Several years ago, I asked a new member of our union’s executive committee what motivated him to run for election. Getting more involved in the academic staff association, he told me, seemed the best way to advocate for the public university.
Canada’s public colleges and universities need defenders and champions more than ever. From Newfoundland and Labrador to British Columbia, post-secondary education has been in the headlines quite a lot recently, and rarely in a good way. Institutional deficits, suspended enrolments, program cuts, academic unit mergers, hiring freezes, and layoffs, some on a mass scale: all are widespread.
Contract academic staff, as always, are in the most inequitable positions. But across the country, nearly everyone is being told to do more with less: teach bigger classes, combine graduate and undergraduate seminars, join more committees, do more routine administrative work. From another perspective, doing more with less means doing less with less: less contact time per student and fewer courses on offer. In the worst cases, entire academic units — even campuses — are at risk.
These are significant losses to our students and to the communities we serve. Here again, inequity compounds inequity, as reduced opportunities hit hardest those whose social or economic situation makes a program not locally available a program out of reach. In short — this isn’t news to Bulletin readers — things are bad. We might even describe them as a crisis. But if the accompanying sense of urgency can have a galvanizing effect, we should approach the crisis narrative carefully. As we saw with the COVID-19 pandemic and as we are seeing in the current retrenchment, invoking an emergency is one way that administrators create cover for any inclination to skirt collegial processes.
Crisis talk can also suggest a situation suddenly gone wrong. By implication, if we could just reset to normal — if, say, the federal government lifted its international student visa caps — everything would be alright. But our current problems are not a discrete catastrophe. Rather, they reflect a status quo that is working to design, a set of entrenched arrangements that have become all too normal: steadily reduced government support for public post-secondary education, even as the support on offer is increasingly conditioned by political agendas of the day.
Peter McInnis diagnosed well this systematic defunding of post-secondary education and its neoliberalizing effects in his April President’s Message. In several provinces, the consequent reliance on such private revenue sources as tuition and donations has intensified to the point of surpassing government grants, provoking questions about how meaningful it is now to describe Canadian post-secondary education as public.
There’s much more to say about the need to think outside the crisis framework — itself a defining neoliberal tactic — not least because the emergency reflex is often defensive. We hunker down and hope to be among the survivors. Relatedly, scarce and politicized funding fosters an entrepreneurial mindset about post-secondary education work and relationships. Our colleagues become rivals or laggards in the latest competition for scarce resources.
Ultimately, such responses do the work of our enemies, weakening not only academic staff associations but our public colleges and universities too. A problem that is collective, structural and political in nature requires strategy to match.
Fortunately, there is no mystery to what we need to do: stay focused on our shared interests and recommit to organizing for power. These efforts take time and systematic work, but they don’t require magic. The skills needed can be learned and are best honed through everyday use.
Those who want to up their game can check out CAUT’s many resources, from toolkits and monthly organizing calls to online courses and regional organizing schools. As a bonus, participation in our courses and schools lets members build relationships and capacity at the same time.
The fight ahead is not going to be easy or quick, but it is winnable. I’m looking forward to getting to it with the rest of the new CAUT Executive, and I hope you are too. Because in the end, my union colleague’s sentiment remains apt. As we confront what feels like full-on crisis, there is no defender of Canada’s public colleges and universities more essential than us: organized academic staff.
