An Evening at Niagara College

On Tuesday, October 1st I attended a general membership meeting (GMM) at Niagara College's campus in Welland.  Like many Colleges, Niagara's central campus has recently been re-built, and looks very modern.  Our GMM took place in a second floor board room with a beautiful view of the campus' naturalized landscape.  The room was beside the Health Science centre where Niagara's popular collaborative nursing program operates.

Before the GMM I had a chance to talk with members of Local 242's Executive.  President Sherri Rosen and Chief Steward Irene Sebastianelli weren't available  for this meeting, but Vice President Martin Devitt, Communications officer Debra Grobb, Treasurer Bonnie Martel, and stewards Mary Spehar, Shannon MacRae and Greg Smith were on hand to tell me about some challenges concerning teaching at Niagara College.

Martin and Mary in the Local 242 union office

One of the first topics of discussion was how management at Niagara have been issuing an increasing amount of illegal standard workload formulas (SWFs) that violate "hard ceilings" such as 47 hours per week of work maximum, no more than 44 hours per week for probationary employees, or no more than 12 hours between the start and end of a teaching day.  In addition, classroom overcrowding is common.  To Local 242, these violations are a result of intense cost-cutting pressures that see every employee workload maxed out, and every classroom space overfilled.  Managers hope that overblown enrollment numbers will drop before class starts, but this doesn't always happen.

Debra, Greg and Bonnie offering their insights

Professors also face constant management pressure to perform extra volunteer tasks that aren't included in their regular workload.  College open houses, community events, and committee work is common, and managers use these extra obligations as means of controlling faculty, rewarding "compliant" professors, and punishing those who don't volunteer for unpaid work (these teachers are generally considered "non-team players").  For partial load and part time faculty the pressure to do extra work is even greater.  With no job security, these members feel that they can't refuse management requests.

A final issue concerns managers usurping the academic decision-making of faculty.  Managers with no applicable credentials are doing course development, deciding on evaluations, and choosing textbooks.  The result is a top-down culture of micro-management, in which the professional expertise of faculty is being side-lined.  In one example, a program manager made it policy that professors had to give students as many opportunities to re-write tests and assignments as the students needed.  With these kinds of directives, how can faculty members possibly create a learning environment that is fair to all students, and that upholds academic and job skills standards?

This problem won't be resolved until faculty are able to define academic standards and to act as a counter-weight to college priorities of cost-cutting and profit maximizing. 

Until next visit,

Kevin