It would appear the gladiators are polishing their weapons and oiling up their biceps, as contract negotiations between the faculty union
– The University of Western Ontario Faculty Association (UWOFA) – and the band of merry MBA’s in Stevenson Hall heats up. At stake, we are told by both sides, is the very future of the university. Setting aside for the moment just what each of these armed camps means by “university,” as a teacher I am struggling with how to make the rising temperature and fast-flowing rhetoric sensible to my students. I am struggling with that task, because I can’t quite make sense of it for myself, let alone begin to explain it to someone else.
So, this teacher has questions for both sides.
Can the administration explain the reasoning behind their proposed “performance management” mechanism? On criteria even an MBA from Ivey can grasp, Western’s faculty and students are doing quite well. Our graduation and post-graduation employment rates are slightly above the provincial average. The degrees, and their value as employables, seem pretty well established. So why the concern with performance?
Can it be the accountants and financiers in Stevenson Hall see a “make the shareholders happy” moment on the horizon, by giving themselves an arbitrary tool that will let them get rid of those expensive senior faculty, to be replaced with contingent labour scrambling from contract to contract? One need only look at how the administration is proposing to treat our essential and invaluable staff colleagues to get a sense of just where these proposals are headed.
And will the administration at least be honest about their compensation package, only recently tabled. 0.0, 0.5 and 0.5 is not holding the line; it represents a wage cut, a cut which might become substantial given efforts by the Bank of Canada and the U.S. Federal Reserve to stimulate inflation. So at least be honest in your proposal. You are asking faculty to take a wage cut. Say so. Justify it. Defend it. But begin by calling it what it is.
UWOFA needs to answer some questions as well, especially if this teacher is going to help his students make sense of the issues at hand.
The first has to do with a simple matter of truth in advertising. I have been swamped with egregious rhetoric about solidarity and a strong strike mandate. I may have failed Grade 10 math, but even I can count heads. Half of UWOFA’s membership either opposes or does not care about granting the union a strike mandate. That is serious. It is not fatal to UWOFA’s argument they are defending academic freedom and quality education, since as a lifelong pacifist and socialist, I fully understand that being in a minority does not make one’s position wrong. But it is fatal to any real sense of solidarity and commitment if the union leadership plays rhetorical games rather than playing their strongest hand, which is a commitment to fundamental principles of learning and scholarship, even against ominous odds, and 50 per cent strike support, which is all I can currently count, are pretty ominous odds.
That means support needs to be encouraged, rather than simply claimed. There is a difference between posturing and substance, as every scholar and teacher knows.
My second question is about money. It took me only a few minutes to find the average household income in London is around $56,000, and the infamous sunshine salary list for Western runs to 19 closely printed pages, with the overwhelming majority on this deeply silly list being faculty. At a time when 1 in 5 children in London live in poverty, anyone staking a claim on public accounts, whether university faculty or corporations whining for deeper and deeper tax breaks, has some explaining to do.
I am more than aware that deficit reduction strategies such as those the administration is hiding behind to justify their compensation proposal are smokescreens behind which poverty will continue to deepen and widen.
I’m a lifelong socialist. I know my capitalist economics inside out. My question however is, like that put to the administration, about calling things by their real names: What are your compensation proposals, and how are these any different from corporate grabs for tax breaks?
UWOFA has been more than quick in revealing the administration’s proposals and, rightly I think, criticizing them. But turnabout strikes me as reasonable. What are you proposing, and why? More rhetoric about helping contract faculty, given what little of the compensation pie focuses on these most vulnerable of our colleagues, just doesn’t pass the smell test. And comfortable and deeply privileged “education workers” demanding more money at a time when more and more of our students scramble to deal with rising tuition and crippling post-graduation debt strikes this teacher as obscene. UWOFA needs to step up and be honest about the justifications for any and all of its proposals, in public, since this dispute is about the very public responsibilities we have as teachers and scholars to the communities who underwrite our privileges and comforts.
Let me be absolutely clear. Unlike a recent letter published in the Western News (“Call for sane heads to prevail,” David Stanford, Oct. 14), my support for UWOFA’s resistance, by whatever means necessary, to the administrations management proposals is unwavering.
I ask these questions out of genuine concern about the principles which seem to be driving these negotiations on both sides. I was recently told that “contract negotiations are not gentlemanly discussions.” Setting aside the ludicrous image of a smoke-filled men’s club, which is contemptible, does this then mean negotiations should be about nothing more than battling slogans and pious bromides, which is all I have received from both the administration and UWOFA, in spite of repeated and patient attempts to get something that at least resembles clarity about their respective positions?
This does indeed seem to be a battle of the privileged against the privileged, with only privilege at stake. Maybe the smoke-filled men’s club is an appropriate image after all, but all of the learners on this campus – faculty and students – and in the wider communities we are a part of deserve better, from both sides.
Helen Connell, Communications and Public Affairs associate vice-president, speaking on behalf the administration, said in a very recent online article on the negotiations that “Western has the best faculty and staff in the country.” I can only hope the administration means this, and re-engages with negotiations in a way which reflects this more clearly than it has to date. UWOFA President James Compton wrote recently that the union’s goal is to “reinvigorate a centuries-old scholarly mandate to work in the service of the public interest – a mandate we carry out by creating both knowledge and knowledgeable citizens.”
The key words here are “public interest.”
Both sides need to put out their cigars, button their flies and do a better job of serving that public interest.
Dr. Douglass St. Christian
Associate professor, Anthropology