Feb 15 2015

This is Contract Faculty Time

Category: Academic Freedom,Contract Faculty — Bob Hanke @ 12:55 am

York Faculty in Support of Contract Faculty

Produced by videographer Alex Lisman, in conjunction with the CUPE 3903 communications committee, this new video features eight, tenured York University faculty members speaking about the obligation to engage the issue of contract faculty, the problem of precarious academic labour, the contribution that contract faculty make to teaching and research, and what the administration can do to exercise higher educational leadership and address this growing problem in the current round of collective bargaining.

To view this groundbreaking, revealing, educational video, click here.

Canadian higher education now faces an ominous situation. Increasingly, the university is being turned into a corporate business where education is viewed as a commodity. As a consequence, to quote John Ralston Saul, “democracy is weakening. Corporatism is strengthening. Certainly corporatism is creating a conformist society” (The Unconscious Civilization: 1995).

Corporate efficiency is the main force now driving York University where the administration holds all the power to implement policies with little regard to York’s avowed mission of academic pursuit, preservation, and dissemination of knowledge. York is chipping away at the collegial entity of the professoriate who endeavor to consciously shape the university in pursuit of its motto: Tentanda Via: the way must be tried.

One can easily see how York University’s commitment to its mission of  ‘social justice and collegial governance ‘ rings hollow, and the top-heavy administration is inclined to pursue short-sighted policies. An instance in point is its continual rejection of the contract faculty’s legitimate claims and insistent denial of their hopes of becoming full-time academics, despite their being fully qualified and fully utilized at a marginal cost. The contract faculty have been carrying nearly half of the total teaching load in the university, all for inequitable remuneration and inelegant terms of employment. It is obvious that the administration cannot hope to fill the classes offered in the university, unless it is prepared to water down the quality of teaching, or replace human creative minds with robotic computers, which will indeed ensure certainty of discipline and control.

The university pursuing the ‘Matthew Effect’ (Robert K. Merton:1968) seems to thrive on accumulating advantages from the contract faculty’s precarity! Is it not YorkU’s time to redress the inequities the contract faculty have bravely suffered so long, and is it not ethical to fairly integrate them into academe?

— Indhu Rajagopal, PhD
Professor, Department of Social Science, York University
Author of Hidden Academics: Contract Faculty in Canadian             Universities (University of Toronto Press, 2002)

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Jan 04 2015

The Workings of Precarity

Category: Contract Faculty — Bob Hanke @ 12:35 pm

Precarious employment is becoming a way of life & academia is no exception

Tenuous employment is now widespread, warns panel invited to attend council.

(excerpted from the CAUT Bulletin, December 2014)

Academic union leaders say the number of academic staff in contract or casual positions is on the rise, a common thread that ran throughout a panel discussion sponsored by CAUT during its council meeting last month.

The event featured Theresa Montaño, a professor at California State University, Northridge, and president of the National Education Association’s National Council for Higher Education; Jeannie Rea, president of the Australia-based National Tertiary Education Union; and Sylvain Marois, vice-president of the Fédération nationale des enseignantes et des enseignants du Québec.

Montaño warned that the role of faculty in the U.S. has changed dramatically as higher education is being transformed into a private right rather than a public good.

“The result has been an increasing reliance on online courses and contingent faculty,” she said.

“High levels of precarious work are undermining the academic profession in Australia,” agreed Rea. Since 2005, casual or fixed-term contracts account for three out of four positions filled at Australian universities.

Marois stressed the need to work in concert with other unions, students, civil society and organizations, to counter the ideologically-motivated attacks on the public sector. “It is important to target precarious work, but not precarious workers,” he said.

Rea said her union’s efforts have focused on mobilizing the membership to support campaigns against casualization and fixed-term contracts.

Recent successes have been realized in the form of limits on fixed-term contract categories, conversions to ‘ongoing’ positions, and creation of new early career teaching positions.

The NEA uses research, advo­cacy and organizing to further the interests of contingent faculty, such as its “Degrees Not Debt” campaign that seeks to extend student loan forgiveness programs to public sector workers, including contract faculty at universities and colleges.

To read the rest of this article, click here.

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Oct 23 2014

The Precarious Professoriate

Category: Books and Articles,Contract Faculty — Bob Hanke @ 11:42 am

Ivory Tower or Temp Agency?

By Herbert Pimlott

(excerpted from Academic Matters, October 20, 2014)

“I never thought teaching at a university would become a dead-end job.”

Jason Sager, an innovative professor whose courses are very popular with students, made this comment when he told me of his difficult decision to leave academia, after teaching for seven years at Wilfrid Laurier University (where he earned his PhD in 2007).

Dr. Sager, like thousands of highly educated—and experienced—faculty members, working at universities across the country, are learning that our profession is indeed becoming a dead-end job—an unfortunate new twist on the PhD’s description as a terminal degree.

The growing number of precarious academic workers teaching an ever-larger number of undergraduate students is a threat. It is a threat to our profession, with serious implications for our working conditions, our compensation, and the future of collegial governance. It is also a threat to the existence of higher education and the public university as we know it. Indeed, it is also part of the tale of Canada’s shrinking middle class.

A common adjective for contract faculty is part-time. At one time, such an adjective was accurate because universities employed part-time professors—or, instructors with other careers outside of the university—to share their real-world expertise with students. However, the long trajectory of public funding cuts and massive increases in student enrolment has meant a surge in part-time faculty positions, filled with academics who have no other source of income. These part-time jobs for full-time scholars are the increasingly likely future for many graduates of PhD programs.

