Another Take On The Teaching-Only Stream Proposal

Janice Newson

Administrations in other universities in Canada are attempting to insert teaching streams into their full-time faculty bargaining units and we need to ask ourselves, why. It is not an issue local to York University. What is local is the political dynamics around it. A common thread to these dynamics is that some full-time continuing faculty members are concerned about casualization, both because in and of itself it is a drag on the quality of education and also because it exploits colleagues who are in lower tiered positions and yet carry the load of teaching. Some colleagues support the teaching stream idea to alleviate the situation of these colleagues.

But there is no doubt in my mind that these colleagues, especially the ones now employed, will not benefit at all from the invention of a YUFA teaching stream. Many people have tried to demonstrate why that is the case and I am not going to repeat their arguments. I want to offer to the discussion an argument that has not yet been put forward as far as I know.

I believe that university administrations are trying to install teaching-only streams in the full-time faculty bargaining units in order to enable significant technological change. Although universities have been wired for almost two decades and the routine university support functions are now provided mainly on-line, technological change has not had significant impact on the delivery of teaching and thus, administrations have not been able to achieve significant cost efficiencies in academic salaries to the extent that technological change has enabled in other kinds of work. But in order to more fully technologize teaching, administrations need teaching to be severed from research, not just de facto, as some people argue has already happened to some degree. They need teaching to be severed from research de jure, meaning, in the contractual provisions of collective agreements. They need to disconnect large aspects of current collective agreements that confer benefits on, and prescribe working conditions for, a three-dimensional professoriate and to re-connect them to one-dimensional professors —teachers and researchers with the service part divided between them or shifted more than it has already to support staff. They need to do this because academic collective agreements are based on the assumption that members of the bargaining unit do both teaching and research, thus placing serious obstacles in the way of restructuring professorial work. Patricia McDermott already has alerted us to the fact that huge sections of our collective agreement would have to be re-written to accommodate a teaching-only stream. This is not just a drafting project: it means that large sections of the collective agreement would need to be re-negotiated. For example, would teaching-only stream faculty be entitled to sabbatical leaves given that the primary purpose of a sabbatical leave is to do research? What about tenure?

If administrations are successful at severing teaching from research, where does this lead?

A cautionary tale that is instructive for this very situation is recorded by the late Sally Hacker, a sociologist and feminist who, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, joined the National Organization of Women's campaigns to open up jobs in AT&T for minority people and women . As in the case of contemporary universities, AT& T.'s labour force was largely composed of highly paid, highly skilled, professionally trained workers. The workers were also largely male and white. Some very low level jobs were open to women and minority groups but these people were effectively blocked from higher level, materially beneficial, and enjoyable positions. Hacker writes in detail about how, within a decade, ALL except for a very few of the A.T.& T jobs disappeared, including the highly skilled ones. She regretfully shows how the campaign to open up jobs to minority groups and women was used by the Management of AT&T to achieve this end. Ironically, opening up jobs to these groups was, for AT&T management, part of a game plan for tiering the work done by the highly skilled workforce. Up to this time, these highly skilled workers belonged to a very powerful union. Hacker discovered well after the disappearance of the jobs that the AT&T Managment feared that this strong union would be able to resist the technological transformation they envisaged. But once the high level multi-dimensional technical jobs were broken into constituent parts, the once powerful ful union was seriously weakened. the workforce was divided up, and the table was set for eliminating these jobs and replacing them with new technologies. Eventually, all jobs were carried out by an integrated technological system. It happened in a ten year period. (You can read Hacker's account of this in her book, Doing It the Hard Way.)

The situation of universities right now is parallel to this scenario and I think it is very likely the reason for administrations trying to institute teaching-only streams, whether or not any particular university administration is fully conscious that they are heading us in this direction. A few recent events give support to this liklihood. First, Dalton McGinty said a year or so ago that his government wants to meet teaching needs in higher education through using teaching technology and on-line learning. Second, an article appeared in late winter in University Affairs — the PR magazine of Canadian university administrations — about learner centered pedagogy. I though it was odd for this article to appear at this time because it was identical to articles that appeared in the early 1990s, just as universities were being wired for internet accessibility. I wondered why it was now being recycled since nothing in it was new and in some ways, it was dated. Third, the current financial situations of universities would benefit considerably from a split between teaching and research. Teaching is largely a cost item: even higher tuitions are not able to fully fund the cost of offering courses. Moreover, funding for teaching comes almost exclusively from provincial governments and it shows no sign of increasing in the near or intermediate future. Research, however, is largely an income item: it is funded through grants from the federal granting councils along with the contributions of corporate clients and private foundations. To improve their financial outlooks, university administrations are motivated to reduce their costs - the cost of teaching, for example - while they increase their incomes — income from research productivity and commercializing intellectual property. Technologizing teaching allows university administrations to staff courses at a much cheaper level through on-line tutors (some on-line universities have their tutors working in calling centres, for example) and retaining a smaller but well paid and highly productive research faculty allows them to compete more effectively for grant money and attract private sector clients. It is a compelling and very likely strategy. If it succeeds, neither the interests of the currently casualized academic work force nor of current members of the full-time continuing faculty will be well served. Nor will the interests of students and members of the public at large who rely upon the university to provide high quality, meaningful education.

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