From the Queen’s Strategy: “All the possibility and potential here at Queen’s resides in our people, whose intellectual curiosity, passion to achieve and commitment to collaboration are great cause for pride.”
1. Last week’s postponed Faculty of Arts and Science Faculty Board meeting will be held this Friday, March 15th, at 3:30 pm, MacCorry B201 or via zoom. You can find the agenda here. Meetings of Faculty Board are now critical to ensuring that any proposed academic restructuring in FAS follows the required procedures that have been designed to ensure the maintenance of collegial governance. This meeting is a key opportunity to ask questions about, for instance: restructuring plans in FAS, especially with regard to staffing; the undue burden placed on staff by the Nous “activity data collection process’’; transparent decision-making and meaningful consultation. Questions from a previous meeting, about the future of ASO (Arts and Science online) remain unanswered. We still have no sense of what vision is guiding any of the changes that are promised to come.
Debate around the University’s deficit, now estimated to be $40.7 million, has centered on the Faculty of Arts and Science, despite the fact that the University is, of course, a single financial entity. The notion that each faculty should operate, more or less, as a relatively independent financial unit is just slightly more than a decade old here at Queen’s, a fact that reminds us that budgets involve choices, and those choices reflect values.
2. As part of the Queen’s Renew project, which is being led by the Nous Group consulting firm, department managers and other staff members are being required to participate in a process of “activity data collection” that involves categorizing staff positions by the percentage of time spent on various activities across 14 different functions (e.g., human resources, finance, general administration, information technology, facilities management, research administration, etc.). Staff members who were selected to participate in this process were identified because they are listed as the people who have prepared contracts for people in other staff roles. For instance, department managers have been asked to code any staff members who report directly to them, as well as research and casual staff in their departments. Graduate program assistants who process contracts have been asked to code graduate research assistants. Other staff who supervise casual employees have been asked to code those positions. In some cases, the staff member may not know anything about the position they are being asked to code. The communication about this process was sent to department managers on March 6th and to staff on March 7th with an invitation to participate in one of three “launch events” (!) to introduce staff to the UniForum coding system. One of the launch events was scheduled for 10:30 am on March 7th, only a couple of hours after staff received the initial communication about this process. Staff are also being asked to sign-up for a “coding clinic” during the data collection period (March 7 – 28th) to input data during a live session with representatives from NousCubane. Associate Dean (Global Engagement) Nick Mosey is acting as the key lead on this project for the Faculty of Arts and Science and Lori Stewart, Executive Director in the Office of the Provost and Vice-Principal (Academic), is the university’s lead for the Renew Project. At a meeting held last week with department managers, they both acknowledged that this timing is not ideal – it is occurring during an already difficult time for staff (given the end of the academic year and the extremely stressful context related to uncertainty and restructuring within FAS) – nevertheless, they insisted that it’s not possible to postpone given external timelines and pressures.
3. The Faculty of Arts and Science is holding two town hall meetings this coming Monday, March 18th. These were announced, not in the most recent FAS newsletter, but in the newsletter that came out on February 7th. The town hall meetings do not appear in the FAS events calendar. The meeting for staff is at 11:00 am. You can register for it here. The meeting for faculty is at 3:30 pm. You can register for it here. Again this is an opportunity to ask questions.
4. QCAA is collaborating with colleagues from Concordia to offer a brief teach-in on the basics of university governance. The session will be held Thursday, March 14th from 12:00-1:00 pm via zoom. Universities have unique governance models that have been designed to ensure decisions affecting their academic direction and function are made by faculty. Known as collegial (or shared) governance, this model is under threat in the current political and economic context. At last week’s teach-in on consulting firms, OCUFA Senior Researcher and former Nous employee, Michael Savage, made clear that Nous Group has little regard for collegial governance, as evidenced by their work in Australia and, closer to home, at the University of Alberta and at Laurentian. The Nous Group offers their take on university governance, with reference to Laurentian, in a short article on their website.
5. To address an oversight in the UniForum Services Effectiveness Survey, QCAA has launched a Senior Administration Effectiveness Survey that can be completed anonymously by staff and faculty. The survey will take about 5-10 minutes to complete and will be available until March 31st.
6. Using an “exemption for educational landlords” in Ontario’s Residential Tenancies Act, Queen’s is going to raise rents for students who live in Queen’s Community Housing by more than 10% per year over the next three years for a total increase of 31.5%. The legally permitted annual rent increase in Ontario in 2024 is 2.5%. Tenants have organized the Queen’s Community Residents Association to negotiate with the university.
7. In related news, the University has informed The Grad Club that their rent will increase by 400% beginning in September, putting the club’s future in jeopardy. Once counted among the top ten small music venues in the country, the Grad Club has for decades been key to the Kingston arts scene and an important link between Queen’s and the rest of the Kingston community. It is also the primary campus space for casual community events like readings, performances, journal clubs, post-thesis-defence celebrations, meals with visiting scholars, or small meetings and other get togethers that benefit from being away from offices and classrooms. If the success of an institution is built of relationships, the Grad Club has made a significant contribution to Queen’s. There is a story about the Grad Club rent increase in the most recent issue (page 9) of the Skeleton Press (Winter 2024), a community newspaper with a strong emphasis on the Kingston arts community.
8. After the teach-in on higher education consulting firms (Nous) and benchmarking and the screening of the documentary film, “Whose University is It?”, mentioned in last week’s newsletter, the Week of Action Against Austerity continued with a social at the Grad Club and Friday’s No Cuts at Queen’s Rally. The rally was scheduled to coordinate with the Board of Trustees meeting, site of financial decisions that will affect students, staff, faculty, and the local Kingston community. Queen’s Students vs Cuts collaborated with other campus groups – OPIRG, Society for Palestinian Human Rights, Queen’s Backing Action on the Climate Crisis – to find links among their concerns and, as a result, the rally was diverse, energetic, loud and smart. Over the course of the week, several hundred people – undergrad and grad students, staff and faculty – participated in events, getting to know each other, sharing their experiences of how this campus is changing, strategizing, and imagining other ways of doing things that would, in fact, recognize that all “possibility and potential” does lie with people that make this place work.
Queen's Coalition Against Austerity 