Response to Shoukri's Senate Speech of Feb. 26
On behalf of the York Democratic Forum
Paul Baxter, Jody Berland, Malcolm Blincow, Ricardo Grinspun, Nick Lary, Marcia Macaulay, Arun Mukherjee, Ester Reiter, Nicola Short
In his address to Senate on 26 February –available at http://www.yorku.ca/mediar/archive/Release.php?Release=1623 –President Shoukri delivered his first speech after provincial back-to-work legislation led to a long-delayed return to class and a chaotic end-of-term schedule for students and faculty.
President Shoukri had promised that he was a healer; this speech was presumably meant to heal the university and reassure faculty and students (and parents and school counselors) about the well-being and trustworthiness of York. Stating that York stands for "accessibility to the very best education, equity and social justice," President Shoukri appealed to faculty to join him in confronting the "shared challenges we face" and the need to overcome the shadow cast by "recent events".
It is hard, however, to see how York can stand for accessibility to the very best education, when York is conspicuous in the province for the proportion of teaching assigned to contingent faculty and for poor and worsening student-faculty ratios. We note, too, the Administration’s decision not to replace retiring tenured faculty with new tenure-stream appointments and the decision to terminate a large number of contractually-limited appointments.
The President speaks of recent events as though he had no part in these events, as though it were some other Administration who had conducted negotiations with CUPE 3903 by ‘waiting out’ the union and looking to the provincial government to support them through back-to-work legislation. It is puzzling to hear of York's commitment to social justice and equity from a President who is aggressively changing the face of York, turning it into a campus of very highly paid executives leading a relative minority of well-paid but overworked full-time faculty and a majority of casualized instructors who must be flexible enough to provide instruction wherever needed while dealing with their precarious financial and employment status. By inviting us to join him in confronting shared challenges, is he asking us to remain silent on these questions?
Shoukri speaks about free speech and academic freedom. Yet the President was a party to the suppression of a recent CAUT Report dealing with these very issues at York. His Administration continues this university's tradition of suppressing pro-Palestinian groups on campus. Moreover, his Administration assigns considerable resources to branding and to corporate image management using highly scripted channels such as Y-file and glossy magazines while marginalizing the open exchange of ideas by academics. Consider the glossy brochure distributed in the Globe and Mail two weeks ago. The cost of this brochure, combined with the hefty daily fees of the lawyer who led the Administration's side in contract negotiations with CUPE, and the costs of the university’s media strategy during the strike, would have helped in no small measure to meeting CUPE's final demands. In this brochure, echoing a photograph of York’s first President, Murray Ross, Shoukri is portrayed seated at a bare desk on a green field. Not a person is in sight (unless the objects that look like decorative plants in front of Vari Hall are in fact people). Shoukri is alone, his back is turned to Vari Hall and the Ross Building.
Like his predecessor, President Shoukri wants this unseen community to get along. At the same time, he is asking students to pay 100% of their tuition, but accept an academically diminished and shortened school year. He is paying TAs and contract faculty 90% of their salary, and asking them to do more work than is normal due to the disruption and chaos created by a long strike. He did not bother to inform course instructors who supervise TAs or graduate assistants that they are being paid less than before, or to explain what this means for remediation. He has done even less to take serious action to assist all instructors with remediation. Is this the “healing” President of a university with some 50 thousand students, 1400 faculty, and 3400 contingent faculty? The man who receives some half-a-million dollars per year in salary and bonuses to run one of the biggest universities in the country?
Given these issues, the opening of the President's speech was disorienting. Its conclusion was positively worrisome. To quote:
While developing the next phase of our Integrated Resource Planning project, we have started an initiative to help our decision-making in the short-term aimed at:
* reviewing the current budget allocation model;
* identifying the percentage of our budget that is allocated to the academic enterprise and bench marking it against that of other universities; and
* providing alternative models that ensure linking the budget allocations or cuts to our academic priorities.
What is this Integrated Resource Planning project? Will it respect collegial academic processes and decisions? What exactly are the planned cuts to our academic priorities? And whose academic priorities are signaled by the royal 'we' in our academic priorities?” Will the crisis partly engineered by this Administration be used to further degrade liberal studies at York? What accountability does this restructuring project have to Senate or to faculty meeting collegially in their teaching units? Or to YUFA? This integrated project must be examined in the context of increased bureaucratization and eroding collegial governance, bolstered by increasingly centralized decision-making, lack of transparency in regards to finance and administration, and an erosion of the mandates of Senate, YUFA and other bodies. Just consider the governance implications of the letter sent by all deans to striking CUPE members (now posted at www.yorkdemocraticforum.org).
The President says, "We must build trust, deal with each other in good faith and communicate in an open and honest way." This is the same person who holds responsibility for disseminating serious misinformation about the qualifications of a new dean given the mandate to engineer the major restructuring of two faculties, but who will not own to his actions and who, after 12 days and two letters to the community, finally acknowledges a “mistake” while choosing to find a scapegoat in the Communications department. The same President who failed to respond to widespread concerns regarding the new dean’s support for collegial governance, research and interdisciplinarity based on previously unsolicited feedback from colleagues in his current institution.
There is little doubt that interdisciplinarity plays an important role in the branding of York University. What will happen to this tradition in the new, more "comprehensive" university Shoukri says York must become? Where is the collegial discussion about shifting resources away from our traditional strengths to mainly unspecified new areas? Apparently these are not questions open for discussion. We hear continuous talk about the financial crisis, but nothing about the possibility of canceling or postponing plans for a new medical school.
The President speaks of the wonderful potential York has. The word sounds vacuous in the context of these events. It appears that Media Relations continues to write his speeches without real regard for “communicating in an open and honest way.” That is not an auspicious start to the new healing and trustworthiness agenda.
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