THE
AUFA PRESIDENT COMMUNICATES
It has started.
The buyers’ market in Ph.D.s is well on its way to becoming a sellers’ market. Over the past few years those who track employment demographics in higher education have been predicting a time when those who have earned a Ph.D. would be in a position to actually pick and choose between jobs.1 Gone, they predicted, would be the days when a university could count on the potential new faculty member becoming an actual new faculty member based simply on the extension of an offer. As I said: it has started.
For example, Acadia’s Department of English needs to hire a new faculty member this year, and we advertised nationally in order to attract applications from the best possible pool of applicants. The number of applicants was smaller than it has been in recent years, which at the very least serves as a warning that the predicted future may be moving closer to becoming the present reality. But despite the size of the initial pool, the search committee was able to select three highly-qualified and appropriate applicants. This year the closing date for the position was in October. In past years, the closing date has been in December. Our fear when we set the earlier date was that the competition was tightening up and the later we closed our search the less likely our chance of hiring the best available candidate. Unfortunately, despite our best, and historically earliest, efforts, by the time telephone calls were made to the candidates on the short list one had already been offered and accepted a job elsewhere.
As President of the faculty association, I receive copies of a variety of letters sent to or by Acadia’s President. Among these letters are those in which faculty members’ resignations or requests for early retirement are accepted. In the first five months of my term in office I have seen five such: three requests for early retirement and two resignations. I know that one of those who resigned has taken a higher paying job as faculty at another Canadian university. At the time of this writing, I do not know any details of the other resignation. But all five faculty positions will need to be replaced if Acadia is to retain its current student-teacher ratio, and if Acadia is to continue to offer its students the same range of educational options available prior to these departures.
The point of all this is not my point, but the point AUFA has been making for at least as long as I have been an active member: Acadia must turn words into actions and make recruitment and retention of faculty members a priority.
I am very grateful to have had the opportunity this term to learn about Acadia’s well-developed, intelligent, and carefully-targeted approach to student enrolment and management. Just as a church without a congregation is only a building, so a university is only a collection of buildings without students and without faculty to teach them. We need students. They are our reason for being. And they need faculty. We are their reason for coming. As well-developed and intelligent as is Acadia’s approach to student enrolment and management, it is destined to fail if it cannot market the crucially important role faculty play in the life of students and of the university. Of course I don’t mean that recruitment and retention of faculty are the purview of the Office of Student Affairs; rather, what I mean is that the best laid plans of even this necessary and strategically sophisticated part of university planning are imperilled if other parts of the university’s governance structure do not realize sooner rather than later that recruitment of prospective faculty members and retention of existing faculty are imperilled by Acadia’s failure in a few key areas to make this university at least comparable to other Canadian universities.
Sadly, even comparability may ultimately fail us. At the risk of being the bearer of bad tidings, I should tell you that rural Nova Scotia has somehow failed to achieve a position at the centre of the Canadian scene. People are not going to stop here and stay because they were passing through and liked what they saw. We have to expend some effort to get them to come. And increasingly, Acadia is going to have to expend some effort to get them, to get us, to stay.
I cannot pretend to speak for everyone, and I know I am about to say too little about what needs to be attended to if we are to become serious about recruiting and retaining the quality of faculty Acadia has traditionally been able to offer students. But just off the top of my head I would say that Acadia needs to make sure it can offer all faculty a pension on which they can retire as comfortably as if they took a job elsewhere; the Board and AUFA have to work together to improve the contract language on Health and Safety; the faculty teaching load described in the Collective Agreement as “normal” must be no more than 3 – 2 for all faculty members; we must find a way to establish a campus daycare; and of course, surprising no one, remuneration must compare much more favourably with the Canadian average.
Unless Acadia moves to make these ideals a part of our reality the trickle of lost recruitment and retention opportunities described above is likely to turn into a flood, and once Acadia starts to haemorrhage faculty it won’t be long before it starts to haemorrhage students. Then, without a critical mass of faculty and students, what we will have here is a collection of buildings, but no university.
Richard Cunningham
President, AUFA
[1] See, for example, the Maritime Provinces Higher
Education Commission’s 2002 Report entitled “Faculty Recruitment and Retention
in the Maritimes,” or the Background Report entitled “University Teaching
Capacity” released by the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada in
June of that year: in the latter document the AUCC
recommends that “universities . . . redouble their strategic recruitment
efforts to attract, retain and support the required numbers of new faculty that
will enable them to meet their teaching and research missions in the decade
ahead.”