December 1, 2010

I hope that the semester is winding down successfully for you and that you are looking forward to the MRFA Christmas party on Thursday, December 9^th.

Department Visits

The MRFA Executive has now met with most departments and will meet with the remainder during the next few days. We have had many worthwhile conversations about Tenure System II during these meetings. Some of the other questions asked, and our responses to them, will be included in the next Monthly Report.

Academic Plan Submission

The Executive prepared a submission based on what we have heard from the membership about the kind of university they want Mount Royal to be and on matters related to the roles and responsibilities of faculty. We have requested a meeting with the Academic Planning Committee to discuss our submission. Click here to read it.

Centennial Symposium on the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

I attended the first annual symposium held November 11-13 in Banff. Congratulations to Richard Gale, Director of the Institute for Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, and to the organizing committee for a very successful conference.

ACIFA Executive Council

The ACIFA Executive Council met on November 19. I will report on this meeting in the December Monthly Report.

Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT)

We are a member of CAUT through the ACIFA federated membership. As External Vice-President of ACIFA, I am the ACIFA delegate to CAUT and attended the Western Regional Conference in Edmonton October 29-30 and Council in Ottawa November 26-28.

CAUT Council

Council is the decision making body of CAUT and meets twice a year. New and revised CAUT policies and model collective bargaining clauses were discussed. A host of committee reports and CAUT Executive reports and presentations were heard. There were two panel discussions, one on higher education in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza and the other on recent developments affecting post-secondary education in Great Britain and the United States.

In other provinces, academic staff associations are under the Labour Code and they think of themselves more as unions than we are accustomed to in Alberta. This is reflected in CAUT and the organization has a tradition of stalwartly defending the collective and individual rights of faculty. Some of the most intense moments of the Council involved the Women’s Committee. There was a motion from the Committee to remove the Chair for failure to provide leadership and to implement the decisions of the committee. The delegate for the Ontario Public Service Employees Union, another federated member, rose to speak eloquently of her work as a feminist and labour activist. Then he read her resignation, making the motion to remove unnecessary. The Speaker announced that there would be an election for chair the next morning and a spokesperson for the Women’s Committee stated that they would be unanimously nominating a member of the committee who had filled the vacuum by assuming a leadership role. This was the only nomination the next morning and, immediately following it, the President of CAUT stood to denounce the lobbying against this candidate that had occurred the previous evening. We heard that she was an Assistant Dean and an individual Associate member of CAUT, which permitted her to be a candidate for any position, including President. Nevertheless, several associations spoke against her, not personally, but on the basis that a person from management should not be in a leadership position of a labour organization. In the end, the candidate was acclaimed, as required by the bylaws.

I attended a meeting of the Librarians’ Committee. The talk was mostly of their struggle for parity with teaching faculty. At McGill, the librarians are not even permitted to say they “taught” a workshop; the correct terminology is “did” a workshop. I reported that in our transition from college to university we were able to keep all faculty together on the same salary grid and in the same system of rank, our librarians do a lot of teaching, and part of the definition of librarian in our collective agreement is that their workload may include teaching credit courses.

Jim Turk, Executive Director of CAUT, presented the latest CAUT Decima/Harris poll results. The telephone poll was conducted with over 2,000 adult Canadians between November 11 and November 21, 2010. Results are considered accurate within plus or minus 2.2%, 19 times out of 20. As in past polls, a majority think spending on post-secondary education should be increased even if it means paying higher taxes. A majority in all provinces except Ontario oppose a freeze on faculty salaries. The poll demonstrates that Canadians believe accessible, quality post-secondary education must be a top priority for all governments.

CAUT Western Regional Conference

The most interesting session for me was the one on current Faculty Association issues. I was in a group that included representatives of the Federation of Post-Secondary Educators, ACIFA’s larger counterpart in BC, and Thompson Rivers University. Thompson Rivers became a university in 2004 and now has three new deans who are telling faculty that in order to become a real university they need to remove workload language from the collective agreement and increase class sizes.

