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.
