‘No trespass order’ issued after academic criticized hiring practices, pay differentials

[The following is an excellent commentary on the characteristic high-handedness of US higher education oversight. University management today has much in common with the corporate sector, complete with the obligatory mealy-mouth (but underlying contempt) toward free speech. Further, college administrators tend to propagate by finding new positions and pay raises for each other with wild abandon. In this instance an adjunct faculty member teaching media arts at a small state college criticized administrators’ policies on his personal blog. This must have been recognized as a threat to management’s ‘safe space’ because the poo-bahs began a malicious rumor campaign against the prof and issued him a ‘no trespass order ,… to protect our students, faculty and staff.’ The ACLU filed the lawsuit late last winter.-JFT]

By Professor Doom
professorconfess.blogspot.com

Perhaps the most abusive employment situation in higher education is in Colorado, where the food banks specialize in helping the severely underpaid faculty. Yes, things are tough all over, but the starving faculty there know the system is exploitative, because, well, let me recycle a quote:

As I stood in a line at the county human services office before Christmas, I realized that, in order to keep the administrative class afloat, this is the reality for me and for my peers. Our college system, for example, has hired two new administrators per day for the past three years, and has grown from 13 to now 41 campuses/centers. Its financial profile is rated at the top of the scale by the metrics of Standard and Poor’s or Moody’s, as a revealed in a recent analysis of CCCS finances conducted by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP).

The culture of fear in higher education did not arise spontaneously. Quirks in our legal system give administration on campus considerable leeway when it comes to crimes, allowing them to “criminalize” perfectly legal behavior and mete out extreme punishments, via the campus kangaroo court system.

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