Most people, including permanent professors, don’t realize that the number of full-time faculty hires have not kept pace with growing student enrolments. They also might not realize how the expectations for tenure-track jobs have changed, becoming more stringent in response to dwindling positions and an increasing number of young PhDs.

I want to address what the growth in contract faculty means for faculty associations in Ontario. To do so, it is necessary to sketch out the rise of precarious academic employment, and the consequences of the growing use of contract faculty for the public university. Then we can examine the implications of precarious academic work for higher education, the tenure-track professoriate, and faculty associations. This issue is not only about the livelihoods of our colleagues in contract positions, but also the future of the public university.

To read the rest of this article, click here.

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Sep 07 2014

The Class Struggle Inside the Public University

Category: Contract Faculty — Bob Hanke @ 3:47 pm

Exploitation in the ivory tower

(excerpted from CBC Radio One, September 7, 2014)

It is a black mark on the ivory tower, a story of insecurity, fear, jealousy, thwarted ambition, poverty and inequality. And it’s a reality that university presidents, and many professors, don’t like to talk about.

Universities in Canada – which threw open their doors this week to almost a million undergraduates – are propped up by a huge army of part-time teachers, who are highly qualified and poorly paid. They have no job security or pension, and little hope of ever getting a full-time position. They go by many titles: sessional lecturers, contract academic staff, adjunct faculty.

Today more than half of Canadian undergraduates are taught by these very precarious workers, not by the big-name  – and well-paid – academics that universities like to feature in their recruiting ads. The institutions simply couldn’t function without them.

Higher education has a new business model. And it affects everyone on campus – the administration, the high-end “professoriate”, the lowly sessionals and the students.

To listen to Ira Basen’s documentary “Class Struggle,” click here.

To read the companion CBC News story “Most university undergrads now taught by poorly paid part-timers,” click here.

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Sep 05 2014

The Faculty Non-renewal Process

Category: Academic Integrity,Online Publication — Bob Hanke @ 2:55 pm

‘My Position Became 6 Separate Contracts for 40 Pct. Less Pay’

by Marc Ouellette

(excerpted from The Chronicle of Higher Education, August 28, 2014)

To the Editor:

I have to admit that I have generally avoided writing too much about my own experience as a contract faculty member because, quite frankly, it does always sound somewhat maudlin. Then I realized that it’s not maudlin if it’s typical; rather, it’s part of a pattern. The pattern is one of blame, denial, obfuscation and, yes, the entitlement Catherine Stukel lists in her jeremiad (“Is That Whining Adjunct Someone We Want Teaching Our Young?” The Chronicle, August 25). However, the entitlement is entirely on the side of those like Ms. Stukel who are quick to point out that things went well for them and therefore if it didn’t go well for the rest of us, it’s our own fault. I do appreciate a good example of transductive reasoning when I see it.

To be sure, it wasn’t my fault when my home province added more than 100,000 students across the board in a period during which they deleted more than 1,100 full-time faculty positions. Indeed, I was hired on a tenure-stream-convertible basis, but nobody wanted me or my predecessor—the position had existed for almost a decade, teaching core courses in the second most popular combined honors program in the faculty—to achieve tenure stream because that would mean a loss of teaching. The chair even joked about it with others during department meetings. While I still had to manage the 40-40-20 load on that contract, I was teaching 3+3 instead of 2+2. The part that was my fault was succeeding. To get that job, I still had to interview and later found that I was definitely the darkest horse in what was expected to be a dog-and-pony show to confirm the hiring of a favorite of certain members of the committee. (As an aside, the dog-and-pony-show interview has become something of a pattern itself and I have come up with some questions to ask hiring committees so that I can tell whether I’m the dog or the pony.) My first year, I earned a merit award in the top third while achieving some of the highest teaching evaluations in the faculty. What made the latter more intriguing was the fact that these were large classes. Eventually, after several years of nominations and being a finalist, I did receive the major teaching award.

In the interim, mind you, my department and faculty decided that I was too expensive, as were 9 of my colleagues. So, during a semi-official moratorium on tenure-stream hiring, my position became six separate contracts for 40 percent less pay (at the time) instead of being converted to tenure-stream. To make things worse, when my students found out via a colleague’s reportage of the same scenario, they banded to protest. This, combined with my excellent evaluations made it clear that I was a Rasputin in the process and was only popular because I was easy on students (with Cultural Studies being an easy ride to begin with). While I continued teaching and became a union activist as a result of the increasingly terrible treatment colleagues and I were receiving, the move to right the wrongs was clearly a further misstep on my part, as three separate grievances (two settlements and one unresolved) will attest.

The last was most interesting and came after a round of provincial negotiations (I had attained the position of vice-chair of the committee for the largest union in the province) in which I was told point-blank by the provincial representative for Ontario and by the human resources chiefs for the Council of Universities that adjuncts “are in the way of graduate students.” I had heard this in the department from my chief rival, in particular. What made this most insulting was the fact that they had developed, cultivated, and perpetuated this myth to obscure their own faculty non-renewal process! Their own policies eliminated more than 1,100 positions, let alone the thousands needed to accommodate current and future growth. Instead, the fastest growing employment segments have been post-docs (who can be disappeared after three years, as if they never happened) and executives. An economist at my own institution did the research for the government(s) regarding the need for faculty renewal and expansion. Yet this data was not only ignored, but the the province and the Council representatives denied its very existence. Then again, they weren’t that happy when some of us obtained the actual budget and revealed that the university was misleading people about its surplus.

To read the rest of this letter, click here.

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