News From Your Board: May 24 Meeting Recap

Returning from the Victoria Day long weekend, a rowdy and energized board assembled to review many in-progress issues. We began with the implementation of the President’s Advisory Committee on Student Mental Health (PAC-SMH) report, specifically how FAUW can support the recommendations on training for faculty. The Board expressed support for these recommendations, and suggests that faculty voluntarily engage in additional mental health training as provided on campus. We’ll have more on this in another post soon.

The second issue brought to us directly from members is the lack of secure bicycle parking on campus. The Board wants to support improved bike parking and hopes to see Parking Services commit more resources to this in the future. Discussions will continue on this topic.

Next, everyone’s favourite topic—the Fall Break pilot—made a reappearance, specifically preferred semester start dates after Labour day, and how changes would affect faculty who teach in the spring term and sessional or contract faculty who are only paid as of the first day of class.

On a related note: We recently sent a reminder to our members that the Registrar’s Office will schedule exams earlier in the spring block for faculty who teach in both the spring and fall terms, in order to provide adequate time between terms. The response was positive (mostly), and we hope that those of you teaching in both of these terms take advantage of this scheduling flexibility in the future.

We have been hearing from members whose professional expense (FPER) claims have been rejected despite meeting the April 30 submission deadline. From FAUW’s perspective, these claims should be reimbursed to our members as soon as possible. This position has been brought to the administration and more information is coming!

Members in Applied Health Sciences will be happy to hear that they now have a representative on the Board for the 2018–19 year. While the position was vacant following our elections in March, Clark Dickerson from Kinesiology has since stepped up to the plate and was appointed by the Board for a one-year term (as per the FAUW constitution).

Lastly, the Board passed terms of reference for the newly renamed Equity Committee. Information about all of our committees is available on our website.

—Peter Johnson, director for the Faculty of Environment

What You Missed at our 2018 Spring General Meeting

We had a full agenda at our Spring General Meeting last week. Here are some of the highlights.

Bryan Tolson’s President’s Report included an update on current policy development and the messages shared with MPPs at OCUFA’s lobby day last month. View the President’s Report slides (PDF) (and our blog post about lobby day) for details.

Marcel Pinheiro delivered the Elections Committee report: The successful candidates from Arts, Engineering, Environment, Mathematics, and Science are, respectively: Alice Kuzniar, Paul Ward, Daniel Cockayne, Dan Brown, and Vivian Choh (read more about the directors-elect). Voter turnout was 33% in Arts, 26% in Engineering, and 29% in Science.

We received no nominations from members in Applied Health Sciences, so this position will be vacant until the Board can fill it by appointment.

Members approved the budget for 2018–19 and changes to the constitution regarding the role of past president, the executive committee, and the name and mandate of the Status of Women and Equity Committee—now the Equity Committee. The updated constitution is on our website.

Lead negotiator Benoit Charbonneau gave an overview of the salary negotiation outcomes and a crash course on how our salary structure works, which you can also get from our Faculty Guide page on salaries. A detailed explanation of the negotiation results was posted on our blog in February. Charbonneau also noted the members of the Lecturers Salary Working Group.

Dan Brown, one of our representatives to the fall break working group, gave an update on the fall break pilot project. Thank you to the 506 faculty members who participated in the survey that closed on March 30. We are reviewing the results now.

We introduced a couple of waste-reduction initiatives at this meeting: Thank you to everyone who brought their own plate and/or coffee mug, and to everyone for composting their pizza crusts and paper plates!

The next general meeting will be in December.

A Fall Break at UW?

by: Bryan Tolson, FAUW Vice President

“Should classes start on the first Thursday after Labour Day to allow for two additional days off in the fall term?”

Our undergraduates said yes in their November referendum (74% of roughly 20% of eligible voters according to the Daily Bulletin).

My answer to the question above is no. Starting the term earlier negatively impacts my mental health and my work-life balance. I’m not saying I don’t care about student mental health and well-being. I certainly do and I think there are means to improve these things for students (see a few paragraphs below). My point is that we need to start this Fall Break discussion by realizing that UW has to balance the perceived improvement to undergraduate student mental health and well-being with the perceived degradation of mental health and well-being to other UW community members such as faculty, staff and graduate students.

