In the past five months, the academic staff at Carleton University have been the miner's canary in the debate over the meaning of tenure at Canadian universities. The decision in December to close several of our language and literature programs carried with it the prospect that tenured faculty would be targeted for dismissal in May 1998. This threat confronted the Carleton University Academic Staff Association (CUASA) with the most serious challenge in our 22 year history. I am happy to report that this conflict has finally ended in a satisfactory settlement. What follows is a brief account of how we got there and the lessons that we learned along the way.

Carleton's Special Situation</
The campaign of our association to fight the threatened layoffs was made considerably more difficult by Carleton's special situation. A potent cocktail of government cutbacks, enrolment shortfalls, miscarried capital projects and expensive early retirements have saddled Carleton with a very large accumulated deficit. All academic staff were aware that Carleton's financial problems were serious, and many tended to see the layoffs as unavoidable.

Moreover, we were still in the honeymoon period of a strong-willed and capable new president who received a lot of sympathy, and rightly so, for the way he tackled the grim financial problem he had inherited. President Richard Van Loon convinced the board of governors to sign on to a long-term recovery plan, one for which he and his administration deserve full marks. But this plan demanded nothing less than a zero-deficit outcome in fiscal 1998-99, and this is what put us at loggerheads.

Finally, the financial recovery plan was accompanied by an academic restructuring strategy that placed emphasis on advanced technology, management, and public policy, along with a renewed B.A. program. This tended to create a "winners" mentality in some faculties, making it easier to regard the layoffs as the necessary price for this transformation. It also created a context in which opponents of the layoffs could be dismissed as liberal arts Luddites trying to hold back progressive change.

Taken together, these three aspects of Carleton's situation put us in front of an uphill battle, to the extent that few of us would have bet the farm on our chances to stop the layoffs of tenured faculty.

Factors That Helped
Just as there were three aspects to Carleton's situation that made our job harder, there were also three developments that helped us turn around faculty opinion.

First, President Van Loon turned down CUASA's public invitation to consolidate his earlier assurances into a straightforward statement that his administration did not intend to seek additional layoffs. By refusing to make that engagement, the president caused many faculty members to think twice about the precedent-setting aspect of the threatened layoffs.

Second, management introduced other demands at the bargaining table which allowed us to place the layoffs in the broader context of the assertion of management power. In particular, their demand for disciplinary powers along "guilty until proven innocent" lines (i.e. with due process protections kicking in only ex post) really caught the attention of colleagues. No matter what their faculty or their feelings about the layoffs, academic staff were universally aroused by this demand.

Third, from the start the administration had argued that the layoffs of tenured faculty were absolutely necessary for the financial salvation of the university. But when the real extent of the savings became known, that argument ceased to carry much credibility. In the framework of the ten-year financial recovery plan, $550,000 could hardly be presented as a decisive sum. By continually hammering at the relative dimensions of this figure (about 0.4 per cent of next year's operating budget), we were able to influence colleagues to ask their own questions about the financial utility of the layoffs.

The Decision to Hold a Strike Vote
A general meeting of CUASA members in January had authorized us to call a strike vote if the layoff issue could not be resolved by further negotiations.

We were also aware that although a strike mandate would give a great boost to our bargaining team, management would understand that we could not take action until September, for a strike in May or June would make no sense at all. A deadline that is five months away is less than compelling as a bargaining chip. So we continued to dither back and forth.

The precipitating factor came on April 14. To show management how serious we were about the layoffs, we had put forward a comprehensive offer for a three-year contract with quite modest salary increases. Our intent was to provide management with the stable financial framework they were seeking -- provided they would agree to forego layoffs. They responded by refusing either to accept our offer or use it as the basis for a counter-proposal of their own.

More than any other event, this dismissive response convinced us that management had no intention of bargaining seriously and was simply stringing us along until the layoffs could be implemented. So on the following day we announced to the annual general meeting of the association that we intended to seek a strike mandate. We explained the reasons why we believed that no realistic alternative remained open. We also made clear that this decision engaged the responsibility of the executive and the bargaining team. A strong vote for a strike mandate would send management a signal they could not ignore, and faculty would show their support for the team.

