It’s been a while. Let’s just get into it!

1. Solidarity with CUPE members! Hundreds of people attended a rally outside Richardson Hall yesterday in a show of support for CUPE members, who will be in a legal strike position on Monday. Great to see Fred Hahn, President of CUPE Ontario, here to support Queen’s workers. This week’s QUFA Voices newsletter has a strong call for cross-campus solidarity. CUPE is up; PSAC and USW are on deck. The combined bargaining strategy developed by Unity Council now needs our vocal and visible support. (Yes! That means you! Don’t wait for someone else to do it!) Check your own Collective Agreement and communications from your union to see your options and responsibilities when workers in other bargaining units are on strike. And get a reality check from your own union re the email that came out yesterday afternoon from the Provost. Remember that the point of a strike is to cause disruption. It is not the job of other employee groups to mitigate the literal and figurative messes that will arise if 1000 CUPE members walk off the job. Show your support for your CUPE colleagues by joining them on the picket line, signing the petition of support, posting a sign on your office door or in your window. If you are looking for materials about the strike for students, this reddit thread is useful.

Austerity conditions at Queen’s have been part of the administration’s bargaining strategy. But, as we constantly argue, this university has resources that could be used to support the people who make the institution run. It’s been a while since the last newsletter, but here is a reminder of what we said in the fall: “According to the university’s Investments Services website, the combined value of the institution’s short-term and Pooled Investment Funds (PIF) surpassed one billion dollars for the first time. This is an increase of $99 million from their combined value at the end of the last fiscal year.” Despite the financial crisis rhetoric, the university ended the last fiscal year with an operating surplus of $20.4 million. This is the actual context in which management has yet to offer CUPE a fair deal.

2. The Principal has released a discussion paper on his Bicentennial Vision for Queen’s. The bicentennial will occur on August 16th, 2041, but the Bicentennial Vision is not to be confused with whatever vision is evolving as part of Queen’s 2040, a project about which most of us know little and which does not appear anywhere on the Queen’s website. Regular readers of the QCAA blog may remember this post on the “Strategy Session for Senior Leaders” – an event related to Queen’s 2040 – featuring frogs and ping pong balls. In his visits to departmental meetings last term, the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Science mentioned that Queen’s 2040 could lead to a diminished FAS. The message of the Bicentennial Vision paper seems to be similar. It argues for a university with less of the liberal arts and more STEM, a striking suggestion to read in the current global political and economic climate. The Principal is interested in community feedback about the vision document and will be organizing town halls and other events at a later date. In the meantime, we encourage you to send your thoughts to him by email. And then please share your responses (anonymously if you wish) with QCAA by cutting and pasting them into this form. FAS Faculty Board members will have an opportunity to discuss the document at assemblies in February and March.

You can read an initial QCAA comment on the Bicentennial Vision here. A second blog post considers the shift in the Principal’s language over the past year, contrasting excerpts from the Bicentennial Vision with his comments from a magazine interview in which he linked the “essence” of Queen’s to the liberal arts and openly discussed the political pressure to advance STEM in higher education. 

3. At a long and packed Senate meeting on Thursday, Senators raised concerns about the strong tilt towards STEM in the Bicentennial Vision and pushed for more transparency on collegial governance. The failure of the Provost to bring to Senators’ attention aspects of Queen’s 2040 that have ramifications for the academic mission of the university prompted questions about how the administration determines what comes under the purview of Senate. It also prompted motions asking for increased transparency and a process through which Senate would be informed about university planning exercises. From the university’s website we learn that Senate “is responsible for determining all matters of academic character affecting the University as a whole” and “will participate in strategic planning for the University, including but not limited to the budgetary process and campus planning and development” (emphasis added).

One controversial motion sought to ensure an open process regarding the above roles of Senate. The motion requested that administrators bring plans that have ramifications for the academic mission to Senate to receive comment on whether they fall within Senate’s jurisdiction. In response to questions, the Principal counselled Senators to “trust them,” that they (senior administrators) would not withhold any information relevant to Senate. But, as some Senators noted, if that were true, it would not have been necessary to introduce the motion. Demonstrating the point under discussion, the Principal advised Senators that the motion would not be binding; administrators would not be bound to comply with Senate’s request. The motion passed 24 to 11.

4. Staff and instructors in the Faculty of Arts and Science are negotiating the impacts of last summer’s layoffs, increased class sizes, loss of adjuncts and TAs, and the new hub structure.

Those impacts include overwork, loss of service, the confusion and inefficiency that comes from lack of information, and the low morale that is the inevitable result of deteriorating working conditions. It is hard to come to work when you know your day will be full of frustrations. Just one recent example of the consequences of insufficient staffing: significant delays in the setting up of employment and funding contracts for graduate students and postdocs. We have yet to receive any evidence regarding the financial impact of this volley of changes.

The next FAS Faculty Board meeting is on February 28th at 2:30 pm in Kinesiology and Health Studies, room 100. Post-meeting drink and debrief at the Grad Club!

