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Streaming of Permanent Appointment Categories

Policy Statement

General

  1. Academic work involves closely related activities comprising different aspects of the same job. These include research, teaching, collegial participation, and public engagement.1 A post-secondary institution’s academic mission relies on all members of its academic staff participating in this range of scholarly activities. However, the balance between these activities can vary between academic staff members and may change over the course of an academic career. No single workload model captures all ways that academic staff organize themselves to contribute, across a wide array of knowledge systems, practices, and areas of focus, to their disciplines, professions, programs, institutions, and communities.
  2. For the reasons above, and in consideration of the circumstances prevailing at particular institutions, there may be legitimate grounds for establishing more than one permanent appointment category. In this policy statement, streaming means the establishment of different types of permanent academic staff appointment categories or subcategories, such that different streams strike different workload balances. In all cases, the terms and conditions of employment governing streams should be located in collective agreements bargained between the academic staff association and the employer.
  3. Streamed appointment categories should be established only after appropriate collegial deliberation and only on principled grounds. These grounds include: to provide internal pathways to permanence for long-serving contract academic staff, consistent with principles of fair employment and decent work; to support the hiring and permanent employment of colleagues specializing in particular aspects of the academic job, where a legitimate academic need for such specialization has been recognized through a collegial process. Under no circumstances should budgetary restraint or administrative expedience be allowed to drive the development or use of streams.

Principles Guiding the Establishment of Streams

  1. Overall, any establishment of streams should be founded on the equal value of all streams and of all components of academic work. Streams should be designed not only to address the collegially determined academic needs of a unit or institution but also to allow academic staff to focus somewhat on aspects of work of their choosing. Streams should never be used a means of institutional coercion into particular roles.
  2. All streams should allow academic staff to pursue all components of academic work (teaching, scholarship, collegial participation, etc.), notwithstanding that the balance of assigned duties (e.g., between teaching and research) may vary between streams.
  3. Distinctions between streams should be minimized. Accordingly, regardless of stream:
    1. Academic staff of the same discipline or who teach within the same program should be appointed within the same academic units as their colleagues and should have full rights of participation within those units;
    2. Employment should be secured through a tenure system that offers the same rights and protections to all academic staff;
    3. Pay scales, benefits, professional development opportunities, access to funding, access to sabbatical leaves, systems of rank and promotion, etc., should be the same as for other academic staff;
    4. All academic staff should have the same academic freedom rights.
  4. All academic staff, regardless of stream, should have fair workloads and schedules that allow time for other aspects of the academic job.2 This includes avoiding excessive workloads overall and reserved annual periods without teaching responsibilities. Academic staff should have equal rights with respect to course selection and workload allocation and should have the ability, within the stream, to vary the relative proportions of teaching, scholarship, and service work over the course of their careers.
  5. Academic staff across all streams should have full academic freedom rights, including rights to engage in scholarly inquiry and professional development, with appropriate supports and without restrictions. Stream-based constraints should never be placed on research, scholarship, or professional and artistic activities, nor should they be placed on how these activities and resulting achievements are recognized.
  6. All academic staff, regardless of stream, should have full rights of collegial participation, including within governance forums, with appropriate supports and without restrictions.3 Stream-based constraints should never be placed on eligibility to participate or for service to be recognized as part of workload.
  7. Academic staff should have the right to apply to change streams. Approvals should be decided according to a fair and transparent process.
  8. Academic staff should not be obliged to change streams. Under no circumstances should the institution’s administration address a real or perceived performance concern by unilaterally imposing a change in streams. For example, collective agreements should prevent the imposition of a higher teaching workload as a penalty.
  9. Performance expectations (e.g., for the purposes of tenure, promotion, or conversion to other streams) should be reasonable in light of each stream’s workload mix.4 As for all academic staff, criteria should be flexible, recognizing the diversity of academic work and admitting a wide variety of evidence that criteria have been satisfied.
  10. The introduction and relative size of streams should be approached with the overall health of the post-secondary institution as a priority, with the aim to safeguard the institution’s educational and research mission. These matters should be considered during collective bargaining, when any framework for streams is being established, and in any collegial processes (e.g., academic staff complement planning, recruitment, etc.) that follow. The establishment of streams should be tied to robust collective agreement complement language. Such language guarantees that academic staffing levels are sufficient to ensure the success of the academic mission and fair workloads, given the nature of the institution’s programs, student enrolment numbers, etc.

Internal Pathways to Permanence for Contract Academic Staff

  1. Academic staff associations should negotiate collective agreement provisions that protect new generations of academic staff from employment practices that perpetuate precarity, fragment scholarly work, and reproduce attendant hierarchies. Where the use of precarious employment practices has become entrenched, an academic staff association may, as a remedy, also need to bargain pathways to permanent employment for long-serving contract colleagues. Such provisions should be fair to classes of colleagues whose work history has been shaped by longstanding conditions of precarity (e.g., extended denial of equal opportunities to pursue research and scholarship, professional development, etc.).
  2. In the circumstances described above, it may be appropriate for an academic staff association to bargain an internal pathway to a teaching-focused stream. However, pathways to permanence need not always be through a teaching-focused stream. Notwithstanding the establishment of teaching-focused positions, qualified contract and limited-term academic staff with a certain amount of seniority should be given the opportunity to convert directly into other categories of tenurable appointment.
  3. Former contract academic staff who have been reappointed into teaching-focused positions should be eligible to apply for conversion to other streams and should be supported when doing so. In some cases, that may mean support for research development or completing a PhD or other terminal degree, which itself should be recognized as a contribution to scholarship (e.g., for the purpose of tenure and promotion).
  4. The bargaining of internal pathways should not be done at the expense of robust complement language but as one way to reverse entrenched precarity.

New Positions Open to External Competition

  1. Streams may be established to support the hiring and permanent employment of colleagues specializing in particular aspects of the academic job. Academic staff association should bargain collective agreement provisions assuring the following:
    1. Prior to each round of hiring, the position profile, including the intended stream, should be decided through a collegial process involving the academic staff in the unit;
    2. The intended stream and attendant duties are clearly described in the posting;
    3. Details about the intended stream are provided to candidates.
  2. The creation of new positions open to external competition does not obviate the need to provide internal pathways to permanence for contract academic staff.

Approved by the CAUT Council, November 2025.

Endnotes

  1. For a fuller description, see the Policy Statement on the Nature of Academic Work. ↩︎
  2. See also the Policy Statement on Distribution of Workload and Sabbatical Leave. ↩︎
  3. See the Policy Statement on Collegiality. ↩︎
  4. See also the Policy Statement on Evaluation of Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activities. ↩︎