by P.D. Lesko

The University of Michigan’s Lecturer’s union, an affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), entered talks for the group’s fourth contract with on November 30, 2012. LEO, as the union is known, represents some 1,500 full-time and part-time non-tenured faculty who teach on all of the college’s campuses. Headed by behavioral sciences adjunct faculty member Bonnie Halloran since the union was formed in 2004, it is one of very few college faculty unions headed by a part-time faculty member. To be sure, there has been tension between the full-time lecturers, many of whom teach on the Ann Arbor campus, and the part-time lecturers, who are spread out among the various campuses, including Ann Arbor, Flint and Dearborn. The decision of union leaders to bargain a first contract in 2004 that called for larger pay increases and increased job security for the lowest paid of the union’s members was ground-breaking, and resulted in grumbling among U of M’s full-time lecturers.

According to a 2009 profile of Halloran: “In May 2006, AFT-Michigan awarded LEO the President’s Award for its activism and organizing work. AFT-Michigan President David Hecker dubbed LEO “a union mature beyond its years,” thanks to the group’s lightning-fast organizing effort, and effort that stretched across three campuses and gathered together 1200 temporary faculty. (To put Halloran’s work into perspective, the AFT-MFT local at nearby Eastern Michigan University (EMU) in Ypsilanti, Michigan, took a decade to organize, and was able to include only 110 full-time non-tenure track lecturers.”

It took Halloran and her bargaining committee six months to hammer out the union’s first contract. According to a piece about those negotiations that resulted in a 6-year agreement, “Some of the gains include the ability for lecturers who work under 80 percent of the semester to be omitted from the Conflict of Commitment Agreement, full health coverage throughout the summer months, and a three percent salary raise for the Dearborn and Flint campus faculty.”

In locals that represent full-time and part-time faculty, there can be serious conflicts of interest. For example, in Washington State, non-tenured faculty represented by a local that is jointly affiliated with the AFT and the National Education Association, recently petitioned the presidents of both organizations to take over their local on the grounds that the full-time faculty who control the union have neglected to represent the part-time faculty equally. This came on the heels of an April 2012 request by another Washington State adjunct faculty member who petitioned Dennis Van Roekel, the president of the NEA, to assume control of a different local union in that state—one where part-time faculty concerns were being ignored by union leaders.

The president of the state affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers in Washington State, Sandra Schroeder, a powerful figure in the national AFT office, as well, was recently discovered to have sent emails that showed her colluding to spread misinformation about her own adjunct faculty union members. The adjuncts in question had formed an independent faculty association to rival the AFT-NEA affiliate at their college (which only 10 percent of the part-timers had elected to join), and had organized an April 2012 teach-in to draw attention to the pay equity issues of non-tenured faculty—some of the very same pay equity issues faced by LEO and its 1,500 Michigan members.

On January 25, 2013, in what LEO officials described to members as “worst day ever” in negotiation, the administration team last proposed an “explicit general waiver” of benefits for the new LEO-UM collective bargaining agreement. According to the LEO website, “The waiver would remove any guarantee from the employee benefits detailed in the contract. Benefit plans — including those for health care, dental, retirement, life insurance, and disabilities — could be unilaterally changed by the University administration at any time with only 60 days notice to employees.”

On January 31, 2013, to draw attention to its own pay equity issues, University of Michigan lecturers participated in a Flash Mob in Mason Hall. Singing and dancing to the Aretha Franklin song, “Respect,” the union members asked for a contract and pay equity. Despite almost a decade of union representation, unionized parking lot attendants earn more per hour than some of the college’s part-time faculty, who are expected to hold graduate degrees, and unionized painters who work on the Ann Arbor campus earn higher salaries than the unionized lecturers.

You can view the lecturers’ Flash Mob performance below.

The day after the Flash Mob, university officials released this statement on their Human Resources website:

The University of Michigan and the Lecturers Employee Organization (LEO) opened negotiations on their fourth collective bargaining agreement on Nov. 30, 2012. The current agreement expires April 20, 2013.

