200 scholars who gathered here this month for a national conference of the Network for Academic Renewal, a project of the Association of American Colleges and Universities. But even as the federal government announced that 660,000 more jobs had been lost in March, several of the speakers here saw — or perhaps grasped for — reasons for hope.

The recession, they said, might be a time for colleges to renew their implicit contract with the public, and for faculty members to reassert their standing as professionals.

Many of the assumptions of the dizzy boom years seem suddenly untenable,” said William M. Sullivan, a senior scholar at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, in a lecture. “In post-crash America, there will be more intense demands for scrutiny and accountability as to the effectiveness of academe at fulfilling its public mission.”

If colleges — and their faculty members — want to maintain their autonomy in the face of such scrutiny, Mr. Sullivan said, they should demonstrate that they are committed to education as a public good. The public must be persuaded, he said, that colleges are not insular and self-absorbed, and that diplomas and academic laboratories have not been reduced “to the status of commodities.”

A similar warning was sounded by Gary Rhoades, general secretary of the American Association of University Professors, during a plenary session.

Some academic institutions, Mr. Rhoades said, have abandoned their public missions as they have pursued tokens of status and wealth.

“The chasing of revenue, the chasing of students who can pay higher and higher tuition, the chasing of technology-transfer money, and the status seeking that comes from trying to recruit ‘better’ students — all of that has taken us away from the idea that education is a path for upward social mobility,” Mr. Rhoades said. “All of the evidence is that over the last 15 or 20 years, we have actually been increasing social stratification with what we’re doing in the academy.”

Mr. Sullivan, Mr. Rhoades, and several other speakers also called for a renewed idea of the professoriate as a profession. But the speakers offered a range of different ideas about what faculty professionalism actually requires.

The most austere vision came from Neil W. Hamilton, a professor at the University of Saint Thomas School of Law and director of its Thomas E. Holloran Center for Ethical Leadership in the Professions. Mr. Hamilton argued that the heart of professionalism is upholding norms and policing one’s peers. Just as law students are required to take courses in professional responsibility, Mr. Hamilton said, graduate students should be required to study research ethics.

Faculty members can justify and protect their autonomy, he said, only if they have a shared understanding of what counts as good and bad behavior.

“A professional cannot defend what he or she does not understand,” Mr. Hamilton said. He said he doubted that most of his colleagues could coherently defend tenure and faculty autonomy in a five-minute conversation with a skeptical trustee or state legislator. “The profession carries an ongoing burden,” he said, “to justify academic freedom, peer review, and shared governance.”

Oddly, in all this talk of academic ethics, faculty autonomy, and external interference, no one mentioned the issue of the moment: Ward Churchill’s successful lawsuit against the University of Colorado.)

In his lecture, Mr. Rhoades, too, called for new faculty members to be more deeply socialized into the ethos of the academy. But he suggested that it is the structure of the academic work force, and not any lack of ethics training, that is the most serious barrier to faculty professionalism.

Adjuncts, Mr. Rhoades said, are almost never given the time, training, and job security that would allow them to develop professional identities at a particular college. He called for a new commitment to full-time, tenure-track jobs.

“You cannot have a fully engaged faculty if less than a third of them are in secure-track positions,” he said. “Would you want a work force in the health-care field that was just, ‘Oh, you know what? You can have part-time positions.’?”

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Op-Ed of the Week:  End of the University as We Know it by Mark C. Taylor.

Blog Post of the Week:  More Drivel From the New York Times by Marc Bousquet.

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