Casualization, Rationalization and Other Realizations

CAUT Council, November 26 - 28, 2010

By Tracy Whalen, UWFA Secretary

For three days at the end of November, Kristine Hansen and I attended the sixty-ninth Council Meeting of the Canadian Association of University Teachers in Ottawa. As a group, we discussed CAUT policy language, heard updates about legal cases in Canadian institutions, and began to consider post-secondary concerns in light of a pending federal election.

Against this backdrop of policy statements and model clauses, a few particularly interesting topics stood out. One notable session included a panel about higher education in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza. University of Windsor law professor Reem Bahdi discussed the difficulties of conducting research with Palestinian colleagues. Bahdi told the group that when she arrives in Israel on her way to Palestine, she often faces invasive searches in the airport, carries the phone numbers of Canadian journalists just in case she goes missing, and calls friends and family before passing through check points. Bahram Bekhradnia, Director of the Higher Education Policy Institute in Oxford, described the barriers Palestinian faculty and students face and spoke of the distressing negative response he received when he chronicled such barriers in a scholarly article.

In another panel discussion, Bekhradnia summarized the Browne Report and its proposed changes for Great Britain’s university funding. He has noted an ideological shift in popular sentiment: increasingly, many believe that money for universities should come directly from students and not from government. This shift means that universities will have to aggressively recruit students to survive. Tuition costs will likely increase on average from £3,300 to £7,000 per year, depending on the university, a   substantial debt load that students will pay back once they’ve reached a certain salary, post-graduation.

Another interesting session was Associate Executive Director David Robinson’s CAUT Decima/Harris Poll. The poll, conducted between November 11 and 21, included the responses of 2,000 adult Canadians. The data suggest that the popular sentiment of the “overpaid” professor is a myth. Of the respondents, 49% disagreed with the statement that college and university teachers earn too much, 26% percent agreed, and the remaining respondents were either neutral or did not know where they stood. In other questions, the majority of those surveyed (55%) opposed a government-imposed freeze in academic salaries. This opposition was strongest in Alberta and Quebec, while Manitoba was pretty much in line with the national figure. There was a split in opinion nationally concerning the right of university and college instructors to strike.

Finally, faculty members might be interested in a recent article, “Occupational Stress in Canadian Universities,” written by researchers from Saint Mary’s University, McMaster University, and CAUT. According to their data, 13% of respondents to a faculty survey reported “high psychological distress,” while “22% reported elevated physical health symptoms” (232). Work-life balance and job security were cited as the most significant factors for predicting psychological health and satisfaction. They concluded, too, that “women had significantly higher scores, suggesting more stress, on Work Load, Work-Life Conflict, Unfairness-Administration, and Unfairness-Rewards than did men”(244). Reported job satisfaction was generally lower, too, for those of the instructor/lecturer rank than for those in professorial ranks. The full citation for the article is as follows:

Catano, Vic, et al. “Occupational Stress in Canadian Universities: A National Survey.” International Journal of Stress Management 17.3 (2010): 232-58. Print.

CAUT Council is the bi-annual general meeting of the Canadian Association of University Teachers. It is the highest governance body of CAUT.