From SRCs to TSAs: Classification and the Creation of ‘McJobs’ at the University
Marcia Macaulay
The current strike at York has broken all records for labour disputes at English-language universities in Canada. Last week, CUPE 3903 faced a forced ratification vote to decide whether the employer’s latest offer would be supported by its membership. The offer was rejected by 62% of the members in a healthy turnout of 69% of eligible members. A significant aspect of this dispute concerns acceptance or non-acceptance of a new class of position: Teaching/Service Appointments. Such appointments replace the existing Special Renewable Contract Appointments already accepted by the York University Faculty Association. The new TSAs have not been accepted by YUFA; they have not even been introduced to its membership, and they present serious problems for YUFA should they be accepted by CUPE 3903.
These new appointments create a contractually limited category of ‘teaching-only’ faculty who will also engage in service. This is a new tier or class of faculty who teach more, are paid less, and do not have to engage in research, scholarship or creative work. Such positions offer no possibility of tenure and promotion. Although their implementation supposedly responds to the problem of ‘job security’ for contract faculty, such implementation has enormous implications for the job security of all faculty at York and other universities. Through the explicit separation of teaching and research/scholarship/creative work, TSAs establish a means by which teaching is divorced from these central academic endeavours, thus constituting separate classes within academe. The professorial stream would continue doing research/scholarship/creative work along with teaching and service, while an established research-only class would focus on research/scholarship or creative work without having to meet present teaching and service requirements.
The creation of Teaching Service Appointments will have the effect of institutionalizing an explicit hierarchy of faculty within the university. It will also serve to erode tenure as teaching becomes more contractual and cut off from research/scholarship and creative work. One could also imagine professors who are not performing according to ‘standards’ being demoted to the ‘teaching-only’ class, while those who perform adequately are promoted to research status, perhaps no longer having to teach. The creation of a TSA class or teaching tier severs the essential tie between research/scholarship/creative work and teaching.
Such appointments are another form of “McJobs,” a term which reflects the significant corporatization of academic work. How did TSAs enter the language of negotiations between CUPE 3903 and the employer at York? The answer is not clear and can only be partially provided here. The SRC Program was created in 1999. According to the Report of the Bargaining Priorities Committee (YUFA, 2006), “Members who are on Special Renewable Contracts (SRC’s) have been employed as bona fide York faculty members teaching and working at York for 20-40 years. They have obtained ‘full-time’ faculty appointments in YUFA by virtue of negotiated arrangements between CUPE 3903 and the York Administration with the full blessing of our union. Their numbers are small (about 35 people)” (53). In its last round of negotiations YUFA achieved an improvement in the extension of such contracts:
The initial term of each contract was five (5)years. The contract will normally be renewed by agreement of the department, Dean and individual for an additional five (5) years and one further final three (3) year term. (Collective Agreement, 12.32)
This renewal system gave the existing pool of teaching faculty with SRCs job security until ‘normal’ retirement age. Previous contract gains included the provision that SRCs “shall be eligible for Progress-through-the-Ranks increments and normal benefits and opportunities which accord to full-time faculty” (CA, 62). In significant ways, then, SRCs were brought in line with other full-time faculty in terms of benefits and leaves. As well as providing for normal retirement through the provision of renewable contracts, such provisions for SRCs diminished the effects of tierification. The administration’s insistence on replacing them with TSAs should be read in the context of these advances, now being shed in favour of TSAs.
The Report of the Bargaining Priorities Sub-Committee (2006) suggests why the Administration may have wanted to replace these appointments with TSAs:
Currently, all SRCs are appointed to the Professorial Stream, but this is not specified in the collective agreement. Some have recent letters of appointment that do not include research as part of the expectations of the position, though others do research, and want the opportunity to do this full range of work in the professorial stream (my emphasis). In principle, the collective agreement does not permit appointments to the professorial stream which do not include the full range of teaching, service, and research (Articles 11, 12) (my emphasis). In this context, a small minority of SRCs have a higher workload than other Professorial Stream (or even alternate stream) faculty in the same unit. This occurred because of an anomaly of high workloads for short term Contractually Limited Appointments (in Atkinson) being applied to long term SRC faculty members.(54)
Although SRCs were placed in the professorial stream, because Deans or Principals did not explicitly indicate that research was a requirement of these appointments, and because higher workloads were provided for CLAs, a practise came into being whereby the workload of SRCs became equivalent to that of CLAs. While SRCs were technically in the Professorial Stream, they became long-term CLAs. This allowed the Administration to give higher workloads to SRCs along with lower salaries. Teaching/Service appointments originated with this practise by Deans and Principals.
As the Report also indicates, “a wedge which permits some people to have higher workloads has become a wedge to increase the number of people who have higher workloads.” This anomaly has become a dangerous precedent. In units with 3.0 as their official workload, Deans and Principals have attempted and in some cases been successful in allotting a 2.5 workload only to those who have membership in graduate programs. This creates a wedge within the existing full-time faculty and between many SRCs and full-time faculty. At Glendon College during this last academic year, SRCs were not given a 2.5 workload, but rather a 3.0 workload in line with those full-time faculty who were not members of a graduate program. This is a clear instantiation of a class system within faculty, using the same rational as that for the creation of TSAs: no research, more teaching. The proposed creation of a teaching only class of TSAs institutionalizes this formula and incorporates it into the university system as a whole, internalizing the example of designating some United States universities as ‘teaching-intensive’ and others as ‘research-intensive.’
It has been observed that during recent negotiations between Cupe 3903 and the employer, SRCs were ‘redflagged’ by both the employer and the mediator. This indicates strong opposition to positions which would permit contract faculty to remain as part of the professorial stream. It is clear that the construction of TSAs has been in preparation for some time by the administration. The formal removal of SRCs claws back all the progressive language surrounding these positions and in effect kills two birds with one stone. Unlike SRCs, creating TSAs within the YUFA contract allows tierification that can in the future threaten tenure itself. This is because the fewer tenure track positions offered by the administration alongside a greater number of contract positions increases pressure on academics to accept contracts rather than tenure-track positions in order to continue in their profession. This would be the full realisation of a corporate model within the academic world.
To combat such ‘classification’ amongst its own faculty, YUFA members must reject TSAs even if some within CUPE 3903 and YUFA support them. They do not provide any lasting solution to job security; indeed they enhance job insecurity. They are a tool with which the Administration erodes progressive measures put in place for SRCs in the past, particularly as they pertain to retirement. In fact the TSAs are best described as contingent appointments since they can be cancelled. They effectively destroy all measures taken in the last round of negotiations to create a clear benchmark of 2.5 for all faculty members. They also instantiate a new benchmark of 3.5, an enormously regressive step.
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