ENDOWED CHAIR NAMED FOR DIAZ
A $450,000 donation was made to Temple’s Beasley School of Law, the university announced in a press release on Thursday.
Exelon, a local energy company, gave the gift under the name of Nelson Diaz, who graduated from Temple in 1972 and is on the corporation’s board of directors.
Diaz, who also is a member of Temple’s Board of Trustees, said in an interview with The Temple News that he has raised an additional $250,000, bringing the total amount donated to $700,000. The money is being raised to help create an endowed chair in civil rights that would be named after Diaz, the release said.
The chair would also seek to help Latino students at Temple, Diaz said.
“Essentially, it’s trying to bring to bear the contributions of many in the civil rights movement, including a lot of Latinos who have contributed to that and bring professors around the country on a semester basis and also to provide some assistance and scholarships for Latino students,” he told The Temple News.
Temple trustee Daniel H. Polett will help Diaz in raising the remaining money for the chair, which would be named the “Judge Nelson A. Diaz Chair for Civil Rights,” according to the release. $550,000 is still needed in order to establish the chair.
“My life has been dedicated to making a difference,” Diaz said in the release. “I want this gift to continue in that long tradition, and I thank Exelon for being a part of that commitment.”
-Steve Bohnel and Christian Matozzo
GROWTH RATE DECREASE FOR PART-TIME INSTRUCTORS
Due to an increasing amount of full-time non-tenure track professors, the growth rate of the number of part-time instructors in universities and colleges has decreased, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education.
New synthesis of federal data obtained by the Chronicle shows that doctoral institutions are the only universities where growth in the number of part-time instructors has remained constant, along with an increase in full-time professors not on a tenure track.
According to the study, which spanned from 2005-13, “our largest and most prestigious universities are the ones that are most culpable in the employment trends that are upending the tenure system and spreading low-wage labor as a routine means of educating undergraduates.”
Steven J. Shulman, a professor of economics at Colorado State University at Fort Collins and research director at its Center for the Study of Academic Labor, conducted a study in response to the federal data, which stated that “the tenure system … seems likely to continue to weaken faculty and graduate student employment at U.S. colleges and universities.”
Kiernan R. Mathews, a director of the Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education, at Harvard University, said a change in how the government counts full-time and part-time instructors – which occurred in 2011 – might have skewed the new federal data.
But Mathews added that there has been “an interest in consolidating teaching into more full-time, non-tenure-track positions,” because it provides stability to students and faculty and increases the amount of faculty who can contribute to non-instructional duties, like those linked to public service and shared governance at institutions.
-Steve Bohnel
