#Now it actually makes sense why the Doctor and various companions would want to collaborate with them

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Possibly controversial Doctor Who take: UNIT should never have been a military organization. I've always hated the idea of the Doctor becoming a stooge for human governments, and it's only gotten grosser as time's gone on... I think UNIT would be much more interesting as an independent research organization (hell, more of a glorified clubhouse full of nerds) rather than a defense taskforce.

Picture this: we start with Colonel Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart, shortly after his encounter with the Second Doctor and the robotic yeti. The whole affair's opened his eyes to a much wider world than he previously thought, and he's taken an interest extraterrestrial life and technology. At first, he thinks only of how this knowledge can be used to England's advantage, but soon it turns into curiosity for its own sake and a genuine urge to learn about other worlds. When another alien creature comes to Earth, Alistair just wants to talk to them if he can. So instead of shooting them on sight like the rest of his regiment, he goes out of his way to defend the alien. Alistair is dragged in front of a court martial for it, and even though he refuses to back down--the creature wasn't threatening anybody, and even if it was, it was still a cowardly move since they outnumbered it seven to one!--he's discharged from the army in disgrace. Severely disillusioned and having done some soul-searching for why he ever worked with those bastards to begin with, he starts to seek out like-minded people. People who are both disgusted with the military and curious about worlds beyond Earth. This leads him to Liz Shaw, John Benton, Jo Grant, and maybe a couple of honest-to-God aliens who've been going about their business unbothered. Maybe the alien whose life Alistair saved decides to join in as well. Together, they pool their knowledge, funds, and resources to found their own private research base to learn about all things paranormal and/or extraterrestrial. It's not a fancy or expensive affair--they're based out of Liz's house, and there's a big hand-painted KEEP OUT sign out front--but it serves their purpose. They don't bother gathering weapons or anything like that since they want to learn about visitors to Earth, not drive them away. The government and the greater Ivory Tower scientific community thinks they're naive at best and idiotic at worst, but they're long past giving a fuck. And when the Third Doctor is unceremoniously dumped on Earth by the Time Lords, the newly-formed UNIT shelters them and offers them a position as scientific advisor. Alistair might even be able to commiserate with them on "Oh, you were strung along by a bunch of close-minded shitstains who'd rather murder something new than try to understand it? Me, too, bud, let's go get drunk about it sometime."

And thus begins a grand, regeneration-spanning saga of protecting new aliens, sabotaging the military, recruiting old companions who want to carry on the Doctor's work, and giving both the Queen and the Time Lords an industrial-grade migraine. Because they're not soldiers--they're "idiots" with some books and a screwdriver, passing through, helping out, and learning as they go.

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The Higher-Education Crisis Is a Labor Crisis

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The Higher-Education Crisis Is a Labor Crisis

Most Americans revel in the better-training crisis inside the economic pinch of their kids’ lessons bill or the burden of post-college debt. But to understand how the disaster feeds into the monetary disaster going through the following generation, ask an adjunct professor why she’s struggling as hard to teach as her undergraduates conflict to graduate—and why both aspects of America’s instructional market seem priced out of both decent jobs and an enriching gaining knowledge of revel in.

Even at Tennessee’s Vanderbilt University, considered an Oxonian educational gem in a kingdom that ranks many of the highest in economic inequality, non-tenure-music professors are preventing to shape a union—the primary of its kind inside the right-to-paintings kingdom.

Vanderbilt’s contingent college filed an election petition with the National Labor Relations Board in February, looking for to unionise adjunct, part-time, and full-time non-tenure-track college, in a proposed unit covering roughly 350 college contributors in various faculties, including the Divinity and Graduate Schools. But the vote, which had been scheduled for April, changed into set back after the administration all of sudden introduced that it planned to assignment the tremendous majority of ballots all through the vote remember. The flow brought about the withdrawal of the authentic election settlement, and now, pending a further NLRB review with a one-of-a-kind unit arrangement, the employees are looking forward to a rescheduled vote.

Sociology lecturer Amy Cooter believes the administration is certainly obstructing what ought to be a neutral vote casting procedure by using efficaciously threatening months of litigation. It’s every other bureaucratic impediment that displays the institutional inertia that continues many contingent faculties at the lowest of the ivory tower.

While she hopes that collective bargaining may want to enlarge access to lengthy-term and tenure-tune positions, most of the organizing committee’s concerns involve job great: making sure that adjuncts are fairly paid for courses, that there may be consistency and equity in benefits plans throughout unique employment ranges, and presenting transparency in place of work selection-making.

