“Nothing more can be attempted than to establish the beginning and the direction of an infinitely long road.”
Georg Simmel
One of the recurring features that has left its mark on the long road of CAUT’s history over the past 75 years is the tension between professionalism and unionization. While the unionization of academic staff is commonplace today, it was a deeply divisive development at the time.
Opponents of unionization argued it would undermine professional identity and autonomy by reducing academics to “mere employees” subject to managerial command and control. Proponents countered that unionization and collective action were the only effective ways to negotiate better pay and conditions, protect professional rights such as academic freedom, and ensure a binding process for resolving disputes.
The eventual acceptance of unionization was not motivated by any deep ideological convictions by academic staff to the cause of organized labour. Rather, it was a pragmatic and most often reluctant response to concerns about the declining status of the profession. As such, certification was largely employed as a defensive strategy, a posture that is arguably showing strains today as CAUT and its members confront new challenges in an increasingly complex environment.
The emergence of academic staff unions
Unlike the United States, where the first faculty union certified in 1918, the prospect of academic staff unionization in Canada was barely even on the radar prior to the 1970s. Faculty associations had formed locally throughout the early half of the 20th century, but they mostly functioned informally as consultative and advisory bodies. Any serious disputes arising with the administration were dealt with quietly and on an ad hoc basis. As Paul Axelrod argues, faculty associations at the time functioned as “a minor adjunct of administrations themselves.”
Canadian academics resisted unionization for decades and stubbornly clung to the belief that they were autonomous professionals and not “workers.” This resistance was partly motivated by professional class elitism. Unions, it was felt, were bodies that might well serve blue-collar workers but were inappropriate for professional scholars.
Such sentiments were on full display when CAUT was founded in 1951. The University of Toronto Faculty Committee, the precursor to today’s academic staff association, was opposed to the creation of CAUT out of concern that it might take on “trade union tendencies.”
One seminal moment that illustrated the contradictions in this professional class elitism came just seven years later, when a major controversy catapulted questions about academic freedom, tenure and the professional status of academics into the public spotlight. In 1958, the administration of United College (now the University of Winnipeg) fired Professor Harry Crowe from his tenured position after he sent a private letter to a colleague critical of the college’s administrators. Crowe was accused of “disloyalty” and dismissed.
The fledgling CAUT launched an investigation into Crowe’s dismissal led by Vernon Fowke, a respected professor of economics from the University of Saskatchewan, and Bora Laskin, a professor of law at the University of Toronto and future Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada. The investigatory committee concluded that, on both substantive and procedural grounds, Crowe’s dismissal was contrary to the basic understanding of academic freedom “to utter and publish opinions in the course of teaching and research and to exchange opinions with faculty colleagues without liability of official censure or discipline.” The report added that, unlike employees in a traditional workplace, professors owed no “duty of loyalty” to their “employer.”
On the one hand, the Crowe case seemed to support the critics of unionization by reasserting that academic staff should not be seen as traditional “employees” but rather as members of a self-governing profession with special rights. However, the incident also exposed that collegial governance was largely a chimera because presidents and boards wielded ultimate authority. It also demonstrated that academic freedom and tenure had very limited legal protection, such that an individual professor had little recourse to contest violations.
By the late 1960s, these tensions were fuelling new debates about the desirability of collective bargaining and unionization. Some within CAUT remained steadfast in their opposition. York University economist Albert J. Robinson suggested in 1968 that the unionization of professors would “involve far-reaching changes in the atmosphere of the university, which would no longer be that of a community of scholars but that of a factory.” In 1971, even as CAUT established its Collective Bargaining and Economic Benefits Committee, CAUT president J. Gordon Kaplan dramatically warned that unionization would weaken professors’ academic freedom and autonomy to such a degree that unions might be “to some extent incompatible with our ideal of the liberal university.”
From laggard to leader in unionization
Despite the ongoing opposition, political and economic developments were beginning to tip the scales in favour of unionization. By the late 1960s, academic staff were increasingly dissatisfied with low salaries, budget cuts, and the autocratic administrative styles of many institutions. The university and college system expanded dramatically throughout most of the decade, with governments providing funding to increase enrolments, establish new institutions, and secularize the older religious-based ones. By the end of the 1960s, the great expansion was coming to an end as government funding began to slow and budget cuts took hold. The rapid massification of higher education also resulted in a sharp growth in administrative bureaucracy that was weakening academic staff voices in institutional governance.
