Academic Futures

Universities are complex: from students to deans, thousands of people work together to build a world of teaching and learning, scholarly activity and service to a universe of ideas and thinking. Within this “complex of occasions,” theoretical, ideological, pedagogical, epistemological, political and ontological battles have been fought in a forum buttressed by, and fuelled by, an environment of academic freedom.

Situations have changed. More than one fifth of the time, at Simon Fraser University, when students face a professor in a seminar or lecture hall they face a qualified, often PhD holding, teacher with no access to academic freedom. Two thirds of their academic worth is squandered as their service to the university goes unrequired, and their scholarly activity goes unrecognized. Without the security of continuing employment, or of a seniority system that would provide for more secure serial employment, the academic lives of these people can only be sustained with teaching jobs they commute to all over the Lower Mainland, and sometimes even on the Island. While the number of these sessional instructors at SFU has grown to twenty-two percent, the situation in the United States, for example, has deteriorated much further and more rapidly to the point where contingent PhD holding academics teach, on average, seventy percent of the courses, for an average of $2900 per fourteen week course. For reasons clear to any academic, this reality needs to be avoided.

In order to avoid such erosion of academic freedom, universities were made intrinsically, and implicitly, democratic: students choose their classes, evaluate their teachers, choose supervisors, and organize their society in an atmosphere of cooperation and conciliation, choosing representatives who enable them to participate in the overall decision making of the university to sit on university boards; departments choose their chairs, organize themselves by committee, and enrich their professional lives by furthering the academic conversation with research presented at conferences; the faculties choose their deans by committee and consultation; presidents are chosen by the greater academic community. This academic universe centres on a tenure system that places power and control in the hands of tenured faculty.

Situations have changed. In the past, a large group of hard working clerical staff helped academics run their university. Working directly with faculty and students, and deans and chairs, these people provided for the mechanical functioning of an academic world. Many of these positions, however, have been redefined as having a management function, and a new class of departmental managers has been created. Simultaneously, the number of directors (defined in different collective agreements as equivalent to departmental Chairs), and coordinators of differing description has blossomed. Few of these people are chosen by the academic community any longer, and the power of the vice president legal and the department placed in charge of personnel, renamed “human resources,” has increased exponentially as a result, and can be characterized as the employer.

These departmental and program managers have no connection with the academic workings of the university, nor do they need to care about or support the academic world that surrounds them. Faculty, teachers, and students—the university—have become viewed as widgets to be managed within a corporate structure that does not recognize as its lifeblood academic higher learning: international students are coveted not, as in the past, for the broadening of perspective they provided the academic community, but for the higher differential fees they now bring with them; teaching assistants are no longer viewed as participants in a process of mentorship and learning funded by their labour, but instead as cheap labour (cheaper still if they are non-students ineligible for the scholarship part of the teaching assistant wages and who do not participate in any mentorship capacity); sessional instructors are valued not for their academic qualifications or potential, but for their contingency and cost effectiveness, and remain ineligible for the wages and benefits of the most junior faculty, manipulated in and out of those junior faculty ranks to keep them from attaining even the tenuous rights to minor job security they have right now; Continuing Studies programs’ original cost-recovery delivered academic link to the community beyond the university—with its seniors program, language programs, and city sustainability programs, for example— has been reshaped into a new profit making function by the university’s corporate employer.

Universities have money, but control over how that money is distributed within their walls has been given by faculty who did not want it over to its corporate managers, the employer. This transfer makes sense because academics have other pressing professional pursuits to follow, and concerns beyond the day to day running of the institution. But, as Lear discovered too late, dangers come with handing over the kingdom to the daughters who pretend to love one most; not until cast out alone, his own retinue depleted and appropriated, did the king realize the folly of his own pride and belief in his entitlement, and understand that his true source of admiration, love and life, was far gone, then ultimately dead. The map has been cast, the kingdom divided; if we do not act now, we will enjoy Lear’s own fate.

