Burning Issues Update & Introducing the New Board of Directors 2013-14

David Porreca, FAUW President

This week’s post will accomplish two things: bring you up to date on some of the outstanding issues that have been of concern to our members this year, and also to introduce the members of the Faculty Association board for next year.

Burning Issues Update

Covered, secure bicycle parking

As a pilot project, UW is looking into and costing out the installation of secure, covered bicycle parking in the vicinity of several buildings on campus. Any suggestions for good examples of existing secure, covered bicycle storage would be greatly appreciated.

FORE Research Accounts access

Dennis Huber informed us that a new user interface would be installed on the FORE accounting system to increase useability and user-friendliness. This process will take some time, however, so we are not to expect improvements before the end of the new academic year.

Advanced Doctoral Dissertation Supervisor (ADDS) Status

UW administration has accepted FAUW’s suggestion and agreed to set up a task force involving faculty members and graduate students, and chaired by the Associate Provost, Graduate Studies. The purpose of this task force will be to determine what the current ADDS regulations are intended to accomplish, and then to provide recommendations on how to accomplish those things without the drawbacks of the current arrangement. Faculty members hired in the last three years have been informed individually about their ADDS status and supervisory privileges. Sorting out the inconsistencies on the various faculty websites is still an unresolved task.

Short-Term / Long-Term Disability

This question of the improper collection and transfer of personal, confidential medical information has been a major concern for FAUW for almost a full year now, yet a resolution is still a work in progress. We can expect an official response to FAUW’s 8-point plan either before the end of this month or, more likely, sometime early in the Fall term.

Bright Starts: Amalgamated Daycare at UW

At long last, construction on the amalgamated daycare facility, known as Bright Starts, is well under way, and I understand that it is still on schedule for completion in November this year. I am the fourth Faculty Association president to be involved in shepherding this project through concept to implementation, so the relief at it reaching this advanced stage is spread quite widely. Many thanks are owed to all those who have been involved throughout the process. Future generations of UW faculty, staff and students will carry on being grateful for all the effort deployed.

Work-Life Balance Report

FAUW is working on an implementation matrix for the recommendations of the Work-Life Balance Report. The matrix will include suggestions for allocating responsibility for each of the recommendations, as well as an aspirational timeline for implementing them. We hope to have this matrix submitted to UW administration before the end of this year’s cycle of FAUW Board and FRC meetings (i.e., the end of June). The recommendations of FAUW’s Compassionate Care and Bereavement Leave Report will be considered simultaneously in this exercise.

 

2013-14 FAUW Board of Directors, effective July 1, 2013
Voting Members
David Porreca (Classical Studies) president
George Freeman
(Electrical & Computer Engineering)		 past president
Greta Kroeker (History) vice-president
Frank Zorzitto (Pure Mathematics) treasurer
Metin Renksizbulut
(Mechanical & Mechatronics Engineering)		 chief negotiator
Jasmin Habib (Political Science) OCUFA director
Vivian Choh (Optometry & Vision Science) director
Roydon Fraser
(Mechanical & Mechatronics Engineering)		 director
Bryan Tolson
(Civil & Environmental Engineering)		 director
vacancy
Ex Officio, Non-Voting Members
Lori Curtis (Economics) Pension & Benefits Committee liaison
Carla Fehr (Philosophy) Status of Women and Equity Committee Chair
Christine Jewell (Library) Library Liaison
Cyntha Struthers
(St. Jerome’s/Statistics & Actuarial Science)		 SJU-ASA rep
Peter van Beek (Computer Science) Academic Freedom and Tenure Committee Chair
FAUW representatives on the Faculty Relations Committee
George Freeman, Greta Kroeker, David Porreca, Metin Renksizbulut, Bryan Tolson

What is the Merit of Merit?

David Porreca, FAUW President
This post owes its origin to a discussion we had both at the last FAUW Board meeting and a subsequent e-mail conversation among Board members. Essentially, the question boils down to asking whether all of the effort expended on the annual assessment of merit for faculty members provides a net benefit of productivity for all the relevant stakeholders: individual faculty members, our university as an institution, and academia writ large? 
In other words, what purpose does our current scheme of merit evaluations serve?

