SEIU announced it would be sponsoring a nationwide webcast on “the dangers of for profit colleges” on February 2. “Good for Wall Street, Bad for Students” will concentrate specifically on the Art Institutes, Argosy University, Brown Mackie College and South University — all of which are owned by Pittsburgh-based Education Management Corporation. According to the union’s press release, the purpose of the webcast will be to “expose” questionable recruiting practices at EMC schools that allegedly “target” low income students, using scholarships to lure their victims into otherwise inaccessible private school educations, only to then get them hooked on learning and convinced that the most attractive path out of poverty is a college degree (and not just a $9/hr SEIU union janitor job), while tricking them into applying for student loans, all so private school 1% fat cat Wall Street types can buy more Super Bowl tickets and further enslave the masses for (ugh) profit. According to their press release, Thursday’s panel will examine “every phase of the for-profit student experience—recruitment often followed by high costs, poor instruction, dropping out, weak job-placement programs, excessive debt loads, and default on loans” which, apparently, is only happening at EMC schools, ha ha. 
Simultaneously, SEIU has launched something called the Coalition of Academic Labor: A National Campaign to Improve Higher Education demonstrating the union’s ongoing commitment to the highest standards in higher education since at least last Tuesday. The “coalition” boasts of organizing its first adjunct faculty unit to election, something the American Federation of Teachers has been doing peacefully and somewhat successfully for a decade now until SEIU noticed, like hyenas to a lion kill. In defense of the purple menace, they did find themselves with hundreds suddenly idled campus-based organizers and activists after years of tormenting Sodexo mercifully and abruptly ended last year. But what “organizing tactics” will SEIU use in unionizing college faculty? Plastic roaches in textbooks? Colloquia with Danny Glover?
