By Keith Sargeant

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Before the meeting, representatives of the Rutgers AAUP-AFT held a protest outside Barchi’s Old Queens office urging the university president to settle with the faculty on fair terms. The organization, which represents more than 6,000 faculty and staff across Rutgers’ three campuses, has been bargaining over employment conditions, including a January 2012 salary freeze, job security, fair pay and consistent procedures, since July 2012.

In addition to publishing an open letter in the Rutgers student newspaper, the Daily Targum, in Tuesday editions, several AAUP-AFT members gathered to draw attention to the stalled bargaining.

“We find the glacial pace of bargaining and the intransigence of the administration’s team to be at odds with the values you expressed about nontenure-track faculty careers to the Board of Governors in July,” read the letter, in part.

Rutgers officials responded with a statement. “The parties are meeting on a regular basis and exchanging proposals,” said Rutgers spokesperson E.J. Miranda. “We look forward to a timely resolution of the issues. It is our intention to discuss all relevant labor issues at the negotiating table and not in other forums.”

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By Amy Goodman

Democracy Now! speaks with the author of a shocking new book that reveals the Ivy League’s bloodied history.

AMY GOODMAN: Tell us a little about Rutgers.

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: You know, the—it’s a fascinating institution for a lot of reasons. And the original Queen’s College, which is a Dutch Reformed college, the Dutch colonists are establishing their own institution, and it’s, as we all know, really quite close to the College of New Jersey, Princeton, and Princeton is originally founded in the eastern part of the state over by Newark and then drifts over, and the governor, Governor Belcher, actually helps it eventually settle in Princeton, New Jersey. And—but, in fact, actually, one of the things that happened is there’s a lot of pressure from the College of New Jersey, from Princeton, for the Queen’s College, Rutgers, to actually fold in. But, in fact, the denominational allegiances are too strong for that, so the Presbyterians remain at New Jersey, Princeton, and the Dutch Reformed at Rutgers.

One of their earliest presidents, [Jacob] Hardenbergh, the Reverend Hardenbergh at Queen’s College, manages to purchase slaves despite the fact that the college is doing quite poorly. You know, Queen’s is so financially strapped that it closes multiple times in its early history, and for long periods. But on the eve of one of its first closures, when it just has to shut down and stop operations, Reverend Hardenbergh manages to buy a second slave for his household. And what does that tell us about colleges in the 18th century? One of the things that it should remind us is that colleges survived on the margins in the 18th century. You know, they were constantly seeking sources of funding. And the most obvious and immediate sources of funding were the rising wealthy traders of the big port cities, dominated by the slave traders, and then the planters of the South and the West Indies who had both cash and children but very few schools. As one historian of the British West Indies puts it very nicely, the British West Indies actually didn’t need colleges because of mainland North America. And there are very few institutions of higher education, or even secondary education, established in the West Indies during the colonial period, because those planters could sent their sons to Europe or to North America, the mainland.

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By D.D. Guttenplan

LONDON — While it may be easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven, it has long been thought easier for the rich man’s son or daughter to get into Harvard. Or Oxford.
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But thanks to a new study by John Jerrim at the Institute of Education at the University of London we now know how much easier. At a time when governments on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean are increasingly facing questions about the widening gap between rich and poor, Dr. Jerrim studied access to high-status universities in Britain, the United States and Australia.

“My background is economics, and if you look at the economics, kids that go to certain universities earn a premium on their wages during their working lives over and above the premium you get just by going to college,” Dr. Jerrim said. In the United States that premium is about 6 percent, he said.

“The other reason for looking at these particular universities is that they seem to influence access to certain jobs and to act as a signal to high-flying graduate recruiters,” he said. “If you take the job of being prime minister of Britain, for example, you almost have to have gone to Oxford.”

Dr. Jerrim found that students whose parents come from a professional or managerial background are three times as likely to enter a high status university in Britain or Australia as students with working class parents. For the sake of the study a “high status” university in Britain was defined by membership in the Russell Group of large research institutions; in Australia the study looked at students attending the “Group of Eight” coalition of leading universities.

The same threefold advantage applied to students attending prestigious public universities in the United States — those described as “highly selective” by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, which rates schools based on the test scores of incoming students. At elite private American universities, moreover, students are six times as likely to come from a professional as a poor or working class background, Dr. Jerrim found.

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By Eunice Lee/The Star-Ledger

NEWARK — Essex County College President Gale Gibson is known to march from office to office with a poster-sized board under her arm.

With crushed corners and tears, the well-worn board makes one thing clear: ECC ranks at the bottom of New Jersey’s 19 county colleges as far as graduation and retention rates.

Gibson — who was appointed interim college president in April and confirmed as president Oct. 15 by the board of trustees — has made boosting ECC’s rank her top mission and has laid out an ambitious five-year plan.

“There’s no place for Essex County College to go but up,” Gibson said in an interview. “I see the college in a better place in five years and if it isn’t I shouldn’t be sitting in this chair. It cannot remain where it is right now.”

The numbers on the ranking chart paint a stark picture: 5 percent of full-time ECC students who began in fall 2007 graduate within three years and just 46 percent of students who began in fall 2009 returned in fall 2010.

By comparison at Hudson County Community College, 57 percent of students returned during the same period and the graduation rate was 12 percent. Meanwhile, Passaic County Community College’s retention rate is 66 percent and its graduation rate is 9 percent. Cumberland County College topped the chart — which also included transfer rates and part time retention — with 34 percent graduation and 67 percent retention rates.

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