Meeting With Members at Conestoga College

On October 9th I traveled to the Kitchener campus of Conestoga College to meet with President Lana Lee Hardacre and members of OPSEU Local 237.

Lana Lee Hardacre

Conestoga is a medium-sized college with approximately 9,000 full-time students.  It is also one of the first institutions in the Ontario college system, being established in 1967. Conestoga operates seven different campuses and offers a wide array of programs, including collaborative degree nursing, engineering, architecture, and computer technology.

In my meeting with the officers of Local 237, they described a now-familiar story of college management squeezing every bit of revenue out of operations, while simultaneously cutting costs at every turn.  This funding pressure manifests in growing class sizes in the college's apprenticeship programs.  In several trades programs, classes used to be capped at 24 students, and now have climbed to 42.  In some machining classes, where the past practice has been a maximum of 15 students, classes of up to 37 are now common.

While these numbers may seem low when compared to massive university lecture theatres crammed with hundreds of students, skilled-trades classes involve intensive, hands-on education using potentially dangerous machinery.  The 24 and 15 student limits were in place to ensure two important outcomes: quality of instruction and student safety.  Now that class sizes are being far exceeded, faculty have serious concerns over both outcomes.

Another cost-cutting measure that is affecting quality education is that professors in skilled trades are being replaced with technicians.  Labs that used to be taught by professors are now being staffed with technicians who can't evaluate student work.  This leads to a disconnect between a student's theoretical and practical instruction that again has professors worried about the quality of education students will receive.

Ontario's skilled trades build and maintain our province's infrastructure and drive our economy.  Given this sector's obvious importance, the public should be concerned when professors are being forced to cut corners and sacrifice both safety and quality for the financial bottom line.  Skimping on resources in the classroom makes even less sense when considering the management at Conestoga, who's numbers and salaries have been growing by leaps and bounds.  In 2012 Conestoga president John Tibbits alone took in over $409,000 in salary, after receiving an extremely generous 16% raise in 2011.  Clearly there's been no austerity in the president's office...