Environment Petition: Universal Pictures: Let the Lorax Speak for the Trees! | Change.org.

In Knight, we also have someone who pays college coaches a fortune so “student-athletes” can wear and by extension advertise their products. We have someone who ploughs millions to the University of Oregon football program funding state-of-the-art equipment and facilities, while the school endures terrible cuts. We have someone who I would argue represents the corrupting of amateur sports and by extension the corrupting of Joe Paterno and Penn State. By defending Paterno, Knight is doing little more than defending himself and the kind of moral relativism he’s brought to campuses around the country.

via The Final Insult: Nike CEO Phil Knight Eulogizes Joe Paterno | The Nation.

I believe that the extraordinary literary tradition of this country should be marked by an annual public holiday around which a major festival of literature would be developed.

A public holiday to celebrate our literary heritage could also be extended to Northern Ireland because of its rich literary tradition too and could become an all island festival of literature and culture.

Aodhán Ó Ríordáin pushes in another (though not incompatible direction, in noting the high level of problems with literacy in many parts of Dublin, and calling for a ‘culture of literacy’:

“Dublin has a rich literary tradition and is recognised the world over because of the brilliant writers we have produced. In addition, Dublin is also a Unesco City of Literature and we are home to the prestigious International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. It is now incumbent on this Government to ensure that we build on these traditions by greatly enhancing our children’s capacity for literacy.

“I believe that fostering a culture of literacy in this city would the most fitting tribute to our great literary giants. It is my hope therefore, that when we celebrate Bloomsday in years to come everyone on this island can truly appreciate the literary genius of Joyce and just maybe inspire a child to create a masterpiece of their own.”

Today’s Galway Advertiser also has an interesting piece from John Morley, providing a sketch of Joyce’s connections with Galway, via Nora.

This strike, over waivers, which are a necessary element of making grad school accessible to those other than the wealthy (and, in Illinois, the well-connected), is clearly situated in a broader context of struggles over the future of public education, as recognized by Amy Goodman on today’sDemocracy Now!, where she was talking, in California, with some of those engaged in the struggle (with credit to Rich Potter of the GEO for making contact with Amy over this issue):

AMY GOODMAN: And Professor Roy, maybe you can comment on this and what is happening at the same time here at home with the state budgets, with our educational system. UC Berkeley is not the only one going through this. For example, the news from the University of Champaign-Urbana in Illinois: apparently, in this last week—let’s see if I can find the information—graduate teaching assistants at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign went on strike yesterday after the university refused to guarantee continuation of the teaching and grad assistant tuition waivers.

Strikes have many elements. There’s the ‘above the fold’ part, the most visible: the pickets, the rallies, and (in the case of the GEO) an amazing drum corps. There’s the bargaining: tedious, important in the formal process of getting an agreement that lets the strike come to an end. And then there’s so much background work. The people who planned and organized: both over the past months, and the many years of activism, work, and sacrifice that brought the union into being and made this week’s action possible, not only necessary. The people churning out press releases and materials, taking care of the administrative overhead and much more. Congratulations to my colleagues, my comrades, at the GEO, IFT/AFT 6300, for their success this week.

Graduate employees have been working without a contract since August, as the University offered regressive proposals in response to the union’s call for a living wage, protection for tuition waivers, and improved conditions for families. In recent meetings, as the threat of a strike has increased, the GEO has reached tentative agreements on a number of items, but the administration continues to refuse both a living wage and a guarantee that tuition waivers will continue to be a condition of employment. [The University tried to unilaterally remove waivers from those on 25% appointments earlier this year.]

Call Interim Provost Robert Easter and new BoT chair Christopher Kennedy this Wednesday, and urge them to reach a fair contract with the GEO. Then pass this message to colleagues and friends.