Just a few years ago, FAUW and the university’s administration undertook a review of the faculty evaluation process, and decided to maintain the broad structure of our current scheme of performance evaluations while encouraging department chairs to use “the full dynamic range” of designations from 0 to 2, in 0.25 increments.  Data regarding the distribution of merit scores is provided in the appendices to the Work-Life Balance Report that was released earlier this year.  Salary increments based on merit are drawn from a different pool of money than the scale increase that FAUW negotiates on its members’ behalf. 
As we all know, this process of annual merit evaluations involves a substantial amount of effort from faculty members filling in forms and templates every January.  As anyone who has been department chair or who has contributed to a departmental evaluation committee knows all too well, those templates and CVs are only the beginning.  An unquantified number of very expensive hours gets invested annually in the evaluating, assessing, comparing and ranking of these materials once submitted, and the resulting evaluation rankings get yet another round of assessment and vetting at the various Deans’ offices across campus. 
As one might expect under circumstances where professionals are judged against each other, considerations of fairness on the one hand, and of inevitable professional jealousy on the other, create fertile ground for the questioning of the resulting evaluations.  A member must determine whether s/he has the wherewithal to challenge the chair’s decision, perhaps as far as an appeal to the Dean, and such an appeal would involve an investment of working hours for all concerned, faculty, academic administrators and staff. 
In addition to these resource-consuming mechanisms mandated by policy and the Memorandum of Agreement, there is also the human angle of productivity loss due to the mental anguish that fretting over this forest of procedures causes.
Considering all of the above, does the net difference between an evaluation score of 1.5 vs. 1.75 on a professor’s salary justify the investment of human capital into all the mechanisms described above?  In a nutshell, it would seem that never has so much time been invested for the sake of so small a net difference. 

ON THE OTHER HAND…

If one compounds that difference over a professor’s whole career, the differences do add up.  Annual performance evaluations are essential for a university with high aspirations.
They serve the role of both carrot and stick.
In principle, they reward those faculty members who, by virtue of having more talent or working harder, accomplish more as teachers, researchers and administrative colleagues. These people expect and deserve better raises in recognition of their accomplishments.
At the same time, evaluations serve as a reminder to the lazier side of our nature that we
should be making strong contributions as researchers, teachers and administrative colleagues.  Despite what we like to believe about ourselves, we are not solely driven from within to be good professors. We need help from knowing that some sort of annual accounting has to be provided.
No system of performance evaluation can be perfect.  Given our human nature, a perfect system for doing such business is not possible.  All that an institution can do is try its best, and continue to seek improvements towards fair outcomes.  But “fair” is a tough target to hit in this endeavor, and there is no getting around it. 

The Hagey Lecture Perspective: 1997

The Hagey lectures are the University of Waterloo’s premier invitational public lecture series. Since 1970, outstanding individuals, who have distinguished themselves internationally in some area of scholarly or creative endeavour have given talks intended to challenge, stimulate and enrich not only the faculty, staff and students of the University of Waterloo, but all members of this community.

These annual lectures are co-sponsored by the Faculty Association and the university, and with the success of this year’s lecture by Dr. Paul Collier, we’d like to take the opportunity to celebrate some of our past lectures.

1997 brought Canadian writer and producer David Cayley to the Theatre of the Humanities. In a way it came full circle, as he was a student of inaugural Hagey lecturer George Wald. Cayley served as the principal writer for the CBC radio series Ideas, and his interviews with figures such as Ivan Illich and Northrop Frye, published in his Conversations series.

His talk, “The Expanding Prison: Is there an alternative?” was based on his then forthcoming book “The Expanding Prison” from House of Anansi Press. In it, he noted an ever-increasing global prison population, but observed that crime and imprisonment aren’t connected in the way we often imagine. “At the moment, while registered crime decreases in many places, imprisonment increases. Conversely, between the 1950s and  1970s the Netherlands cut the number of prisoners in half, while registered crime increased by 300%” Cayley set out to challenge what we consider the traditional notions of prison and punishment, and explore examples of successful alternatives displayed both in Canada and around the world.

Speaking to an audience of 450 people, he decried the current state of prisons, calling them “…the universities of crime,” isolating prisoners from society rather than helping them to rejoin it. He discussed alternatives to prison, such as victim mediation programs that give offenders an opportunity to make amends for their wrongdoing, and sentencing circles that encourage offenders to take ownership of their actions. His colloquium, delivered on the following day, expanded on these topics as he discussed the matter with Waterloo students.

Since his lecture, David Cayley has continued to produce and write for the CBC, and his 2009 book Ideas on the Nature of Science included edited transcripts of interviews with University of Waterloo professor Lee Smolin and 2011 Hagey lecturer Ian Hacking.

Quotations from Dave Augustyn, “Is there a better way?” University of Waterloo Magazine, Spring 1998

Tenured Positions Under Threat at St. Paul University

On Saturday May 25, we received the following message from the Professors’ Association of St. Paul University in Ottawa.

“The administration of Saint Paul University is threatening to fire an unspecified number of tenured professors to make up a deficit in the budget for the coming year.   Last week they began by firing a professional librarian who holds a permanent appointment.  There is no financial exigency clause in our Collective Agreement that would allow this.”

David Porreca, President of FAUW, responded to Mme. Chantal Beauvais, the Rector of St. Paul’s with this letter.

