York U Contract Faculty

York University’s get out of jail free card

Rewards and consequences of bad-faith bargaining

by Tyler Shipley (Canadian Dimension, April 23, 2009)

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Tough union, tough lessons

Learning from the CUPE 3903 strike defeat at York University

Tyler McCreary (Canadian Dimension, April 23, 2009)

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Tags: strike

Demanding the Impossible: Struggles for the Future of Post-Secondary Education[1]

by Tyler Shipley (excerpted from The Socialist Project, E.Bulletin, No. 215)

There is growing acknowledgement emerging from student and faculty associations across Canada that there is a crisis in post-secondary education and a need for real change in the structure of university funding. This has manifested as a proliferation of student and worker unrest across the country and, indeed, the world; in 2008 and early 2009, there were dozens of university strikes and occupations across the world marked both by broader ideological challenges to the prevailing social order as well as increased repression from campus and state authorities. In Montreal, a protracted faculty strike was supported by an active student movement at UQAM and ended in an impressive victory. Meanwhile, student movements like “Opiskelijatoiminta” in Helsinki, and occupations of university space at NYU and the New School in New York have drawn inspiration from the sometimes violent demonstrations in universities across France and countless other actions in Italy, Greece, India and elsewhere.

Nonetheless, it cannot be denied that there has been a simultaneous divergence of goals and strategies that has translated into fewer decisive victories in the long-term struggle for high-quality, accessible education.[2] The recent strike of graduate students and part-time faculty at York University in Toronto over the winter of 2008-09 confronted these questions directly. Many competing narratives will emerge from the CUPE 3903 strike, given its untimely end at the hands of back-to-work legislation, but it seems clear that most of its participants agree on one thing: the state of post-secondary education is in a bad way and it is quickly reaching its breaking point. This breakdown, especially as it has played out at York, is well documented in Eric Newstadt’s The Neoliberal University: Looking At The York Strike, published during the first weeks of the strike. Given his thorough exposition of the extent to which York has embodied the troubling neoliberal shift, he can perhaps be forgiven for the pessimistic tone of his analysis.[3]

Building on Newstadt’s framework, this piece will sketch a brief history of the funding crisis in post-secondary education in the hopes of highlighting what I think are the crucial pressure-points in fighting back the trends toward inaccessible and watered-down educational experiences for students and low-reward, exploitative working conditions for teachers. Unlike Newstadt, I believe that there are significant openings for radical transformations emerging in the current moment, provided we build the necessary political groundwork to sustain larger, broader and more militant student and faculty coalitions that can challenge the neoliberal status quo. But, as Newstadt convincingly illustrates, this struggle requires a nuanced and critical understanding of how the neoliberal university replicates itself in ever more nefarious forms.

The problems facing post-secondary education today cannot be addressed by working within the constraints of current university budgets; mismanagement of resources is certainly a time-honoured tradition at places of higher learning, but it is not the source of the problem. Further, it is not sufficient to locate the source of our troubles at, for example, the provincial level and commit ourselves to lobbying campaigns at Queen’s Park. Such efforts have proven themselves unable to bring the leverage necessary to alter the austere climate of neoliberal legislatures.

In contexts where collective bargaining and normal progressive strategies no longer make inroads against the underlying distribution of power and resources, political advance seems to run up against unmovable obstacles and defeat sets in even when only advancing minor reforms or attempting to hold onto the status quo. Being politically ‘realistic’ either continues the spiral of decline or begins to confront the limits. Hence the slogan of the CUPE 3903 strike, taken over from the Situationists during the May 1968 social movements, “be realistic: demand the impossible.”

Chronic Underfunding and the Neoliberal University

The strike by CUPE (Canadian Union of Public Employees) 3903 set a record for university strikes in English-speaking Canada at 85 days. It is clear that the mobilization around the 2008 round of bargaining, and eventually the strike itself, was built around a growing recognition among academic professionals that the entire system of post-secondary education is eroding from the inside. Despite the fact that students are paying ever higher user fees in order to gain access to the intellectual establishment, their experiences once inside are increasingly mediated by an army of underpaid and overworked teaching assistants and contract professors who – far from being given the resources to adequately teach their students – are forced to take on hundreds of students each semester just to pay their bills from month to month. Graduate students, for their part, survive almost exclusively on student loans, amassing tens of thousands of dollars in debt on the promise of a sustainable tenured teaching career in their future. Only now are they beginning to discover that those careers are being eliminated in favour of contract work, and the skyrocketing attrition rates in graduate schools are a most immediate visible effect.[4]

Hardly cause for celebration, but you wouldn’t know it at York University.

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Tags: strike