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Higher Education

Wales Just Hit A Massive Green Energy Milestone

Earlier this week, it was revealed that over 75% of UK universities have now divested from the fossil fuel industry, illustrating how cutting financial ties with the industry is being increasingly recognised as a step that aligns with university goals and values. Laura Clayson, campaign manager at Climate Justice, said: This news is incredibly significant given how fossil  fuels have shaped the nation’s recent history and landscape. It is an act of solidarity with frontline communities globally, as well as those within Wales itself. This includes the community surrounding the controversial Ffos-y-Fran, the UK’s last and largest open cast coal mine, which closed in 2023. The community continues to have to fight for justice, for everything from health impacts to restoration of the area, as the mining company continues to break their promises on each and every front. We hope this news provides some additional strength to their struggle.

Universities Are Ending Recruitment Ties To Fossil Fuel Companies

Aberystwyth University has committed to ending its recruitment ties with fossil fuel and mining companies. In doing so, it becomes the 10th UK university and the 3rd in Wales to exclude the fossil fuel industry from its careers and recruitment activities. In an updated Ethical Careers Policy published on Aberystwyth’s website, the university states that it will “no longer collaborate or hold relationships” with fossil fuel, mining or tobacco companies. The announcement makes Aberystwyth the 10th UK university and the 3rd in Wales to publish such a policy, following similar commitments from the Universities of Swansea in November 2023 and Wrexham in December 2022.

Organizing To Strike: How 20,000 California Workers Got Ready

Michael McGlenn is a clinical psychologist at the University of California-San Diego. Three years ago, feeling the pinch of dues, he looked into dropping the union. He felt that “the best I could do was see the person in front of me and care for them,” he said, and as far as he could see, the union had nothing to do with what happened in his office. That was until a member organizer went to see him. They talked about how his ability to care for his patients was related to turnover and understaffing that could only be fixed through collective action. That conversation not only kept McGlenn in the University Professional and Technical Employees—years later, he is a leader on his campus.

University Of South Florida Workers Lose Union And Rights

Tampa, Florida – On October 2, 355 University of South Florida (USF) employees discovered they would no longer be working for the state of Florida. Instead, beginning on December 1, custodial, groundskeeping and maintenance workers have a choice to work for a private dining and facilities contractor, Compass Group, or else find another job. In 2023, Senate Bill 256 passed in the state of Florida. SB 256 is among the most anti-union labor laws in the country and effectively decertifies any unionized bargaining unit in the public sector that does not meet a bar of at least 60% dues-paying membership.

Northwestern’s Campaign Against Palestine And Anti-Zionist Jews

On the first day of Sukkot, the Jewish harvest holiday, I joined my fellow members of Northwestern Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) in constructing a sukkah on our campus. Just hours later, Northwestern staff tore down our religious structure — allegedly, they claimed, in the name of fighting antisemitism — but really because it dared express solidarity with Palestinians. Sukkot honors the displacement of our ancestors and the temporary structures they inhabited while fleeing slavery, and erecting a sukkah, a temporary shelter in which we dwell for eight days, is an essential part of celebrating this holiday.

The Crisis Of The Neoliberal University

This past year in the U.S., a new chapter in class struggle has been written. Students, many from the Palestinian diaspora, anti-Zionist Jewish people, leftists, and people of conscience of all stripes have stood up against the genocide in Gaza. They have built encampments and questioned universities that run like businesses with investments in Israel. They have faced off the repression of university administrators while unmasking the imperialist character of both the Democrats and Republicans in office who help to send the police to beat up students and workers.

University Of Pennsylvania Police Raid Pro-Palestine Students’ Home

On Friday, October 18 at 6 am, 12 Penn Police officers and one Philadelphia Police officer raided the home of pro-Palestine Penn students organizers. After threatening to break down the door with a battering ram and pointing a gun at their neighbor, they stormed the house in full tactical gear. The police banged on each door as students were sleeping, pointing rifles and handguns at their heads as they exited their rooms with their hands raised. Officers refused to show a warrant to residents of the house, and refused to provide their names and badge numbers. While the students were corralled by police in a room, one student was separated and taken in for questioning.

Tribal College Campuses Are Falling Apart

In the 1970s, Congress committed to funding a higher education system controlled by Indigenous communities. These tribal colleges and universities were intended to serve students who’d been disadvantaged by the nation’s history of violence and racism toward Native Americans, including efforts to eradicate their languages and cultures. But walking through Little Big Horn College in Montana with Emerson Bull Chief, its dean of academics, showed just how far that idea has to go before becoming a reality. Bull Chief dodged signs warning “Keep out!” as he approached sheets of plastic sealing off the campus day care center. It was late April and the center and nearby cafeteria have been closed since January, when a pipe burst, flooding the building, the oldest at the 44-year-old college. The facilities remained closed into late September.

