An Authoritarian Management Model and a Precarious Workforce are Destroying College Education

On November 7^th Mohawk College president Ron McKerlie published an op-ed in the Hamilton Spectator. In this article McKerlie commented on negotiations between OPSEU, the union representing 12,000 striking Ontario college faculty, and the College Employer Council – the private corporation that represents management at the province’s 24 colleges. While McKerlie is entitled to an opinion on the current faculty strike, it is unacceptable that the statements he made are misleading.

As a sociology professor at Mohawk College, member of the 2017 College Faculty Bargaining Team, and author of the 2014 Report on Education in Ontario Colleges, I feel a duty to challenge McKerlie’s inaccuracies.

McKerlie seems to suggest that it is faculty who are putting the semester in jeopardy for students, not the College Employer Council. However, the fact is that Council’s forced offer vote could have happened at any point after September 15^th. That the Council chose to call the vote after three weeks of a strike, knowing that it would extend the strike by at least another two weeks, can only be seen as a calculated and cynical move to intensify student fears of a lost semester, and to weaken the resolve of striking faculty.

McKerlie then goes on to say that “Ontario’s 24 colleges have already met every priority set out by the faculty union, from higher salaries and wages to more full-time jobs and a provincial task force to address their concerns with precarious employment.” This sounds nice, but again is directly contradicted by the facts.

First, salaries and wages have never been a priority for faculty in these negotiations, which is why the Union’s final offer takes the Council’s monetary proposals as-is. Second, the Council’s current offer contains concessions that seriously weaken the ability of the Union to create full time positions, again, directly contradicting McKerlie’s statement. Third, the provincial task force he mentions was in fact a Union proposal that was endorsed by the Province and only grudgingly signed-onto by the Council. The Council first tried to force language that would make the task force an empty exercise, and only through hard bargaining was the Union able to give it substance. Council’s final offer also contains language that enables them to avoid their equal pay for equal work obligations under Bill 148, the Fair Workplaces Better Jobs Act.

Council’s offer would directly exacerbate precarious work in the colleges, but it also contains numerous other concessions. It attacks the union’s ability to buy time so that local officers can support members, and so that future bargaining teams can prepare for negotiations. It enables managers to control faculty professional development – narrowing its scope and making it easier to deny professional development leaves.  It also removes important caps on overtime and on teaching weeks, allowing members to be pressured into unsustainable workloads.

Throughout negotiations the Council has flatly refused to discuss the key faculty issue of creating a stable ratio of 50% full time to 50% contract faculty. This is even though Ontario colleges, with over 70% of faculty being contract, are seriously out of step with other education sectors. 77% of the 76,000 members of the Elementary Teacher’s Federation of Ontario (ETFO) are full time. 73% of the 37,125 members of the Ontario Secondary School Teacher’s Federation (OSSTF) are full time. Finally, over 70% of the Federation of Post Secondary Educators (FPSE) 10,000 members are full time. FPSE represents faculty at 19 British Columbia community colleges and teaching universities.

The blatant falsehood of the Council’s offer promising “more full time jobs” is unfortunate, yet McKerlie’s most egregious statements are reserved for academic freedom – the no-cost faculty demand that the College Council has flatly refused to contemplate. McKerlie says that faculty are demanding “complete academic control”, which is absurd. Academic freedom is a hallmark of any post-secondary institution, and ensures that faculty who are experts in their respective field have the ability to set and maintain academic standards in the courses and programs they deliver. It does not mean that faculty control the college’s business operations, which is the proper sphere of management and each college’s Board of Governors.

Academic freedom can seem like a vague concept, but in fact it is very simple. Ask yourself this question. Would you rather the person teaching you how to repair your car engine be a licensed mechanic, or would you rather they be a business grad with zero automotive experience? Academic freedom means that the expert – with years of teaching experience and either advanced degrees, trade certifications, or extensive time in industry – determines what needs to be learned, how students can best be supported, how students are evaluated, and when students have mastered the knowledge and skills required for their diploma, degree, or certification.

The reality today in the colleges is that administrators have total control over these key academic decisions, a fact affirmed by arbitration. The Council knows this, as should McKerlie, and this makes his call for “working collaboratively” sound wholly disingenuous. What college faculty experience are managers forcing them to use less time-consuming evaluation methods in order to cut costs, forcing faculty to put part or all of courses online to save on money and space, changing student grades to increase “retention” (maintaining funding units), and cutting deals with publishing and education-technology corporations that force faculty to use certain textbooks and course materials. These things are happening at Mohawk College, and they are happening at every college in the system.

For McKerlie to suggest that the demand for academic freedom is some kind of egotistical play by faculty for “total control” is thus a cynical inversion of the truth. Right now in the colleges an authoritarian management class has total control, and they are using it to produce a “product” as cheaply as possible. In contrast, faculty are struggling to maintain the integrity of courses and programs, to advocate for students, and to deliver the highest quality of education.

McKerlie states that faculty “already play a key role at Mohawk, serving alongside college partners on program advisory committees“, but the truth is that such participation is largely token, and lacking in any real decision-making power.  Ontario colleges are again the outlier in not giving their professors, counselors, and librarians the basic academic freedom possessed by university faculty, or by faculty at colleges in other Canadian provinces. Ontario’s colleges now offer hundreds of degrees and post-degree certificates.  They conduct research. They offer collaborative degree programs with university partners. They do all of these things without having the safeguards for quality and integrity that academic freedom brings. This has been an untenable situation for years, and the time has finally come for it to change.

A strike is never an easy thing, especially when students are caught in the middle. And while there are many valid perspectives as to how this conflict can be resolved, it is unhelpful to misrepresent the facts of the matter to faculty, students, their parents, and the citizens of Ontario. That McKerlie and the College Council appear committed to do just this is a sad commentary on the state of Ontario colleges. It is also a clear example of why faculty will vote down the Council’s forced offer on November 14 to 16 and push toward the fundamental change that the system so desperately needs.

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