Representing Contract Faculty at York University
Jan 18 2010
A Toronto School of Creativity & Inquiry Event
In collaboration with Edu-factory and Autonomedia Labour Struggles in the Edu-factory: Discussion and book launch for Toward a Global Autonomous University, edited by the Edu-factory collective
Tuesday, January 26
7:30-9:30pm
Toronto Free Gallery
1277 Bloor Street West (by Lansdowne Ave)
Jan 04 2010
The President’s “Report to the Community 2009” mentions the 2008-09 CUPE strike once but neglects to consider how the “economic downturn” (aka recession) is giving impetus to the growth of contract faculty (aka adjunct or contingent faculty). Hidden contract faculty at York, both unionized and nonunionized, look forward to the new year and the President’s Task Force on Faculty Life, Learning and Convergence, and its recommendations for transforming precarious into sustainable academic livelyhoods. For starters, the Task Force could study and report on an Affirmative Action Convergence Program that that would unite YUFA full-time tenure track and tenured faculty and librarians with contract faculty. For qualified contract faculty, the Task Force could recommend that Academic Employee Relations start to define seven years of intensive ‘part-time’ teaching as probationary towards tenure. Finally, how about implementing a quota that would limit the percentage of ‘part time’ hires, starting with the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies (FLA&PS), in order to address the casualization of academic labour and the disappearance of tenure track employment?
While we wait for this Task Force to be struck and redefine the possible, the good news is that there is no shortage of money at York. According to Shoukri’s report, “Despite challenging economic times, the campaign has raised more than $190 million towards its $200 million goal.”
While CUPE Unit 2 members may look forward to initiatives that address the sustainable livelyhoods issue, we can read the news that is fit to print in the Education Life section of the The New York Times:
The Case of the Vanishing Full-Time Professor
By Samantha Stainburn (excerpted from The New York Times, December 30, 2009)
THE REALITY
If you’ve written a few five-figure tuition checks or taken on 10 years’ of debt, you probably think you’re paying to be taught by full-time professors. But it’s entirely possible that most of your teachers are freelancers.
In 1960, 75 percent of college instructors were full-time tenured or tenure-track professors; today only 27 percent are. The rest are graduate students or adjunct and contingent faculty — instructors employed on a per-course or yearly contract basis, usually without benefits and earning a third or less of what their tenured colleagues make. The recession means their numbers are growing.
“When a tenure-track position is empty,” says Gwendolyn Bradley, director of communications at the American Association of University Professors, “institutions are choosing to hire three part-timers to save money.”
THE PROBLEM
While many adjuncts are talented teachers with the same degrees as tenured professors, they’re treated as second-class citizens on most campuses, and that affects students.
It’s sometimes harder to track down adjuncts outside of class, because they rarely have offices or even their own departmental mailboxes.
Many patch together jobs at different colleges to make ends meet, and with commuting, there’s less time to confer with students or prepare for class. It’s not unusual for adjuncts to be hired at the last minute to teach courses they’ve never taught. And with no job security, they may consider it advantageous to tailor classes for student approval.
HOW TO
Colleges tend to play down the increasingly central role of adjuncts. This fall, the American Federation of Teachers complained that some top-ranked universities exaggerated the percentage of full-time faculty to U.S. News & World Report for its rankings. U.S. News declined to investigate.
Another source is the “Compare Higher Education Institutions” search tool at A.F.T.’s Higher Education Data Center. These are the stats that colleges report to the federal government.
Ask admissions officers point-blank: what percentage of classes and discussion sections are taught by part-timers and graduate assistants, and are they required to hold office hours?
For entry-level classes — the ones tenured faculty famously don’t want to teach — the squeaky wheel often gets a full-time professor, says Harlan Cohen, author of “The Naked Roommate: And 107 Other Issues You Might Run Into in College.” “If you’re not thrilled with your adjunct professor,” he says, “go to the head of the department and see what options are available. They may put you in a different section.”