Dear Mme Beauvais,

I am writing to you as the President of the Faculty Association of the University of Waterloo, as it has come to my attention that Saint Paul University is planning to cut a number of tenured faculty positions. I urge you to reconsider this decision, for a number of what I believe to be good reasons:

  1. The principle of tenure precludes the casual firing of faculty members. The basic premise of academic freedom is at stake, and your administration is setting a noxious example that, if adopted elsewhere, sounds the death knell of academia in Canada. In my view, selling physical infrastructure is preferable to firing people, especially people with tenure.
  2. As a result of your administration’s recent actions, Saint Paul University finds itself without a professional librarian at this point in time. Consequently, the academic activities of your institution no longer have the support they need, which can only have deleterious consequences on the work of all those concerned: both students and faculty members. Therefore, I urge you to reinstate the Librarian whose position was terminated last month.
  3. The collective agreement your administration has with faculty members does not have a “financial exigency” clause. Therefore, by actively terminating positions, your administration is in clear breach of the collective agreement.
  4. Saint Paul University is well-recognized for the strength of its Theology program, both in terms of the research conducted as well as the teaching and training of new generations of theologians. As a Medievalist myself, I have a keen appreciation for the work that, historically, Saint Paul has done in this field. It is truly a tragedy that your administration has seen fit to torpedo one of your institution’s greatest strengths in this manner. Do you really want to be remembered as the administrator who gutted one of the best Theology programs in the country?
  5. At the University of Waterloo, our budgeting exercise is transparent – not as much as we as a Faculty Association would like, but nevertheless enough to allow us to consider critically the manner in which our University is run. From my understanding, there is a lack of transparency in your operations, such that your Professors’ Association is unable to assess whether your administration’s chosen course of action is really necessary. Instead of firing people, it would behoove you to construct a well-argued case to your faculty members and staff in order to get their support in any restructuring that may indeed be necessary, rather than imposing it by diktat.

From a purely human perspective, I would also urge you to put yourself in the position of those people whom you are terminating: they have devoted their entire careers to making Saint Paul University the excellent institution that it is. Do they really deserve to be treated in such a heavy-handed way? Is there really not a more humane way to resolve your budgetary concerns?

Yours most sincerely,

– David.

For more background on the situation with faculty at St. Paul, you can read this fact sheet put out by the Professors’ Association of St. Paul University.

Redefining the Scope of Academic Freedom

Principal Threats to Academic Freedom

David Porreca, FAUW President

This is the second entry in the series of posts on academic freedom stemming from the CAUT general meeting in Ottawa last month, this one focusing on attempts to redefine academic freedom in increasingly restrictive and less useful ways.  By way of example, I shall compare and contrast the definitions of academic freedom as expressed on the one hand by the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada (AUCC), and on the other by our colleagues at St. Jerome’s University in their collective agreement.

In terms of context, university presidents across Canada adopted the AUCC statement on academic freedom unanimously.  The SJU-ASA wording has been held up at CAUT meetings as a model of brevity and comprehensiveness.  The fact that both are almost exactly contemporaneous adds to the relevance of the comparison.

To facilitate comparison, here is the language adopted by both groups presented in a table, side-by-side. I’ve numbered the paragraphs in the AUCC Statement for ease of reference:

AUCC Statement on Academic Freedom
(25 October 2011) 		St. Jerome’s University Collective Agreement (effective: March 24 2011)
I. What is academic freedom?

1. Academic freedom is the freedom to teach and conduct research in an academic environment. Academic freedom is fundamental to the mandate of universities to pursue truth, educate students and disseminate knowledge and understanding.

2. In teaching, academic freedom is fundamental to the protection of the rights of the teacher to teach and of the student to learn. In research and scholarship, it is critical to advancing knowledge. Academic freedom includes the right to freely communicate knowledge and the results of research and scholarship.

3. Unlike the broader concept of freedom of speech, academic freedom must be based on institutional integrity, rigorous standards for enquiry and institutional autonomy, which allows universities to set their research and educational priorities.

II. Why is academic freedom important to Canada? 

1. Academic freedom does not exist for its own sake, but rather for important social purposes. Academic freedom is essential to the role of universities in a democratic society. Universities are committed to the pursuit of truth and its communication to others, including students and the broader community. To do this, faculty must be free to take intellectual risks and tackle controversial subjects in their teaching, research and scholarship.

2. For Canadians, it is important to know that views expressed by faculty are based on solid research, data and evidence, and that universities are autonomous and responsible institutions committed to the principles of integrity.

III. The responsibilities of academic freedom 

1. Evidence and truth are the guiding principles for universities and the community of scholars that make up their faculty and students. Thus, academic freedom must be based on reasoned discourse, rigorous extensive research and scholarship, and peer review.

2. Academic freedom is constrained by the professional standards of the relevant discipline and the responsibility of the institution to organize its academic mission. The insistence on professional standards speaks to the rigor of the enquiry and not to its outcome.

3. The constraint of institutional requirements recognizes simply that the academic mission, like other work, has to be organized according to institutional needs. This includes the institution’s responsibility to select and appoint faculty and staff, to admit and discipline students, to establish and control curriculum, to make organizational arrangements for the conduct of academic work, to certify completion of a program and to grant degrees.

IV. Roles and responsibilities

1. University leadership: It is a major responsibility of university governing bodies and senior officers to protect and promote academic freedom. This includes ensuring that funding and other partnerships do not interfere with autonomy in deciding what is studied and how. Canada’s university presidents must play a leadership role in communicating the values around academic freedom to internal and external stakeholders. The university must also defend academic freedom against interpretations that are excessive or too loose, and the claims that may spring from such definitions.

