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Eastern Michigan University (EMU) in Ypsilanti, Michigan issued layoff notices to ten of its eleven full-time non-tenured faculty in the College of Education. Some have been with the university for decades. The layoffs are effective for the fall semester of 2014. No part-time faculty were laid off, reflecting the administration's alignment with a national trend toward less experienced, lower-salaried faculty. Those faculty who did not receive the layoff notice reported seeing the writing on the wall in terms of increased class sizes, increased work loads, and worsening conditions. .... Last month Equality for Contingent Faculty: Overcoming the two-tier system by Keith Hoeller was published. In it Hoeller, longtime adjunct professor of philosophy at Green River Community College in Washington, states, "one million professors now teach off the tenure track and make up 75 percent of all college professors. "Throughout the country, college administrators, often with the collaboration of academic unions, have gone to great lengths to keep their increasing numbers of adjunct faculty secret from students, parents, legislators, accreditors, foundations, and the public." Hoeller chronicles a "new academic labor system under which the explosion of graduate students and the abuse and overuse of adjunct and non-tenure-track faculty is the most prominent characteristic of a new employment strategy sometimes referred to as the two- or multi-tiered labor system.

Here's a TV report. It looks like this affects the entire Maine public college system. Here's the Chronicle story: http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/jp/u-of-southern-maine-president-facing-budget-cuts-proposes-faculty-layoffs I googled and it appears the NEA has a system wide union for the full-time faculty. And the AFT has a system wide union for the part-time faculty. Here's a story: http://mainecampus.com/2012/01/19/part-time-faculty-union-to-enter-mediation-with-system-over-contract/ Who is above Provost Stevenson? Cordially, Keith Vanessa replied: The CGEU FB page picked up a Common Dreams link, http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2014/03/21-7 So I shared that on several FB pages along with alert request, Chronicle and local paper links -- plus a link to the U Southern Maine FB in case anyone wanted to leave a message. https://www.facebook.com/precarious.faculty.rising/posts/10202254592379137 While there, I saw a notice about a "Transition Program" http://usm.maine.edu/transition described as moving USM into the future, providing "quality, affordable" education while addressing "fiscal situation"