<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
</head>
<body bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000">
<br>
<div class="moz-forward-container"><font face="Tahoma" size="2"><font
size="+1"><br>
</font><small><br>
<font face="Helvetica" color="#212100" size="6"><small>The U
Of M
Stands At A
Historic Crossroads</small></font></small>
<br>
<br>
<font color="#0060a0" size="3">BY </font><a
moz-do-not-send="true" onclick="return
checkLinkHref(this.href);" target="_blank"
href="http://www.themanitoban.com/contributor/radhika-desai/"><font
color="#0060a0" size="3">RADHIKA
DESAI</font></a><font size="3">ON NOVEMBER 15, 2016</font><br>
<br>
<font size="3">As I walk the picket lines with my colleagues,
still
strongly
supporting the strike in its second week with no sign of a
resolution,
<br>
our stakes are very concrete: increased workloads, performance
indicators,
and arbitrary management decisions affecting job security, <br>
tenure, academic
freedom, and collegial governance. At the same time, as a
scholar of
politics
and political economy, I can’t help<br>
seeing things in a wider and longer
frame.</font>
<p><font size="3">The UMFA strike is stalemated because it turns
on
fundamental
principles. That is also why it is being watched by
university<br>
communities
the world over. This is why it has received such widespread
support:
from
five student bodies – the U of M Arts<br>
Student Body Council, U of M Science
Students’ Association, Manitoba Medical Students’
Association, Manitoba
Dental<br>
Students’ Association, and recently the University of
Manitoba
Students’ Union which represents roughly 21,000 students – <br>
from the trade
unions in Manitoba and beyond, and from university
associations across
the country and the world. If UMFA’s <br>
demands are fulfilled, the strike
could number among the forces that began to turn the mighty
ship of
higher
education in <br>
Canada, and possibly the Western world, away from the
commodification
and corporatization of education – its transformation<br>
into an arena for
profit – and towards a renewed commitment to the ideals of
public
higher
education.</font>
</p>
<p><font size="3">Sound overblown? Read on.</font>
</p>
<p><font size="3">For UMFA, the non-monetary issues relating to
workloads
and governance are so important that it has even signaled
willingness<br>
to
set aside salary demands, urgent as they are given how long
U of M
salaries
have languished at the bottom of its class of Canadian<br>
universities. Media
coverage has so far failed to note UMFA’s pecuniary
forbearance and
fails
to report, discuss, and appreciate <br>
what our non-monetary demands are about.
That requires historical context.</font>
</p>
<p><font size="3">Postwar investment and expansion began to
transform
universities,
widening access to these institutions whilst systematic and
<br>
rigorous research,
education, and training, relevant to the major questions of
the day,
displaced
their original elitist and at times<br>
obscurantist functions. To be sure,
as Cambridge University professor of English and history
Stefan Collini
noted, this process<br>
was far from complete when neoliberalism – the market
fundamentalism which posited the state and public sector
could do<br>
no good
and markets and the private sector no harm – abruptly
shunted public
higher
education onto the free market track.</font>
</p>
<p><font size="3">As the world has found out in the decades that
followed,
free markets do not deliver and the promised Valhalla was
not attained.<br>
More than three decades on, it is clear that something
curious happened
on the way there. As Warwick University business <br>
professor Colin Crouch
pointed out, what advanced behind the covering fire of
rhetoric about
free
markets and competition<br>
were large uncompetitive monopoly corporations
enjoying cozy relationships with others of their ilk and
with
governments.<br>
As they came to dominate our economies, we experienced
stagnant wages,
rising inequalities, permanent and unsustainably <br>
high unemployment, financial
bubbles and crises, and, last but not least, deteriorating
public
services
and public life. <br>
The excoriation of public higher education was a central
part of the last.</font>
</p>
<p><font size="3">It was a long and involved process. Public
services
do
not easily lend themselves to corporate profit-making. A
great deal of<br>
government effort, directed by corporate input, goes into
it.</font>
</p>
<p><font size="3">The opening move was to starve universities of
public
funding,
increasing their reliance on tuition fees and corporate
research<br>
funding.
