Blog posts

The biggest issue we’ve been facing at work of late is the ‘action short of a strike’ which the Association of Union Teachers has called to last indefinitely. The AUT action consists of a refusal to cover for absent staff and a boycott of all assessment work. With finals fast approaching, higher education is potentially facing some months of serious disruption. The dispute is chiefly over pay and conditions, but is also an expression of concern at the proposed ending of national pay bargaining (letting each university set pay levels for its lecturers) and frustration that the union has been thrown out of pay negotiations. When levels of pay for academics have been falling in real terms for such a long time, the prospect of losing what little bargaining muscle they retain is an understandable concern. ...

Since I mentioned it on Tuesday, it seemed appropriate to share some thoughts I jotted down after watching Roma last weekend. It was my first Fellini, an experience I’d been awaiting for some time but since his films aren’t a regular feature of the local Blockbuster I had to wait till Movietrak appeared, and then so manipulated my DVD queue as to send me this title (it’s a great service, but the ranking of films in the queue appears to bear little correlation with the order of despatch). ...

Last week I wrote on the question of plagiarism and blogging, a topic my mind returned to while watching Fellini’s Roma on Saturday. It would have been while the young Fellini’s family jostle for seats in a cinema that I wondered about the influences that previous filmmakers and other visual artists have on the visual language of a film. Sadly the DVD I was watching didn’t include the credits so I wasn’t able to see how Fellini referenced his included material. When filmmakers use other films within their own they usually do credit them. The same is not true, however, when elements from other films are utilised in more implicit ways, such as the way the photography in The Passion Of The Christ is said to move to capture views of classic paintings. ...

Today doesn’t allow much time for writing. The student newspaper has just taken delivery of three shiny new computers and between that and our Finance Committee meeting this afternoon, I’m feeling busy. Via supradeluxe’s fair trade coffee blog I spotted this report. It seems that the World Bank is getting in on the Fair Trade act (nice timing guys) and the report contains some pretty stark figures on the crisis in the global coffee market. The pressure on richer governments to reduce their agricultural subsidies has long been present, but when a body like the World Bank makes statements such as:

One of my part-time colleagues has an obsession with the word ‘oligarchy’. He’s a politics student and just can’t seem to get enough of the word. It’s perhaps not surprising that in the modern world someone could get caught up with the word, given that many ‘democracies’ tend to operate oligarchically (is that a word? it should be). A few weeks ago, the blogsphere was full of analyses of Howard Dean’s campaign to be the Democrat Party’s nominee for US President. They were asking what it had brought to the primary campaign and why when initially so strong, it had failed to win Dean the nomination. In that regard I found this interview with Joe Trippi (Dean’s former Campaign Manager) a fascinating read. ...

In the wake of moves to establish a British ‘Supreme Court’, the introduction of US-style ‘citizenship ceremonies’ and a government minister’s suggestion that we remodel graduation ceremonies along American lines, a frequent question in many of the instant messenger conversations I’ve partaken in has been what’s the next step in the American makeover of Britain? If this report in The Guardian is to be believed it is a change of emphasis in government volunteering schemes to shape them along the lines of Clinton’s ’ AmeriCorps’. ...

With this being Fairtrade Fortnight, and the tenth anniversary of the Fair Trade mark at that, it was to be expected that there’d be some movements on the part of major retailers. The biggest news I’ve picked up so far in the UK is that Marks and Spencers are introducing their first fair trade labelled clothing range. The range appears to be a rebranded version of Gossypium’s yoga clothing, but this is a good step forward. Strangely the Marks and Spencers website doesn’t appear to make any mention of this news, even in their “Commitment to Society” section. ...

Browsing Juan Cole’s blog always provides some useful insights into the current situation in Iraq. You may well not remember something I wrote about back in November about current threats to federal funding of Middle Easter Studies in the US. All seemed to have gone silent on the matter, but a recent entry on Juan’s site shows that this hasn’t gone away and provides considerably more detail than I was able. Well worth checking out.

One of the hot topics in Higher Education at the moment is plagiarism, with Universities struggling to develop appropriate educational and disciplinary responses to a rapidly increasing number of cases. The reasons for this increase are many: from changes in research styles resulting from increased internet use; to less awareness of British approaches to plagiarism; to increased financial and other pressures on students. It is also a tricky area to deal with given that many other cultures have a very different approach to western academia when it comes to copying and referencing. ...

This article (linked to by Nate) reminded me of a train of thought I’d intended to blog, but forgot about while Kari visited. Salon recently ran an article about American Apparel, a clothing manufacturer in Los Angeles who have made waves by ensuring all their employees are paid a living wage and looking for ethically sound suppliers. Paragraphs such as: At American Apparel’s corporate and manufacturing headquarters, Charney appears to have done the unthinkable: He’s made working in a garment factory hip, not just for his young creative and corporate staff, but for the Latino shop workers as well. Fingers fly as teams of sewers are paid by the piece (a modern-day version of the old sweatshop payment system), but shop workers also partake of such trendy on-site services as yoga and massage and wear the T-shirts they make to work. The company offers counseling for co-workers who get involved romantically and then break up again, nobody cares if you smoke a joint, and seven or eight times a year working class joins management in one big beer and pizza party. It’s like one of those multicultural Benetton ads, except, well – it’s an American Apparel ad and it’s real. ...