[Fdu] A View from the University of Manitoba Strike

[Cynthia Wright]

The U Of M Stands At A Historic Crossroads

BY RADHIKA DESAI 
<http://www.themanitoban.com/contributor/radhika-desai/>ON NOVEMBER 15, 2016

As I walk the picket lines with my colleagues, still strongly supporting 
the strike in its second week with no sign of a resolution,
our stakes are very concrete: increased workloads, performance 
indicators, and arbitrary management decisions affecting job security,
tenure, academic freedom, and collegial governance. At the same time, as 
a scholar of politics and political economy, I can’t help
seeing things in a wider and longer frame.

The UMFA strike is stalemated because it turns on fundamental 
principles. That is also why it is being watched by university
communities the world over. This is why it has received such widespread 
support: from five student bodies – the U of M Arts
Student Body Council, U of M Science Students’ Association, Manitoba 
Medical Students’ Association, Manitoba Dental
Students’ Association, and recently the University of Manitoba Students’ 
Union which represents roughly 21,000 students –
from the trade unions in Manitoba and beyond, and from university 
associations across the country and the world. If UMFA’s
demands are fulfilled, the strike could number among the forces that 
began to turn the mighty ship of higher education in
Canada, and possibly the Western world, away from the commodification 
and corporatization of education – its transformation
into an arena for profit – and towards a renewed commitment to the 
ideals of public higher education.

Sound overblown? Read on.

For UMFA, the non-monetary issues relating to workloads and governance 
are so important that it has even signaled willingness
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
universities. Media coverage has so far failed to note UMFA’s pecuniary 
forbearance and fails to report, discuss, and appreciate
what our non-monetary demands are about. That requires historical context.

Postwar investment and expansion began to transform universities, 
widening access to these institutions whilst systematic and
rigorous research, education, and training, relevant to the major 
questions of the day, displaced their original elitist and at times
obscurantist functions. To be sure, as Cambridge University professor of 
English and history Stefan Collini noted, this process
was far from complete when neoliberalism – the market fundamentalism 
which posited the state and public sector could do
no good and markets and the private sector no harm – abruptly shunted 
public higher education onto the free market track.

As the world has found out in the decades that followed, free markets do 
not deliver and the promised Valhalla was not attained.
More than three decades on, it is clear that something curious happened 
on the way there. As Warwick University business
professor Colin Crouch pointed out, what advanced behind the covering 
fire of rhetoric about free markets and competition
were large uncompetitive monopoly corporations enjoying cozy 
relationships with others of their ilk and with governments.
As they came to dominate our economies, we experienced stagnant wages, 
rising inequalities, permanent and unsustainably
high unemployment, financial bubbles and crises, and, last but not 
least, deteriorating public services and public life.
The excoriation of public higher education was a central part of the last.

It was a long and involved process. Public services do not easily lend 
themselves to corporate profit-making. A great deal of
government effort, directed by corporate input, goes into it.

The opening move was to starve universities of public funding, 
increasing their reliance on tuition fees and corporate research
funding. Raising fees eventually led to the marketing of higher 
education (as the U of M has taken to doing in recent years)
as a commodity, a lucrative investment in one’s future earning capacity. 
That this strategy eventually runs aground can
be seen in the United Kingdom. The high cost of education combined with 
the increase in the number of severely indebted
university graduates alongside no improvement of job prospects has 
shrunk the educational premium, leaving many to
question whether it’s such a good investment after all.

Meanwhile, turning education into a high-priced commodity is 
constricting access once again just when greater numbers
of women, minorities, and Indigenous people have begun to access it. 
These are among the reasons why UMFA supports
low or no fees, greater public funding of post-secondary higher 
education, and a return to universities’ core educational,
researching, and training functions.

As professor Ursula Franklin noted in her Massey Lectures, corporate 
research funding became part of university life in
the late nineteenth century. Although some form of collaboration between 
industry and universities is undoubtedly necessary,
it has taken problematic forms in recent decades. Since public funding 
still accounts for most of research funding, relatively
small amounts of corporate funding often tend to buy more or less 
complete corporate control over the direction of research,
not to mention control over its dissemination, which clogs up the 
arteries along which scientific discussion courses to
advance knowledge.

Turning public institutions, such as public health care and higher 
education, into sites for profit-making entail many processes
that are jointly sponsored by corporations and states. Their often 
intangible and indivisible products – health and education –
have to be converted into discrete commodities such as pills or course 
modules. Patients and students have to be converted
into willing but also ‘buyer-beware’ customers. Doctors, nurses, and 
professors, who are imbued with a strong sense of public
service and a pride in their vocation, have to be turned into pliant 
employees. None of these processes are pretty. They are
part of what is making so many aspects of university life intolerable 
for faculty, staff, and students and has made support
for the UMFA strike so solid.

