THE
AUFA PRESIDENT COMMUNICATES
During the 1980s, prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall, US President Ronald Reagan offered this pithy commentary on his government’s stance toward negotiations with the Soviet Union: “Trust, but verify.” As a (mediocre, at best) actor and a (dangerous) politician, Ronald Reagan is unlikely to have invented that phrase, but for simplicity’s sake, let me just attribute it to him.
Fast forward to a new scene: AUFA strike headquarters, 2003, after negotiations have broken down. The association executive, the negotiating team, the various strike committee leaders, and the association’s legal counsel are gathered together to make sure the association breaks no laws as it moves into the uncharted (for AUFA) waters of a strike. Luckily, our legal counsel has seen this before, if not here in Wolfville, and so can offer not simply legal advice on how to conduct a strike, but, no less importantly, advice on how to end the strike. He asks who we can trust on the other side. And as he is explaining that strikes end by people, from both sides, who trust each other getting together to determine the outline of the issues and what it will take, in general terms, to bring the job action to an end, a subset of the negotiating team quietly excuse themselves to attend a pre-arranged meeting with a subset of the team from the other side.
The common theme in the preceding two vignettes is trust. Without trust we are stuck where we are. Where we are may in fact not seem too bad to some of us, but I cannot believe anyone thinks being stuck is a good thing. It connotes a lack of control. We may like it here, but if here changes, wouldn’t it be nice to be able to move forward?
Since long before I arrived at Acadia I have read much about the origins, the history, and the current state of the university as a cultural entity. (I highly recommend Bill Readings’ The University in Ruins, just in passing.) This now decade-long course of reading has prepared me to hear much of what I have heard from the administrative side of campus since becoming association president in July. To quote Bob Dylan, “the times, they are a-changin’.” I believe we all know that, at some level, however suppressed. For example, our students pay as much to be here for one year as I did for three years of undergraduate education in the 1980s. I cannot see that it will do anyone any good to pine nostalgically for the good old days, nor have I seen anyone on campus doing so.
But, unfortunately, what I have seen a great deal of on campus is unconstructive nay-saying about things the administration is doing to meet the new demands of new times. I do not mean to insist that you, or AUFA, should passively accept any plans the administration puts forward to deal with university finances, student-teacher ratio, campus health and safety, student recruitment and retention, faculty recruitment and retention, curricular development, etc. Far from it. Passivity is a recipe for getting stuck. Rather, what we need to do, more than we have been, is engage with the administration. We need to recognize that the times are changing, the university is going to change in response to the new set of pressures changing times bring—whether the administration wants it to or not, whether we want it to or not—and join in a dialogue with the administration to ensure that the particular concerns of each of our academic units, and of each of our individual research programs, is taken into consideration as change is contemplated and implemented.
But to do this requires more trust than some of us seem willing to extend to the administrative side of campus. I want to suggest that such a stance is not merely unproductive, but dangerous. If you insist on staying on the sidelines—“if I get involved it will just legitimate the process”—you run the very real risk of being overlooked as plans are made to meet the new demands of changing times. Please, don’t do that. Get involved. Make your voice, and your concerns, heard. Choose to trust, so that you can help verify.
Richard Cunningham