5. Despite platitudes about transparency, the lack of information flowing from senior administrators to frontline staff and faculty has been a constant over the past year. At QCAA a lot of what we learn comes from friends, colleagues, and commiserators around the university. In recognition of the importance of our collective knowledge, QCAA has introduced the Austerity Gossip Box. If you are aware of information that could be useful to help us understand the rollout and impact of austerity at Queen’s, please submit it anonymously to the Gossip Box so that we can share it on the QCAA blog. 

6. The announcement of a provincial election this spring suggests that the underfunding of higher education is not likely to change any time soon. QCAA has recently been asked to meet with faculty at several other Ontario universities to share notes on challenging austerity at our institutions. We hope to be able to report more on this in the future.

In related news, St. Lawrence College announced this week that it would be suspending admissions in 55 programs, which accounts for 40% of its offerings. The SLC announcement does not mention how many jobs will be lost. The announcement comes three months after St. Lawrence administrators laid off 30 staff people.

7. From the poor management and deteriorating working conditions file and relevant as some instructors are getting ready for mid-terms: A few weeks ago we received the following commentary from a colleague. She titled it “Exam chaos results from absurd austerity measures.” We thought it was worth sharing in its entirety. The point here is not that the Exams office is in any way unique with the challenges faced by its staff and or with the pettiness of the decisions to which their work is subjected. Stories like this could come from any corner of the campus.

What does austerity at Queen’s look like on the ground, where students and staff just try to get through the day? I would direct you to look at the exams office and their overall staffing crisis. Queen’s has implemented a hiring freeze and is filling needed positions with term appointments. This typically means that a person will work in a role for 6 months to a year and then be “let go,” just as they are getting to know the in’s and out’s of their job. Short-term staff do these jobs with no benefits or pension entitlements. Sometimes their term appointments are set for just a few days shy of three years, because if you are employed in a position for three years plus a day, your position is automatically converted to a continuing position that comes with benefits and a pension. A continuing position means that upper management acknowledges that the work a person does will need to be completed, year after year, and is not just a one-off task. Obviously, in the minds of upper management, it seems cheaper to let an employee go and train a new person all over again or try to do without by making someone else do extra work. But as any good business would know, this is not true. Constant retraining, precarious employment, worker burnout, worker sick leave and low morale are expensive in the long run.

Imagine what this turnover does to a workplace like the exams office, on which every student and professor depends to complete a basic function of the university. The result is chaos. How exams are scheduled and into what venues, and how exams are printed, distributed, and collected are issues that depend on institutional memory and the expertise of people who understand why and how things can go wrong and why procedures and protocols exist. These are the people who can save a business money because they understand how to operate efficiently.

Are you a student? Have you stood out in the snow and rain because there is not enough room in a building for all the people that showed up for your exam? Have you started your exam late because there were not enough copies to go around in the venue? Have you been told to run to another building on campus because there are no seats left for your exam in the venue you were told to show up to? Has your SOLUS account told you an exam is in one place when it is in another? Are you a professor whose administrative assistant was one of the people laid off by senior leadership’s restructuring plan? I met one such Prof this December whose Crowdmark exam was not formatted correctly, and he said, “the person who did this for me was laid off and this is not a skill set that I have.” The exam had to be altered such that some questions were not counted, and the students were stressed and confused during the exam. These scenarios are sadly becoming the norm, not the exception.

Let’s not overlook the people who actually run the exams, the mostly Kingston retirees who work as proctors for the exams office, making sure that academic integrity is maintained and the venues run smoothly. They handle the tears, panic attacks, and sick students. They stand in washrooms watching for cheating, they spend hours on their feet and ensure that every exam that comes in gets back to the professors. It seems there was a rumour going around that if one asked for the legally required overtime after doing a 44-hour week that one would not be invited back to proctor. This rumour was quelled by the announcement that overtime would be paid. It was likely the threat of someone calling the Ontario Labour Board that ensured that at least the workplace was legal. Then these same folks were told that due to a “budget crisis” they would no longer get a parking permit. A permit that is only good for the two-week exam period. But a parking ticket is the loss of an hour’s pay, so upper management acquiesced and gave passes to some folks for the St. Mary’s parking lot, so they could arrive at 7:00 am instead of 7:30 am and hobble their way on bum knees and hips through the ice and snow to main campus to work for an apparently ungrateful institution. Yeah, that’s right, Queen’s asked 60 to 80 year-old workers to walk from St. Mary’s to campus for 20 bucks an hour. These proctors often arrive at their venues to find out they don’t have enough exams, or any clocks that work, or to find out that students were told to show up where there was no exam. Nevertheless, they make it work by luck and perseverance, and then they walk back to St Mary’s at 10pm in the dark.

Is it worth it? Probably not. Queen’s is on the verge of losing the last of the people who have any idea how to make this vital function – functional. Say goodbye to the people who actually know how to run an exam; the humiliation and stress is no longer worth it. This is just one way the manufactured budget crisis impacts students and workers directly.

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Sending CUPE members all the good vibes!

Thanks to the colleagues who have been contributing to the QCAA blog and who helped with this newsletter.

If you would like to be added to the mailing list for this newsletter, you can write to me at mla1@queensu.ca. You can also subscribe on the home page of this website.

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