2. To ensure and protect academic freedom, universities must be autonomous, with their governing bodies committed to integrity and free to act in the institution’s best interests.

3. Universities must also ensure that the rights and freedoms of others are respected, and that academic freedom is exercised in a reasonable and responsible manner.

4. Faculty: Faculty must be committed to the highest ethical standards in their teaching and research. They must be free to examine data, question assumptions and be guided by evidence.

5. Faculty have an equal responsibility to submit their knowledge and claims to rigorous and public review by peers who are experts in the subject matter under consideration and to ground their arguments in the best available evidence.

6. Faculty members and university leaders have an obligation to ensure that students’ human rights are respected and that they are encouraged to pursue their education according to the principles of academic freedom.

7. Faculty also share with university leadership the responsibility of ensuring that pressures from funding and other types of partnerships do not unduly influence the intellectual work of the university.

 Article 2 – Academic Freedom 

2.0 The Parties agree to uphold, protect, and promote academic freedom as essential to the University’s objective to serve the common good through searching for, and disseminating, knowledge, truth, and understanding, and through fostering independent thinking and expression in academic staff and students.

2.1 Members possess the individual right, regardless of prescribed doctrine, to academic freedom, which includes the right to engage in the following without institutional censorship or reprisal provided the Member complies with relevant legal considerations and any related policies required by law:

(a) examine, question, teach, and learn

(b) disseminate opinions on any questions related to the Member’s teaching, professional activities, and research both inside and outside the classroom

(c) choose and pursue research, creative, or professional activities without interference or reprisal, and freely publish and make public the results thereof

(d) choose and pursue teaching methods and content;

(e) create, exhibit, perform or adjudicate works of art

(f) select, acquire, disseminate, or critique documents or other materials

(g) criticize the Association, Employer or any other organizations, whether corporate, political, public, private, institutional,
as well as society at large

(h) engage in service to the institution and the community

(i) participate in professional and  representative academic bodies; and

(j) recommend library materials relevant to the pursuit of learning

2.2 Academic freedom does not require neutrality on the part of the Member. Academic freedom makes intellectual discourse, critique and commitment  possible.

2.3 Academic freedom does not confer legal immunity and carries with it the duty to use that freedom in a responsible manner consistent with the scholarly obligation to base research and teaching on an honest search for knowledge. In exercising their legal rights, Members shall not be hindered or impeded by either Party in any manner contrary to this Agreement.

2.4 In any exercise of freedom of expression, Members shall not purport to convey an official position of the Employer unless so authorized by the Employer, President or his/her designate.

Some unsettling observations result from this exercise in contrast:

  • At I.3, the AUCC appears to be suggesting that academic freedom is a lesser right than freedom of speech, whereas the opposite is true.  Would freedom of speech prevent one from being fired for criticizing one’s corporate employer?  Only academic freedom allows the professorate to have a say in how it and universities are governed.
  • The AUCC statement (III. 2) purports that academic freedom is “constrained by the professional standards of the academic discipline and the responsibility of the institution to organize its academic mission.”  Besides the ambiguity inherent in the statement “professional standards” (which ones? set by whom? isn’t obtaining tenure a high enough bar to qualify one as having “professional standards”?), I doubt any academic discipline could agree internally on a set of “professional standards” – disagreement is precisely the point of having academic debates. 
  • Anyacademic who criticizes their employer would be in breach of academic freedom according to this section (III. 2) of the AUCC statement.  Indeed, aside perhaps from certain branches of philosophy, there is no academic discipline that deals directly with issues of university governance.  So, if a mathematician sees fit to publish a critique of her/his employer – clearly something guaranteed by the SJU statement (2.1 (g)) – the AUCC would view this individual as being in breach of academic freedom since none of the “professional standards” in mathematics have anything to say about university governance. If the criticism came consistently from the same department, could administrators use the AUCC statement to justify the targeting of that department because it hinders “the responsibility of the institution to organize its academic mission”?
  • The previous point is made all the more ominous when read along with the next point (III. 3), which places in institutional hands the task of appointing faculty, determining curricula and so on.  This statement would be acceptable if it recognized that “the institution” and “the faculty” are one and the same, based on the principle of collegial governance.  It is not at all clear, however, that this is the understanding implied in the AUCC statement.  The separation of “the institution” from “the faculty” is a pernicious sub-text to the AUCC document, the barn door through which academic freedom can be wheeled out on a gurney.
  • At IV.2, the AUCC makes a strong case for institutional autonomy and administrators acting in the institution’s best interests. As public institutions, however, universities have a responsibility to the public good, and it is the latter that academic freedom ultimately aims to protect and foster.  Not much is said explicitly of the public good in the AUCC statement.
  • Despite its considerably greater length, the AUCC statement says nothing about protecting faculty members who criticize corporate entities, governments or their own institution.
  • At IV.3, we read: “ Universities must also ensure that … academic freedom is exercised in a reasonable and responsible manner.”   Who determines what is “reasonable and responsible”? I’ve rarely seen such unsettling Orwellian language in an official statement, and it takes very little imagination to figure how such a statement could be abused to the detriment of individual faculty members or even whole departments.  Universities are in the business of learning about the world and transmitting what is learned to subsequent generations at the highest possible levels of attainment.  Being a general rights defender is not part of the ‘central mission’ of a university, although an institution should be willing to defend the rights of its own constituents (as McMaster University has done in the recent cases brought against one if its librarians, Dale Askey).
  • At IV.7, the AUCC invites faculty members to join the university administration to prevent “undue” influence by funding or other partnerships on university-based intellectual activity.  What would qualify as “appropriate” or “due” influence, and how would those boundaries be defined?  The qualifier is unnecessary and unsettling.  Better would have been to emphasize the importance and value of curiosity-driven research.

