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Faculty and staff at New Jersey colleges protest stalled contract talks

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  1. On April 25th and 26th, employees and students at New Jersey’s public colleges held rallies protesting the lack of progress between state negotiators and unions representing faculty and staff at the various institutions. Most of the campus unions have been without a contract since July 1, 2011.

    Why I put this post together

    This post provides a round-up of news about last week’s protests, with commentary for context based on my 24 years of experience as either an adjunct or full-time faculty member. Academia is actually my second career. Prior to joining the TCNJ faculty, I was a lay counselor and writer for a comprehensive cancer center, and then a public relations writer for AT&T. I have also been a freelance magazine reporter and blogger. Although I am an AFT member and a TCNJ employee, these comments are my own.

    I wanted to put this post together because I can remember how little I understood about what college faculty do before I became one. I completely understand why many people think we only work a few hours a week, for example, which couldn’t be farther from the truth. The hours in the classroom don’t count the time spent preparing for class, grading, advising students, writing recommendations, serving on committees, chairing departments or programs, advising student organizations, or networking on behalf our our students with employers and graduate schools. This is not a complaint – it’s an explanation.

    I’ll also acknowledge that the respective state institutions vary widely in our mission and focus, and I can only speak about the institution where I work. I’ve never worked at a community college, where I hear of colleagues teaching 5 courses a semester. (I did that one semester, and considering that all of my classes are writing-intensive, I don’t recommend it.)

    I’m a taxpayer too, and I’ve been a tuition-paying parent

    I know the sticker shock associated with college costs. I’m still paying off my part of the loans that put my kids through school. I also paid my own way through graduate school. I know what it’s like to do that under the kind of duress that many workers experience – an unemployed spouse, health crises, single parenthood. I also know what it’s like to have to take on extra jobs to make ends meet.
    I also understand why there’s skepticism about the value of a college education, especially with the state of the national economy and tales of college graduates scrambling for minimum-wage jobs. My colleagues and I spend a lot of our time outside the classroom boning up on the changes in our respective fields and reviewing our curriculum, advising practices and career development resources so that our students and alumni have the best chance possible in an increasingly competitive market. Sabbaticals and career development funds help us do that.

  2. How do sabbaticals and career development funds for faculty benefit students?

    Here’s an important quote from the first story in the list below that deserves comment: “[Gov. Chris] Christie has called for four-year salary freezes and an end to perks such as guaranteed sabbaticals, a staple of academic life, at the state’s nine nonresearch universities, which do not include Rutgers or the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, according to faculty union officials who have been involved in contract talks. You might wonder why “nonresearch” faculty would need sabbaticals.

    It’s important to understand that although colleges such as mine are not designated as research institutions, we are required to do research in order to stay current in our fields so that we can be effective mentors and teachers to students. It’s called the “teacher-scholar” model – the idea is that our scholarship feeds our teaching, and our undergraduates get to be involved in research. Here is a 2007 report from the American Association of Colleges and Universities that does a good job of explaining the value of the teacher-scholar model. (http://aacu.org/liberaleducation/le-fa07/le_fa07_perspectives2.cfm) One difference between the description of the teacher-scholar model in the report and its implementation at our institution is that our undergrads work closely with faculty across the campus – not just in the sciences.
    Doing scholarship requires not only that we publish, but that we join the learned societies in our field (often at our own expense), present at conferences (again, often at our own expense or with limited support from our departments, because there just isn’t enough money to go around.)

    We take on the responsibility of securing grant funding for much of that research, as well as for needed improvements to labs, equipment and curricula. Going after grants is a lot of work for both faculty and staff, and there is no guarantee of success, but it’s worthwhile. However, many funders look for signs of institutional commitment in considering funding proposals. Here is a sampling of funded proposals that TCNJ has garnered in recent years.  http://grants.intrasun.tcnj.edu/RecentlyFundedProposals.htm

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    New Jersey state college faculties protest pay, benefit proposals t.co/T9aGJjeR

     

    PhillyInquirerPhillyInquirer

    Sun, Apr 29 2012 16:10:16

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    RT @NJAFLCIO: Proud to join in solidarity with faculty, staff, @AFTNJ and students at TCNJ to rally for a fair contract youtube.com/watch?v=kSAF1u…

     

    AFTNJAFTNJ

    Fri, Apr 27 2012 11:15:23

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    #council_contract Photos: TCNJ Day of Action for a fair contract and higher ed funding: bit.ly/Iy18jv #labor #union

     

    AFTNJAFTNJ

    Fri, Apr 27 2012 20:17:36

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    #council_contract College of New Jersey professors rally to protest contract dispute: By David Kar… bit.ly/JKfu63 #labor #union

     

    AFTNJAFTNJ

    Fri, Apr 27 2012 10:31:34

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    #council_contract Photos: William Paterson University Day of Action: bit.ly/KaIVNq #labor #union

     

    AFTNJAFTNJ

    Fri, Apr 27 2012 18:45:23

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    RT @SpencerKlein18: Proud to stand with NJ teachers at TCNJ! RT @AFTNJ: NJ United Students Spencer Klein shows student solidarity at TCNJ twitter.com/AFTNJ/status/1…

     