There were two sessions on research funding. Some disturbing trends are:

·         one result of competition is that money is taken from teaching to be spent on research so that the university can improve in the rankings and thereby increase their share of research grants;

·         a decrease in the number of research faculty on the granting councils and a corresponding increase in the number categorized as corporate representatives, some of whom are purely political appointees with no relevant industry experience;

·         a decrease in basic research funded by NSERC and an increase in targeted research;

·         funding the purchase of expensive equipment, but not the operating expenses required to use it effectively.

The opening session was a report on the UBC governance case. This began with an extensive Senate report that recommended it become more proactive with respect to its statutory mandate over academic governance (the UBC Senate has about 90 members, 36 of whom are faculty). Subsequently, the Senate passed a policy on student evaluation of teaching that was in conflict with provisions of the Collective Agreement. The Faculty Association filed a policy grievance that went to arbitration. UBC argued that Senate policies cannot be the subject of arbitration because they are outside the Collective Agreement and in March, 2008 the arbitrator ruled that he did not have jurisdiction over the policy and so, even if it were inconsistent with the Collective Agreement, he would not be able to provide a remedy that would interfere with it in any way.

The Association appealed to the British Columbia Court of Appeal, contending that the arbitrator erred in rejecting their principal argument that UBC was a single entity employer whose constituent parts, including the Senate, were bound by the Collective Agreement. They submitted that the Senate is not a separate, unaccountable entity and that the Collective Agreement must prevail. Because of the importance of the case, both CAUT and AUCC were granted intervenor status. The Court of Appeal upheld the arbitrator’s award on April 20, 2010, finding that there is a clear division of powers between the Board and the Senate in the University Act and that the Board could not bargain away the Senate’s authority over academic matters. The Association was ordered to pay UBC’s costs.

The boards of other BC universities have moved to take advantage of the Court of Appeal’s decision. For example, on May 25, 2010 the Board Chair of Kwantlen Polytechnic University wrote the Faculty Association to say:

As we were formerly subject to the College and Institute Act, it is possible that there are some current provisions in the collective agreement that were bargained in good faith at the time but that deal with areas that may now be under Senate’s exclusive jurisdiction, or that require Senate’s advice or approval.

Under the University Act, the Board does not have power over matters that fall within the exclusive jurisdiction of the Senate. If, in the future, the Senate, in carrying out statutory powers vested exclusively in it adopts educational policies that conflict in whole or in part with the collective agreement, or if the collective agreement language were successfully challenged based on a conflict with the Senate’s exclusive statutory powers, those parts of the collective agreement that infringe upon the Senate’s exclusive jurisdiction will be void and of no effect.

As a result, bargaining meetings scheduled for this fall have been replaced by protocol discussions in which the two parties are attempting to agree on a common interpretation of the University Act with regards to bicameral governance. The powers of the Board are the same for all universities in BC, but the Senates of the new special purpose, teaching universities have less authority than those of the older universities.

There is no danger of this happening at Mount Royal under the present legislation. Unlike the University Act of British Columbia, Alberta’s Post-Secondary Learning Act specifies that an academic staff association shall be established and that it shall have the exclusive authority, on behalf of the academic staff members, to negotiate and enter into an agreement with the board of the public post-secondary institution. The Act also states that the board shall, subject to any existing agreement, prescribe the terms and conditions of employment of academic staff members. Our General Faculties Council is constituted under the Alternative Academic Council Regulation which grants a limited set of powers, mostly related to academic programs. Some additional powers and recommendation and advisory roles have been delegated to GFC by the Board. For example, GFC must make recommendations to the Board prior to their decisions on tenure and promotion procedures and policies.

Gerry

Dr. Gerry Cross

President,

Mount Royal Faculty Association

Ph.  (403) 440-6191