Raising fees eventually led to the marketing of higher
education (as
the
U of M has taken to doing in recent years)<br>
as a commodity, a lucrative
investment in one’s future earning capacity. That this
strategy
eventually
runs aground can<br>
be seen in the United Kingdom. The high cost of education
combined with the increase in the number of severely
indebted<br>
university
graduates alongside no improvement of job prospects has
shrunk the
educational
premium, leaving many to <br>
question whether it’s such a good investment
after all.</font>
</p>
<p><font size="3">Meanwhile, turning education into a
high-priced
commodity
is constricting access once again just when greater numbers<br>
of women, minorities,
and Indigenous people have begun to access it. These are
among the
reasons
why UMFA supports <br>
low or no fees, greater public funding of post-secondary
higher education, and a return to universities’ core
educational,<br>
researching,
and training functions.</font>
</p>
<p><font size="3">As professor Ursula Franklin noted in her
Massey
Lectures,
corporate research funding became part of university life in<br>
the late nineteenth
century. Although some form of collaboration between
industry and
universities
is undoubtedly necessary, <br>
it has taken problematic forms in recent decades.
Since public funding still accounts for most of research
funding,
relatively<br>
small amounts of corporate funding often tend to buy more or
less
complete
corporate control over the direction of research,<br>
not to mention control
over its dissemination, which clogs up the arteries along
which
scientific
discussion courses to <br>
advance knowledge.</font>
</p>
<p><font size="3">Turning public institutions, such as public
health
care
and higher education, into sites for profit-making entail
many processes<br>
that are jointly sponsored by corporations and states. Their
often
intangible
and indivisible products – health and education –<br>
have to be converted
into discrete commodities such as pills or course modules.
Patients and
students have to be converted <br>
into willing but also ‘buyer-beware’ customers.
Doctors, nurses, and professors, who are imbued with a
strong sense of
public<br>
service and a pride in their vocation, have to be turned
into pliant
employees. None of these processes are pretty. They are <br>
part of what is
making so many aspects of university life intolerable for
faculty,
staff,
and students and has made support<br>
for the UMFA strike so solid.</font>
</p>
<p><font size="3">A university education is supposed to be one
in which
students
are, on the whole, taught by professors actively engaged in<br>
research, each
picking away at one or another part of the vast coalface of
the unknown
and imparting not only the results<br>
but something of the experience of seeking
knowledge and the tacit and codified skills required to gain
it. In
Canada,
the<br>
standard academic was supposed to devote 40 per cent of her
job to
teaching, 40 per cent to research, and 20 per cent to
service.<br>
Over recent
decades, university administrations appear to want to reduce
such
positions
if not do away with them entirely. <br>
hey have been pushing most professors
to teach more – assigning them more courses or increasing
their class
sizes – reserving <br>
a small number of elite research positions whose occupants
students rarely see. Administrations have also been
expanding <br>
the number
of ‘teaching only’ positions and saddling them with even
more teaching.</font>
</p>
<p><font size="3">Moreover, while such positions have long been
critical
for universities, their recent expansion has been at the
expense of the<br>
standard academic teaching and research positions. The
result is that
all-too-many
who would prefer to do research as well<br>
as teaching are forced into the
new positions instead, with costs to their own research
aspirations,
not
to mention students<br>
and society. The current increase in workloads that
UMFA is fighting against is part of this trend.</font>
</p>
<p><font size="3">The service component of academic work is
critical.
Like
the modern professions, universities are self-governing
because their<br>
governance
involves knowledge not available to lay people; though
unlike
individual
professions, a much greater range of <br>
knowledge is involved in university
governance. Under collegial governance, the faculty body
judges what to
teach and research, <br>
how to do both, how to evaluate career progress, how
to allocate resources, etc. through a whole range of
committees – on <br>
graduate
and undergraduate curricula and programs, academic
discipline, research
funding, appointments, tenure, promotion <br>
and so on at the department, faculty,
and university levels. Faculty members also serve their
respective
disciplines,
participating <br>
in peer review, editing journals, organizing seminars,
workshops
and conferences, running learned societies nationally and <br>
internationally
(such as, for instance, the Canadian Political Science
Association and
the International Political Science Association).</font>
</p>
<p><font size="3">Without such <i>pro bono</i> work, the entire
institutional apparatus on which contemporary scholarship
operates
would
grind to a halt.</font>
</p>
<p><font size="3">Collegial governance requires that university
administrators
be drawn from the faculty body, be accountable to it, and
return to it
after<br>
relatively short stints in administrative office.