The university recognizes the valuable contribution lecturers make to the university community and to the world-class education available to U-M students. A collaborative approach to bargaining has resulted in contracts that have demonstrated the value of lecturers to the university.

As the fourth contract is negotiated, U.S. universities face significant funding challenges. With tuition revenue now comprising the majority of the general fund at U-M, disciplined spending is increasingly important to the university’s goal of keeping tuition affordable. The university must be responsive to that challenge and intends to reach a negotiated agreement that serves the interests of the union, the faculty it represents and the academic enterprise of the university.
Negotiations Update

Latest Update: February 1, 2013

The University of Michigan and the Lecturers Employee Organization (LEO) opened negotiations on their collective bargaining agreement on Nov. 30, 2012. To date, the teams have had six regular bargaining sessions, scheduled for each Friday, and three small group sessions.

Currently, the open articles are salary, benefits plans, term of agreement, layoff, performance evaluation, and union security. The university has reached tentative agreements with the Union on:

Faculty support
Union rights
Professional development
Benefits eligibility

by Ernesto Van Dersar

John Wiley & Sons, one of the world’s largest textbook publishers, is continuing its efforts to crack down on BitTorrent piracy. The company has now named several people who allegedly shared Wiley titles online, and is demanding a jury trial against them. If these actually go ahead it will be the first time that BitTorrent-related evidence is tested in a US court.

Last fall, John Wiley and Sons became the first book publisher to go after BitTorrent users in the US.

By filing a mass-BitTorrent lawsuit the company followed mostly in the footsteps of several movie studios, who together have sued more than 250,000 people in the U.S. since early 2010. And the publisher didn’t stop at just one.

In recent months Wiley has filed more than a dozen mass BitTorrent lawsuits involving a few hundred John Doe defendants in total. The Does are all accused of sharing digital copies of titles including WordPress for Dummies, Hacking for Dummies and Day Trading for Dummies.

Wiley’s attorney William Dunnegan said previously that one of the main goals of the legal campaign is to obtain the personal details of the alleged infringers and offer them the opportunity to solve the matter through a settlement.

“Our intention is to stop the infringement and let individuals know that they are violating the law and depriving the creators of the works of rightful compensation. Our preference is to educate, settle, and prevent further infringement,” Wiley’s attorney William Dunnegan said.

However, this strategy doesn’t always work. While the courts and Internet providers have been cooperative in assisting Wiley to obtain the personal details of the alleged book pirates, a new filing suggest that some defendants are not taking the publisher’s settlement offer.

In one of Wiley’s cases four defendants have now been named in an amended complaint.

New York residents Jeff Ng, Ralph Mohr, Robert Carpenter and Xiaoshu Chen are no longer anonymous Does. Wiley is proceeding to call for a full jury trial against the quartet in which they will face accusations of copyright infringement and up to $150,000 in penalties for each offense.

Wiley’s attorney William Dunnegan declined to comment on the recent developments in these specific cases. “We are proceeding with these cases as a part of Wiley’s overall copyright enforcement and education program,” was the comment we got instead.

If one or more of the three cases indeed proceeds to a full trial it will be the first time that actual evidence against BitTorrent infringers is tested in court. This is relevant because the main piece of evidence the copyright holders have is an IP-address, which by itself doesn’t identify a person but merely a connection.

In a past RIAA court case experts described the evidence gathering techniques “as factually erroneous,” “unprofessional” and “borderline incompetent.” In addition, academics have shown that due to shoddy technique even a network printer can be accused of sharing copyrighted files on BitTorrent.

If the evidence is indeed tested in court, it should be a case to watch for sure.

That said, there’s also the chance that the lawyers are using the threat of a full trial by jury as a pressure tool to convince the defendants to settle. After all, the RIAA’s litigation campaign against individual file-sharers has shown that even when a jury awards hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages, lengthy trials cost more than they bring in.

First posted to Torrent Freak.

Governor Rick Snyder has repeatedly claimed he has no interest in starting a Right-To-Work war in Michigan. Whether he has been telling the truth may become very clear, very soon.