The reason UW does not currently have a Fall Break, and would be justified in continuing with this approach, is very simple: Co-op. UW flexibility to accommodate a Fall Break is incredibly constrained, unlike any of the 14 Ontario universities that currently have a Fall Break, by our massive Co-op program, which involves more than half our full-time undergraduates (>60%) and thus has our campus buzzing over the summer. Providing the co-op program means that a large proportion of faculty members, staff and graduate student TAs are committed to lectures, tutorials, labs and proctoring and then grading exams May through mid-August.

Based on my personal experience of teaching in almost every spring term since I have been at UW, I can tell you that it is quite limiting to have to plan a family vacation for the final two weeks of August or the first week of September. This is even more frustrating when holiday plans sometimes need to wait until the spring final exam schedule is released in mid-June.

However, I don’t have it as bad as lecturers who typically teach all three terms in a calendar year. Their only current dependable opportunity to take a two week or longer holiday not over Christmas (they have 4 weeks of holidays to take) is the period between spring exams ending and the start of the fall term. There are also UW staff and faculty who choose to take family holidays during orientation week (week of Labour Day) with the rationale that this is the only dependable non-teaching week outside of December when their family can take a week long holiday that only requires four days of vacation time.

Perhaps more UW staff and faculty with children at home use the week of Labour Day to deal with the stress of transitioning the family into new routines for the new school year as that is the week their kids return to school. Adding the work stress of the start of term at UW to that of an already stressful week at home is not very attractive. For all these reasons, it is not acceptable in my mind to further reduce the potential vacation period at the end of the summer by starting the fall term on Thursday after Labour Day.

After ruling out an earlier start to the fall term, perhaps the next option the campus would consider is Sunday exams. Students didn’t answer to this option/question but my answer is again no. This is not for religious reasons. Sunday happens to be the only day of the week that I can currently count on having no mandated commitments and thus plan family gatherings for the Christmas season in advance. Faculty and graduate student TAs all deserve to count on having one such commitment free day a week in December. Faculty and graduate student TAs are already required to work a few Saturdays a year without overtime and I personally think that is fine.

As I mentioned earlier, I do care about student mental health and well-being and so we should talk about ways to improve this. Here are two approaches that do not require a Fall Break

Follow the advice of a wise student-senator who suggested we just have a 24-48 hr moratorium on deliverables and exams immediately after the Thanksgiving long-weekend. This is easy in my view and makes complete sense. We should let the students decompress and not have to work over that weekend.
Use the new campus scheduling software to maximize efficiency of final exam scheduling and constrain the system so that students never write two exams in one day. While it is entirely plausible that this is not feasible, our campus won’t know for sure until this is tested. We could even consider melting one of the Columbia Ice sheets to make available more large scale final exam writing space.

If the above improvements are not enough and a Fall Break must happen then how about having the break only when the scheduling of Statutory Holidays during the September-December are favourable? Why not just change UW guidelines on the pre-exam study days to say only that there must be a two day break (weekend or weekday, but not statutory holiday) between last day of classes and first day of final exams [actually I think this just partially happened at Nov. Senate meeting – see the minutes, pg 27]? This is arguably better than the current guidelines, which can sometimes yield only a 48 hour study period like this term while in other terms students have 96 hours to study before their first final.

What about squeezing the final exam period into a 12-day instead of 14-day stretch? Note that both of these stretches will usually cover two non-exam writing Sundays and so students with perfectly spaced exams would on average go from writing an exam every 2.8 days to every 2.4 days (see #2 above for feasibility assessment of perfectly spaced exams).

In fact, the spring term exam period is only 11 days of exams while the other terms have 12 days of
exams. If the exam scheduling could be made to work over 11 days, why not move to 11 days of exam writing in all terms? One way to squeeze the exam period without having to rely on the scheduling system software would be to increase the number of exam time slots from four to five per day. This is achievable by changing the first exam time to start at 8 am, moving to only 30 minutes in between exam times and then finishing the last exam at 10:30 pm.

