Universities should pay up
I have a little scrap of advice for contract teachers at Canadian universities. But first some background. Contract faculty, or sessionals as they are sometimes called, now outnumber full time tenured or tenure-track professors at Canada’s universities.
The contract positions pay less, are often part-time or short-term contracts, and they let universities save money. A recent study of 67 Canadian universities by CUPE and the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives — using freedom of information requests to collect data — found that 53.6 per cent of instructors are now on contract. These are contracts that pay as little as $5,000 a semester, or as the study puts it, “which means that an individual can teach a full course load at some universities and still be living in poverty.” Eighty per cent of those jobs are part time.
Here’s how the numbers break down in Atlantic Canada: Nova Scotian universities released information that shows 53 per cent of their faculty were contract staff; Newfoundland and Labrador, 52 per cent; Prince Edward Island, 39 per cent; and New Brunswick, 47 per cent. That’s a whole lot of instructors. Simply put, contract instructors are very much the steerage passengers on the SS Academia, well below first class and without even a porthole where they can see the ocean.
And keep in mind: they are fully trained, qualified academics. They’re just not paid that way.
But back to that advice.
Hey folks — unionize, and if you are unionized, strike. Or sue. Or do both.
Because it’s not going to change any other way. As the study pointed out, “Our findings lead us to the conclusion that the heavy reliance on contract faculty in Canadian universities is a structural issue, not a temporary approach to hiring.”
Why am I so certain it won’t change? Because universities have been happily stealing my work as an author for years, and telling me I should just put up with it, because they are “educators.”
(It’s worth noting that they only steal because they can get away with it — while my work is reproduced at will and added to course packs that universities sell to students at a profit, international journal consortiums extract millions of dollars in payments from Canadian universities. The universities pay up in that situation — because they have no choice.)
About suing? In my case, Access Copyright, which represents authors, took a test case with York University to court and won handily over a year ago. York is using the same excuse to copy my work that every other university in the country is.
But York has appealed, and the footdragging goes on. As far as I’m concerned, if York’s appeal fails, Access Copyright should file similar actions against every university that’s violated copyright for every dime they owe, right back to when they stopped paying for copyright in 2011. If that creates great hardship for universities, tough.
I don’t care if they are educators. Thieves should pay restitution for what they take.
But back to contract sessionals; universities are stealing your work, too, and they will continue to steal it because they are first and foremost businesses, despite any highfaluting claims about “higher callings” and the noble cause of education.
If they can lowball you on price, divide and conquer and get your work for cheap — or better yet, for nothing — they will. If they can freeze individual contract staff out and never hire them again because they are “difficult” or because they want a fair wage, they absolutely will. And they’ll probably have staff write articles defending their behaviour.
Don’t confuse the business of running a university with any love of knowledge, fairness, collegiality or higher purpose. That’s just a cap and gown they like to put on for special occasions.