CAVEATS
If you take a strict anti-adjunct stance, you may miss out on some star instructors — Barack Obama taught a seminar on racism and the law at the University of Chicago Law School as an adjunct. Professoring part-time is a hobby for overachieving architects, graphic designers, lawyers and entrepreneurs, all of whom can share insights from real-world experiences that full-time academics haven’t had.
“Before making assumptions that an adjunct is bad, Google them,” Mr. Cohen says. “You may find that real estate teacher is one step removed from Donald Trump, and these are the types of people you want to meet.”
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Dec 03 2009
Underfunding shortchanges students
by Mark Langer, President of the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations
(excerpted from the Toronto Star, Wednesday, December 2, 2009)
In the recently published book, Academic Transformation: The Forces Shaping Higher Education in Ontario, co-authored by Ian D. Clark, Greg Moran, Michael L. Skolnik and David Trick, the authors argue that the current model of university education in Ontario is “unsustainable.”
They conclude that our university system can only be sustained if we create a new model, with new universities that offer just undergraduate degrees and employ faculty who spend the majority of their time teaching, performing little or no original research. The book is thoughtful and well-written. But the conclusion it reaches, simply put, is wrong.
It’s not our university model that’s the problem in Ontario. It’s the funding, or more accurately, the lack of funding. For more than a century-and-a-half, Ontario has been a world leader in providing affordable public education to all, but it is abandoning that commitment.
The Ontario government’s per-student funding to universities has fallen since the 1970s from $6,500 to $4,200 (in current, inflation adjusted dollars), a full 35 per cent, more than a third. California, by way of comparison, invests twice as much as Ontario per student: $9,500.
The results are stark. Skyrocketing tuition, enormous classes, fewer courses, impoverished libraries, outdated labs and equipment, shabby facilities – and most troubling of all – the underpaying, undervaluing and sheer exploitation of a generation of new faculty who work on short-term contracts for poverty wages, with no benefits and no job security.
Faculty share the authors’ concerns about the state of higher education in Ontario and have been warning about its deteriorating quality for years. But the authors’ proposal is not about offering a better education, or even the same quality of education. They want us to offer a cheaper education by way of lower-paid, teaching-only faculty.
The authors assert that university teaching is not enriched by university professors conducting original research in addition to teaching. But their assertion is belied by another publication from the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario, the same body that commissioned Academic Transformation. This publication points to a number of empirical studies demonstrating that university teaching and university research are related. It also points out that there are a number of studies which demonstrate that students support this view.
University research and university teaching depend on one another. Mutually supportive, together they enrich the students’ classroom experience while enlivening faculty research. So, contrary to the authors’ assertions, their model is not going to offer our students a better quality education. It will not even provide the same quality of education. It will give students only a lower-cost education, a degree on the cheap.
We can’t do university education on the cheap and do it properly.
Where will the necessary funding come from? There are really only two sources of base funding for Ontario universities: tax dollars from the province or student fees. Consequently, there are only so many policy options available to the government.
It can continue to underfund universities and force students to make up university budget shortfalls. (Today’s students are paying 43 per cent of university operating budgets, up from 15 per cent in the 1980s.) Or it can provide lower-quality education by creating universities whose lower-paid faculty are not robustly engaged in original, teaching-enhancing, research.
Or it can increase public investment in our university system.
Ontario’s gross provincial product grew at almost twice the rate of inflation between 1983 and 2008, meaning our wealth almost doubled. But we have not invested in our public services. Quite the opposite: the Mike Harris government’s tax cuts – mostly favouring the well-off – are costing Ontario’s fiscal capacity $11 billion a year.
Ontario needs to offer our students – not to mention our families, our society, our communities and our economy – a high-quality, world-class, university education. We don’t need to make our university system “sustainable” by sacrificing the next generation of students and the next generation of faculty. We just need to invest in higher education in a way that recognizes its importance to our future. We can afford it.
In fact, given the uncertain times we live in and the challenges ahead, we can ill afford not to.