The administrative costs of running the University of California Berkeley had risen over 156% by 2009, and are still rising now. How much have they risen at Simon Fraser University while faculty numbers have dropped, cut by attrition? Those cuts are justified by the employer with governmental funding cuts, but distribution of the money already provided by government funding and burgeoning tuition is not fuelling the academic engine, or fulfilling academic goals. The replacement of losses to faculty with contingent academic labour endangers faculty by offering monetary solutions without academic ends to distorted budgets.

Teachers and students of all types, and the academic professionals they all become, together form the university. The interests of any part of that academic community are never at odds with the interests of any other part. Students leave universities, but the university never leaves the student; alumnas and alumni all over the world, in academic and other professional capacities, take their university experience with them. The university provides a connection between people no corporation ever pretends to provide, and this synergy between teaching, scholarly activity and connection with the community must be preserved and defended. If the academic communities of all universities do not protect our world, we will lose it. Cancer begins imperceptibly and destroys an organism without malice; it acts as it has been created to act, and when successful, destroys the very organism that sustains it. The academic organism needs use the multiple resources it can access to work together to heal a body that is worth saving. 

Changes

Things will be what they will. No matter what anybody says, things that are true are true: cutting revenue (from, say, corporate taxes) is the same as spending without the benefits.

Imagine you invite somebody to stay at your house. The deal is that he can stay without paying any rent if he gives the people of the neighbourhood jobs. He, of course, can reap and keep as much of the profit as he likes, and do what he likes with it—send it home, send it to the Bahamas, give it back to his employees with some kind of profit sharing arrangement—anything.

The other homeowners of the neighbourhood decide this is a good idea. People from outside seem to want to set up businesses and bring jobs, so they decide to make it easy for them and offer them their homes rent free.

Now everybody is doing it and funding the infrastructure of the neighbourhood, garnishing their own wages to pay for the services and facilities they need and want. The rent free business owners also enjoy the quality of life they gain in the neighbourhood.

The people of the neighbourhood get together and decide that though the companies are making record profits and thriving in the neighbourhood, and because the lion's share of their profits is nowhere to be seen, that they must start collecting some rent to cover the costs of running the neighbourhood and maintain the quality of life that they have all come to expect. Some people in the neighbourhood with especially close relationships with the more or less permanent "guests" do not agree with this plan, though. These people say that if the neighbourhood starts charging these "guests" rent they will not come and will leave to start their businesses elsewhere.

Some of them will leave; but others will stay because they like the neighbourhood and came here in the first place because they liked the place anyway. The ones who leave, leave having taken the profit (that was paid by the people neighbourhood as consumers and with their labour anyway) and without any loyalty or feeling of indebtedness to the people of the neighbourhood.

If they leave, what's the problem? If new people don't come in because they won't accept profits if they have to pay rent, are they the kind of people the neighbours want to work for anyway? Do they want them in the neighbourhood? Would it not be better if the people in the neighbourhood owned the businesses and were the bosses anyway? Would they mind paying the rent if it meant that everybody in the neighbourhood would live better, instead of the lucky few working near the top of the "guests"' companies?

There is a saying: "that's the price of doing business." Why does that only seem to apply when business wants to take it to the neighbourhood?

Move on

The world is on the other side of a pane of glass; it haunts me without my being able to touch it. I watch helpless as the newspaper quietly spins its support for an unmandated candidate in stories that have nothing to do with her; I watch and feel as Japan tries its best not to panic in the face of the worst fear of the '80s; I see people in positions they do not appreciate, and who spend their time keeping others out; I watch as a thick fatty layer of administration insulates the public from its own educational institutions; and though the glass is there, I sit and hear nothing but a spiralling hellish vortex of a multitude of irrational ways to say no to reason through the receiver hung there by the window for me.

Time to concentrate on this side of the glass and live the life I have been given, satisfied and content in the crux of my own position and stance, my own potential and the warmth of that of those closest to me.

