Jul 05 2015

CUPE 3908 Call for Presenters: Academic Precarity Symposium

Category: Conferences — Bob Hanke @ 11:54 am

Challenging Academic Precarity

October 2-4, 2015 Artspace, Peterborough ON

Academia has long been heralded as the ivory tower to which we all should aspire and those that are admitted are thought to be well compensated. With the prevailing winds of neoliberalism blowing at the doors, the corporatization of the university has witnessed the reduction of tenured faculty positions. At the same time, increasing resources have been assigned to professional administration. The result is that more and more full-time academics are paid part-time wages and forced to endure precarity when alternatives abound.

This interdisciplinary symposium seeks to situate and understand how these trends emerged and continue to develop. The first two days will feature a keynote address, roundtables and panel discussions. The final day will be an exploration of avenues for future intervention and activism.

We seek proposals for the following possible subject matter:

* Political economy of ‘just in time’ academic labour
* Forms of resistance and protest
* Engaging tenured & tenure-track faculty
* Student academic workers’ plight
* Mobilization strategies
* Challenging precarity with art
* Movement to zero tuition

We welcome diverse proposals and formats including, but not limited to, full panel proposals, multimedia presentations, artistic interventions, and, of course, more conventional academic papers.Please send all abstracts and/or presentation proposals in either .rtf, .docx, or .pdf formats to office@cupe3908.org by August 25th, 2015. Please limit your proposal to no more than 250 words. Notifications will be sent out by September 1, 2015. Please send all other inquiries to: James Onusko at vp1@cupe3908.org

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Mar 30 2015

York U Strike in Context

Category: Contract Faculty,Discussion,Online Publication,Strike Discussion (2015) — Bob Hanke @ 11:48 pm

York strikers show the way — now let’s build a truly public university

Protracted labour dispute raises questions of post-secondary governance and funding

by Justin Podhur

(excerpted from Ricochet)

The strikes at York University, the University of Toronto, and elsewhere have opened a long overdue debate about student debt, precarious labour in the academy, rising tuition, and, to a lesser extent, university governance. The York University strike offers an opportunity to argue for the continuing relevance of universities as public institutions. The importance of the public in the public university is especially true for York, which, if it embraced its role as such, could tackle a new list of issues and lead the way for other educational institutions.

Precarity, debt, and defensive struggle

York’s contract faculty are the precarious academic labourers whose difficulties have been brought into some public light by the York strike and other labour actions in North America. The contract faculty settled earlier in March. The teaching assistants and graduate assistants had to battle on until the end of the month to win their objectives.

To read the rest of this article, click here.

 

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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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Feb 06 2015

Report Back from COCAL XI

Category: Academic Freedom,Conferences — Bob Hanke @ 11:28 am

International adjuncts in solidarity: COCAL XI

Precarious academic labour transcends borders in 200-member adjunct “think tank.”

by Kane X. Faucher

(excerpted from University Affairs, January 29, 2015)

This past August, I attended the Coalition of Contingent Academic Labour conference (COCAL XI) in New York City. The biennial event, which has been running since 1998, brings together adjuncts from around the world to discuss the challenges that face “adjunctification” in higher education. For those who are interested, the 2016 COCAL will be hosted in Edmonton, Alberta. Previous Canadian cities to host have been Quebec City (2010), Vancouver (2006) and Montreal (2002). For those not familiar with COCAL, it is not an organization but a movement that empowers local labour actors both inside and outside the academy, recognizing that labour fairness is a key principle of social justice.

Due to its international scope there are some acknowledged limitations such as labour laws, university and college structures, union coverage, and other issues particular to regions and specific institutions. To overcome these differences, the conference focuses on what unites contingent academic workers, and works to develop an array of tools and tactics in the spirit of collaboration and solidarity. The affectionately dubbed “COCAListas” – organizers and attendees alike – all share a strong belief in the value of higher education, resisting its commodification, and pushing back against the exploitation of our underpaid and too frequently unappreciated academic professionals. Issues of labour equity and academic freedom are treated as inseparable and essential aspects of the higher education mission.

Amidst serious and high-level policy talk there was also occasion for a collaborative poetry reading, a presentation of books written by and about adjuncts, and numerous “hallway chats” between sessions where attendees could discuss finer points not covered during the plenary sessions. Plenary speakers included representatives from New Faculty Majority (NFM), American Federation of Teachers (AFT), American Association of University Professors (AAUP), Fédération nationale des enseignantes et des enseignants du Québec (FNEEQ-CSN), as well as several faculty unions from across Canada, US, and Mexico – a veritable who’s who of academic labour organizations – all dedicated to improving the working conditions of academic workers.

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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.

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