Dear President Chakma,
At Friday’s Senate meeting, you repeatedly addressed us as ‘friends.’
We are not your friends.
Friend is a special word we save for each of those who share our values, who support us in difficult times, who communicate openly and without reserve. Friends learn together through shared experiences. Each year of a friendship offers opportunities for renewal and growth.
The two of us grew up together in Vancouver. We attended the same high school, where the talents of a few good teachers fostered our intellectual ambition. The undergraduate training we received at the University of British Columbia prepared us well for graduate programs in the United States. We were re-united at Western in the mid-1990s, where we began our careers, full of hope and expectation.
The erosion of the university, as we understood it, began before we arrived here and it will continue after we retire. The forces contributing to that erosion are larger than any one Board of Governors or university administration. But each university has choices, even in straitened circumstances, and we can say, with the wisdom of 20 years at Western, the choices you and your administration have made over the course of the past five years have worsened the crisis for all of us.
“There is not enough time for all that needs to be done,” you told us.
As faculty, we know this hard truth better, perhaps, than you do. Increased class sizes, cuts in research funding, administrative bean-counting that wastes valuable hours of our time – we have all been doing more with less for the past decade. Our priorities have been to buffer students against the corrosive effects of cutbacks; to maintain research records that allow us a seat at the table of international scholarship; to serve our departments and the larger Western community.
What were your priorities when you signed a contract that paid you $967,000 in one year?
The outrage that greeted the news of your compensation package was, you said, “a wake-up call.” The metaphor of the alarm clock is an apt one; it suggests you have been asleep for a while. We have not been asleep. We have been kept awake by the tragedy that is unfolding in the 21st century university: the dearth of opportunities it affords newly minted PhDs, its treatment of adjunct faculty and staff, its reduction of the humanist mission to a commercial model of ‘efficiencies.’
You have a 100-Day Plan in mind to address the crisis of the past two weeks, but we can assure you 100 days will not get you past the start gate.
You say you “love this place,” but you are a relative newcomer to Western, and your love has yet to deepen into a meaningful engagement with its object. For the first time since we arrived at Western, our president, provost and vice-president (research) all come from outside the institution. This matters because you and your team have no experience with, have not seen the evolving challenges in, and are not connected organically to any academic unit on this campus. Coming from elsewhere, it is not easy for you to connect with our core academic activities – doing so would require a special effort, if you value them. It would take more than your attendance at a few town hall meetings to change this simple fact – you don’t know us.
Last Friday you asked us to “set aside emotion,” even as you asked for our forgiveness, pledging your “heart and soul” that you will honour the university’s core values in the days ahead. We pledge our hearts and souls to our students and colleagues every day, and our passion for our work is what drives this university’s achievements. As one of our Senators said, the messages we’ve received from your administration have been relentlessly negative. That your team thinks it necessary to look for ways to ‘incentivize’ faculty has contributed to the breakdown of relations between you and the institution you claim to love.
None of us would have completed doctorates if we were motivated by anything other than our attachment to our research and its inherent satisfactions. We strive for excellence not because our employer threatens to withdraw funding from us if we don’t, but because it is so much more rewarding than mediocrity. Our language is not the language of carrots and sticks.
We hoped you would take the opportunity afforded you by Friday’s Senate meeting to identify the roots of this crisis and not just its surface manifestation. We also hoped you would bring to Senate some concrete proposals to reform administrative practices. Hearing none, we encourage Senate to pass a motion of non-confidence in you this week.
In making this recommendation, we set aside emotion. It’s not personal, President Chakma. We expect you to step down in the interests of sending a clear message to the senior administrative team.
It’s not personal, because you are not our friend.
Sincerely,
Alison Conway, English and Writing Studies professor
Kim Clark, Anthropology professor