We are more by Shane Koyczan: Vancouver 2010

May 26, 2008 On Fiction

As a place becomes more familiar, it becomes less random.

Familiarity creates shape.

Families exclude: the more familiar, the more exclusive.

Shaping the real creates fiction.

Fiction creates new expectations by violating others.

Fiction informs the family.

Family manifests fiction.

For setting to work it needs to be felt along the blood.

Place forms families.

False formality

False Formality and (ironically) fear of grammar have caused the four most ridiculous nonsensical misuses of the English language: using "due to" instead of "because of"; the use of the reflexive pronoun "myself" as if it were a more formal version of "me" or "I"; using "speak to" instead of "speak about"; and using nouns like "impact" as verbs.

Language changes; language evolves. Evolution, however, selects for simplification, for clarity and elegance. All the above cases are born from a fear of making a mistake and a fear of being too simple to understand. Rather than having and expressing complex ideas, the artifice of false formality is being used to make ideas seem complicated: "purchase" instead of "buy"; "beverage" instead of "drink."

Something is due to some other thing. Her lateness was due to her lack of care for others (not "She was late due to [sic] her lack of care for others"). Is this a small thing? Of course it is, and it would not matter so much but for the reason: a false sense of formality and/or self aggrandizement.

The nonsense of saying "Michelle and myself perused the aisles for chocolate baked goods" is most clear if you drop the "Michelle and" and read it out loud. Equally "You should submit the report to Hanna or myself by 4:59 Friday afternoon" just makes no sense under even the weakest lens. If it said "I should submit the report to Hanna or myself by 4:59 Friday afternoon" the usage would be proper, but does not make any sense, because I myself would probably give myself until 5:00 (or maybe Monday morning).

I would love to watch somebody speak to an issue—I cannot even imagine what that would look like. I prefer to speak to people (actually plants, but that's beside the point) about things, and why an "issue" cannot be a problem or a difficulty or a current problem I do not know.

Good English verbs are frowned upon (more formality), so instead of changing something, the business world says it "impacts" it. This is the least offensive of the above problems, and is probably quite Shakespearean in its inventiveness (new words excite unless they become trite expressions of one's "business acumen").

There are, of course, others. Do not use the word "comprise" unless you know how, because it does not sound formal it just sounds uppity, and never try and do anything.

As Francophone mothers wring their hands over their language becoming more informal, English in Canada has all but lost its informal lustre: thou, thee, thy, thine, and thyself all having been relegated to the basement of unused archaisms.

Do not be afraid of prepositions or any other good old English words. Start sentences with "but" and "because"—just do it properly. And, for god's sake, do not be afraid of "me"; it never hurt anybody, and you were only corrected when you were a kid because you were using it incorrectly, not because it was not possible to use correctly at all.

(Nothing I have written here has not been noticed by Orwell himself; it has all just irritated me afresh)

Oh Canada

When I was in high school, we (teachers included) would laugh at the arrogance of southern Ontarians calling where they lived "Central Canada." These are words that would never pass the lips of someone from BC, and my time in Nova Scotia also suggests that the place people there refer to as "Upper Canada" would never be called "central" anything.

Nobody is asking anybody to be politically correct. Political correctness is a term for what used to be called lip service. The words themselves are only the sentiment made manifest, and it is the sentiment that offends people. Southern Ontario is many things, but is not central Canada in any way of imagining the term. Why not call the region "Southern Ontario?" That still shows all the privilege of having a region named after part of a province, without implying that the rest of the country revolves around this self-perceived fulcrum.

Should we not be calling the regions of Canada "the North", "BC" (or "the West," aka the Pacific Cordillera), "the Prairies," "the Canadian Shield," "Southern Ontario" ("the Industrial Heartland," or "Upper Canada"), "Québec," "the Maritimes," and "Newfoundland Labrador" (or, the latter two combined into "Atlantic Canada")? Though the Upper Canadians of the Southern Ontario industrial heartland bear no malice when they say "Central Canada," how could they not know it would be taken that way?