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Nov 15 2009
Corporatized universities devalue education
by Howard Woodhouse (excerpted from the Toronto Star, November 15, 2009, p. A21)
Governments, corporations and most university administrators regard Canadian universities as “engines of economic growth.” Their function is no longer the search for truth, but to increase global competitiveness.
Critical questions about this new orthodoxy are rarely raised. The goal of education, after all, is the advancement and dissemination of shared knowledge, whereas the goal of the corporate market is the maximization of stockholder value. Unless these opposing value systems are recognized, the distinctive features of education are subjugated to the demands of the market.
Some university presidents have expressed skepticism toward the market model of education. Several years ago, Colin Starnes, then president and vice-chancellor of University of King’s College, argued that underfunding by the federal government over a 20-year period (amounting to 30 per cent on a per student basis) combined with increasing student enrollment (more than 60 per cent) had resulted in “a rising tide” engulfing universities.
Two related currents in this tide particularly concerned Starnes: The pressures and benefits of a vastly increased research agenda had, in turn, created a new environment in which undergraduate education was being “privatized” in the form of a dramatic increase in tuition fees. The distinctive features of openness, accessibility and quality were under threat. The net result was that the Canadian university system was becoming much more like that in the United States.
The pace of privatization has since increased, including further increases in tuition fees. The federal government would now have to invest an additional $4 billion a year in universities just to return to the funding levels of the early 1980s.
The Innovation Agenda was first introduced by the Liberal government of Jean Chrétien in the late 1990s. The panel which designed the initial report comprised CEOs of private banks and corporations in addition to the president of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council. Not a single faculty member was included on the panel of “experts.” The report defined innovation in exclusively economic terms as the overriding need for universities “to bring new goods and services to market.”
As a result, the federal government required universities to produce research that primarily serves the needs of the market. Matching funds for such research must be found from the provinces and the private sector. Universities and provincial governments have been forced to comply with an Innovation Agenda that undermines the institutional autonomy of universities.
The explicit goal of the Innovation Agenda was to have Canada move to fifth place in the world – from its position as 14th – in research support in order to increase economic productivity. But the agenda has failed to achieve its goal. Canada has not moved into the top five countries in the OECD, our capacity to compete in the global market is much the same as it was, and universities remain chronically underfunded.
A reasoned response would be for university presidents to call for a reassessment of the Innovation Agenda together with a large increase in government funding. But the presidents of the so-called “top five” universities (Toronto, British Columbia, Alberta, McGill and Montreal) have done the opposite.
They want a larger share of existing research money and graduate education for themselves. They believe that other universities should focus on undergraduate education, which is seen as a lesser activity. Indeed, University of Toronto president David Naylor has called for more “differentiation” among universities – just the kind of system which Starnes and others have been decrying.
In order to counteract this trend, faculty, students and the general public must remind governments of their responsibility to fund the entire university system as the only place in society where the critical search for knowledge takes precedence.
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Howard Woodhouse is professor of educational foundations and co-director of the University of Saskatchewan Process Philosophy Research Unit. His book, Selling Out: Academic Freedom and the Corporate Market, was published by McGill-Queen’s University Press.
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Oct 22 2009
Can we see the future of York University in the University of California?
SAVE the University is a UC Berkeley faculty group dedicated to preserving student access and academic quality at UC. Both are imperiled by a UC leadership that has systematically failed to stand up for state funding.
Save the University, Wendy Brown, Part 6, is a YouTube talk by Professor Wendy Brown, Political Science, UC Berkeley, from a a Teach-in on the UC Crisis, September 23, 2009, on the meaning of the privitization of higher education and ten things that privitization generates as it brings market principles into the very heart of the university.
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Sep 27 2009
Communiqué from an Absent Future
(from the UCSC occupation barricades, excerpted from We Want Everything, September 24, 2009)
Like the society to which it has played the faithful servant, the university is bankrupt. This bankruptcy is not only financial. It is the index of a more fundamental insolvency, one both political and economic, which has been a long time in the making. No one knows what the university is for anymore. We feel this intuitively. Gone is the old project of creating a cultured and educated citizenry; gone, too, the special advantage the degree-holder once held on the job market. These are now fantasies, spectral residues that cling to the poorly maintained halls.