WHEN: Wednesday, November 11

WHERE TO CALL:
Interim Provost Easter: (217) 244-4545
Christopher Kennedy: (312) 527-7890 x7890

WHAT TO SAY:
It’s useful if you can put your message in your own words, but the following provides a basic template for you to use. (My text suggests leaving a message, but if you can talk directly with these men, even better.) Remember, what’s most important is that the message of support for the GEO position be communicated to administrators.

Hello, my name is __________. I’m a graduate of the University of Illinois, and I’d like to leave a message for [Provost Easter/Mr Kennedy.]

I want to urge him to reach a fair agreement with the Graduate Employees Organization, and ensure that graduate employees, who teach a quarter of classes at the University, receive a living wage.

Thank you.

OTHER POINTS YOU MAY WANT TO USE:
Graduate employees have voted for strike action, but there is still time to avoid that if the administration engages positively with the wage concerns of those employees.

The campus budget grew by 7% in FY09, but the percentage devoted to instruction grew by only 0.8%. I urge you to do everything in your power to ensure that the university lives up to its responsibilities as a land grant institution that serves the public good and is committed to high quality instruction and research.

The public higher education system has a responsibility to ensure accessibility to all. The GEO’s requests for  a living wage, secured tuition waivers, better health care, and better support for working parents, would increase access to graduate education and would also improve the quality of instruction and research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

We have to call this kind of abuse by its proper name – torture. We must also call the organised exploitation of unpaid child labour – young girls placed in charge of babies “on a 24-hour basis” or working under conditions of “great suffering” in the rosary bead industry; young boys doing work that gave them no training but made money for the religious orders – by its proper name: slavery. It demands a very painful adjustment of our notions of the nature of the State to accept that it helped to inflict torture and slavery on tens of thousands of children. In the light of the commission’s report, however, we can no longer take comfort in evasions.

I haven’t yet been able to bring myself to read the report itself.

In Hungary, an earlier policy to give money to schools for the mentally disabled, to which a disproportionate number of Roma were sent, was abandoned when it was realised that it encouraged segregation.Now funds are focused on mainstream schools which accept more Roma – though they impose limits of 25% Roma in a class.

There’s a lot to note in this excerpt, and the article more generally, but I’m particularly interested in how integration works. Segregation is seen as problematic (though we’re not told for which reasons in this case) and integration is now favoured. However, this is only in cases where the number of Roma in a class is kept low enough that it is the Roma children who must acclimatize to ‘mainstream’ society. The notion that a non-Roma child might be placed in a majority-Roma setting (or even a setting with more than 1/4 Roma children) is viewed as so appalling a prospect that it is prevented by government policy.

Later in the article mention is made of the problems for parents and Roma communities when schools in Roma-majority villages are closed, with children being bused out of their communities:

But in far-flung villages with a majority Roma population, Roma and non-Roma parents alike are upset when local schools close and children are bussed off each day to towns.

The links between the parents and the schools are broken.

An alternative policy, supported by opposition parties, would be to improve the facilities and standard of teaching in existing schools.

I should mention that my mother is engaged in research on parental involvement in education among the Irish Traveller community, and this article seems (to me) to provide some interesting parallels to some of her initial findings.

Comment threads may not be the most elegant solution, but they beat working your way through an entire conference catalogue – and maybe someone could take the initiative of migrating responses to a prettier interface (PDF of a grid of sessions, anyone?) closer to the conference date.

First, the picture to the left is of Labour TD Joe Costello, who for the last 5 years has run a weekly protest outside the Mater hospital, calling for better healthcare.

Second, potentially good news for grad employees in private universities in the United States, as a bill in introduced in Congress to guarantee them the right to join unions and be represented by them.

Finally, it’s been a hard time for those fighting for the undocumented Irish in the United States, with our own Taoiseach essentially throwing them to the wolves during his visit in March. However, the ILIR isn’t giving up, and Kelly Fincham is quoted in their most recent release as calling for increased ambitions and “a solution which reverses what Senator Kennedy described as the one of the unforeseen consequences of the 1965 Immigration Act: the ‘dramatic and significant’ discrimination against Irish immigrants.”