The Michigan House quickly approved SB 0971, legislation that bans the unionization of graduate student research assistants (GSRA) at public universities. There was no debate on readings of the bill or proposed amendments to it. In essence, SB 0971 was sped through the House without discussion.

SB 0971, sponsored by Senate Majority Leader Republican Randy Richardville, would make it clear that GSRAs are not public employees and not subject to collective bargaining rights. The bill is in direct response to a unionization effort at the University of Michigan (U-M).

Bonnie Halloran is the President of the University of Michigan lecturers’ faculty union, LEO, which represents about 1,400 full-time and part-time non-tenured faculty on the University of Michigan’s three campuses.

Halloran had this to say about the passage of SB 0971 by the Michigan House of Representatives:

This bill is a direct assault by Republican legislators on graduate student researchers’ right to form a union.

The passage of this bill is an egregious attack on collective bargaining rights in Michigan. It singled out one job classification for exclusion under PERA, the state labor law which oversees the rights of unionized workers.

Further, it opens the floodgates for the exclusion of other job classifications under PERA. Will part-time faculty now be excluded? Or Graduate Teaching Assistants? Or all public employees?

In early February 2012 311 University of Michigan tenure-track and tenured science faculty, collectively paid upwards of $45 million dollars per year, signed a letter of protest against the unionization of their research assistants.

The bill sped through the Senate and a House committee.

There was no discussion of the bill on the House floor on second or third reading today. The item was not initially on the agenda.

Democrat Vicki Barnett, who represents Farmington Hills, said she was not allowed to speak on her amendment to the bill, which was the same amendment she proposed in committee.

“It is surprising that one would squelch debate under those circumstances,” she said, citing the unexpected appearance of the bill on the agenda and it’s move from second to third reading in one session.

Majority Floor Leader Jim Stamas asked for a record roll call vote on immediate effect for the bill. That motion was passed for the day by a voice vote.

The bill now goes to the Senate for final approval. It is expected to be passed.

by P.D. Lesko

President Obama came to Ann Arbor to tell the country that federal aid to colleges should be tied to tuition costs. Federal aid to students would remain untouched, and a cranky Congress would have to pass the President’s proposed plan. The reactions were swift and in some cases revealed thinly veiled contempt—and this was just from the academics:

“Fuzzy math,” Illinois State University’s president called Obama’s proposal. At Washington, President Mike Young said Obama showed he did not understand how the budgets of public universities work.

“They really should know better,” Young said. “This really is political theater of the worst sort.”

Harsh words from University presidents about the speech President Obama delivered recently at the University of Michigan.

The academic crowd didn’t stop here.

“Focusing on the net price that colleges charge is focusing on a symptom of a very complex process,” said David Feldman, chairman of the economics department at the College of William and Mary and the co-author of Why Does College Cost So Much? “ It’s naïve to think that you can jawbone down the net price without jawboning down quality.”

I didn’t bother to go to hear President Obama speak about his plans to keep college “affordable” for the masses—the speech on education he gave at the University of Michigan. I just couldn’t bring myself to go.

Bloggers all over the area, like lemmings, filed into the luxe enclosed field house built for the University of Michigan’s football team:  ”Live Tweets from President Obama’s speech!” “Video of Obama’s speech!” “Photos of President Obama!” Reporting about a pie delivered to Air Force One from a local eatery, was actually a feature on a local news site. In the old days, high schoolers kept scrap books with clippings from newspapers and magazines. Putting up video and photos and calling it coverage is an exercise in, well, uploading video and photos, scrap booking minus the scissors.

Meanwhile, Michigan residents are suffering.

Childhood poverty is up, up, up. In Michigan 20 percent of the population relies on food stamps, up from 12.5 percent in 2008, when Obama was elected. The state has lost 800,000 jobs. The President is tied with Republican Mitt Romney in recent Michigan voter polls, better than in November 2011, when Mr. Obama trailed Romney, but still not the comfortable lead Obama needs.

Despite what Governor Snyder claimed in his recent State of the State address, the state’s mass migration away from joblessness, foreclosure and economic stagnation has not abated, according to a recent analysis piece posted by Kurt Metzger to Bridge, a news and analysis site for Central Michigan.

