FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE August 29, 2014 Contact: Natalie Higgins (nhiggins@phenomonline.org, 978-227-8473) Ferd Wulkan (ferdwulkan@gmail.com, 413-627-5268) PHENOM Joins Senator Elizabeth Warren’s Fight for Student Loan Refinancing; Startling New Data on Student Debt in Massachusetts On Friday, September 5th, the Public Higher Education Network of Massachusetts (www.phenomonline.org) will bring together Massachusetts residents affected by student […]
Thank Sen. Elizabeth Warren for her efforts to cut student loan interest rates by signing PHENOM’s thank you card. Almost a million Massachusetts residents owe more than $24,000,000,000 (that’s billion!) in student debt, much of it at high interest rates. Private banks and the federal government have been making a ton of money on these […]
Read the fall 2014 issue of the PHENOM newsletter on your screen, and then let us know if you would like a batch to distribute. We have also made it available in .pdf format here. It includes interesting material on the demand for free higher education, the recent elections in the Massachusetts Teachers Association, student organizing and more. Please write […]
“Performance Funding” is all the rage in public higher education these days. A cornerstone of the Department of Higher Education’s Vision Project, it is playing a bigger role in how state allocations are distributed to our campuses. Basically, externally-imposed, one-size-fits-all criteria are used to assess how well a school is doing, and the better it […]
By Ken Haar (Westfield State), PHENOM Legislative Director The fiscal 2015 budget process is over, and while there were many successes for public higher education, there was a good deal of disappointment as well. Following the grand success of the fiscal 2014 budget, with progress made toward splitting the cost of public higher education 50/50 […]
By Kim Selwitz, PHENOM President We have exciting news to share: after a rigorous, extensive search process we have hired our first ever Executive Director, Natalie Higgins. Natalie graduated in May from the Northeastern University School of Law with her Juris Doctor. She received her B.A. in Political Science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. […]
During a wide-ranging conversation on April 14, 2014 at UMass Amherst, it was clear that Representative Jim McGovern was passionate and well-informed about the current state of affairs in higher education. Initiated by PHENOM, a group of about a dozen students, staff and faculty met with Congressman McGovern. He shared a letter he wrote to […]
By Colleen Avedikian, PHENOM Vice President UMass Dartmouth’s PHENOM chapter has hosted weekly meetings and campus events since 2009. Its formula for success is close contact with student groups, support from the UMD Faculty Federation, and academic department recognition. UMD PHENOM has been able to organize important events on campus, including teach-ins, Legislative Call-In Days, […]
By Ira Rubenzahl, President, Springfield Technical Community College When we look back on terrible wrongs–slavery, unjust wars, periods of deep and pervasive inequality–we may wonder how individuals tolerated and ignored these realities. Yet this is, unfortunately, a human tendency that Margaret Heffernan details in Willful Blindness: Why we ignore the obvious at our peril. “We […]
On July 15, Barbara Madeloni took office as President of the Massachusetts Teachers Association, the 113,000-member union of educators in public schools in Massachusetts. This follows a year-long campaign during which Madeloni articulated a progressive platform for public education — pre-K through college and university. As a professor at the University of Massachusetts, and Secretary […]