In light of the above, I invite our President to renounce the AUCC statement, since it effectively erodes and fails to defend basic principles of academic freedom that faculty members need to do their jobs.

Global Trends in Media and Higher Education

Worldviews 2013: Global Trends in Media and Higher Education will take place in Toronto, June 19-21, 2013 on the University of Toronto campus. It is a unique international conference that brings together thinkers, academics, editors, students, journalists, and communication professionals to examine how media coverage of higher education —  including universities and colleges — is shaping the organization, operation and perceptions of these institutions.

The conference is a forum for those from media and higher education to engage one another and consider directions for the future. The impact of new and emerging forms of communication, the internationalization of higher education campuses, and the restructuring of media and academia in the context of financial constraints are some of the critical issues that those attending Worldviews will address.

Worldviews also aims to actively engage its audience and is designed to maximize the participatory nature of the event. Interviews, panels, keynote addresses, workshops, café conversations, a live twitter feed and engagement with other social media will allow participants to deliberate, network, and generate ideas in a unique setting.

The Themes of the 2013 Conference are:

  • Newsflashes from the global campus: Reporting trends, interpretations and relationships
  • Hooking up or a long-term relationship? Future depictions of the professoriate and of journalism
  • Unlocking the tower: How trends in media, citizenry, and government are altering higher education

And of particular interest are some of the following sessions:

The Age of Austerity for Higher Education: Public Reaction and Media Depictions

  • Student protests or civil society mobilization? Media depictions in Quebec, Chile, US, and UK
  • The under-reported story: The role of university campuses in the Arab Spring
  • Innovations bred by austerity: Crowd-sourcing in media and in higher education
  • Playing favourites? Media’s bent on the Social investment vs. Government austerity debate on the future of higher education.
Who Owns the Academy: Academic Freedom, Public Finances and National Security
  • Academic freedom and freedom of the press: Old tenets, new interpretations
  • National security, social media and the publicity of academic findings

The Internationalization of Universities

  • International students and campus integration: Institutional strategies and media interpretations 
  • The breadth, depth, and diversity of coverage in China and India as emerging (major) players in higher education
  • The cultural impact of western-centric hubs and branch campuses in Asia and the Middle East

Confirmed Speakers Include:
Adrian Monck, Head of Communications and Media, World Economic Forum
Sir John Daniel, former President of the Commonwealth of Learning
Phillip Altbach, Director of the Centre of Higher Education, Boston College
Teboho Moja, Clinical Professor of Higher Education, New York University and former advisor to the South African Minister of Education
Nicole Blanchett Nehili, Professor in Journalism Broadcast Program, Sheridan Institute of Technology
Gili Dori, professor of sociology and anthropology, Hebrew University
Tony Burman, Ryerson University journalism professor and Al Jazeera’s former head of strategy in the Americas
Andrew Keen, author of “The Cult of the Amateur”
Lynn Pasquerella, President of Mount Holyoke College
Goolam Mohamedbhai, former Vice-Chancellor, University of Mauritius
Pericles Lewis, President, Yale-National University of Singapore College
Chad Gaffield, President, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
Shari Graydon, Founder, Informed Opinions
Mary Dwyer, Senior Editor, Maclean’s
Simona Choise, Education Editor, Globe and Mail
Scott Jaschik, Editor of Inside Higher Ed; and
Karen MacGregor, Global Editor of University World News.
Mark Kingwell, Philosopher, University of Toronto
Frank Furedi, Author and Professor Emeritus, University of Kent
Sheila Embleton, Distinguished Research Professor of Linguistics, York University
Vinita Srivastava, Professor of Journalism, Ryerson University, and former editor, New York Times Magazine

See the list of speakers confirmed to date on the World Views website.

