Image Courtesy of Sanco McCannStudents at the University of Manitoba returned to classes on Tuesday after a 20-day faculty strike.
Professors at the U of M have reached an agreement with the university that puts a limit on how much administration can increase their workload — but concerns over professor workloads aren’t limited to the U of M, according to Carolyn Sale, president of the Association of Academic Staff University of Alberta (AASUA).
“This is what’s happening everywhere,” she said. “It’s one of the consequences of insufficient funding of post-secondary education.”
At the U of A many new workload burdens arose after $100 million was cut from the Albertan post-secondary sector in March 2013 under the Progressive Conservatives, Sale said. The cuts caused 121 faculty members to leave under the voluntary severance program, which in turn increased the responsibilities of remaining professors.
“There seems to be an attitude that all of this is in the past because it’s a whopping two and half years ago,” she said. “The point is that the impacts are being felt pretty dramatically. If you lose support staff, if you lose faculty, there’s more work to be done by fewer people all around.”
While academic staff at the U of A aren’t currently under the labour relations code and don’t have the right to strike, new legislation in the spring is set to put them under the code or provide them with similar protections. Sale said that if that were to happen, a strike at the U of A would be possible but not easy.
“A strike is something that only happens after a great deal of care, thought, and process,” she said. “A faculty association is only striking when things have really come to an impasse.”
Because of this, Sale said there’s no question that the U of M’s faculty association felt it was necessary to strike to see change in their workloads. The AASUA executive issued a solidarity agreement and $1,000 solidarity cheque to the faculty association at U of M within the first three days of the strike. AASUA released a longer statement and gave another $5,000 in the third week of striking.
Sale attended the Canadian Association of University Teachers annual western regional meeting in Winnipeg where she and other delegates were bussed to the U of M campus to participate in the strike rally and deliver solidarity cheques.
While a three-week strike is not unheard of, it’s unusually long, Sale said. She attributed the strike’s length to the support the U of M faculty received from undergraduates and graduates, as students joined faculty on the picket lines.
“(The faculty) had managed to create sufficient understanding of the problems and the community was behind them,” she said. “That’s what makes real change possible in a strike scenario, the university administration has no choice but to respond because the community is so clear in its message to them.”
At the U of M, students demonstrated they understand that academic staff’s working conditions are closely related to students’ learning conditions, Sale said.
“It’s important that (students) understand the issues and are willing to support the academic staff,” she explained. “It’s ultimately about the community as a whole and whether it’s meeting the university’s teaching and research mission.”
And a huge factor at all the universities, here and around the world, is the increasing proportion of budgets that are devoted to increasing layers of highly paid administrators. These parasites leach scarce resources from real work of teaching and research to their useless, and often counter-productive ‘work’. The insidious thing is they increasingly control the budget and can build their castles in the air.