The term should disappear, along with its implications. We in BC welcome people from all over the country to live here, but please leave the eastern centrism behind.

Hardhats and...

The hardhat symbolizes work and honesty, so when we see a politician wearing one our nerves should bristle. The image of a polished shovel gleaming as it rips into the soil, its happy wielder joyfully looking at the cameras and ignoring the earth itself, says all we need to hear. But it doesn't: instead people are filled with the hope that the sight of a job getting done brings with it. If the government builds homeless shelters, why not have homeless people themselves breaking the earth and earning a living (and a place to live) with their own labour? Politicians earn their living finding money and a place for projects, but taking credit for the actual labour of creation often appears to be their real job—ensuring the continuation of their own species—as if they were new fathers wearing their hospital gowns and having their pictures taken in the delivery chair, feet in the stirrups, gleaming forceps about to penetrate their nether regions.

Soulcarving 2000

Potential: road swelling through the cambered cradle below, through limbs into downhill feet resting, heels against asphalt; electric dust of dusk alive, anticipation suspending action; the hill is itself steep enough to impel its own completion, its base a disappointment even before pushoff, is itself an enactment of gravity--an expression of descent. The last line always strings out the same, always leads, rain running down a dry window; the last turn alive in the first and containing, remembering, the pressure of the first at its end. The reclining western sky removes detail and adds intensity, smoothing while brightening surface; the memory of last night's rain remains alive in both cedars and rolled concrete curbs redirecting the lime green serpents rocking below, still breathing the heat of the days sun in the blacktop. Some momentous compulsion incites the stone beast from its ageless sleep, uprooted feet grounded against silica crystal, as the force that had held it static itself frees it forward and down. Feet still, waiting,, gravity blooming manifest in pitch and friction voicing its approval in the plastic metallic tones particular to the occasion, the hill alive and rotating, downward force vectored into acceleration. The drop, the unmakeable made, the complicated simplified. Then the quiet walk home. Potential realized.

Reginald Postman becomes Regular Mailman

"And it would be like saying that to anyone. Some words carry the same import wherever they are sent—regular mail or special delivery—yet other words are so generic that the way they're sent defines their meaning. Which are which? Is it really possible to tell?

"People are just complex words: layers of meaning, and the routes and paths they travel, accumulate and gather in the corners of dance halls, growing into contorted brain-like dust bunnies, shifting nervously toward their purpose. Of course, that purpose is only discovered when it is reached, no sentence ever complete 'til it is punctuated, and then only as punctuation ever is, a marking of rhythm and really a pause in the infinite. Do people really know where the period goes until there is one to be marked?" he wondered out loud.

A Song for Hiroshima, 2004

I didn't want to leave you,
But we knew it had to be;
That the time had come for me to go
To make my life complete.

We write on the wall to show we've been
Down here all the while,
Then the morning comes
And we put it all away.

Let's raise a glass
To all the plastic
People who come and go;
Let's shine our shoes
And walk away,
For miles until we're home.

I ran my hand along the rail,
Weathered, cracked, and smooth;
I chose my words carefully,
Knowing that I would
Not be here the next night,
Or hundreds after that,
That I had to leave
That one last time
Into the blinding light.

Let's all choke back
Those last good-byes,
And head off on our way,
Let's close our eyes
And stagger out
Into the final day.

I find myself sitting here on the other side
Of the big ball we call home
There’s not a day that goes by
Without dreaming of what is gone.
There’ll come a time, when I’ll be back,
Singing the same old song;
'Til that day arrives,
I sit here all alone

Breath

The music of song has eroded with the years;
the music of the spheres deafening now.
Language of the world showing itself from beneath
the film of artifice, spread
lightly,
blanketing
the sound life makes
as her perspective scrapes leaves
cleans away days,
plays at renewal,
coughs up past reliances,
whets teeth with words—
sheer wish, steep face drop—
ends puddling intransitive verbs
in the corners of well-trained thoughts.