    John W. Connelly jwconn

    Fri, Apr 27 2012 10:07:43

  9. A spirited debate on NJ.com, with supporters and critics of the union protestors weighing in

  10. In the end, it’s the students who matter

    Last week, our students presented their original research in our annual Celebration of Student Achievement. The research presentations ran the gamut, from a new software tool that will help journalists do a better job of extracting important information about the environment, to analyses of Medicare funding, to inventive applications of physical computing technologies and more. This is a TCNJ highlight reel from the 2009 Celebration that shows the kinds of things that can happen when faculty and students get to work closely together, appropriately supported by staff and with the right technology infrastructure.
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    TCNJ Celebration for Student Achievement

     

    tcnjvideo

    Sun, Apr 29 2012 17:17:23

  • There are others who can give you chapter and verse on the concessions that we’ve made over the years and the efforts that have gone into addressing shortfalls in funding for public higher education. We can also have a good discussion on the relative cost-benefit models for delivering higher-education through online or blended learning courses. College costs and accessibility are huge issues that need to be addressed in a mutually respectful and informed partnership. To participate in that partnership, taxpayers, bond investors and tuition payers have a right to know where their hard-earned college dollars are going. I hope this post helps provide a bit more of that needed transparency to help that process along. And with that, I must get back to grading. Thanks for your time.

    • Could journalists clear new Labor Department reporting roadblock by filing in html?

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    The Poynter Institute reports that the US Labor Department is imposing new rules on reporting on new employment data that could make it harder for reporters to file timely stories that are so critical to the financial markets. All credentialed news organizations will be forced to try to file their stories at the same time on department of labor computers only equipped with IE 9 and MS Word. In the past, the news organizations could bring their own equipment. The Labor Department says they are instituting the rules because in the past, some news organizations have violated their embargo – a requirement that the a news item be withheld until a certain time.

    First, with everyone trying to file their stories at the same time, you know there will be more network congestion than you’d find in the arteries of a quintuple-bypass candidate. Second, some news orgs are complaining that the Word docs will require substantial reformatting to work with their content management systems. According to the Poynter story, the DOL officials were committed to implementing the new rules, despite the journalists’ expressed concerns.

    Now I am wondering whether there would be an advantage for reporters who can insert the simple html formatting in the story and save the word document as plain text? If so, that’s another argument for why journalists need at least html and css. Nah, it can’t be that simple.

    (h/t to M. Edward Borasky, whose Computational and Data Journalism curation site led me to the Poynter.org story.)

    Leap-frogging the Matrix: A Collage Inspired by Black Thought 2.0

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    Note: This past weekend (April 6-7, 2012), I participated in Black Thought 2.0: New Media and the Future of Black Studies. The event was the brainchild of Duke University African American Studies professor Mark Anthony Neal and was held at the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University.

    The program consisted of a Friday evening keynote address in which sociologist S. Craig Watkins shared his research on young people’s engagement with media technologies and the effort to deploy those technologies to create more effective, culturally responsive learning environments inside and outside of school.  He called upon Black Studies departments to do more to make the physical and intellectual resources of the Academy available to those stuck on the wrong side of the digital divide. This was followed by four Saturday panels that contemplated, the history of African American engagement with the Internet, teaching and research in the digital age, internet activism, and the role of the black public intellectual in social media. The event was a dynamic interplay between face-to-face and virtual participants since it was live-streamed and live-tweeted.

    Videos of the conference are being edited and will be archived for public viewing at the Franklin Center’s YouTube channel.

    This is the first of what I suspect will be several personal ruminations on this event.

     

    Leap-frogging the Matrix

    Sojourner Truth sold the “shadow to support the substance.”

    Sojourner Truth sold these "cartes de visite" at public appearances, bearing the caption, "I see the shadow to support the substance."We store her shadow in clouds for sampling remixing reusing

    What is the essence that we download?

     

    I am not being plain. Let me tell you what I mean.

    Long ago I learned to seek truth like Diogenes

    Holding the tales of my griots aloft

    I headed for the agora that had not imagined me.

    Straining ears and eyes for places to connect

    And Terry said , “Try to remember, my dear, we’re only pilgrims here…”

     

     

     

     

    Live blog, NABJ blogging panel

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    I took these notes at the NABJ convention in Philadelphia in early August. Although I never got a chance to refine them, the notes will be useful for the Social Media class I will be teaching next semester.

    Topic: What makes a multimedia blog successful?
    Dan Farber -Great content. – the same things that make for great journalism

    Neal Scarborough -Before you worry about multimedia as a blogger, decide who you are as a blogger, where your audience is or what they want.

    Clay Cane – Find your style, your tone, and what you are passionate writing about. He started with a personal blog and was discovered by BET because he built a strong following. “It really is being your own brand, and selling yourself.”

    Sarah Bernard, Deputy Director of Digital Strategy, the White House: Use your blog to cover undeserved stories. Be consistent.

    Question: How do you drive traffic?

    Clay Cane collects email subscriptions, sends out blasts when he has big news. Example: he posted an interview with Janet Jackson to his site and sent out masse emails. Some major news sites picked it up and linked to him.

    Farber: learn about SEO

    Moderator Markette Smith: Shows Alexa.com. She is collecting questions via twitter at #nabjbloggingandbeyond. Question: can we attract advertising?

    Cane: He got started with Blogads.com. Notes that advertising market has changed.

    Scarborough: “Blogging has really opened up.” Bites that Richard Branson has a blog.

    Question: Publisher of a niche blog for lawyers wants to know how to make more money.

    Moderator Smith tries to go back to how to make money.

    More later: running out of power and this room is short on outlets.