Tuesday, November 8, 2011

SIUC on strike

“This is what I have worked for. In our time of need our students have stood up for us”: Jyotsna Kapur, associate professor in cinema and photography, at a student rally in support of striking faculty at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. You can follow the story online at Occupy SIUC and SIUC Unions United.

The SIUC administration’s thesaurus seems to be opened to intransigent:

uncompromising, inflexible, unbending, unyielding, diehard, unshakable, unwavering, resolute, rigid, unaccommodating, uncooperative, stubborn, obstinate, obdurate, pigheaded, single-minded, iron-willed, stiff-necked.
I think the administration needs to find a different word.

[Adjectives courtesy of the Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus.]

comments: 2

Daughter Number Three said...

I just heard about the strike on BoingBoing. The implications about cloud computing are what caught my attention most. After the recent brouhaha over a University of Wisconsin professor using his email for "political" purposes, I can only imagine that the cloud model will have an even larger chilling effect on academic freedom.

Michael Leddy said...

I think it’s pretty standard for universities to lock faculty out of everything during a strike, including their offices. Even gradebooks are reputed to be university property.

I’m not sure I understand how the cloud is the issue here: if you had your e-mail in an Outlook account on one machine, you still wouldn’t be able to send anything if the university locks your account (though you’d still be able to read your old mail). Am I missing something?