Worldviews 2013 is organized by the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations(OCUFA), OISE-University of Toronto, the Washington-based Inside Higher Ed and the London-based University World News. For more information or to register, please visit the World Views Conference website: http://worldviewsconference.com/ You can also talk with them on Twitter (@worldviewscon) and on Facebook

The Casualization of the Academic Workforce

Principal Threats to Academic Freedom

David Porreca, FAUW President

The Canadian Association of University Teachers – the umbrella organization representing 68,000 university faculty members and librarians nationwide – held its 74th Council April 25-28th, in Ottawa. I attended representing FAUW.  Among the many issues and concerns that were discussed from Thursday to Sunday, threats to academic freedom in Canada loom large.  The ten items below were identified as the principal threats to academic freedom currently prevalent in Canada.

  1. Casualization of the academic workforce
  2. Redefining the scope of academic freedom
  3. Undermining the concept of tenure through permissive contracts
  4. Discrimination and harassment of members of marginalized language groups
  5. Loss of custody and control of faculty members’ records
  6. New donor agreements and collaborations
  7. Contracting out of academic work
  8. Policies on “respectful workplace” / “civil discourse”
  9. Diminution of civil liberties
  10. Restriction of trade union rights

Over the next several months, but interspersed with items of immediate interest, a post about each of these threats will appear on this blog, beginning today.

Although other jurisdictions have advanced far more along the path of casualization than we have – over 70% of university and college teaching in the US is done by contract academic staff – UW finds itself particularly vulnerable to this trend. The research-intensive focus on our campus leads full-time faculty to want to reduce their teaching loads to leave more time for research.  In fact, in the ten years I have been a faculty member at UW, my own department has gone from a 3-3 to a 2-2 teaching load to accommodate more time for research. I know of many other departments where the regular teaching load is even less.

From my perspective, the idea of a university is encapsulated by the dynamic interplay between teaching and research, between faculty members and students at all levels.  Favouring one to the detriment of the other does a disservice to the idea and ideal of what activities a university should undertake and emphasize.  Students deprived of being taught by researching faculty are not getting what they are paying for.  Faculty members who limit their interaction with students whenever possible in favour of their research are at risk of missing out on the stimulating effect that transmitting their expertise viva voce can have: explaining complex concepts to a new audience often leads to clarification in one’s own mind, not to mention the useful feedback once can get from clever, critically-minded individuals from a younger generation.

The above observations lead me to ask: Who is doing all the teaching that used to get done when full-time faculty members taught more courses?  Part of the answer resides in regular curriculum revisions that, in many cases, aim to reduce the full-time staffing necessary to deliver academic programs.  These revisions, unless undertaken with the utmost care to avoid such an outcome, will tend to adversely affect the students’ experience compared to programs delivered, let’s say, a generation ago.

If teaching loads are being reduced and curricula remain viable and strong, inevitably the other part of the answer to the question posed above is ‘sessionals’, also known as ‘contract academic staff’ (or, at UW, as ‘adjuncts’) These people are practically by definition a casualized category of individuals who in many cases are parachuted in to cover gaps in what departments promise to teach in the course listings of the academic calendar.  This trend toward casualization is particularly threatening to academic freedom and the quality of teaching students receive because those sessionals whom increasingly we entrust with the teaching of our students do not have tenure.  Therefore, they are much, much more vulnerable than tenured faculty members to threats and pressures to modify what they teach for the sake of conforming to whatever ideological or personal flavour du jour that happens to prevail in their academic unit or institution.

One of the more pernicious knock-on effects of this casualization is a reduction in the professional consideration accorded to professors in their workplace and in society at large.  On a local level, attempts to exert more control over the working lives of academics (e.g., through changes in practice over scheduling, or increasingly onerous accountability measures ranging from travel expenses to teaching curricula) are being resisted by FAUW on behalf of its members whenever possible. On a provincial level, we can see the end result of the process of de-professionalization in the treatment accorded to Ontario’s primary and secondary school teachers by our province’s government.

Essentially, our students deserve better than to see their university education be casualized and therefore become more conformist and less questioning of corporate or political agendas.  Above all, we owe it to ourselves to resist casualization by emphasizing publicly and forcefully that we are purveyors of an essential public good: an educated citizenry that has witnessed the exercise of academic freedom, so that everyone’s civil liberties can be defended effectively when they come under threat, as they increasingly have been over the past 12+ years.

In related news, the contract academic staff at SJU have recently voted to join the SJU Academic Staff Association as a separate bargaining unit.  How long will it be before their UW counterparts feel compelled by circumstance to do the same?

Senate Follow-Up

David Porreca, FAUW President

Last week’s post by George Freeman received more hits than all our previous postings combined. In response to several comments I received both personally and in the comments section, I had promised to provide a summary of the discussion that actually occurred.

I note, however, that the draft version of the minutes to the last Senate meeting are now available. I hereby invite all faculty senators to look over the text provided in the minutes and make sure the wording reflects the tone and content of the discussion as you recall it occurring.

Go Forth and Differentiate?

George Freeman, FAUW Past President

The Senate meeting of Monday, April 15 will live in my memory under the heading “kill two birds with one stone.” Unfortunately the two birds seem to have been institutional autonomy and collegial governance. Also, curiously, I don’t think I’ve ever seen more examples of the prisoner’s dilemma or tragedy of the commons illustrated in a single meeting. That’s because we had a great talk by Prof. Keith Hipel of Systems Design Engineering on methods to analyse problems which otherwise might go down those unfortunate paths. Then we went down them.

