This January, the Inter Faculty Organization, the union representing nearly 3,300 faculty members at the seven Minnesota state universities, took the unusual step of making an offer that broke dramatically with past practice and with typical union negotiating. The Minnesota faculty offered to accept a pay freeze while holding current contract…

In this article, the authors provide a description of the academic climate in New Mexico. Like many other places in the world today, New Mexico is trying to find an identity in an environment that the authors label "increasingly privatized, corporatized, and militarized." New Mexico's higher education salaries are lower than those in…

Faculty sometimes use votes of no confidence as a tool of last resort to express opposition to a college administration. Unfortunately, however, such votes often have limited effect aside from further damaging relations between administrators and faculty. This article describes how a no-confidence vote was averted at Alfred State College (formally…

A summary of the 1982 Sonoma State University case of dismissal of 24 tenured faculty members for financial reasons provides background regarding financial exigency, faculty participation in decisions leading to the layoff, provision for individual hearings, notice, efforts to reinstate and relocate, and teaching service areas. (MSE)

A case study detailing efforts by University of Minnesota administrators to "re-engineer" the medical school by selling the teaching hospital without faculty consultation and nearly eliminating tenure notes that the medical school now faces an uncertain future and has experienced a precipitous decline in federal research support. (DB)