Dr. Mary Sue Coleman, ever the politician herself, wrote an open letter to the President about the need to keep college “affordable.” In her letter, she suggested that more public funding would help keep college affordable. Seriously? She believes college is affordable? In 2011 the Pew Research Center conducted an interesting study that compared the responses of the general public to university presidents concerning the affordability, cost, and overall value of a college education. Almost twice as many university presidents (42 percent) concluded that college is affordable today than did members of the general public surveyed (22 percent).

National political analysts concluded Mr. Obama came to Michigan to deliver bread and circuses to keep the Democratic plebes in Michigan from rioting, en masse, next November and staying home instead of voting to put him back into office. He came and sat next to the highest paid public university president in the United States, at a school where leaders pat themselves on the back during meetings for cutting a total of 3.9 percent out of a multi-billion dollar budget over the past seven years.

The University of Michigan needs more public money like an addict needs more drugs. Here’s why, according to the John William Pope Center For Higher Education Policy:

Perhaps the most talked about subject pertaining to higher education in America is the fact that costs keep rising faster than the rate of inflation, faster than the growth in the number of students, faster than most family incomes. Try googling “rising cost of college” and you get more than 18 million hits.

What explains that persistent phenomenon? In a study released last month by the Goldwater Institute, authors Jay Greene, Brian Kisida, and Jonathan Mills identify a big part of the problem: administrative bloat.

“Between 1993 and 2007,” they write, “the number of full-time administrators per 100 students at America’s leading universities grew by 39 percent, while the number of employees engaged in teaching, research, or service only grew by 18 percent. Inflation-adjusted spending on administration per student grew by 61 percent during the same period, while instructional spending per student rose 39 percent.”

The study singled out the University of Michigan. There, the number of administrators has risen at a clip, as had spending on those administrators.

According to a 2010 piece published in the Detroit Free Press: “Michigan universities increased their spending on administrative positions by nearly 30% on average in the last five years, even as university leaders say they’ve slashed expenses to keep college affordable for families. The number of administrative jobs grew 19% over that period at the state’s public universities, according to data submitted by the schools to the state budget office.”

College tuition stopped being “affordable” in the late-70s, when middle-class income began to stagnate. In 1979 the American worker’s average hourly wage was equal to $15.91 (adjusted for inflation). By 1989 it had reached only $16.63/hour. That’s a gain of only 7 cents a year for the entire Reagan decade.

By 1995 it had risen to only $16.71, or virtually no gain whatsoever over the 6 years between 1989 and 1995. During the great “boom years” between 1995 and 2000 it rose briefly to $18.33 per hour. In other words, from 1979 to 2000, even before the Bush recession, after more than two decades the American worker’s average wages increased on average only 11.5 cents per hour per year. With nearly all of that coming in the five so-called “boom” years of 1995-2000, and most of that lost once again in the last three years. And that includes for all workers, even those with college degrees.

According to information from the College Board, between 1980 and 2009 the cost of tuition at public 4-year institutions, such as Michigan, rose from $900 per year to $8,000 per year (Michigan’s tuition is currently $12,000 per year). At private 4-year institutions, tuition costs during the same period tripled rising from $9,000 per year to $27,000 per year. College ceased being “affordable” for American middle-class families three decades ago. That President Obama came to Michigan to suggest that college tuition, which is already obscenely unaffordable thanks to increases that have outpaced the cost of inflation by 2-3 percent for the past 30 years, needs to be kept “affordable” is one reason why he was roundly criticized for indulging in “political theater.” He came to Michigan to urge colleges not raise the cost of an already over-priced product “too much,” or risk losing federal funding.

EUMTalk.org, a local blog that is not affiliated with Eastern Michigan University, but rather the brainchild of Steven D. Krause, a Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at EMU, posed an excellent observation:

I realize that U of M is the big draw, but you would think this might be an opportunity for a more affordable university– say, one that had a 0/0/0% campaign– to have the chance to be on the national stage as a model for keeping costs down.

Just goes to show you what incentives places like EMU really have to be the cheapest game in town….

