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NEA Affiliates in Action
The survey was conducted jointly by the American Association of Community Colleges and ACT, the nonprofit research and testing company. Students in more then 75 cities nationwide rallied, sat in, and otherwise showed their solidarity with working families during the week of April 4, the anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination. Student activities included a sit-in at the admission office at Wesleyan to support out-sourced campus janitors and a "sleep out" by students at Harvard University in support of living wages for campus cafeteria workers. The Student Labor Day of Action was sponsored by the United States Student Association, United Students Against Sweatshops, the National Student Labor Alliance, and Jobs WIth Justice. The students' actions "are part of a firestorm of support for working people's issues among university students," said AFL-CIO President John Sweeney. A new faculty group has begun a campaign to eliminate athletic scholarships, force public disclosure of information about classroom performance of college athletes, and put the faculty in charge of academic counselling for the members of college sports teams. The National Alliance for Collegiate Athletic Reform, a group of about two dozen professors, has adopted a platform designed "to restore academic integrity, to fulfill our obligation as faculty, and to protect the welfare of all students." The group said it plans to send its platform to every faculty senate in the nation. Faculty leaders say the effort will work because of its focus on academic abuses.
If the regional director's decision is upheld on appeal, the university will be required by law to bargain with its teaching assistants, if the TAs so choose. The decision marks the first time TAs at a private institution have been given bargaining rights under the Act. One-quarter of the faculty at U.S. colleges and universities are expected to retire between 1998 and 2008, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. Community colleges will be the hardest hit because the majority of their current faculty were hired in the late 1960s and early 1970s, an era of enrollment surge.
About 570,000 full-time faculty were employed in degree-granting, eligible institutions, representing 21 percent of the staff in those institutions. Overall, 66 percent of higher education staff work full-time. The full report is available only from the NCES Web site http://nces.ed.gov/ pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2000164. Historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) are seeing an increasing enrollment of white students. Observers credit the increase to the high quality education and low tuition costs offered by the HBCUs. Four of the nation's 106 HBCUs are now majority white. Full-Time Faculty and Staff by Occupation, 1976 and
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