The Student Movement Awakes With A Roar In Argentina

When far-right president Javier Milei intervened to veto a Congressional bill to fund public universities and keep his slashes to the education budget intact, he had no idea that he would wake up the sleeping beast of Argentina’s student movement. Between October 14 and 15, students and faculty held more than 100 assemblies to decide how to organize the fight against the far right government’s attacks and many voted to occupy their universities. Students are now occupying 72 different schools and departments across the country and they are holding public classes in the streets in 30 universities across Argentina.

BU Graduate Students Reach Deal End Seven-Month Strike

Boston University and its graduate student union have agreed on terms for a new contract that would raise the graduate students’ pay, benefits, and job protections and end the longest such strike in American history. The agreement, announced jointly on Friday afternoon, concludes seven months of sparring between the administration and the union that represents 3,000 graduate students. Many teach classes, grade papers, and conduct research, and argued the school severely underpaid them for essential work. Now the first-of-its-kind contract includes provisions to raise the annual stipend PhD workers receive to at least $45,000, or $20 an hour for graduate students, which would be as much as a 60 percent bump for the lowest paid PhD students.

Utah Students Win Victory Against Israeli Study Abroad Program

Salt Lake City, UT – On October 3, 50 students and community members gathered on the campus of the University of Utah to demand an end to the school’s study abroad program with the University of Haifa, an Israeli military college that practices discrimination against its Arab and Muslim students. Organizers also called for the University of Utah’s full divestment from companies involved in the Israeli genocide in Gaza, reinvestment in student resources, and for the University of Utah to respect students’ right to protest for Palestine. The rally also celebrated the Palestinian resistance. Chris Loera-Peña of Mecha de U of U said, “It’s been a year of genocide, but also a year of non-stop resistance and fighting from the Palestinian people and the entire world.”

Long Beach Demands Return Of Puvungna To Indigenous People

Long Beach, CA – On September 28, a crowd of about 20 people, including faculty, students and community members gathered near the Walter Pyramid at California State University, Long Beach (CSULB) while the school started an event to celebrate its 75th anniversary. The protesters chanted “land back!” and made chalk art to advocate for the protection of Puvungna, a 22-acre site located on campus, sacred to the Acjachemen and Tongva peoples of California. The university is bound by a 2021 settlement with the tribes and its representatives to return the land to indigenous custodianship by September 2023, but the administration failed to do so and refuses to make progress towards this goal.

University Of Michigan Moves To Eliminate Due Process For Students

Over the last two years, the University of Michigan (UM) administration has been fiercely repressing student and worker voices on campus with a combination of police and administrative attacks. The University has conducted large-scale arrests of student protestors demanding divestment from financial ties to the Israeli military, sent campus police to the homes of graduate student union organizers as an intimidation tactic, and violently attacked the community encampment calling for an end to the university’s complicity in the genocide in Gaza. In less physically violent but no less aggressive moves, UM  has attempted to discipline the activist Graduate Employee Organization (GEO) union for their 2023 strike and their substantial fights for a living wage, the dismantling of the large campus police apparatus, and divestment from Israel  by changing hiring practices for graduate student workers.

University Students Rally Behind Expelled Encampment Leader

Cleveland - Over 100 pro-Palestine activists rallied and marched to the office of Case Western Reserve University on Sept. 18 in protest of the expulsion of Yousef Khalaf, a leader of the Gaza Solidarity Encampment. CWRU students erected the encampment on April 29 and kept it up until May 10. After Khalaf appealed the discriminatory expulsion and related discipline, a hearing was held in August. There, Jewish students and community members challenged the university narrative equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism. Nevertheless, the CWRU administration upheld its original decision. The one victory was that all of Khalaf’s tuition and housing payments were refunded.

Fossil Fuel Companies Are Hijacking Our Universities

Elite universities in the United States — which conduct important climate research — are raking in millions from fossil fuel interests, potentially creating conflicts of interest. This is according to a collection of new reports compiled by student organizers and released by the student-led Campus Climate Network, as The Guardian reported. “Universities globally are often caught in a web of financial and research dependencies with the fossil fuel sector. These ties not only conflict with the ethics of academic independence but also hinder the progress of genuine climate research,” Campus Climate Network said on its website. One institution, Princeton University, seems to have actually owned an oil company — Petrotiger, named after its mascot — earning it millions of dollars, reported The Guardian.
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