LABOR’S LOVE LOST: The labor-studies department at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst has recently become an object lesson in labor strife. Professors in the department have filed two grievances against their university’s administration, saying it has unfairly barred them from filling a full-time faculty position in their department that has stood vacant for the past five years.
In addition, the labor professors say their department, called the Labor Center, has lost three full-time staff members in the past three years. “There’s been this pattern of administrative animus towards the Center,” says Thomas Juravich, department director. “We believe strongly that this is retaliation for both our union activity and our political activity on campus.”
The university’s provost, Charlena M. Seymour, declined to comment on the grievance.
For most of the past five years, the University of Massachusetts system has been under the shadow of a severe budget crisis. Vacancies in short-staffed departments multiplied and went unfilled — until this past year, that is. “There’s a big hiring spree going on,” says Mr. Juravich.
When departments across the university started filling out their lean faculty rosters this year, Mr. Juravich says, the labor-studies professors began to conduct their own informal search for a candidate to fill the department’s vacant slot. But the administration surprised them, he says, when it withdrew support for the budgeted position.
“There are plenty of examples of other departments that are in exactly the same situation we are in,” he says, “being able to perform a search for faculty members this year.”
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CLUSTER OF HIRES: Demographers rejoice. The City University of New York has announced plans to hire 10 such scholars over the next four years, all of whom will get senior appointments financed by the university’s central administration.
CUNY says it will hire three demographers at either the associate- or full-professor level by September 2006. That will likely include a director for a planned CUNY Institute for Demographic Research. The entire initiative has a “ballpark” price tag of about $1-million, according to Selma Botman, vice chancellor for academic affairs.
But why demography? And why now? “New York City has had a history of no demographic training for scholars,” says Neil G. Bennett, a professor of public affairs at the system’s Bernard M. Baruch College who is a member of the search committee there. He and others at Baruch submitted a proposal to the central administration to be considered for CUNY’s “cluster hire” initiative, in which the university doles out money to campuses for targeted hires filling a specific scholarly niche.
Mr. Bennett says that because New York City has so many entities that do demographic research, such as the United Nations’ population division, there is demand for experienced demographers. CUNY already has scholars who could form a core, he says.
Next year’s new professors will be based at three different campuses. Baruch College’s School of Public Affairs is seeking a scholar who studies aging, health, or mortality; CUNY’s Graduate Center is looking for someone interested in immigration, urban inequality, family dynamics, and community change; and Queens College hopes for an expert in fertility, children, mortality, health, or aging. But Mr. Bennett encouraged all types of demographers to apply, saying that the categories are flexible.
CUNY is also making cluster hires in U.S. history, and will have tenure-track openings for 10 professors over the next four years.
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COMINGS AND GOINGS: Susan C. Aldridge, vice chancellor of University College at Troy University, in Alabama, will become the next president of University of Maryland University College. She had been at Troy, which has 62 teaching sites in 17 states and 14 countries, for the past decade. She replaces Gerald A. Heeger, who left in August to run Whitney International University, a for-profit education venture. Maryland’s University College has an online enrollment of more than 125,000 students. ... Darrell G. Kirch, dean of the College of Medicine at Pennsylvania State University, in Hershey, Pa., has been named the new president of the Association of American Medical Colleges. He will take the post in July, replacing Jordan J. Cohen, who has been the association’s president for 12 years.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Faculty Volume 52, Issue 16, Page A7