Monday, September 30, 2013

Northward ho! Visiting Boreal College in Sudbury, ON



In the afternoon on Thursday, September 26th I had the pleasure of meeting with the members of OPSEU Local 673 at Boreal College.  Boreal is located just outside of Sudbury, Ontario, and is surrounded by beautiful northern countryside.  It had been a few years since I'd been north of Barrie, and on the drive up I was captivated by the beautiful shield rock, birch trees, and early autumn colour.  Beautiful scenery makes a four and a half hour drive (almost) fly by.

Boreal was built relatively recently, in the late 1990s, and the main campus building at Sudbury looks modern and well maintained.  Against its natural backdrop, it looks picturesque.  According to Local 673 secretary Karl Aubry, the natural environment isn't just a beautiful frame for Boreal, but a very interactive part of the campus.  He told me stories of "campus bears" that are so tame and friendly that students and faculty hardly pay attention now when they amble into sight.

Boreal College - can you find the bear?
I met with the Boreal team at their 12:30pm Local Executive Committee meeting.  In attendance were President David Fasciano, VP Josée St-Jean, Chief Steward Jacques Babin, and Secretary Karl Aubry.  Stewards Hélène Coté and Michael Mainville were in attendance via speaker-phone.  Due to their work at Boreal's far northern satellite campuses, driving in to LECs is difficult for Michael and Hélène, necessitating trips of 4 to 6 hours.  This is one of the challenges faced by northern colleges, and in particular by Boreal.  As the sole francophone college in the north they service a vast area.  Although the number of full-time students is relatively low, with approximately 1,000 at the Sudbury campus, another 500 are spread throughout six satellite campuses and dozens of smaller "access centres".  

Local 673 President David Fasciano
Because of the distributed nature of Boreal's instruction, resources are constantly tight, and the pressures being felt by professors throughout the college system - to do more with less - are particularly acute.  The Local 673 executive explained that because providing post-secondary access to small francophone populations is more costly per-student than for the large city-based english-speaking colleges, the smaller communities lose out.  This is concerning given the original mandate of the colleges to ensure access, and to serve the unique employment and educational needs of their home communities.

Today's impoverished college funding model makes the normal challenges faced by a northern, francophone college especially difficult.  Under budget pressure Boreal has relied extensively on part-time professors to deliver its programs, with Local president David Fasciano noting that part-time faculty now outnumber full-time two to one.  Jacques noted that in programs that have been relying heavily on part-time faculty, that student complaints about the quality of education are rising.  The issue isn't that part-time teachers aren't qualified and committed.  The problem is that due to the refusal of management to offer them full-time jobs, or even better paid partial load work, part-time teachers tend to be transitory.  This high turnover rate, coupled with no time to develop, prepare, or evaluate the courses they are teaching,  makes it nearly impossible for part-time teachers to offer the same quality of instruction as full-time professors.  At the end of the day, as the Boreal Executive argue, it is students who are impacted the most.

VP Jose St.-Jean and Secretary Karl Aubry
Funding pressure has also led to challenges concerning academic freedom, and the ability of professors at Boreal to maintain the quality of education in the face of cost-cutting measures.  The executive related stories of professors who were told to use more multiple choice tests and cut out essays to deal with overwhelming workloads.  They also mentioned the difficult double-bind that full-time faculty are put in when managers direct them to hand over all of the course materials they have developed to part-time teachers.  In doing this, they are simply supporting management's refusal to hire full-time positions.  However, to not help our part-time teachers goes against the collegiality that the great majority of professors feel.   Academic freedom isn't an abstract concept - it means the ability to control the terms of our work, to own our intellectual property, and to pressure management into doing the right thing and hiring full-time professors.

In the end, my visit to Boreal was very enlightening.  As a professor at Mohawk College in Hamilton, I teach in a very different environment.  Mohawk has over 12,000 full-time students at a large central campus in a city four times the size of Sudbury.  While there are some similarities in terms of increasing part-time work, budget cuts, and the need for academic freedom, the particular context of Boreal as a northern, francophone college is substantially different.  Canada is an officially bilingual country, and our identity is powerfully shaped by the historical and present-day contribution of our francophone population.  Our college system should be supportive of this community, and of all of the diverse communities that make Canada what it is today.  Sadly, the corporate model being pushed by the provincial Ministry and college management is the antithesis of one that embraces local contexts, supports diverse communities, and ensures that all Canadians can access quality post-secondary education.

Thanks to Local 673 for the hospitality and very educational discussion!

Wednesday, September 25, 2013

First Stop: Centennial College

Yesterday afternoon I had the pleasure of meeting with the intrepid members of Local 558 at Centennial College.  Centennial has five campuses throughout greater Toronto, and our meeting took place at the Ashtonbee campus, just off of Eglington.  Building 930 at Ashtonbee houses Centennial's automotive technology program, and we held our meeting in a classroom right off of the main automotive shop.