To deliver their working conditions greater in line with the ones of tenured college, Cooter says, the fee of a union is “more approximately first-rate-of-lifestyles measures, ensuring humans are paid reasonable earnings…making sure human beings have clean rules about how they’re hired or maybe fired, due to the fact right now most of those guidelines aren’t spelt out everywhere, and that they’re rather subjective depending on what department you’re in.” Cotter herself is notably fortunate; she has constant pay and a 3-12 months agreement. But like many of her younger instructional colleagues, on the grounds that incomes her doctorate some years ago she’s been stuck on a non-tenure music indefinitely, in a glutted educational exertions marketplace that gives ever-fewer lengthy-time period positions. The uncertainties inherent in the more and more competitive studies process additionally affect place of business dynamics, she adds, due to the fact contingent school have problem securing funding aid: Depending on how cozy their contracts are, her colleagues at Vanderbilt and many different personal liberal arts establishments are frequently reluctant to push for studies price range from their departments “because it’s been made clear to them…that they’ve different priorities in this branch, and they may face sure varieties of backlash if human beings don’t keep their head down and do their task.”

Publicly, the management takes an impartial stance on faculty unionisation, but it has set up a website, and assembled a crew of company legal professionals, to stealthily drip poor messaging at the unionisation issue throughout campus. The website warns that, lest instructors get the influence that a union ought to save you the arbitrary discount of their benefits and pay, “A union doesn’t have the proper or electricity to dictate to the University the terms and conditions of bargaining unit contributors’ employment,” including wages, blessings, schedules, or teaching assignments.

Although Tennessee’s right-to-work legal guidelines allow college members to opt out of union club and avoid union prices, the administration insinuates that actually being represented thru collective bargaining potentially poses undue economic danger: “you can get extra than you’ve got nowadays, the same as you’ve got nowadays or much less than you have nowadays,” and “could have to subtract union dues or costs, have to you pick to join the union, to decide the net result.”

University administrators regularly contend that faculty unionization needlessly interferes with scholarly endeavors or educational freedom. But it is the instructional hard work market itself that pushes pupils into the financial volatility that needs collective resistance, to shield now not simply themselves but also the instructional community they fear is becoming a neoliberal organization. So for the lots of educators at public and personal campuses, from graduate fellows to adjuncts, a fair agreement is more about equity and democratic manner than approximately fabric gain.

With contingent faculty now constituting most of the people of the usa’s school positions, Cooter says, “it makes sense to at a minimum create a area where we will talk about what our needs are and approach the admin [about how] to make this a higher and more effective environment, no longer handiest for us but for the university as a whole, such as our college students who might benefit from school who don’t need to worry approximately locating a activity on the last 2d in August.” They want that primary monetary protection to be “merely targeted on their students’ experiences.”

What those educators are hoping to good buy for is greater than material benefits; they want academic existence to be more approximately the revel in of gaining knowledge of rather than the value of it. Higher Education and Society Institutions of education, and the gadget of which they are a element, face a bunch of remarkable challenges from forces in society that affect and are influenced by using these very establishments and their communities of inexperienced persons and educators. Among these forces are sweeping demographic changes, shrinking provincial budgets, modern advances in information and telecommunication technology, globalization, opposition from new instructional providers, marketplace pressures to form educational and scholarly practices in the direction of income-driven ends, and increasing needs and pressures for fundamental changes in public coverage and public accountability relative to the function of better schooling in addressing pressing issues of communities and the society at massive. Anyone of these demanding situations could be sizable on their very own, but collectively they boom the complexity and trouble for schooling to preserve or advance the fundamental paintings of serving the general public correct.

Through a discussion board on education, we can conform to: Strengthening the relationship between better training and society will require a large-based attempt that encompasses all of training, now not just character institutions, departments and institutions.

Piecemeal solutions can best go to date; strategies for trade have to be informed via a shared imaginative and prescient and a hard and fast of not unusual targets. A “movement” technique for exchange holds more promise for remodeling academic lifestyle than the winning “organizational” technique.

Mobilising exchange would require strategic alliances, networks, and partnerships with a broad variety of stakeholders inside and beyond education.

The Common Agenda is especially designed to help a “movement” technique to exchange by encouraging the emergence of strategic alliances amongst individuals and organizations who care about the function of higher education in advancing the beliefs of a numerous democratic gadget thru schooling practices, relationships and provider to society.

A Common Agenda

The Common Agenda is intended to be a “living” record and an open procedure that guides collective movement and learning amongst devoted companions inside and outdoor of higher training. As a dwelling document, the Common Agenda is a collection of focused activity aimed toward advancing civic, social, and cultural roles in society. This collaboratively created, implemented, and centered Common Agenda respects the diversity of pastime and programmatic foci of people, institutions, and networks, in addition to acknowledges the not unusual hobbies of the complete. As an open procedure, the Common Agenda is a structure for connecting work and relationships round commonplace interests focusing on the instructional position in serving society. Various modes of aliening and amplifying the common work within and past training might be furnished inside the Common Agenda manner.

This approach is understandably formidable and specific in its purpose and application. Ultimately, the Common Agenda challenges the machine of higher training, and people who view education as important to addressing society’s urgent problems, to act intentionally, together, and truely on an evolving and full-size set of commitments to society. Currently, 4 wide issue areas are shaping the focus of the Common Agenda: 1) Building public know-how and aid for our civic undertaking and movements; 2) Cultivating networks and partnerships; 3) Infusing and reinforcing the cost of civic duty into the tradition of higher education institutions; and four) Embedding civic engagement and social responsibility inside the structure of the schooling gadget.