Incongruous architecture, the ghosts of vanished ideals, the vista of a dead future: these are the remains of the university. Among these remains, most of us are little more than a collection of querulous habits and duties. We go through the motions of our tests and assignments with a kind of thoughtless and immutable obedience propped up by subvocalized resentments. Nothing is interesting, nothing can make itself felt. The world-historical with its pageant of catastrophe is no more real than the windows in which it appears.
For those whose adolescence was poisoned by the nationalist hysteria following September 11th, public speech is nothing but a series of lies and public space a place where things might explode (though they never do). Afflicted by the vague desire for something to happen—without ever imagining we could make it happen ourselves—we were rescued by the bland homogeneity of the internet, finding refuge among friends we never see, whose entire existence is a series of exclamations and silly pictures, whose only discourse is the gossip of commodities. Safety, then, and comfort have been our watchwords. We slide through the flesh world without being touched or moved. We shepherd our emptiness from place to place.
But we can be grateful for our destitution: demystification is now a condition, not a project. University life finally appears as just what it has always been: a machine for producing compliant producers and consumers. Even leisure is a form of job training. The idiot crew of the frat houses drink themselves into a stupor with all the dedication of lawyers working late at the office. Kids who smoked weed and cut class in high-school now pop Adderall and get to work. We power the diploma factory on the treadmills in the gym. We run tirelessly in elliptical circles.
It makes little sense, then, to think of the university as an ivory tower in Arcadia, as either idyllic or idle. “Work hard, play hard” has been the over-eager motto of a generation in training for…what?—drawing hearts in cappuccino foam or plugging names and numbers into databases. The gleaming techno-future of American capitalism was long ago packed up and sold to China for a few more years of borrowed junk. A university diploma is now worth no more than a share in General Motors.
We work and we borrow in order to work and to borrow. And the jobs we work toward are the jobs we already have. Close to three quarters of students work while in school, many full-time; for most, the level of employment we obtain while students is the same that awaits after graduation. Meanwhile, what we acquire isn’t education; it’s debt. We work to make money we have already spent, and our future labor has already been sold on the worst market around. Average student loan debt rose 20 percent in the first five years of the twenty-first century—80-100 percent for students of color. Student loan volume—a figure inversely proportional to state funding for education—rose by nearly 800 percent from 1977 to 2003. What our borrowed tuition buys is the privilege of making monthly payments for the rest of our lives. What we learn is the choreography of credit: you can’t walk to class without being offered another piece of plastic charging 20 percent interest. Yesterday’s finance majors buy their summer homes with the bleak futures of today’s humanities majors.
To read the rest of this essay, click here.
To download as an easily readable PDF with introduction, click here.
To download as a PDF booklet with introduction, click here.
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Sep 19 2009
On March 9th, the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations launched its Quality Matters campaign.
This campaign addresses the problem of chronic underfunding, which is at the bottom of the issues that were raised during the 85-day CUPE 3903 strike and in the Ontario legislative assembly. As we face even deeper, cascading budget cuts this year, it’s time for faculty and students to do something about it.
Please take a few minutes right now to read more about the campaign, and to follow the links to send your message to Premier McGuinty and your local MPP.
OCUFA is using social media to support the campaign using paid electronic ads in print media and on Facebook. Course directors and their TAs using a Content Managment System (Web-CT, Moodle) can also lend support the campaign by adding this website as an educational resource to your course.
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Sep 10 2009
(Excerpted in solidarity with the faculty, staff and students of the University of California system who are self-organizing to collectively walk out).
Under the cover of the summer months, UC administration has pushed through a program of tuition hikes, enrollment cuts, layoffs, furloughs, and increased class sizes that harms students and jeopardizes the livelihoods of the most vulnerable university employees. These decisions fundamentally compromise the mission of the University of California. They are complicit with the privatization of public education, and they have been made in a manner that flouts the principle of shared governance at the core of the UC faculty’s capacity to guide the future of the University in accordance with its mission.
