Editie BZI LIVE cu studentii Universitatii Cuza din Iasi care-si doresc sa schimbe profund in Romania
Luni, 27 mai 2019, incepand cu ora 15.00, in lumina reflectoarelor Platoului Studioului BZI LIVE a fost programata cea de-a 309-a editie - dialog ce a scos in prim plan si a pus in valoare oameni din domeniile educationale, culturale sau istorice • Astfel, invitati speciali la o productie media de NOTA ZECE au fost trei tineri aparte din cadrul primei universitati moderne a Romaniei - Alexandru Ioan Cuza - UAIC din Iasi • E vorba de Adelina-Maria Tudurachi de la Facultatea de Drept, Daniela Raducanescu din cadrul Facultatii de Psihologie si Stiinte ale Educatiei respectiv Marian Dalban, reprezentant al studentilor in cadrul Senatului Universitatii Cuza • Alaturi de cei trei vor fi abordate elemente ce se vor lega de: activitatea studenteasca, didactica, de voluntariat, realitati din mediul invatamantului superior romanesc, aspiratiile lor pentru viitor, cariera pe care o vor urma • Emisiunea completa cu cei trei poate fi urmarita AICI
Luni, 27 mai 2019, incepand cu ora 15.00, in lumina reflectoarelor Platoului Studioului BZI LIVE a fost programata cea de-a 309-a editie - dialog ce a scos in prim plan si a pus in valoare oameni din domeniile educationale, culturale sau istorice. Astfel, invitati speciali la o productie media de NOTA ZECE au fost trei tineri aparte din cadrul primei universitati moderne a Romaniei - Alexandru Ioan Cuza (UAIC) din Iasi. E vorba de Adelina-Maria Tudurachi de la Facultatea de Drept, Daniela Raducanescu din cadrul Facultatii de Psihologie si Stiinte ale Educatiei respectiv Marian Dalban, reprezentant al studentilor in cadrul Senatului Universitatii Cuza. Alaturi de cei trei au fost abordate elemente ce s-au legat de: activitatea studenteasca, didactica, de voluntariat, realitati din mediul invatamantului superior romanesc, aspiratiile lor pentru viitor, cariera pe care o vor urma.
Productia vine in contextul organizarii, in premiera la Cuza, a Galei Studentului UAIC 2019, prin care institutia si-a propus sa recunoasca rezultatele remarcabile obtinute de studentii Universitatii pe parcursul anului universitar 2017-2018. Scopul Galei Studentului UAIC l-a constituit recunoasterea si promovarea, atât în interiorul cât si în exteriorul comunitatii academice, a meritelor deosebite ale studentilor Universitatii Alexandru Ioan Cuza obtinute pe parcursul unui an universitar, precum si propunerea unei noi viziuni asupra tipurilor de activitati defasurate de studenti, o masura distincta prin care reprezentantii studentilor în Senatul UAIC încearca sa contribuie la prevenirea abandonului universitar. "Acest eveniment este o premiera pentru Universitatea Cuza din Iasi si reprezinta încununarea muncii studentilor pe parcursului unui an universitar. Noi, studentii reprezentanti am initiat acest proiect cu gândul de a transmite un mesaj de încurajare colegilor si de a promova excelenta în educatie si exemplele de bune practici. Suntem convinsi ca aceasta este doar prima editie si ca trebuie sa devina un proiect de traditie, marca UAIC", a declarat Marian Dalban din partea studentilor senatori UAIC. Emisiunea completa cu cei trei poate fi urmarita AICI
Publicație : Bună Ziua Iași
One of us: lecturer turned UCU leader hails ‘landmark moment’
Jo Grady promises ‘new era of member engagement’, plus tough line on pay and pensions
The new leader of the UK’s main higher education union has hailed her election as a “landmark moment” while promising to take a hard line with vice-chancellors over pay and pensions.
Jo Grady, senior lecturer in employment relations at the University of Sheffield, told Times Higher Education that her election as general secretary of the University and College Union would “usher in a new era of member engagement and participation”.
She will succeed Sally Hunt, who resigned in February due to ill health, after resoundingly beating Matt Waddup, the UCU’s national head of policy and campaigns, in the second round of the ballot.
