IN CHOOSING THE BEST COLLEGE, CONSIDER RATIO OF CONTRACT VS. F/T FACULTY
“A majority of the faculty - estimated between 51-61 percent - at most elite private college with yearly tuition exceeding $50,000 a year, are not full-time tenured professors. The percentage at most public colleges is up to 80 percent,” according to Georgetown University professor Jacques Berlinerblau in his 2017 book “Campus Confidential.” These “contingent” faculties work on short term of semester contracts, are paid by class size, have few benefits including often not even office space on campus and have little or no leverage to improve their conditions which range from “bad to deplorable.” Many are highly frustrated at the situation and that affects their teaching, according to Berlinerblau. Especially graduate students—estimated to be at least a third of contingent faculty on most campuses. They want change. But in the last months of 2017, prestigious universities such as Boston College and Georgetown opposed unionization for graduate instructors declaring they are enrolled in degree programs as students and should be treated as such, not as employees. “Unionization could alter the graduate student instructors’ relationships with their own professors.” Graduate student teachers point out they are the instructor of record for a majority of undergraduate classes. They have the same responsibilities as a tenured professor. “Collective bargaining is the only way universities will take their demands for better working conditions seriously,” teaching assistants at GTU wrote. Berlinerblau maintains the percentage of adjuncts who teach at any college compared to full-time professors, should be a factor in determining a college’s value.
PROTECTING DACAS ON CAMPUS
Congress has until mid-March to agree on legislation that would give legal status to at least some of the 800,000 millennials who entered the country illegally before the age of 16 and had been granted a temporary deferment from deportation, as well as a temporary work permit, under an executive order by President Barack Obama in 2012. President Donald Trump rescinded the order known as DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), to take effect as of March 2018. About 30,000 DACA recipients (aka DREAMers) were estimated to have enrolled in college during the summer of 2017 according to Generation Progress, an advocacy group at the Center for American Progress on Oct. 19. The organization is calling for “All colleges to enact policies that fully open the gates of higher education to undocumented students, provide them guaranteed housing, financial aid, confidentiality and safeguards from immigration enforcement on campuses. That includes in-depth counseling services specific to DACA recipients and other students in the country illegally.”
FRENZY OVER SEXUAL HARRASSMENT IN TOWN, ECHOES THAT ON CAMPUSES
In the recent months, as accusations of sexual harassment and assault on women by icons of America’s entertainment, news, business, political and education professions have escalated, the new guidelines issued by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos last September take on new meaning. In September 2017, six years after President Obama issued a Title IX “Guidance Letter” making it easier for alleged victims of sexual harassment and assault to punish their accused abusers within the university, not the civil justice system, President Trump’s Secretary DeVos rescinded that 2011 order. She ordered schools to adopt a higher “clear and convincing standard of proof” that would give equal legal treatment to both the accuser and the accused in sexual assault cases, particularly in the right to call witnesses and have the presence of attorneys. DeVos calls for a better definition of what is sexual assault, harassment and even rape; what kind of proof is needed within what time frame; and what the appropriate punishment should be. What some analysts such as Stuart Taylor of the Heritage Foundation have called a “campus rape frenzy” (in a book by that name) seems now to be happening in the halls of Congress. Rushes to judgment outside of cultural and historical context are, it seems, just as bad as years of silence about abuse. Balance is needed.
WORRIES ABOUT NEW TAX BILL, LARGELY ABOUT IMPACT ON HIGHER DONORS
On December 20 2017, Republicans legislators passed a tax reform bill that would become law by January 2018. No Democrats supported it. They expressed instead dire warnings about its impact on higher education. But most of the initial fears appeared to be about the hypothetical impact of new tax laws on donors to higher education and on elite schools’ endowments. For instance, Dems determined that a 1.4 percent tax on investment income at private schools with endowments worth at least $250,000 (U.S.)per full-time student “would affect as many as 70 schools and cost them an estimated $2.5 billion over a decade. “Public universities in states like New York and California hit by the bill’s elimination of the federal deduction for state and local taxes, might come under voter pressure to offset possible higher taxes with tax cuts,” Dems also pointed out. “That might require corresponding expenditure reductions to which public universities were particularly vulnerable,” some fretted. But the final bill actually allows taxpayers to deduct up to $10,000 for state and local property taxes while previous language had eliminated state and local deductions entirely. And the excise tax on private college endowments was amended to those valued at $500,000 endowment per full-time students – affecting few institutions indeed. It will take months to really determine the affects particularly on Hispanic students, but there were no caps set on funds going to Minority Serving Institutions and to recruitment efforts for first-time-college goers. •