A comment in response to Krause’s post picks up on the absurdity of Obama delivering a speech about college affordability at a college which has raised tuition exponentially over the past three decades—tuition costs that are out of reach of many middle-class families in the state: “The President went to the University of Michigan to talk about ‘college affordability?’ When has Michigan ever been affordable? That’s like going to the Grosse Pointes and talking to people about owning an affordable home.”

It’s no wonder that national political analysts and academicians on the left, right and in the middle went about dissecting then rolling their eyes at the President’s proposed changes.

President Obama has accomplished more than his critics in Congress will ever admit to. That’s a shame, because he deserves credit for keeping our economy from imploding, for creating jobs, for crafting and getting passed historic health care legislation. On other hand, the number of people in this country on welfare has increased markedly during the President’s years in office. There are Occupy protesters all over the country in tent cities, and there are significantly more homeless veterans, women, children and families than when Barack Obama took office.

To come to Michigan to deliver a speech that urges a poorly regulated multi-trillion dollar industry, with some of the same pricing scams as big pharma, (and significant lobbying clout on the Hill) to make their product “more affordable,” is not what Michigan needs from the President. A pool of $55 million dollars for universities that keep tuition affordable? Does Mr. Obama realize that such a pool of money means little in higher education, where colleges make multiples of that from patent revenue, alone. The UC system raked in $193.4 million in patent revenues in 2008, and New York University earned $157 million in patent revenue in 2006.

It’s always nice to have the President stop by for a visit. However, next time perhaps he can stop by Wayne State University and talk about graduation rates in American higher education, a topic that is even more pressing than “college affordability.” At the moment, that “affordable” school’s graduation rate stands at an embarrassing 39 percent, the lowest of all of Michigan’s 4-year colleges and universities.

by P.D. Lesko

After successful October 13 Student Solidarity Protests around the country, including on the Ann Arbor campus of the University of Michigan, Occupy Colleges plans nationwide Teach-ins at colleges and universities.

You can watch a video of the October 7th protest at the University of Michigan below:

According to a piece published in the A2Journal, “About 100 concerned citizens filled the Diag at the University of Michigan, where some of the organizers spoke about their mission and what those in attendance could do to help. Their mission was taken from a ‘declaration’ the General Assembly at Occupy Wall Street created last week. Ian Fulcher was volunteering at the event trying to help with community outreach. ‘(The main goal) would be to restate the main bullet points from New York, and to support that and put that into practice here as much as possible,’ he said.”

For two days beginning November 2, 2011, Occupy Colleges, a grassroots organization bringing awareness to the Occupy Wall Street movement within the college sphere, will organize a National Solidarity Teach-In for colleges and universities across the country. The Teach-ins will serve to open and continue dialogue around the Occupy Wall Street movement. They are primarily a means to bring together students in an environment where experts in various fields can liberally address questions or concerns.

Teach-ins will be organized by students on campus. They will take place in a central and easily accessible place for students, local communities and the media. Participants will be comprised of experts in their fields (professors in anthropology, political science, history, economics, etc) and fellow students. Stay tuned for information about other participating speakers. Topics will range by school, but will include poignant discussions on how Occupy Wall Street movement may affect future elections, historical perspectives on past Occupy Wall Street-like movements, what led to the Occupy Wall Street movement and what is next. Teach-ins are meant to be participatory and oriented toward action. The purpose is to create an open discussion with professors and students with no defined ending time, so that everyone has an opportunity to speak and contribute to the discussion.

Occupy Colleges’ goal is to bring much needed attention to the Occupy Wall Street Movement at a time when more and more high school students are foregoing a college education because their families can no longer afford it, while others are graduating with inconceivable amounts of debt and stepping into the worse job market in decades. Occupy Colleges represents students who share these fears and support Occupy Wall Street. It is not for profit and works in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street. Its objective is to promote the Occupy Wall Street movement and provide a unifying forum and means of support for students nationwide.

The Occupy Colleges web site lists campuses across the country where teach-ins are scheduled. Thus far, no college faculty members in the state of Michigan have volunteered to participate in the two-day event.