A university education is supposed to be one in which students are, on 
the whole, taught by professors actively engaged in
research, each picking away at one or another part of the vast coalface 
of the unknown and imparting not only the results
but something of the experience of seeking knowledge and the tacit and 
codified skills required to gain it. In Canada, the
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.
Over recent decades, university administrations appear to want to reduce 
such positions if not do away with them entirely.
hey have been pushing most professors to teach more – assigning them 
more courses or increasing their class sizes – reserving
a small number of elite research positions whose occupants students 
rarely see. Administrations have also been expanding
the number of ‘teaching only’ positions and saddling them with even more 
teaching.

Moreover, while such positions have long been critical for universities, 
their recent expansion has been at the expense of the
standard academic teaching and research positions. The result is that 
all-too-many who would prefer to do research as well
as teaching are forced into the new positions instead, with costs to 
their own research aspirations, not to mention students
and society. The current increase in workloads that UMFA is fighting 
against is part of this trend.

The service component of academic work is critical. Like the modern 
professions, universities are self-governing because their
governance involves knowledge not available to lay people; though unlike 
individual professions, a much greater range of
knowledge is involved in university governance. Under collegial 
governance, the faculty body judges what to teach and research,
how to do both, how to evaluate career progress, how to allocate 
resources, etc. through a whole range of committees – on
graduate and undergraduate curricula and programs, academic discipline, 
research funding, appointments, tenure, promotion
and so on at the department, faculty, and university levels. Faculty 
members also serve their respective disciplines, participating
in peer review, editing journals, organizing seminars, workshops and 
conferences, running learned societies nationally and
internationally (such as, for instance, the Canadian Political Science 
Association and the International Political Science Association).

Without such /pro bono/ work, the entire institutional apparatus on 
which contemporary scholarship operates would grind to a halt.

Collegial governance requires that university administrators be drawn 
from the faculty body, be accountable to it, and return to it after
relatively short stints in administrative office. Contemporary 
university governance, on the other hand, has favoured professional
administrators. Though most still start out as scholars, they 
effectively abandon teaching and research and have no intention of
returning to it. With the transition to administration being made at 
earlier and earlier career stages alongside the rising number
of administrators who were never scholars, university administrations 
are increasingly removed from the intrinsic teaching,
training, and research functions of universities less concerned with 
preserving these and more easily moulded for the corporate
agenda.

The proliferating connections between university administration and the 
corporate world mean that university administrators
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
and maintain relationships between universities and various 
corporations, or how far they advance corporate and pecuniary
values in universities, rather than how well they advance teaching and 
training at our public institutions of higher education.

This is where the increasing frequency with which the universities’ 
proliferating exclusive relationship with large corporations
– whether as travel agencies exclusively supplying all the university’s 
travel needs, or suppliers of software for everything from
maintaining academic records, scheduling classes, booking rooms to 
accounting, or suppliers of printing and copying equipment
and services – which has been the source of so much frustration among 
students, staff, and faculty alike, fits in. Their efficiency
gains remain questionable even as they vastly increase workloads for all 
concerned.

Collegial assessment of the quality and quantity of a faculty member’s 
work for tenure and promotion is being replaced by
simple, not to say often simplistic, performance indicators because they 
will permit non-academic administrators to wield them.
No matter that such indicators reduce quality to quantity, penalize 
long-gestation fundamental research or research that does
not require high levels of funding (since research excellence is judged 
only by amounts obtained in research grants) and
overlook what is considered excellent in particular disciplines. Such 
methods of evaluation also endanger academic freedom
as professors’ research and teaching priorities are channeled in 
determinate direction while criticism within the university
is increasingly silenced. That is why UMFA is fighting performance 
indicators.

Why has this now come to a head? Not because UMFA leadership has 
unilaterally decided to be intransigent – as its flexibility
on salaries shows. Rather, it is the membership that has decided ‘enough 
is enough.’ Extensive surveys revealed that practically
all UMFA members are sufficiently affected and alienated by whatever 
combination of these problems they confront that they
have told UMFA to prioritize them. That is why support for the strike is 
strong.

UMFA is one of the strongest and oldest faculty unions in the country 
with a long and honourable record of fighting these changes.
Partly as a result, and partly because an NDP government ruled in the 
critical decades during which public higher education
was being hollowed out elsewhere, the process is less far advanced at 
the U of M. UMFA is in the relatively privileged position
of fighting to retain what has long been lost elsewhere and now stands 
between the U of M’s advance towards the precipice.

The final piece of the puzzle is the disrepute into which neoliberalism 
has fallen, so serious that even the International Monetary
Fund, hitherto its chief proponent world-wide, is questioning its own 
principles. The result is that while UMFA can proclaim
the principles for which it is fighting from the rooftops, the 
administration is fighting for a cause it dare not name and seeks to
camouflage behind talk of lack of funds. The effects of neoliberalism 
and the corporate agenda on universities is increasingly
widely chronicled, lamented, and resisted. That is why the UMFA strike 
is being watched across the country and even internationally.

We in Manitoba have what is sometimes called the ‘privilege of 
backwardness’: having advanced less far along the neoliberal
and corporate road, we could have the privilege of leading others back 
from it to restore to our universities their public,
educational, researching, and training functions.

/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./
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