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.

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CAUT Begins Censure Process

Reprinted from CAUT’s website (www.caut.ca).

(Ottawa – April 27, 2010) Delegates to the national Council of the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) meeting in Ottawa have voted unanimously to begin the process of censuring the University of Manitoba and the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority (WRHA).

The vote came after delegates discussed the findings of an ad-hoc committee of inquiry into the case of Dr. Larry Reynolds, which concluded that the University of Manitoba and the WRHA terminated his position without just cause or due process.

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Spring CAUT Council Report

By Dr. Tracy Whalen, UWFA Secretary

This past week (April 22-25), I attended the 2010 Spring Council for the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) in Ottawa. This session included some of the standard fare: reports on administration and finance; annual reports from standing committees; the amendment of clauses in CAUT Policies and Issues; the presentation of awards. But one topic on the agenda—-diversity and representation on the Executive—-provoked debate and ultimately a change in CAUT by-law.

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