Apr 06 2009

New OCUFA Survey in Sync with Strike Issues

Category: Post-strike Discussion (2009),Research — Bob Hanke @ 8:48 pm

OCUFA has sounded the warning over declining quality again, but are the full-time university president and the part-time Board of Governors listening?

In Profs blast lazy first-year students, Toronto Star education reporter Kristin Rushowy writes:

The question on student preparedness was part of a larger survey of professors completed in February and March that asked about all aspects of campus life. More than 60 per cent of professors said they were teaching larger classes than three years ago, and that not only has hiring slowed down, but so has the creation of full-time tenured positions – which was an issue in the recent strike by teaching assistants and contract faculty at York University.

To read the whole April 6, 2009 front-page story, click here.

To download the key findings of this online province-wide survey, click on the OCUFA 2009 Questionnaire.

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Mar 06 2009

Tenuous-track Positions

Category: News — Bob Hanke @ 9:42 pm

By Jon Marcus (excerpted from Times Higher Education, March 5, 2009).

Overworked, underpaid and insecure: adjunct and part-time US faculty are fighting to convince their institutions – and tenured colleagues – that they deserve better. Jon Marcus reports

As an adjunct instructor in English at a small higher education institution in the American North West, Jessica Bryan lived with the usual indignities of being a part-time faculty member.

Unlike her senior tenured counterparts at North Idaho College, she had no job security, no benefits and none of the safeguards of academic due process. And even while teaching three classes a semester and two summer courses, and supplementing that income as a tutor in the institution’s writing centre, she earned, at best, $15,000 (£10,600) a year.

Yet Bryan continued working as an adjunct, part of the swelling ranks of contingent faculty appointed for one term at a time without the typical faculty privileges, and often resented by their full-time, tenured and tenure-track colleagues, who were watching their own proportion of the professoriate decline.

Even as a part-time instructor, Bryan prided herself on knowing all her students’ names by the end of the first week of class. She returned assignments promptly with feedback and made herself available for extra office hours.

“Like many adjuncts across the US, I did at least the same amount of work as senior tenured faculty members. I believe, because of my commitment to and love for the classroom, I did more. I entered the classroom with enthusiasm and dedication, and all my professional evaluations attest to that. My belief was that my commitment to the students, coupled with my hard work and personal concern to see my students succeed, would be rewarded, although perhaps not financially,” Bryan says.

But in the autumn of 2007, on the last day of term, the college sent Bryan an email telling her that she would not be reappointed for the following semester. It gave no reason for the move, and shortly thereafter hired another adjunct to replace her. In a written statement, the institution says that Bryan’s contract was to teach a specific course for a specific semester, and that it could not make binding commitments to part-time instructors because of the need to maintain flexibility.

Now the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), which routinely investigates complaints about workplace mistreatment of senior faculty, has forcefully intervened in Bryan’s case.

To read the rest of this article, click here.

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Feb 07 2009

French Universities are on a Permanent Strike

Category: News — jonnyj @ 12:04 pm

The French system of universities is public, with teachings and research of high quality. It has always enjoyed independence, liberty and recognition. But, within the past few months, the government has decided, brutally and without any concertation, to end this system and replace it by some sort of marketplace model of research where arbitrary decisions and instability prevail.

  • The previous statute of the academics has ended and their teaching duties are now decided on face value.
  • Permanent positions are being cut dramatically and being replaced by temporary, insecure and dependent positions.
  • PhD students can now be fired without any justification during the first six months of their PhD, and are now made available to private industries without any recognition of their rights.
  • The training of teachers is in distress.
  • Universities are autonomous (but in fact, they compete with each other under a reinforced government control) and without sufficient funding, they will soon have to put in place tuition fees and put themselves under the influence of local funding sources.
  • The CNRS is suppressed and changed into a funding agency managed by technocrats.
  • Academic researches are evaluated by inadequate and inept “quantitative means” rejected by all scholar societies.

We, academics and researches from all around the world, assert that these decisions are bureaucratic, financially motivated and dangerous. Similar decisions were or are imposed in other institutions of many countries. As such, we support the French academics in their fight. If, the education and the research of the country of the Encyclopédie, of Voltaire and Rousseau, and of the Declaration of Human Rights, are now reduced to market laws and under the influence of the political powers, then it is the freedom of the whole world that is under threat.

The powers that are imposing this new deal are organizing themselves. To defend our common values, we need to organize ourselves better and in greater number. Therefore, we call for all academics of all political sides, of all beliefs and of all creeds to join to oppose these changes that no humanist scientists of any time ever supported.

http://math.univ-lyon1.fr/appel/

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Jan 27 2009

Letter from Cheri DiNovo (NDP) – MPP for Parkdale-High Park

Category: Point of Information,Strike Discussion (2008-09) — jonnyj @ 1:15 pm

The following is a response from Cheri DiNovo, which nicely contextualizes the strike and back-to-work legislation within the larger educational and fiscal trends that are ongoing at Ontario universities. Read on…

As you know, this strike has been about issues of grave importance to the quality of post-secondary education in Ontario. In many ways, the strike has highlighted the significant lack of funding that the province gives to large post-secondary institutions like York University. In another way, as the Canadian Union of Public Employees Local 3903 has highlighted, it is also about the working conditions of contract faculty and TAs, who perform upwards of fifty percent of all teaching at the University. New Democrats believe the chronic hiring of mostly part-time and casual workers at low wages has become a deliberate strategy on the part of York University and the McGuinty government, which refuses to fund universities to the point that Ontario is now ranked last among all provinces in per capita university funding.

Unfortunately, contract faculty and TA wages have failed to keep pace with their increased value within the University sector. Indeed, as Marc Bousquet has recently pointed out in his informative book, How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation (2008), universities like York have remodelled their core business practices from one of higher education to one of fundraising, which increasingly relies on corporate donations to fund research and infrastructure. One of the drastic side effects of this transition has been a significant decline in tenured faculty positions. Currently, York is offering contract instructors 17 five-year contracts over three years. The union says that this is inadequate since there are already 67 contract faculty members with more than ten years of experience. It is clear that contract faculty positions are not a substitute for tenure conversions. However, there have been over 100 retirements in the past five years, which have not been replaced. Clearly, the University plans to replace these full time tenured faculty members with temporary part-time contract faculty. We believe this is weakening the standards of education in the province.

The York University administration, aided by the inaction of the McGuinty government, has exacerbated the crisis. The back-to-work legislation provides them with a convenient crutch that strips away the rights of workers to collectively bargain.

The strike at York is an attempt by a union of dedicated and hard-working TAs and contract faculty to protect the core values of the university: strong public education, equitable access to university, and fair and reasonable contracts for workers in the university sector. We support the struggle to preserve high quality public education in the province. We thus oppose the McGuinty government’s attempt to ignore the chronic lack of public funding at York University by legislating legally striking workers back-to-work. We also call on the University administration to return to the bargaining table and treat these workers with dignity and respect.

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To read a transcript of today’s debates in the Ontario Legislative Assembly, download the Legislative Assembly of Ontario Hansard Transcripts January 27 2009

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