Straws in the Wind - Part 92

From Inside Higher Ed: Less than a month before the start of the semester, Ph.D. students at Columbia University in New York were told with little explanation that they would no longer be teaching this fall. The catalyst for this change is unclear. The university said it’s an effort to reduce the teaching load on Columbia graduate students and allow them to finish their degrees in six years rather than seven. The students said it’s a move to weaken the labor power of their union, which is in the middle of tense negotiations with the university to renew its contract, which expired June 30. The students, who are members of the graduate student union Student Workers of Columbia, will still be paid. However, instead of receiving a biweekly teaching stipend, they’ll get a lump sum at the start of the semester. 

To pay both the Ph.D.s and their replacements, “the cost to the university likely runs to millions of dollars,” estimated Michael Thaddeus, a mathematics professor at Columbia and vice president and acting president of the Columbia chapter of the American Association of University Professors... 

To fill the now-vacant teaching jobs, Columbia is recruiting for one-year lectureships and advertising the roles to adjuncts, postdocs and New York–based graduate students at other universities...

Full story at https://www.insidehighered.com/news/students/graduate-students-and-postdocs/2025/08/27/columbia-ends-some-teaching-roles-grad.

Note: Private-sector grad student unions - as at Columbia - would likely lose their legal protection were they to file unfair labor practice charges at the current NLRB. In the case of UC, which as a public institution is not under the NLRB and is regulated by the California PERB, this issue does not arise directly. On the other hand, higher ed is a field in which everybody looks at everybody. So if Columbia and other private institutions take aggressive stances, UC administrators will be watching the results.

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From Lookout Eugene-Springfield: Faculty frustrations with potential layoffs and program cuts at the University of Oregon came to the surface on Friday, Aug. 29, during a testy question-and-answer session with two top university officials.  The University Senate’s executive committee held an emergency virtual meeting at noon and invited UO President Karl Scholz and Provost Chris Long to answer questions from faculty members on rumored terminations coming the week of Sept. 7. The meeting, which peaked at 200 participants, came hours after faculty members protested against the potential cuts in a campus rally organized by the faculty union, United Academics of the University of Oregon. The union claims that UO will terminate 25 tenured and tenure-track faculty next month, on top of the 42 employees who got layoff notices in June.

Scholz and Long opened the meeting with back-to-back statements, then answered questions from faculty members. Throughout the session, some attendees directly responded to the officials’ remarks with sharply critical messages in the meeting’s chat feature and with emoji reactions.  In his statement, the president reiterated the university’s reasoning for the cuts: insufficient state funding, “overly generous” pension payments and expensive health benefit costs, labor contracts, and competition among universities to grow student enrollment. All of those factors converged to create a $25 million to $30 million projected budget gap when enrollment numbers came in lower than forecasted on May 1, Scholz said...  He said the university is making “very extensive” administrative cuts, but didn’t provide further details. Scholz said at a town hall in June that he didn’t want to cut administrators’ pay due to the competitive job market in higher education. 

The faculty union has argued that budget cuts disproportionately affect faculty and staff...

Full story at https://lookouteugene-springfield.com/story/university-of-oregon/2025/08/29/faculty-press-uo-leaders-protest-over-looming-layoffs/.