“I think anybody who works in education, whether they are an academic or not, should really feel encouraged that someone who knows what it is like to work on the front line will be representing them in all of the negotiations, discussions, and also all the public campaigns that we have,” Dr Grady told THE.
“Sally did an amazing job. I think the manifesto outlines that what I am more interested in is finding ways to include and centre voices that have perhaps been marginalised or not encouraged to get involved in the union and really making the best use of the expertise of our members and the skills of our staff.”
Top of Dr Grady’s to-do list will be resolving the dispute over the future of pensions offered by the Universities Superannuation Scheme, which triggered 14 days of strike action last year. The latest option proposed by the USS still falls short of the union’s policy of “no detriment” – under which employers, not staff are expected to foot the bill for future increases in contributions.
The swirl of uncertainty hanging over the scheme heightened last week when The Pensions Regulator warned that it had “grave concerns” over the USS’ proposal, and a whistleblower – Jane Hutton, a member of the USS trustee board and professor of statistics at the University of Warwick – claimed that she had been obstructed in her efforts to establish whether the USS’ reported deficit was exaggerated.
Dr Grady, who has previously called for “a radical overhaul of the USS’ valuation methods, governance and, if necessary, personnel”, told THE that the fund managers would have to come up with an acceptable solution.
“None of [the options] is acceptable and, as far as The Pensions Regulator is concerned, [the latest option] is potentially unlawful. The position of the UCU is ‘no detriment’.”
Dr Grady was equally uncompromising on pay, saying that the final offer of a 1.8 per cent minimum pay rise for 2019-20 was “nowhere near enough”. Whether union members are prepared to strike to force a better offer remains to be seen – while 70 per cent of voting members backed a walkout over last year’s offer, the turnout fell short of the 50 per cent threshold for industrial action – Dr Grady said that she was determined to fight for an improvement.
“I think anybody who works in this sector knows that pay has declined significantly in the past 10 years and at the same time that pay for vice-chancellors has rapidly increased, disproportionately to staff [pay], so I don’t think it’s a controversial statement to say the increase offered is nowhere near enough,” Dr Grady said.
“Also, we need to do a lot more for precarious and casualised staff, a lot more to close gender and ethnicity pay gaps, [and] a lot more to ensure disabled staff aren’t performance-managed out of our institutions.”
Michael Carley, senior lecturer in the department of mechanical engineering at the University of Bath, questioned whether there was “appetite” among union members for further industrial action.
He highlighted that, coming from outside the UCU’s traditional factions, Dr Grady “doesn’t have a national executive committee that comes from her camp at all. She has to convince the NEC, and I am not sure she can do that,” Dr Carley said.
Dr Grady said that strike action was always “more than just the call of the general secretary”.
But it is “clear that as a union, we have to always be willing to ballot. Sometimes balloting is sufficient, sometimes taking strike action is needed”, she said.
And, despite her stance on key issues, Dr Grady said that she was prepared to work constructively with vice-chancellors.
“If you speak to people in senior management who I work with at Sheffield I am really open to collegial discussions,” she said.
Nick Hardy, Birmingham fellow in the University of Birmingham’s English literature department, said that he believed Dr Grady would be “much more proactive” on pushing members’ rights in the USS dispute and would do a “really good job of mobilising members if and when they need to be mobilised”.
University staff were “very pleased to see a member who has worked on the front line of the sector leading the union”, he added.
Publicație : The Times
Italian academics fear for freedom after League attack on book
Author concerned about lack of pushback after Italy's far-right governing party demanded removal of critical book from reading list
Calls by Italy’s far-right governing party for a book about it to be removed from a university reading list have been met with limited resistance, Italian academics have warned, opening the door for further attacks on academic freedom in the future.
Last month, a regional branch of the League, part of Italy’s governing coalition and currently the country’s most popular party, demanded the removal of La Lega di Salvini from the reading list of a course taught by a political science professor at the University of Bologna.
The branch objected to the book’s description of the party as “extreme right” and to its criticisms of Matteo Salvini, the party’s leader and Italy’s deputy prime minister.
Academics have a duty of loyalty to the state, and universities should not be places of political “propaganda”, party representatives argued in the Emilia-Romagna regional assembly.
