Over the last several weeks, faculty, staff, and students have been asked to rearrange schedules at the last minute; we’re pulled into job talks and appointments committee meetings through hushed tones with the promise that we might land a Big Researcher. Most of the appointment processes underway are part of the Canada Global Impact+ Research Talent Initiative, a program of the Government of Canada to “support institutions in attracting world-leading researchers to Canada.” As a key component of the Canada Strong federal budget 2025, which prioritizes investments in artificial intelligence and military spending, the program is timed to take advantage of scholars leaving the United States due to research funding cuts and overtly fascistic government actions in that country. The Government of Canada’s ‘Strategic Priority Areas’ for hiring through the Impact+ program reflect the federal government’s desire to build defence and dual-use technologies, ‘sovereign’ AI infrastructure, and high-tech health and environmental futures predicated on the mining of critical minerals. The Impact+ Chair priorities are mirrored in Queen’s own research chair program, the Queen’s National Scholar (QNS), now hiring four positions in the areas of neuroscience, quantum nanophotonics, cancer epidemiology, and artificial intelligence.

In the current context of austerity and (manufactured) budget deficit, it can be easy to grovel at anything we might be thrown. And the researchers interviewing for these positions are hardly dregs of academia; many will become valued and valuable colleagues. But the stakes of these hiring processes are about more than simply attracting high-level researchers. These Chair programs are part of broader efforts to make universities do the bidding of the federal government. While public universities have always been an extension of the state in this country, the changing geopolitical context here matters. Canadian sovereignty is being couched in high-tech, resource-intensive, austere, and militarized solutions, and post-secondary education is being steered towards technomilitary and nationalist futures at the expense of other, more democratic and just visions. At the same time, and not coincidentally, both programs are remaking the processes of university governance by undermining democratic decision-making, while constraining our imaginations of what higher education can and should be in this country.

Undercutting Collegial Governance through QNS and Impact+ Searches

In a typical hiring process that respects collegial governance, units, departments, and programs come together and decide the profile of future appointments based on the needs and aspirations of the department. These decisions have always been made based on a variety of factors, including areas of the discipline that are crucial to deliver a well-rounded education to students; areas of research that are growing quickly and increasingly important for understanding the social and physical context of our world; and areas that not only ‘diversify’ knowledges beyond the white Eurocentric hegemony of our higher ed institutions, but are indeed required to dismantle the colonial foundations of knowledge production here on Turtle Island.

The Queen’s National Scholar program was, until recently, focused especially on this last criterion. Always committed to research excellence, the last 10 years of QNS searches have been oriented to equity, too, ensuring that faculty and research areas at Queen’s better reflect the knowledges and pedagogies required to understand the physical, cultural, and economic structures and experiences of the past and present world. The QNS has served as the basis for both general job searches and targeted hires that now provide the foundation for the Indigenous and Black Studies Programs at Queen’s. Yet even with this commitment to equity coming from ‘above,’ so to speak, units and programs still had a meaningful role in outlining the positions and writing the appointment calls, based on the areas of research and teaching crucial to supporting the growth of (inter-)disciplines.

Under the new Provost and Vice-Principal Research (VPR), these commitments have disappeared. At a Senate meeting last Fall, the Provost all but declared equity ‘solved’, insinuating that a continued focus on equity would only harm research at Queen’s. Now QNS searches are oriented predominantly to those STEM fields that could bring in significant research dollars. This agenda not only reflects the priorities of the Canadian government, but also makes good on central administration’s desire to shrink the Faculty of Arts and Science and especially the arts and humanities. This is an agenda we’ve been experiencing over the last several years of cuts at Queen’s, but one that has been made explicit in the recently leaked consultation documents reported by the Queen’s Journal.

The Canada Impact+ Research Chair program further undercuts commitments to collegial governance and the ability of units to make decisions for themselves. This erosion of decision-making has of course been happening for years, as the neoliberalized academy pits departments against one another to compete for limited positions. But the Canada Impact+ Chair process is of a different kind. Candidates for the Impact+ Research Chairs first apply to a centralized committee run by the VPR. The appointee indicates, or the VPR committee chooses, which unit they should sit in. Under compressed timelines dictated by the government, job talks and interview schedules are being released at the very last minute, taking little to no consideration of the schedules of appointments committee or department members, and often providing no opportunity for non-committee members to meet the candidates. Units (or whoever has interviewed the candidate) are then tasked to provide feedback on the candidate for the centralized committee to make a decision. Little if any concern is given to the areas of research and teaching required by units – which are increasingly urgent and debilitating within the current hiring freeze and context of austerity – and we are instead being asked to accept those who might want us, based on decisions ultimately made by central. And, after years of a hiring freeze, we have been positioned to accept, and even desperately celebrate, a prospective faculty member who might indeed choose us. 