On September 24, in solidarity with UC staff and students, faculty throughout the University of California system will walk out in defense of public education.
To read the open letter to UC faculty and the call for a systemwide walk out, click here.
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Sep 01 2009
by James Turk,
There is a fundamental crisis facing all of Canada’s universities and colleges today, and that crisis is chronic underfunding.
Most institutions understand this, as do students and their families, but the point seems to have been lost on the presidents of the so-called “top five” (Toronto, UBC, Alberta, McGill and Montreal).
Instead of demanding much-needed investment in post-secondary education and academic research as a whole – or a bigger pie – they want a bigger slice of the existing pie for themselves, at everyone else’s expense.
The real problem is obvious. In the early 1980s, the federal government contributed one-half of one penny of every dollar earned by the Canadian economy to post-secondary education. Now, the federal government contributes less than two-tenths of a penny. Just to bring us back to the funding levels of the early ’80s would require an additional investment of more than $4 billion per year.
But rather than calling for a solution to the real problem, the “top five” university presidents say they want a bigger share of existing research money and graduate student education, and that other universities should focus on undergraduate education. Only this, they argue, will help Canada raise the international standing of some of its universities.
A disturbing implication of their proposal, of course, is that undergraduate teaching is somehow a lesser activity, to be carried out in institutions without a serious focus on scholarly work and research.
University of Toronto president David Naylor says we need more “differentiation” among universities. He says we need to move away from what he calls the “Canadian way,” which he says has been to “open the peanut-butter jar and spread thinly and evenly.”
Nothing could be further from the truth – there is already significant differentiation among institutions. Resources may be spread thinly due to underfunding, but they are not spread evenly. Naylor’s university alone already gets about 15 per cent of all research funding in Canada. Together, the big five already get about 40 per cent of the total available funding, and award about 45 per cent of doctoral degrees.
To read the rest of this article, click here.
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Toronto Star Editorial: Survival of the Biggest, September 2, 2009
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Last Call for Contributions to the CUPE U2 Chronicle No. 2.! The deadline to submit your digital content has been extended to Tuesday, September 8. Download the designer, graphically-enhanced Call for Contributions for details.
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Jul 28 2009
CAUT president highlights threat posed by the casualization of academic work at the UNESCO World Conference on Higher Education
(excerpted from CAUT News, July 13, 2009)
Around the world, more and more university and college administrations are using the economic crisis as a pretext to impose hiring freezes and lay-offs, and to increase the use of part-time and fixed-term academic staff hired at low pay, with few if any benefits and no job security.
This was the key message in a presentation by CAUT President Penni Stewart at the UNESCO World Conference on Higher Education in Paris.
“Higher education is quickly becoming one of the most casualized professions, perhaps second only to retail services,” said Stewart. “In many counties, fixed-term academic staff comprise the majority of those teaching in post-secondary systems.”
Stewart pointed out that in the United States, close to three-quarters of academic staff are off the tenure track, and in Central America, the number of professors employed on a casual basis has doubled in the past ten years.
In Uganda, Stewart said, the government floated a proposal a few years ago to eliminate tenure and convert all professors in the country onto fixed-term contracts.
“The conditions of work for contingent faculty are generally poor – especially in contrast with their full time peers,” she said. “Many teach multiple courses – sometimes at several institutions….contingent staff are given few opportunities to participate in governance, wages are low relative to full time academic staff, and access to research and conference funds, libraries and office space is limited.”
Stewart said the casualization of academic labour is “perhaps the most significant threat to academic freedom today.”
“Let’s be perfectly clear: staff employed on fixed-term contracts do not need to be fired if they offend powerful interests,” she said. “Instead, their contracts are simply not renewed.”
The international conference brought together over 1,000 participants from around 150 countries at UNESCO Headquarters over four days, including ministers, university rectors, faculty, students and representatives of the private sector as well as regional and multilateral institutions.
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