Sessional Contract Faculty, Unionization, and Academic Freedom

This article explores the relationship between unionization and academic freedom protections for sessional faculty in Ontario universities. Specifically, we compare university policies and contract provisions with a view to determining whether unionized sessionals hired on a per-course basis have stronger academic freedom protections than their non-union counterparts. We then explore whether particular kinds of bargaining unit structures are more conducive to achieving stronger academic freedom provisions. Finally, we consider whether academic freedom can be exercised effectively by sessionals, whether unionized or not. We conclude that unionization does help to produce stronger academic freedom protections for sessionalfaculty and that faculty association bargaining unit structures are most likely to help deliver this outcome. We further conclude that academic freedom is difficult to exercise for sessional faculty, regardless of union status, but that unionization offers greater protections for sessionals facing repercussions as a result of asserting their academic freedom.

My Campus Administration, Faculty Association, Senate, and Me

This chapter recounts recent experiences of the author with the University of British Columbia (UBC), its Faculty Association (FA), this association's relationship with the author's campus administration at UBC Okanagan campus (UBCO), and the relationship of the campus administration with the senate of the campus. The chapter is a case study of academic mobbing. The author's targeting, exclusion, and ostracism is fully documented in the chapter and fully explained by the concepts of academic bullying, harassment, and mobbing. It is a case study of where an elected union representative of faculty members and an elected senator was targeted, excluded, and ostracized by the powers that be in the union and university administration, working in collusion and complicity.

You can’t live or work here in Vancouver, BC and you won’t be able to attend our future Top 10 university either – is loss of autonomy a characteristic of neoliberalism?

The philosopher Suzy Killmister introduces the concept of self-trust as part of autonomy. In this essay I contrast the autonomy demonstrated in the behaviour of two University of British Columbia (UBC) professors, former President Arvind Gupta, and Jennifer Berdahl, the Montalbano Professor of Leadership Studies: Gender and Diversity. Berdahl trusted that the UBC Faculty Association would be competent in protecting her academic freedom and treating her with benevolence. Berdahl has a multi-disciplinary academic focus that includes organizational studies. This gave her competency in assessing the situation, and the confidence that she would not self-sabotage by going public about her encounter with the former Chair of the Board of Governors of UBC.

Compulsory Arbitration and the Right to Strike: The Experience of Alberta’s University Faculty.

University academic staff in Alberta operate under a collective bargaining regime in which compulsory arbitration replaces strike/lockout to resolve disputes over contract renewal. How did this come about? And what has the experience been under a regime of interest arbitration? This paper addresses these questions by investigating the origins of faculty association collective agreements in Alberta, tracing arbitral experience over the past thirty years, and looking more closely at a group of four arbitrations in 2001-2003. The paper concludes by asking whether it is time for academic staff associations to assert their fundamental right to strike, regardless of what is in their collective agreements or in the statute governing their collective bargaining.