The decision to seek a strike mandate paid off. About 83 per cent of the faculty present on campus turned out for the vote on April 27. This was the highest voter turnout recorded since the creation of CUASA in 1975. A resounding 82 per cent of those who voted cast their ballots for a strike mandate. This was an outcome that surpassed our most optimistic expectations.

The Element of Risk
The strike vote was intended to break the deadlock. Faced with a result they could neither ignore nor explain away, senior managers would have to choose to start serious bargaining so as to limit the damage of adverse publicity.

For months senior managers had been adamant that program closures had to be followed by some layoffs. In such circumstances it is all too easy for decision makers to view the prospect of concessions as a threat to their authority. To speak personally, my greatest worry at this point was that the dispute had developed such a momentum of its own that the seven layoffs had ceased to be a pragmatic question -- were they financially necessary? -- and had instead become markers of managerial control. Thus the risk inherent in our strategy was that even if our members gave us a strong strike mandate, management might still refuse to react constructively out of fear that this might be construed as backing down under threat.

Thankfully that did not happen. To their considerable credit, the president and his senior managers accepted the significance of the strike vote and acted quickly. Our 82 per cent endorsement was announced at 6:00 p.m. on Monday, April 27. Less than 48 hours later we were launched on an all-night bargaining session. By 5:30 a.m. on Thursday morning -- two and a half days after the results of the strike vote were known -- a tentative agreement was reached.

The terms of the agreement require that details be kept confidential until ratification. Nevertheless, I can say in a general way that the settlement is a good one. The legitimate authority of managers to manage is not called into question. But a duty has now been created requiring the administration to undertake, over a lengthy period, serious (and testable) efforts to retrain and redeploy faculty in the programs that were closed. In the context of a long-term contract with a good (albeit back-loaded) salary settlement, this is an outcome that can be welcomed by both sides. It will provide the administration with a stable framework for financial planning and the completion of academic restructuring. It will provide the seven colleagues targeted for layoffs with a fair chance for redeployment to other units. And it will provide members in ongoing programs with a no-layoff guarantee for the life of the agreement.

The Lessons
Two lessons emerge from Carleton's story. The first is obvious. Without the strike vote, layoff notices would have been in the mail by now and CUASA would still be locked in glacial negotiations that were going nowhere. The strike vote was absolutely necessary to break the logjam. As academics we may not like to admit it, but a bargaining framework that operates along adversarial lines does not reach collective agreements by the application of sweet reason. Rather, it is the perceived power of the opposing parties that causes genuine bargaining to take place and compromise settlements to be achieved.

The second lesson we learned is probably the oldest one in the book, but we had to discover it the hard way. In retrospect we can see that we spent far too much time worrying about "what would our members do" if we took the plunge. This is, of course, a legitimate question, but it certainly is not a formula for decision making. It took us a long time to learn that leadership is not followership -- but that is precisely the lesson that had to be learned in order for us to reach a successful result.

There is and never will be a good time to hold a strike vote. There are and always will be reasons for deciding not to act. There are and always will be colleagues to counsel caution, delay, "wait and see". But the fact of the matter is that inaction is not riskless. If we had not held a strike vote, we would not have run the risk of losing it. Instead we would have run the graver risk of demonstrating that we were too divided and too scared to be anything more than a company union with whom management did not have to deal seriously.

In short, the lesson CUASA learned may sound like an inspirational message straight out of a Dale Carnegie course, but none the less it is true. In this kind of conflict there are no guaranteed outcomes. But if you truly believe that the choice you have made is the right one, if you can speak from conviction and not just from calculation, then you don't have to keep looking over your shoulder and constantly ask "what will our members do." Real conviction goes a long way towards convincing colleagues that real action is necessary -- or at least unavoidable. Even when confronted with a tough choice in a worrisome context, faculty members can be counted on to come through. They certainly did at Carleton!

E. Peter Fitzgerald is president of the Carleton University Academic Staff Association.