I believe UW can find the right balance on this issue but it will not be achieved by implementing a Fall Break in the way the students voted for. I’d like to think that a faculty referendum on this issue is not necessary. But if it is, perhaps this question is appropriate:

“Should classes start on the first Thursday after Labour Day thus, shortening the period between the end of the spring term exam period and the start of the fall term by two working days?”

FAUW Updates – Part 2 of 2

David Porreca, FAUW President

This is a continuation from Part 1 posted last week.

6. Pharmacy building

East side of the pharmacy building showing flower garden

Photo by George Freeman

FAUW has received reports that certain peculiarities of the newish Pharmacy building on the corner of King & Victoria in Kitchener have been generating substantial environmental problems for the users of the building. In particular, large teaching laboratories on the King Street side of the building have been experiencing high temperature and humidity levels on hot summer days.

Their large windows face roughly north east and would get direct sun in the early morning, especially around the summer solstice. Users of the lab need the full protective gear of safety glasses, long-sleeved lab coats, etc., along with giant fume hoods to whisk away any hazardous vapours. It is possible the HVAC equipment in that part of the building is not sufficient to its task or needs adjustment in view of the exhaust force of the fume hoods. FAUW and colleagues working in the Pharmacy building are working with Plant Ops to find a solution.

7. Fall break?

Sign post labelled October pointing to the right

The Federation of Students has expressed an interest in running a referendum on whether or not to call upon the university to establish a Fall Break, similar to the winter-term Reading Week. Currently, 14 Ontario universities have such a break, leaving only 8 without one (UW included). A Task Force has just produced a report for the Provost detailing the various trade-offs that would be needed for such a break to be established (e.g., some combination of shortening Orientation, allowing exams on December 23, Sunday exams, and other options).

The mandate of the task force was simply to gather information about these trade-offs, and to comment on their relative feasibility, rather to make any decisions or formal recommendations about whether or not to go ahead with this idea. The Task Force had good representation from all relevant stakeholder groups, and any moves toward a Fall Break would certainly involve much more extensive consultation of all the relevant parties. Any changes would require formal approval by Senate.

8. FAUW staffing

Just as the university itself is facing a crisis of continuity, the Faculty Association is also in a similar bind with respect to our staff. We have already bid farewell in early July to Jim Tigwell, our Communications Coordinator and Administrative Assistant, as well as to Carrie Hunting in mid-August, who was our Academic Freedom and Tenure and Policy Officer. Job postings forthcoming.

Geese graxing on the lawn beside the ENV3 building

Photo by George Freeman

9. Revamped course evaluations

Another Task Force, chaired by Mark Seasons (School of Planning) has been working on revising how UW conducts its in-class instructor evaluations by students. The faculty of mathematics and the faculty of science have been doing some pilot testing of all-electronic course evaluations using a very promising in-house electronic system. FAUW will be paying close attention to who has access to the completed evaluations, their format and content as well as to how they end up being used.

10. FAUW retreat and priorities for 2014-15

In July, the FAUW Board of Directors held its first-in-a-long-time strategic retreat to discuss large-scale issues facing us over the next year. During this retreat, we established a list of items that we hope to devote time and effort to over the course of the year. Some have already been discussed above, others are listed briefly here:

a – Surveys: the FAUW Communications Sub-Committee intends to do more intensive polling of our membership on assorted questions of concern during this year.

b – Revisions to Policy 33 (Ethical Behaviour)

c – ADDS status: the revised ADDS regulations are winding their way through various Faculty Councils before going for approval at Senate. Revisions to the draft FAUW negotiated with grad students and the administration last year is likely to undergo revisions as a result of this process. More as it arises.

d – Performance evaluations: The idea of shifting tenured faculty members to a biennial performance evaluation scheme will be considered once again over the course of the year.

e – Arts 1.25 for service: This refers to the manner in which standards were set and communicated for assessments on the faculty annual performance (merit) evaluation. It remains unresolved from last year.

f – Best practices in graduate supervision: In collaboration with FAUW and the GSO, the Graduate Students’ Association is planning to develop a document setting out best practices in graduate supervision.

g – Athletics: We will continue to explore ways of improving our health and wellness facilities on campus in collaboration with the student and staff associations.