Contemporary
university
governance, on the other hand, has favoured professional<br>
administrators.
Though most still start out as scholars, they effectively
abandon
teaching
and research and have no intention of <br>
returning to it. With the transition
to administration being made at earlier and earlier career
stages
alongside
the rising number <br>
of administrators who were never scholars, university
administrations are increasingly removed from the intrinsic
teaching, <br>
training,
and research functions of universities less concerned with
preserving
these and more easily moulded for the corporate<br>
agenda.</font>
</p>
<p><font size="3">The proliferating connections between
university
administration
and the corporate world mean that university administrators<br>
can expect
to move between the two, as the U of M’s current president
has, for
instance.
They are judged by how they create <br>
and maintain relationships between universities
and various corporations, or how far they advance corporate
and
pecuniary
<br>
values in universities, rather than how well they advance
teaching and
training at our public institutions of higher education.</font>
</p>
<p><font size="3">This is where the increasing frequency with
which the
universities’
proliferating exclusive relationship with large corporations<br>
– whether
as travel agencies exclusively supplying all the
university’s travel
needs,
or suppliers of software for everything from <br>
maintaining academic records,
scheduling classes, booking rooms to accounting, or
suppliers of
printing
and copying equipment<br>
and services – which has been the source of so much
frustration among students, staff, and faculty alike, fits
in. Their
efficiency<br>
gains remain questionable even as they vastly increase
workloads for
all
concerned.</font>
</p>
<p><font size="3">Collegial assessment of the quality and
quantity of a
faculty
member’s work for tenure and promotion is being replaced by
<br>
simple, not
to say often simplistic, performance indicators because they
will
permit
non-academic administrators to wield them.<br>
No matter that such indicators
reduce quality to quantity, penalize long-gestation
fundamental
research
or research that does <br>
not require high levels of funding (since research
excellence is judged only by amounts obtained in research
grants) and <br>
overlook
what is considered excellent in particular disciplines. Such
methods of
evaluation also endanger academic freedom <br>
as professors’ research and
teaching priorities are channeled in determinate direction
while
criticism
within the university <br>
is increasingly silenced. That is why UMFA is fighting
performance indicators.</font>
</p>
<p><font size="3">Why has this now come to a head? Not because
UMFA
leadership
has unilaterally decided to be intransigent – as its
flexibility <br>
on salaries
shows. Rather, it is the membership that has decided ‘enough
is
enough.’
Extensive surveys revealed that practically<br>
all UMFA members are sufficiently
affected and alienated by whatever combination of these
problems they
confront
that they<br>
have told UMFA to prioritize them. That is why support for
the
strike is strong.</font>
</p>
<p><font size="3">UMFA is one of the strongest and oldest
faculty
unions
in the country with a long and honourable record of fighting
these
changes.<br>
Partly as a result, and partly because an NDP government
ruled in the
critical
decades during which public higher education<br>
was being hollowed out elsewhere,
the process is less far advanced at the U of M. UMFA is in
the
relatively
privileged position <br>
of fighting to retain what has long been lost elsewhere
and now stands between the U of M’s advance towards the
precipice.</font>
</p>
<p><font size="3">The final piece of the puzzle is the disrepute
into
which
neoliberalism has fallen, so serious that even the
International
Monetary<br>
Fund, hitherto its chief proponent world-wide, is
questioning its own
principles.
The result is that while UMFA can proclaim <br>
the principles for which it
is fighting from the rooftops, the administration is
fighting for a
cause
it dare not name and seeks to <br>
camouflage behind talk of lack of funds.
The effects of neoliberalism and the corporate agenda on
universities
is
increasingly<br>
widely chronicled, lamented, and resisted. That is why the
UMFA strike is being watched across the country and even
internationally.</font>
</p>
<p><font size="3">We in Manitoba have what is sometimes called
the
‘privilege
of backwardness’: having advanced less far along the
neoliberal<br>
and corporate
road, we could have the privilege of leading others back
from it to
restore
to our universities their public, <br>
educational, researching, and training
functions.</font>
</p>
<font size="3"><i>Radhika Desai is a professor at the U of M in
the
department
of political studies. The views expressed here are her own,
not those
of
UMFA or any other body.</i></font><br>
</font>
</div>
</body>
</html>