This is the second time around for Regna Darnell as the president of the University of Western Ontario Faculty Association (UWOFA), but that doesn’t make the job any easier.
There are many challenges ahead as Regna Darnell settles in to her second term as University of Western Ontario Faculty Association president, including upcoming contract negotiations and highlighting excellence across its membership.
Having just completed contract negotiations for the librarians and archivists, UWOFA heads back to the bargaining table to hammer out an agreement for its 1,100 members. The contract expires in June. Heavy on the minds of faculty is the spinoff from university budgetary challenges and concerns about resources for the post-secondary sector.
Darnell is half-way through her term as 2009-10 president, yet she feels there is much to be accomplished, including bringing more members into the association’s fold and maintaining strong, collegial relationships with the administration and other employee groups.
Western News reporter Heather Travis sat down with Darnell for a better sense of what is ahead for UWOFA.
Western News: We’ve entered into some tougher times for universities. What are the feelings among faculty members these days?
Regna Darnell: I think it varies considerably. I just returned from a CAUT (Canadian Association of University Teachers) presidents’ forum in which I was asked to speak as an introductory panelist for a discussion of universities ‘crying poor.’ CAUT identified Western as one of the poster children for that position. In preparing that talk I went back over the 2009 year in terms of budget discussions, their coverage by the Western News and the alternative positions provided by UWOFA. We have an alternative analysis of the budget. We think there are many possibilities not explored.
We think that the faculty, our constituents, already subsidizes the university on at least two major counts. One is that we are low on salary relative to the Bovey 6 (comprised of Guelph, McMaster, Queen’s, Toronto, Waterloo and Western). The other is that the pension plan is entirely member-risk. The university is not in the same position as almost all other Ontario universities and therefore they do not have a pressure from that.
We continue to take the position that the investment policy has caused the problem and that the university could weather their losses and their present position. There has been no discussion that a good bit of the losses have been made up by now. We are certainly not down over $45 million. We will be presenting our own analysis of the budget results that were presented to Senate and to campus council at the end of last year.
We are also noting clearly the faculty share the anger among students over the loss of positions in UWOSA and PMA. I think many of our members feel utterly betrayed by a supposed constitutive process which appeared to have made its decisions before we went into it. A number of people donated back their salary raise voluntarily. We felt unable to advise them to do that collectively. But, a number of people did so voluntarily hoping that would save jobs and the position was that anything that came in that was a one-time money would not be used for any ongoing expense. So we are still getting people who feel thoroughly betrayed by the ‘OK if you help us, things will be better.’
They weren’t, and it’s the reason that people were angry and unhappy.
I believe that almost all departments and units are stretched to their limits and that the quality that Western prides itself on is at risk.
WN: UWOFA negotiated a contract for the Librarians’ and Archivists’ which came down to the wire. The faculty union is heading to the bargaining table in June. What are your top priorities/issues during these negotiations?
RD: We will be proposing reopening of a large number of articles, in some cases to clarify contract language and in some cases because we see them as unfair or not inclusive. One that is close to my heart is workload issues. Graduate expansion puts a great deal of unmeasured and unrewarded additional burden on those who take up the work, since graduate courses are the tip of the iceberg in terms of program and individual commitment to working with graduate students. I think most of us want to do it, but there are only 24 hours in a day. The workload issues are in part system issues, not exclusive to Western, but they nonetheless impact dramatically on the working environment of our members.
WN: How does this term as president of UWOFA compare to your past term? (Darnell served as president of the association in 1994-95).
RD: That was before we unionized. We unionized in the anger over budget cut priorities and a number of workload issues – terms and conditions of work. I was part of the group that worked towards unionization, but I had finished my term as president before that happened. So, the union makes a great deal of difference.
I think the union has been immensely beneficial in terms of the imperative for the university to take us seriously and to speak with us on a range of issues. If it’s in the collective agreement, it’s our business. We haven’t always agreed, but we have brought to the table the things that need to come to the table. I think we could not have done that effectively under the old rules.
I think for the last 20 years we’ve had an overall decline in the post-secondary system of collegial governance. I’m involved in this because I believe collegial governance is the best route to excellence across the work of the university – research, teaching and service. There’s been both a commercialization and a return to business models across the post-secondary sector, not just at Western, in ways that leave the faculty feeling there is very little understanding of the work they do from some parts of the employer’s bureaucracy.
WN: You are halfway through your term as UWOFA president. What are your goals for 2010 and are you making progress on them?
RD: I think it’s been a real pleasure to be president of the association in the year that we have a new president (Amit Chakma) because it enables us to talk things over. I have tried to emphasize that we have common interests. I don’t see a union as a labour-management divide, but as a way of balancing power relationships between an administration and its faculty. We do a lot of things jointly – we have workshops that are co-sponsored, we have joint committees that work on various implementations of the collective agreement – most of the time it works pretty well.
Our members all do their work well and we do not want a system in which only a few people feel their work is esteemed within the university community. All of us teach, do research and try to produce a community in which we are all comfortable and productive. I think that works better when people have a sense of community.
