On November 7th 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 15th. 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.