Gianluca Passarelli, a political scientist at Sapienza University of Rome and co-author of the book, told Times Higher Education that his biggest surprise had been how little reaction there had been in Italy to such an attack.
“From a media point of view, there has been no attention,” he said.
The book, published in September 2018, draws on surveys and policy documents to examine the party, which entered government last June in coalition alongside the anti-establishment Five Star Movement.
In a sense, the book’s content is “quite banal”, Dr Passarelli said, because calling the League “extreme right” was hardly controversial in academic literature and was something that the authors had done before in previous research.
“The fact that they tried to silence our book meant that they…do not accept their identity,” he said. Dr Passarelli added that the incident illustrated that the League was attempting to “deny the freedom of research”.
The League’s attack on the book was “worrying”, said Andrea Mammone, a history lecturer at Royal Holloway, University of London and a commentator on Italy’s far right. It was “one of the first times that someone is challenging an academic book”, he said. “They are actually criticising researchers…they want to shut down opinions.”
Whether the League would continue to attack academic research “depends on the reaction of society and mainstream politics”, Professor Mammone said. “For me, there was not enough reaction.”
Despite the League’s objections, Dr Passarelli’s book has remained on the reading list. There have been no further developments since the initial attack, a University of Bologna spokesman said. Nor has the Italian government enacted any concrete policies to limit academic freedom, said Professor Mammone. The country’s Ministry of Education, Universities and Research is led by an independent, Marco Bussetti.
But Mr Salvini has stoked anti-academic sentiment by repeatedly disparaging the professoroni: know-it-all, elitist experts who, he claims, oppose his policies. “I’m worried about their overall approach,” Professor Mammone said, because the League sees academic freedom as a “leftist bastion”.
“The Italian academy is strong,” said Dr Passarelli. “We are not scared of the League, frankly. The problem is that they do not like universities. They assume that we are lazy, that we do not do anything” and “do not produce anything useful to the country”, he warned.
League representatives did not respond to a request for comment.
Publicație : The Times
Academic on 10th fixed-term contract fights for permanency
More than 1,200 people sign letter supporting Feyzi Ismail in her dispute with SOAS University of London
An academic on her 10th fixed-term contract is fighting to force her university to give her a permanent contract.
More than 1,200 people have signed a letter supporting Feyzi Ismail in her dispute with SOAS University of London, where she is a senior teaching fellow.
Dr Ismail has been teaching in the department of development studies since 2011 and is currently on her 10th contract.
She has been employed continuously since 1 January 2014 on a series of full-time fixed-term contracts but has twice been denied a permanent post.
Employment law in the UK states that “any employee on fixed-term contracts for four or more years will automatically become a permanent employee, unless the employer can show there is a good business reason not to do so”.
Her supporters have said that they are “deeply concerned” that SOAS “is not adhering to the spirit of labour law for all workers”.
They call on the institution to “take the lead in eliminating the precarious and discriminatory conditions currently endemic within higher education”.
Dr Ismail told Times Higher Education that she believed universities were “benefiting from the exploitation” of PhD students and early career academics, who were just looking for a “measure of security in a very insecure” higher education sector.
Dr Ismail made requests for permanency last year and this year, both of which were rejected on the basis of “objective justifications”.
These included that she was covering for staff absences or specialist expertise required by the institution for a temporary period.
SOAS had made the argument that “you have been covering and therefore at some point we don’t need you”, said Dr Ismail. “My argument is that I have been doing exactly the same things in my job for the last five years, so whether it is this or that objective justification is irrelevant, because the core of my job has stayed the same.
“I do exactly the same thing as every other permanent employee in the department.”
After her first request for permanency, SOAS reduced the hours associated with Dr Ismail’s position to half a full-time equivalent post.
She has taken up a second half-time position at Goldsmiths, University of London, and said that it was like “literally doing two full-time jobs”.
Dr Ismail has appealed against the latest rejection and was due to have a grievance hearing on 21 May, but it was cancelled for the third time.
Students had organised a silent protest outside the venue in her support.
A SOAS spokeswoman said: “Employment issues for all staff are dealt with using our internal HR procedures and we cannot comment on individual cases.”
Publicație : The Times
|
