University of California is holding its annual survey of undergraduates. It surveys on several subjects, including "campus climate for diversity and inclusiveness". This is especially important for disabled undergrads to weigh in on, IMO. If there are freeform comment fields, make sure to fill them with anything you want them to know that they're NOT asking you about.
In an interview I just taped with Rashid Khalidi about #Columbia he said words to the effect of "this is the neoliberal dream of the university--no students, no professors, just administrators and cops on campus"
Fellow academic colleagues: please get involved in shared governance at your institution. I know, that kind of service takes up your time and is often thankless, but it is crucially important. And it is on the verge of extinction at many places. The rug is being pulled out from under us while we go about our teaching and research.
If we value our work in #HigherEd we have to do the work to make the institution a place that is fair, equitable, and just.
"police raids do not serve a university’s own interests in maintaining peace and civility on campus. The 1960s made that crystal clear. Bringing law enforcement to campus invariably intensifies protests, fuels acrimony, and creates a climate of distrust. Police involvement doesn’t dampen protests; it accelerates them, often with devastating consequences"
This excerpt from a DEI survey shows the attitude: In their view, it's not up to the university or the department to do the work to be as accessible as they can be by default (highest common denominator accessibility). It's up to the disabled person to take on the labor of fighting for our rights and they'll "accommodate" us if we take it up the chain (they don't).
Even the word "accommodation" betrays that they like inaccessibility to be the norm, from which they may occasionally deviate if you do the work, fill out the forms, and beg.
In which I propose an integrated #academic#conference team to be established at #universities, to make the process of organising and running academic conferences much easier - and reduce the workload on #academics - who don't usually have event management as a core skill.
'Dance Your Ph.D' music video 'Kangaroo Time' showcases differences, diversity - winner turned his research on #kangaroo personality into a winner #highered#australia
At Columbia University and elsewhere, law enforcement is displaying a growing militarization when it's sent in against protesters, according to a criminal justice historian
Students at my institution - the University of Toronto - have joined others across the continent in establishing an encampment on campus. Having been rebuffed by the administration in early April, the students continue to call "on the post-secondary institution to divest from assets that 'sustain Israeli apartheid, occupation and illegal settlement of Palestine.'"
My faculty association's response to the university's recent letter to students:
"The Administration appears to believe that with the stroke of a pen it can transform freedom of expression from a fundamental right, the protection of which is the sine qua non of the University, into a privilege that the Administration may confer or deny at its pleasure. This cannot stand."
The president of #Barnard College lost a faculty-wide vote of no confidence on Tuesday, as criticism mounts over the school’s response to a pro- #Palestine 🇵🇸 encampment
It is the first no confidence vote against a president in the college’s history.
Curious about #university#divestment movements, I poked around student newspaper archives today. While some discussion of South Africa took place at the U. of #Toronto earlier, 1983 looks like the moment when it took off. However, this relatively well-known case wasn't the first to garner attention at UofT and other Canadian universities (notably U. of Winnipeg). That honour seems to go to Noranda, a mining company heavily involved in Pinochet's Chile. #BDS#histodons 1/ https://archive.org/details/varsity
All of this makes me want to do more university history, especially to get a better handle on how institutions (especially these two - McGill and UofT) shifted from a more-or-less hand-to-mouth existence (where they were in the mid-19th century, the period in which I know their history best), to the endowment-toting behemoths they've become. I've got reading to do! 3/