Sep 05 2014

The Faculty Non-renewal Process

Category: Academic Integrity,Online PublicationBob 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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Aug 09 2014

Another University Is Possible

Category: ConferencesBob Hanke @ 10:10 am

Another University Is Possible: Praxis, Activism, and the Promise of Critical Pedagogy

Riverside Convention Center, Riverside, Greater Los Angeles Area, California
21-24 May, 2015

The Cultural Studies Association (CSA) invites proposals from its current and future members for participation in its thirteenth annual meeting in the Riverside Convention Center, Riverside, Greater Los Angeles Area, California.

Proposals from all areas and on all topics of relevance to cultural studies are welcome, and are not limited to proposals that critically and creatively engage this year’s highlighted problematic.

This year’s theme, “Another University is Possible: Praxis, Activism, and the Promise of Critical Pedagogy,” plays on the World Social Forum’s motto, “Another World is Possible.” It expresses a commitment to the intellectual and political project of a radically different university. Moving beyond policy and pundit-driven discussions of the state and the future of higher education, we seek proposals that highlight socially-engaged scholarship and activism, and projects that explore the transformative possibilities embedded in the present. What forms and formations of research, pedagogy, praxis, and activism have emerged from the struggles being waged in, around, through, and in spite of institutions of higher education? What roles can culture, theory, imagination, and technology play in these struggles? Taking up cultural studies’ historical commitment to the interrogation of the relations among knowledge, power, and social transformation, the 2015 Cultural Studies Association conference seeks to provide an insurgent intellectual space for imagining, enacting, and mapping new forms of knowledge production and scholarly communication and community.

We are particularly interested in work that links the global neo-liberal conjuncture of higher education to local acts of collective resistance and action, and back again. We want to know more about how students, staff, faculty, administrators, and community partners are responding to the current social, legal, economic, financial, political, cultural, institutional, and intellectual challenges and possibilities: student debt as a means of financing higher education institutions; court cases that attack the history and practice of affirmative action; the rise in union activity on campuses; the re-entrenchment of the “humanities” as a division under “crisis”; the emergent emphasis on MOOCs and other online forms of education that extend the already dominant casualization of academic labor; the emergence of public and digital pedagogy and scholarship; the ambivalent politics of academic freedom; the reduction of education to vocational training and degrees to commodified credentials; the role of universities in reproducing or amplifying (rather than reducing) the social inequalities of contemporary capitalism; and the university as a site of capital accumulation and dispossession, among many other trends and tendencies.

To read the complete call for papers, click here.

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Jun 28 2014

The Plight of Hidden Academics

Category: Academic Freedom,Academic Integrity,Contract FacultyBob Hanke @ 11:50 am

on TVO, The Agenda, June 23, 2014

Many of Ontario’s colleges and universities employ sessional lecturers. What does that mean for the quality of education Ontario students are receiving?

Panelists: Moria MacDonald, Marie Van der Kloet, Bob Hanke

To watch this half-episode, follow this link.

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Dec 08 2012

The University to Come

Category: JournalsBob Hanke @ 10:01 pm

TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies

Out of the Ruins, the University to Come

Number Twenty-eight — Fall 2012

Guest edited by Bob Hanke (York University) and Alison Hearn (University of Western Ontario)

Contents
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Memorial: Roger I. Simon
Jody Berland, Blake Fitzpatrick, Henry Giroux, Deborah Britzman

Introduction: Out of the Ruins, the University to Come
Bob Hanke and Alison Hearn

Articles

Struggling Universities: Simon Fraser University and the Crisis of Canadian Public Education
Edna Brophy and Myka Tucker-Abramson

Academic Feminism’s Entanglements with University Corporatization
Janice Newson

University Branding Via Securitization
Julie Gregory

Beyond Academic Freedom: Canadian Neoliberal Universities in the Global Context
Sandra Jeppesen and Holly Nazar

Reconfiguring the Academic Dance: A Critique of Faculty’s Responses to Administrative Practices in Canadian Universities
Claire Polster

Knowledge Mediators and Lubricating Channels: On the Temporal Politics of Remissioning the University
Filip Vostal and Susan Robertson

Offerings

Circulation and the New University
Brian Whitener and Dan Nemser

The Scholarly Affair is Self-Love
Paul Magee

The University, the Media and the Politics of Voice
Sean Phelan

The University System: Alienation or Emancipation?
Éric George

Social Science Research and the Creation of Publics
Nick Mahony

David F. Noble 1945–2010: An Appreciation
Wade Rowland

Gallery

Gallery of Voices and Images from the Maple Spring
Nicolas Quiazua, Rushdia Mehreen, Rosalind Hampton, Lilian Radovac, Laurence Guénette, Matthew Brett, Natassia Williams, Kevin Paul, CLASSE, Chicoutimi, Linda McQuaig, Frédéric Faddoul, Yvan Perrier and Guy Rocher

Review Essays

The Neo-University
Ross Eaman

University Professors: Recurring Issues Revisited
Kenneth-Roy Bonin

Beyond the Knowledge Factory?
Ian Angus

From the Arab Spring to the Maple Spring: National Student Protests Graduate to Transnational Social Movements
Lena Palacios

The Academy and the Politics of Exchange: A Network for The Public Good
David N. Wright

Reviews

Hard Times: The Impacts of Neoliberal Hegemony on Academic Culture
Patricia Hughes-Fuller

Topos of Faith: Derrida’s Counter-institutions
Joshua Synenko

The Need for Care and Attention in the Face of Psychopower
Margrit Talpalaru

Stalking through the Academy
Robert Pike

The University and a New Definition of Enlightenment
Maria Victoria Guglietti

The Perils of “Research Capitalism”
Michael Cottrell

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Nov 10 2012

2013 OCUFA Conference Addresses the Austerity Agenda

Category: Conferences,University FinanceBob Hanke @ 6:34 pm

Academia in The Age of Austerity

Governments in Canada and elsewhere have embraced “austerity” as a necessary public policy to eliminate budgetary deficits and ensure future prosperity.  How has this “austerity agenda” affected faculty, students, administrators and institutions in Ontario, in Canada, and globally?  Is “austerity” inevitable, or are there alternatives?   And what might universities do now, and in the future, in response to the “austerity agenda” or possible alternatives?

The Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Association’s 2013 Conference –   “Academia in the Age of Austerity” – will seek to answer these questions and more. Join us for two days of insightful presentations and engaging discussion with speakers and participants from universities, research institutes, government, and the private sector in Canada, the United States, and Europe.  The conference will critically explore the idea of “austerity” by unpacking the meaning of the term, its implications and impact on higher education, as well as consider other possible policy directions.  Like previous OCUFA conferences, a diversity of views will be sought in each of the keynote and panel sessions.

The conference will take place on January 10-11, 2013 at the Pantages Hotel in Toronto.

For more information about this conference, follow this link.

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