Why We Must Oppose a New Teaching Stream at York University
Craig Heron
Department of History (LAPS)
Teaching-stream appointments are fundamentally antithetical to all that our university stands for, and, in the name of cost-cutting, would do grave damage. I am opposed to their introduction because I strongly believe they will have a negative effect on us, our students, the young scholars we have recently trained, and those filling the new positions.
1. A teaching stream fundamentally disrupts the important intellectual dynamic between research and teaching.
Few of us (at least in the Social Sciences and Humanities) would deny that we bring a great deal of intellectual energy and insight from our research into our work with students in the classroom. They benefit from engagement with faculty who can explain, first hand, how research questions are formulated, and who can share the approaches to research and research tools that they employ in their own research. This is true at all levels of the curriculum. This has always been one of the strengths of a research-intensive university and one of the ways that our scholarship enriches undergraduate education. Few of us would also deny how much our research benefits from the insights that arise from synthesizing broad bodies of knowledge and highlighting key themes and issues in our disciplines for our undergraduate audiences. The symbiosis between teaching and research is essential and would be seriously threatened by a teaching stream.
Moreover, the undergraduate curriculum would be bifurcated, as teaching-stream appointees would inevitably be assigned to introductory courses. Since they would not be expected to be active scholars, they could not be assigned to upper-level undergraduate or graduate courses. The integrity of the undergraduate curriculum would suffer as students encountered this great divide between teachers and teaching scholars.
2. The introduction of a teaching stream at this point would seriously undermine the academic careers of a recent generation of young scholars.
The reason that this measure looks so attractive to management is that there is a large pool of underemployed young scholars on the academic labour market who, after years of graduate training, have been unable to find tenure-stream jobs. Under our supervision, they have been taught to be scholars (and teaching scholars), and would almost invariably prefer a normal academic appointment. They will be forced by their economic circumstances to apply for the new teaching-only positions, and in the process will effectively end their development as scholars. Teaching four courses a year will give no time to devote to research or the presentation of research findings to scholarly conferences or in journals, and their contracts with the university will have no incentives to do so. This is exploitation of highly skilled academic labour of the worst sort, and, by adopting such a policy, York will be encouraging other universities to do the same, and will therefore be participating in the academic kneecapping of a generation of once eager, hopeful young scholars.
3. There is no room in the collegium for such an employment hierarchy.
Our various academic professions are communities that welcome new hires as equals. We share a mutual respect based on the commonality of our experience as scholars and teachers. It is fundamentally disruptive of that sense of collegiality to introduce people who are hired with the expectation that they will only do part of what we do and who would not be expected to share our research orientation. It would be impossible for the pure-and-simple teachers to avoid feeling inferior to the researchers. Disciplinary cultures within York would be eroded and impoverished. We should not be willing to accept such a fundamental change in our working environment.
4. A burdensome four-course load will make high-quality teaching nearly impossible.
Teaching-stream appointees would typically be juggling twelve contact hours a week. Preparation time could easily involve another four hours for each course (assuming that this is not a new course), for a total of sixteen. Two office hours a week would bring the total up to 30. Grading assignments, test, and exams would be on top of that. How could undergraduate instructors pull together the knowledge on a subject, assemble appropriate reading material, and develop creative pedagogical techniques in such a packed scenario? They would not have time to keep abreast of new literature to be incorporated into course content, and would have no incentive to use more labour-intensive teaching techniques (more writing assignments, for example). Students would be short-changed, and the quality of the learning experience at York would certainly decline still further. Would this further the goal of the recent University Academic Plan to enhance the student experience?
5. The proposed new teaching-stream appointments will inevitably be applied to the YUFA complement.
There is absolutely no assurance that the proposed teaching stream will simply replace CUPE Unit 2 appointments. It is almost certain that some of the renewal of the complement that the recent strategic planning exercises promised last year will include teaching-stream positions. Deans will start to approach units with a proposal of two appointments, one of which will be teaching-stream. Indeed, as we were told by our Appendix R negotiators, the proposal for this new stream came forward from the administration when the YUFA representatives insisted that the extra faculty needed to implement a workload reduction would have to be YUFA members. In ten years’ time, it is easy to imagine that as many as 10 per cent of our full-time faculty will be in the teaching stream – perhaps more. Even with a cap on their numbers, we have no guarantees that they will not eat into the complement of regular tenure-stream appointments.
6. Regular tenure-stream faculty will end up with more work, not less, and will therefore not have a great deal more time to do research.
Management has argued that a teaching stream will support more “research intensity” by allowing scholars to devote more time to their research. Yet, if we combine the effects projected above, the new teaching-stream appointees will have little time for service (if their work week is already chock full of teaching responsibilities, how could they be chairs, undergraduate or graduate directors, program coordinators, committee chairs, etc.?) and will, of course, do no graduate teaching or supervision. If, as I fear, the full-time faculty complement will actually shrink over the next ten years (as teaching-stream appointments take over some former YUFA tenure-stream positions), then there will be fewer of us to do service and graduate supervision. In fact, arguably there will be a reduction in the proportion of active scholars, and thus the “research productivity” will not expand at all.
This is a bad proposal in principle and in its details. York should not be part of reshaping post-secondary education in this way, and YUFA should stand firm against it.
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