The story actually starts a long way back with a peculiar organization known as the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario or HEQCO. In early April, it produced a report entitled “Quality: Shifting the Focus – A Report from the Expert Panel to Assess the Strategic Mandate Agreement Submissions.”

Anyone wanting to understand the shortcomings of education and business leadership in Ontario must read this report, keeping in mind the credentials of the people whose names are attached to it. I promise you will be shocked, by the naked self-interest and by the lack of sound evidence-based reasoning.

The strategic mandate agreements were a bait-and-switch game foisted on university and college presidents. Under the hint of some new money, they were asked to summarize the strengths and goals of their institutions. As you might expect, there’s a strong similarity among the submissions and also a bunch of points of differentiation, such as cooperative education at Waterloo. The new money seems to have morphed into new cuts. However, differences can be amplified and marketed and that appears to excite both government and industry.

The apparent shift in “shifting the focus” is to an explicitly two-tiered system of university education (like that bastion of social equity, the United States). The big lie in “quality” is twofold in my opinion:

  1. That quality can improve under this kind of differentiation, except for a few of the privileged or lucky, and 
  2. That costs can go down.

The HEQCO report gives no evidence for any quality increase or cost decrease. What the report does indicate is that Ontario’s universities are already differentiated on everything the panel cared to measure. Yet, they repeat over and over a call to differentiate. Thus, maybe it’s useful to contemplate where the problems with university differentiation might exist, or be perceived to exist.

The main ones I could think of, off-hand, are location and faculty pay.

Location is important because Ontario has built huge settlements ringing Toronto over the past few decades but not sited enough universities within them. Also, the present universities, being close to uniformly good and close to uniformly diverse in program offerings, attract many students from their local areas. This saves a lot of money for a lot of parents (except in the huge new settlements). A recent proposal from government had three distinctly second-tier campuses being built to serve these areas. However, such a direct approach to making quality lumpy has obvious and negative bang-for-the-buck optics. In any case, Ontario’s universities are clearly too uniformly good even when badly funded.

Faculty pay is important because it’s the supposed key to a two-tiered system. The dream seems to be to have large numbers of students educated by less expensive non-research-active faculty teaching more courses per year. Let’s say on average one of these people costs $100k and teaches eight courses in comparison with a present-day faculty member who costs $130k and teaches four courses. Then, three faculty members costing $390k and teaching twelve courses could be replaced by one faculty member and one non-research-active faculty member costing $230k and teaching twelve courses.

On the surface, this would save about 40% of the 30% of the university budget which goes to faculty salaries, say twelve percent. In the university system, that’s about three to four years of inflation covered at the cost of both research diversity (including graduate courses) and research resilience dropping by 67 percent. About one third of the approximately 10% of space used for academic offices might be freed up (half a building or so at Waterloo).

This might buy enough time to fund the construction of a cheap campus or two (12% of the system budget is about $800m). It would be to the great benefit of any politicians who could announce it.
Of course, I doubt one could come anywhere near this level of transformation, so the actual potential savings must be much smaller. In any case, a system which gives a viable research opportunity to all faculty is, again, too good and too uniform to market effectively as sound bites.

The Prisoner’s Dilemma

HEQCO’s financial survival depends on telling the government what it wants to hear. They especially like surveys of public perception and arguments involving performance metrics and system-wide control by outside, non-democratic and non-participatory agencies. Increasingly, university presidents and the Council of Ontario Universities seem to just fall in line, giving up their institutional autonomy and voluntarily playing the prisoner’s dilemma game while destroying the Ontario university commons. By Feridun’s description of the last COU meeting to Senate, there is zero chance of the university presidents cooperating against differentiation. Bird number one went down but the stone continued.

On further questioning, it emerged that Waterloo would consider shutting down departments as part of differentiation; perhaps those with not enough participation in graduate studies. The next natural question was about what kind of consultation might go on before (or while) proceeding with such a differentiation agenda at Waterloo. Apparently, the meetings around the mid-cycle review of the university’s strategic plan over the past year have given the administration a mandate to go in this direction. That, and the fact that other universities are already doing it. Bird number two, dead.

One might wonder what roles Senate, its Long-Range Planning Committee, and its Finance Committee play in this, especially if you read their legal responsibilities under the University of Waterloo Act and Senate Bylaws, in particular, the Act Section 22, Bylaw 3 Section 3, and Bylaw 4 Section 3. Apparently, their roles are deemed to be none, none, and none, except that the SLRP did assist Sallie Keller (former VPAP) with the strategic mandate agreement for Waterloo and Senate still gets to ask questions. SLRP will also review, in some sense, the strategic pl
an. FAUW members have some further leverage through Articles 15, 16, and 17 of the Memorandum of Agreement. Keep in mind, however, that the province does not respect such agreements or existing legislation very much lately.

