Academic Labor: The Canadian Context

As I write this, 9,100 college faculty in Ontario are walking picket lines. Teaching staff, librarians and counselors in the province's college system (equivalent to two-year colleges in the United States) are represented by the Ontario Public Service Employees Union. After two decades of cuts to the post-secondary education system, academic staff have found themselves burdened with increasing class sizes, too few resources, and heavy workloads. Enrollment at Ontario colleges has increased by 52 percent since 1988–89, while numbers of full-time faculty have fallen by 22 percent. Faced with employers who refuse to acknowledge the connection between workload and educational quality, academic staff felt they had no alternative but to withdraw their labor. Universities and colleges across the country face many similar challenges: no significant improvements in funding despite improved fiscal situations for federal and provincial governments, the legacy of two decades of significant budget cuts, a looming infrastructure crisis, and a generation of faculty nearing retirement without a clear strategy for replacement and a system reliant on casual labor.

Canada's post-secondary system differs considerably from its neighbors to the south in several ways. The Canadian system is almost exclusively public; it is both regulated and funded by provincial or territorial governments, although the institutions operate independently. The federal government provides funding through transfers to the provinces and territories as well as specialized programs to support research, such as granting councils, as well as student financial assistance.

In the mid-nineties the federal government implemented a number of changes to its fiscal arrangements with the provinces, leading to drastic cuts to funding to health care, social services and education. Funding for post-secondary education was reduced from .56 percent of GDP in 1983–84 to .19 percent of GDP in 2004–05. ¹ Provincial governments, many of which were also struggling with deficits, passed the cuts along to universities, many of which turned to students to help fill the gap through increased tuition and fees. In recent years, some provinces have begun to reinvest, while others are left with drastically underfunded institutions. Ontario and the Atlantic provinces have since 1990 implemented the most extreme austerity measures: since 1983–84, funding has dropped 32 percent in Ontario, 60 percent in Prince Edward Island and 36 percent in Nova Scotia.

To make up for the shortfall, universities and colleges have looked to two sources: students and the corporate world. Tuition and other fees have risen dramatically—average undergraduate arts tuition has increased 135 percent since 1991–2. ² Tuition for professional programs, deregulated in many provinces, is now beyond the reach of many. Student debt loads have also seen a considerable rise.

As for corporate contributions, one look at a university or college campus is all one needs to see the creeping influence of the private sector on public education—cafeterias have become fast-food franchise outlets; soft drink companies negotiate exclusive deals with institutions in exchange for project or infrastructure funding; classrooms, buildings and even programs bear the names of corporate sponsors. But there are more insidious effects on institutional management, working conditions and educational quality.

The adoption of a corporate mindset by post-secondary institutions is reflected in the language used by administrators. What once were institutions that served the public interest are now being transformed into deliverers of "education services." Students are referred to as "clients" or "customers." Whether by necessity or design, university administrators have assumed the persona of the corporate manager or CEO, experimented with "Total Quality Management" techniques, embraced outsourcing and flirted with labor-replacing technology to help reduce costs.

One particularly disturbing development involves the way the university views research. According to Neil Tudiver, "Where universities have traditionally operated from a professional model, the corporate university follows a business model: capitalizing on research as an investment, seeking profit from its ventures, and forming partnerships with corporations through equity financing and licensing." ³ The increase in corporate-sponsored research has led to some very prominent violations of academic freedom, the most notorious of which is the case of whistle-blowing medical researcher Dr. Nancy Olivieri. ⁴ Olivieri...