Facilitating interdisciplinary research and teaching is something I feel very strongly about. Western is moving slowly towards doing a better job at that.
I feel strongly about the balance across programs. A lot of the attention seems to go to programs that bring in large amounts of money, which doesn’t entirely capture the scope of the undergraduate program, in particular where huge numbers of students are in Arts and Humanities and Social Sciences or FIMS (Faculty of Information and Media Studies). The SSHRC (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council) areas, I think, need careful attention not to be marginalized, so we try to maintain the visibility of those programs and bring their interests into discussions that could otherwise focus only on the lucrative programs.
We are currently seeking input to things people need and want for negotiations. We take considerable pride in some of the things we achieved in our negotiations last fall for the librarians and archivists. It was a decent contract, never of course all of what one wants, but we are quite satisfied with the contract we signed. I think we have taken some major steps towards seeing the librarians and archivists as professional colleagues within UWOFA.
WN: What are some of the challenges facing UWOFA’s membership right now?
RD: Chronic underfunding of the post-secondary sector – we are all up against that. The challenge will be to see Western’s response to that situation is not on the backs of the faculty. We are not going to deny that there are pressures, but for example faculty salaries are a decreasing percentage of the operating budget. We find that odd.
I think the biggest challenge will be to try and maintain a sense that the community is meeting those pressures. I think Western is a fantastic university with all kinds of potential for leadership in the system. We have excellence on a whole lot of fronts and we have a whole lot of really innovative things. I think our research office, for example, has done a superb job without using a lot of money in enabling the kind of things that produce real excellence and that’s great. I think we all are challenged to come up with creative ways of maintaining that excellence.
There are two ways to respond to not having enough money: you either figure out a way to get more money or you start cutting back. I think the creative lets go for ideas that keep things moving forward (and) is a much more sensible approach than increasing stress on faculty and other employees and students.
I worry about class size, about the increasing load placed on contract faculty. I worry about the staff support for the work we do. Everywhere you look there are challenges, but at the same time there are successes where people are very creative, partly because research, teaching and service are so interrelated and are able to juggle things for multiple purposes. So you really can say to a potential student, ‘you want to be at a research intensive university? You want to be at Western.’ I feel very strongly about that one.
WN: Past president Mike Carroll wanted to increase the number of younger faculty involved in UWOFA governance. Has this been achieved?
RD: We’ve made a number of efforts to get more people involved in our committees, debates and meetings, with some success I think. Particularly, young faculty members who have not been at Western long are finding that the union has something to offer them. I think we’ve made some progress on that front.
WN: President Amit Chakma has signaled in his priorities list that graduate education and research intensity are areas for growth. What does this mean for your membership?
RD: It is the responsibility of the employer to provide conditions under which it is possible to do the work. So we expect and hope that the employer will reasonably meet the needs of those priorities. There has been a limited sense among our members, I think, that we’ve been consulted. The priorities state strategic leadership as something done by administration primarily. We think the faculty should be much more involved in that to the extent it involves faculty. The president has a happy tendency to list the campus stakeholders as ‘faculty and staff.’ In our view the faculty raises really quite different questions and need to be treated in a different way on many fronts. One example would be recruitment and retention, where the issues are quite different than they are for staff and where I think Western is in need of some changes.
WN: A publication that came out in December written by four academics, including Western’s Greg Moran, claims the current model of post-secondary education is unsustainable. They propose a greater focus on teaching, three-year undergraduate degrees and the creation of an ‘open university.’ What are your feelings about this approach?
RD: Western is a research-intensive university. I think all of us who are here want it to remain so. It’s difficult for anyone to speak outside their own field of expertise, but certainly as a social scientist with humanities inclinations, I feel very strongly that I could not teach well without being involved in ongoing research. I come back from conferences and tell my students what is going on at the cutting edge of the field. I talk to them about colleagues who are doing cutting edge work. I put them in touch with people who are doing work that isn’t published yet. I take them to conferences and enable them to present at conferences – some of which are by invitation only. I am able to get grant funding that funds them to do more complicated and extended research.
I would not of course demean good teaching at any level, but I think the increasing dependence on contract faculty, without giving them opportunities to also do research and services, is a disservice to our students. I would like to see our contract faculty well paid and engaged in all of the work of the university.
I have not read the book … I have followed the discussion about it and I think it is a really unfortunate tack to take. It cuts back on precisely the things we should be protecting as the values of the academy. This is a university, not high school.
WN: We’ve covered a lot of ground, but is there anything else that we haven’t yet discussed that you would like to talk about?
RD: In general, I would urge colleagues to get involved in the faculty association in some way. Find the issues that concern you and have some input to them. I have learned an enormous amount about how the university works and I think made some modest contributions to making it work better because of the faculty association. I think it’s extremely important that faculty members and members of other employee groups realize the value that comes from their solidarity and common interests. I think UWOFA is doing an increasingly good job at showing its membership that we do add value to their employment with this university.