The Impact+ program is only a pilot project. But we must remain vigilant of this trend towards the centralization of decision-making at a university where collegial governance is already being eroded: the current Faculty of Arts and Science Dean search committee is almost fully devoid of faculty members, and central administration is paying consultants such as Nous to offer new models for shrinking Senate. The ‘remits’ of collegial governance bodies such as Faculty Boards and Senate are shrinking, too, as the Secretariat repeatedly rules academic-related motions that touch on finances ‘out of scope’ for these bodies. With cuts to Ontario government spending creating a crisis of higher education in this province, the federal government may implement a modified version of this program for the long term to fill the funding void. Based on past behaviour, we anticipate that Queen’s administration would be only too happy to enable this undemocratic turn.

Reinforcing A Multi-Tiered Research Ecosystem

The university has always been built on multiple tiers of labour – hierarchies that will only be exacerbated through the Impact+ program. Increasingly rare is the tenure track stream (TTS) job, where faculty inherit what tends to amount to a ‘40-40-20 split’ labour profile. Although not explicitly written into QUFA’s Collective Agreement, the understanding is that most TTS will spend about 40% of their time on research-related activities. The ability to focus 40% of one’s time on research has always been uneven, of course; faculty who receive large research grants and chairs (such as university-based endowed chairs or Canada Research Chairs) can buy-out teaching load, thereby placing greater pressure on those without chairs or large grants to deliver undergraduate and professional programs. In some cases, where these chairs are equity-focused, course buyouts can serve to boost scholars and scholarship that have historically been excluded from the academy. But these positions are increasingly under threat. What is more common is that chairs confer inequalities in research time that become compounded over the course of a career, where teaching buyouts earlier in professional life set the foundation for greater research productivity and chairs and grants further down the road. 

Both the contraction of TTS jobs and teaching buyouts for researchers have also, historically, provided the basis for adjunctification and contractualization of labour. Adjuncts at Queen’s are not generally financially compensated for research. They are also not provided the time for research: if someone takes on adjunct teaching as their full time job, in order to even approach a living wage in Kingston they must spend all of their time teaching and/or performing the few compensated service tasks available. Time poverty through adjunctification leaves little ‘leftover’ for uncompensated research that would help those in adjunct positions be more competitive for a research-focused, TTS-streamed contract: the system reproduces itself. And, with the current phase of austerity now rolling back this contractualization – thus targeting adjunct positions – greater teaching and service burdens are placed back on the dwindling numbers of faculty who remain teaching in departments.

The Canada Impact+ Research Chair program only heightens these long-brewing disparities. Legitimated by neoliberal performance metrics and the ability to secure large grants, these Chairs will form another elite tier of research labour at the university unlikely to support the daily teaching and functioning of any given unit. At least some of these Chairs may hold 100% research appointments, or teach only one grad course, which will prove a drain especially on smaller departments that are already sharing staff and resources under the hub model. Instead of investing in those researchers who already exist at the university, from TTS to adjunct faculty, not to mention the staff who are integral to delivering research and teaching programs at Queen’s, the Chairs represent yet another move towards big, flashy projects and profiles that undercut any commitment to providing post-secondary education in this country.

A Different Future?

Imagine if the government money allocated to the Impact+ Research Talent Initiative went towards supporting the talented researchers already here in Canada? Imagine if this money, or Queen’s own ‘Transition Fund’, was routed in a way that helped make more equitable the playing field for all who teach and research at Queen’s, so that those locked into higher teaching loads could also grow their research programs? Or, better yet, if the money was invested in the functioning of universities themselves so that students did not have to pay exorbitant tuition fees? We are pulling farther away from the ideals of a truly public education, and instead buttressing the agenda of a (conservative) Liberal government and institution that sees the future of this country only in AI and defence spending. Our job in post-secondary education is to produce scholars and researchers for this moment, not to reproduce the agendas of the ruling elite at this moment.

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