The usual message is trotted out, that Waterloo might be a net “winner” in differentiation of teaching just as we appear to be so in the differentiation of research. However, in both cases, this is just in the context of everyone losing. The United Kingdom and Germany, strangely enough, were the touted models at Senate. The UK takes performance metrics to the limits of absurdity and seems to have completely abandoned the notion of the university as a social good. Germany is distinguished by having universities which are free but mediocre, according to The Economist last June. Not exactly the leaders I would have picked to follow.

Bottom line: If we’re so innovative, why would we seek to emulate haphazard social experimentation or mediocrity?

Addendum 1: A quick scan of the just-released strategic plan draft shows “cut” only three times, as part of the phrase “cutting-edge” and, although “different” appears seven times, it is never in the context of differentiation. Whatever mandate came from the consultations isn’t obvious in the plan.

Addendum 2: HEQCO must be rolling in money because reports come too fast to read. The latest from them claims that Ontario universities are efficient, productive, and accessible – then argues for a new accountability regime to improve what we do without additional funding. OCUFA characterized it quite astutely as “fiddling at the margins.” I feel so naive having worked here for 28 years without any notion of quality to guide me.

FAUW News Flashes

David Porreca, FAUW President

Today’s blog post aims to bring our readership up to speed on a number of different issues that FAUW is working on at the moment.

FAUW elections

All of the open positions on the FAUW Board of Directors have been filled by acclamation this year.  I am very pleased to welcome the following new faces for the 2013-14 academic year: Vivian Choh (Optometry and Vision Science), Jasmin Habib (Political Science) and Bryan Tolson (Civil Engineering). We also have an experienced hand with Frank Zorzitto (Pure Mathematics) returning to the Board, and I will be continuing as President.

MoA changes

Expect an electronic vote imminently on two separate questions, both of critical importance:

  1. Adding a modification clause to our MoA, which had been absent before; and 
  2. Re-configuring Article 14 on Research Integrity in order to abide by the Framework established by the Tri-Agencies and imposed upon all institutions receiving Tri-Council monies.

In principle, UW has until the end of the month to sort out the latter.  We are still collaborating with the Secretariat to establish mutually agreeable wording before presenting the final draft to a membership vote.

Scheduling

Discussions are ongoing with the Registrar’s Office to improve communications and procedures surrounding the testing of the new scheduling software.  FAUW has been informed that a communications professional has been hired by the Registrar’s Office in an attempt to remedy a long-recognized problem.  We wait to see whether this welcome development will make a positive difference.  FAUW is well aware that this issue rankles faculty members like few others can, so we are keeping a sharp eye on it.

Daycare

Construction is underway on Columbia just north and east of the optometry building.  Since we have a significant financial stake in the operation, FAUW is helping Bright Starts Inc. (the amalgamated daycare operator) negotiate a lease agreement with UW.  Discussions are ongoing – this very morning, in fact. Stay tuned.

Access Copyright

Access Copyright has decided to press a lawsuit against York University for copyright infringement.  This will be a test case for the viability of that enterprise’s approach to academic users of copyrighted materials.  CAUT is paying very close attention to this issue, as is FAUW.

Fallout from our Spring General Meeting

The following items were raised at FAUW’s Spring General Meeting that we plan to tackle over the next weeks and months, in addition to all of the rest of what we are pursuing:

  • We need user-friendly software that allows faculty members to track their research funds in real time.
  • We need to push for the modification of the provisions for choosing membership on university-level committees such that regular faculty members are not placed in a position to run for election against their own Dean.
  • UW needs covered, secure, well-lit bike parking, and/or the ability to park one’s bike in one’s office, while acknowledging that the latter doesn’t work for students.
  • The net effect of full-cost programs has been exactly what FAUW feared it would be: the diversion of the teaching efforts of the full-time professorate to those programs, while leaving our regular students to be taught by sessionals and TAs, thereby de facto relegating them to a second-class student status.  This is a serious problem that will need careful attention, since it arises at the intersection of pedagogy and university finances.

Do you know of anything we need to add to this list? Please leave a comment below!

Work-Life Balance Report

FAUW has been asked to provide a prioritized list from the recommendations contained in the Work-Life Balance Report (full text available in the Senate materials from March) that UW is to tackle first for implementation.  If any of you have strong feelings on this question, please do not hesitate to provide a comment below, or contact the FAUW President.

In conclusion

There are a number of other issues we are dealing with at the moment where discussion is ongoing but there isn’t any concrete progress to report in this forum.  These include:

  • Our concerns over ADDS status.
  • Finding alternatives to the Registrar’s Office restricting student access to LEARN when their fees aren’t arranged on time.
  • Information collection from Short-Term and Long-Term Disability claims.
  • Parental leave salary top-up for families with both parents being university employees.
  • Compassionate care and bereavement leave.
  • Ongoing concerns over scheduling.

All this to say that there’s a lot going on behind the scenes for FAUW on behalf of our membership, and we’re far from idle!