 The impressive automotive technology shop

Thankfully, Local president Jacques O'Sullivan met me in the hallway before I had a chance to get horrendously lost, and introduced me to the other Local officers: 1st Vice President RM Kennedy, 2nd Vice President Derrick Thomson, Chief Steward Patricia Steger, and Secretary Julee Joseph.



Jacques and RM getting the meeting room set up
The officers at Centennial were holding their first Local Executive Committee (LEC) meeting of the year at 5pm, and were welcoming a number of new stewards to the committee.  Between 4 and 5pm I talked with the officers about a number of challenges facing their members.  A significant issue mentioned by officers and stewards in several areas was the growing amount of part-time faculty.  Several programs at Centennial are being run with no full time faculty at all, a situation that makes it difficult to maintain the program's coherence and consistency. 
The lack of full time staff had an impact in other ways.  Due to budget cuts, some programs in business and engineering have decided to not hire any partial load faculty and instead have relied on large amounts of part time and sessional faculty.  Partial load faculty teach between 7 and 12 hours per week, receive a decent hourly rate of pay, and are members of the union with benefits.  In contrast, part-time faculty teach 6 hours per week or less, are paid at a lower rate than partial load, and are not members of the union.  Sessionals teach more than 15 hours per week and receive a daily pay rate.  This rate is also much lower than the equivalent per-hour rate paid to partial load faculty, and sessionals are also not members of the union.  As non-unionized workers, both part-time and sessional professors have no benefits and no job security. 
A steward from engineering related the negative impact that the "no partial-load" policy has had on their programs.  Sessional appointments were being abused, with professors teaching 20 hours per week, 3 different courses, at multiple campuses.  This is an incredibly difficult workload for someone who is not paid for prep, development, evaluation or travel time.  In addition, growing numbers of part-time and sessional faculty place significant strain on the smaller number of full time faculty, who often have to provide considerable support to non full time staff.  One steward remarked that another problem is that, without job security, part time and sessionals won't complain about being over-worked and having insufficient resources.  In addition, they are much less likely to report bullying and harassment of faculty by students or administrators.
RM and Patricia describe working conditions



Another issue facing professors at Centennial are steadily increasing class sizes.  This trend is especially worrisome in hands-on labs, in which students are learning complex skills and need intensive supervision by professors to monitor correct procedure and to ensure health and safety.  Automotive labs have been increasing in size, pharmacy technician lab sizes have also been expanding, and some computer labs have grown to a size that they have become, in the words of one steward "basically unworkable."  In super-sized computer labs students have to wait between 30 and 40 minutes to have a question answered, and faculty members have taken to covering each other's labs to provide support.  The work is simply too much for the assigned faculty member to deal with it alone.

The LEC gets down to business



Despite the challenges in staffing and class size that Local 558 members have been facing, president O'Sullivan and his team remain committed to supporting their members and fighting for the maintenance of academic standards.  The Local has reached out to its membership, created new steward positions, rotated meetings to different campuses, and hired a former chief grievance officer to work in the union office as a member liason.  Their Local newsletter, Unfettered, is also a great tool used for outreach and member engagement. 

Like other academic locals, 558 have got a tough fight on their hands.  It was hard to hear the difficulties they've been facing, but also inspiring to see the creative strategies they have been enacting to deal with budget shortages and a declining full time workforce.  If only they didn't have to spend so much energy making up for a chronic lack of post-secondary funding!

Tomorrow I'll be meeting with the members of Local 673 of College Boreal, in Sudbury.  This will be my first trip to a northern college, and I'm excited to see what they're up to!

'till then,

Kevin

Tuesday, September 24, 2013

And We're Off!

Welcome all to the Campaign for Quality Education blog!  Over the next few months I'll be travelling to all 24 Ontario community colleges and speaking with professors, counselors, librarians and students about their educational experience.

The campaign is sponsored by the Ontario Public Service Employees Union (OPSEU), and the CAAT-A division in particular.  This is the division that includes the professors, counselors and librarians at Ontario's colleges - the people that work with students on the front-lines of post-secondary education.

The purpose of the campaign is to collect stories and raise awareness about the challenges facing our members in an environment that is suffering from scarce funding, increasingly corporate and autocratic management, and decreasing full-time work.  We're hoping to reverse these trends in coming contract negotiations, and to give professors, counselors and librarians the ability to protect academic standards, ensure the full-time staffing needed to deliver quality education, and create a collegial work environment that respects faculty academic freedom.

In the coming weeks I will be posting about my trips to different colleges, about the stories I've heard, and about the complex issues that confront education today.  Please check back often, as I'll be updating regularly!