The importance of securing stronger legal protections for academic freedom was also a factor in convincing some CAUT members to consider unionization. By the late 1960s, CAUT’s Academic Freedom and Tenure Committee was dealing with over 100 individual cases. At the time, alleged violations of academic freedom at an institution might be dealt with through an internal hearing process, but individual faculty had limited recourse to appeal to the courts or independent tribunals.
A report prepared for CAUT by Queen’s University law professor Daniel Soberman in 1965 concluded there was no real legal recognition of academic freedom or tenure in Canada. Soberman mused that one way to remedy this might be to embed these rights in contract law by negotiating binding collective agreements with mandatory arbitration like those secured by industrial unions.
The fragility of academic freedom and tenure was made abundantly clear in 1968 when Professor Norman Strax was dismissed from the University of New Brunswick for participating in a protest at the library. The CAUT president at the time, noted political scientist C.B. Macpherson, proposed that the matter be heard before an independent arbitrator, but the administration refused. CAUT imposed censure on the university, but Professor Strax was never reinstated.
Against this backdrop, the Association des ingénieurs-professeurs en sciences appliquées de l’Université de Sherbrooke became the first faculty association to unionize in Canada in 1970. Unionization spread quickly to other French-speaking universities in Quebec, spurred on by the broader social developments of the Quiet Revolution. Within five years of the first union being formed at Sherbrooke, over 60 per cent of professors within the province were unionized.
Academic staff unions emerged more slowly in the rest of Canada, and only as a reaction to gross overreach and missteps by university administrations. By the mid-1970s, only 25 per cent of full-time academic staff in Canada were unionized, a figure that rose to about 50 per cent by the mid-1980s. Today, of the 111 public degree-granting institutions in Canada, all but three have academic staff associations that are legally recognized trade unions.
The future of CAUT and academic unionism
While the unionization of Canadian academic staff is now close to universal, some of the historical tensions linger and shape how academic unions are confronting today’s challenges. Post-secondary education in Canada has undergone a profound restructuring since at least the mid-1990s. Sometimes characterized as “corporatization” or “neoliberalism,” this transformation has been marked by reduced government funding, rising tuition fees, a focus on the commercialization of university research, and increased managerialism.
In the process, academic labour has been transformed, most notably with the significant increase in precarious employment contracts. By some estimates, contract academic staff make up between 40 to 50 per cent of all university and college teachers.
This shift in the academic workforce has sometimes created divisions within and between academic unions by pitting tenure-stream and contract faculty against one another. Academic staff unions emerged and organized around the preservation of a specific professional occupational identity — one that has been primarily associated with that of tenure-stream professors. Collective bargaining has delivered important gains for the profession, particularly with respect to academic freedom, but traditional approaches to contract negotiations that have focused on preserving professional status have not always been effective in confronting the broader social and economic forces reshaping academic work. Continuing to defend elite notions of professionalism risks weakening efforts aimed at building solidarity within an increasingly bifurcated and unequal workplace.
This doesn’t mean we should abandon the defence of academic freedom, tenure and collegial governance. On the contrary, CAUT and its member associations can strengthen these rights by shifting from a defensive strategy focused just on professional self-preservation for a few toward a proactive, solidaristic approach that extends academic rights to and elevates the status of all university and college workers.
If academic staff associations and CAUT are to remain relevant, they need to pay less attention to status distinctions, demonstrate a stronger commitment to coalition work and to the broader labour movement, and do the hard work of organizing members on the issues that unite rather than divide us. That is the next turn in the long road that lies ahead.
David Robinson is the executive director of the Canadian Association of University Teachers. The views expressed here are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of the association. This is an edited version of a chapter published in Glenda Strachan (ed.) Research Handbook on Academic Labour Markets (Edward Elgar, 2024). The author wishes to thank James Compton for his input and editorial assistance.
