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My former colleague Osman Durrani, who has died aged 77, was a scholar of German literature and culture with a broad range of research interests. He wrote books on Goethe, Faust and the Bible (1977) and Faust: Icon of Modern Culture (2004), and another on fictions of Germany in the modern novel. He also edited an anthology of German Romantic poetry and had a collection of his poems, After Sunset, published in 1978.
There was more to Osman’s range than classical literature, though. He was a close observer of the contemporary literary scene, a friend of the novelist Joseph von Westphalen, and a key participant in the 1990s at conferences on post-unification German themes, one of which he organised himself at University College Durham in 1994, resulting in the publication The New Germany: Literature and Society after Unification, co-edited with Colin Good and Kevin Hilliard. To the end of his life he enjoyed reviewing books, for academic journals and the Times Literary Supplement, insisting that a review should never take more than a day to write.
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Medical workers treating patients with Covid-19 at the Brooklyn Hospital Center in January 2022, when the Omicron wave was in full force.
Los Angeles school employees and supporters rallied in Los Angeles State Historic Park on Thursday.
The strike began on Tuesday in the Van Nuys neighborhood of Los Angeles, with bus drivers and other school employees walking a picket line outside a school district bus depot.
“At first, I was just in disbelief,” Veronica Gonzalez, a doctoral student at the University of California-Irvine, recalled in an interview. “Then I was incensed.”
The disdain shown to us by Queen Mary University of London inspired me to redouble my efforts on the picket lines. Staff and students have had enough
On 29 June 2022, all the staff at Queen Mary University of London, where I work, received an email from management. To our horror, they were threatening to withhold 100% of our pay for 21 days of both July and August, because we were participating in a marking boycott over pensions, pay, labour precarity, inequality and working conditions. Life in the higher education sector had been getting tougher ever since I started my career in 2017. But at that moment, I not only resolved to continue to strike, but redoubled my efforts to get as many colleagues as possible to join me on the picket lines. The condescension from my employers made me feel something stark and visceral.
I hadn’t always felt so jaded. I finished my PhD in law in 2016 and was ready to begin a life of service in education and research, working in the subject I cared passionately about. But several things quickly became clear. There was the increasing precarity of university labour: one-third of academics are on fixed-term contracts, 41% are on hourly paid contracts and there are still 29 institutions employing at least five academic staff on zero-hours contract. In 2021, it was reported that pay had been cut by 20% in real-terms over the past 12 years, while changes to the pension scheme mean that we’ve taken a 35% cut to our guaranteed retirement income despite contributing more. Meanwhile, university and college staff are doing the equivalent of two days’ unpaid work every week on average. It’s an environment that leaves me feeling, like many others, disillusioned and questioning my future.
Dr Tanzil Chowdhury is a lecturer at Queen Mary University of London.
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Stephen and Rae Ann Gruver said the funds from the verdict over their son’s death would help support the mission of the Max Gruver Foundation, an organization committed to ending hazing on college campuses.
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Adriana Kuch, 14, told her father that she didn’t want to be the girl who was beat up on a video, he said.
Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio, argues that the Justice Department has victimized and attempted to silence conservative parents.
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