[P2P-F] Fwd: [NetworkedLabour] Fwd: York strikers show the way — now let’s build a truly public university

Michel Bauwens michel at p2pfoundation.net
Thu Apr 2 18:46:34 CEST 2015 

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: peter waterman <peterwaterman1936 at gmail.com>
Date: Wed, Apr 1, 2015 at 8:58 AM
Subject: [NetworkedLabour] Fwd: York strikers show the way — now let’s
build a truly public university
To: "CRITICAL-LABOUR-STUDIES at jiscmail.ac.uk" <
CRITICAL-LABOUR-STUDIES at jiscmail.ac.uk>, "<
networkedlabour at lists.contrast.org>" <networkedlabour at lists.contrast.org>




   1. 2014. From Coldwar Communism to the Global Justice Movement:
   Itinerary of a Long-Distance Internationalist.
   <http://snuproject.wordpress.com/2015/01/02/1987-e-reader-ed-by-peter-waterman-on-labour-social-movements-and-internationalism-the-old-internationalism-and-the-new/>http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/from_coldwar_communism
   _to_the_global_emancipatory_movement/
   <http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/from_coldwar_communism_to_the_global_emancipatory_movement/>
(Free).

   2. 2014. Interface Journal Special (Co-Editor), December 2014. 'Social
   Movement Internationalisms'. (Free).
   <http://www.interfacejournal.net/current/>
* <http://www.interfacejournal.net/current/>*
   3. 2014. 'The Networked Internationalism of Labour's Others', in Jai Sen
   (ed), Peter Waterman (co-ed), The Movement of Movements:
   <http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/the_movements_of_movements/>Struggles
   for Other Worlds  (Part I).
   <http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/the_movements_of_movements/> (10 Euros).
4. 2012. EBook: Recovering Internationalism
   <http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/recovering_internationalism/>.  [A
   compilation of papers from the new millenium. Now free in two download
   formats]
   5. 2013. EBook (co-editor), February 2013: World Social Forum: Critical
   Explorations http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/world_social_forum/
   6. 2012. Interface Journal Special (co-editor), November 2012: *For the
   Global Emancipation of Labour  <http://www.interfacejournal.net/current/>*
   7. 2005-?
   <http://interfacejournal.nuim.ie/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Interface-1-2-pp255-262-Waterman.pdf>
   Ongoing. Blog: http://www.unionbook.org/profile/peterwaterman.???. Needed:
   a Global Labour Charter Movement (2005-Now!)
   <http://interfacejournal.nuim.ie/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Interface-1-2-pp255-262-Waterman.pdf>
   8. 2011. Under, Against, Beyond: Labour and Social Movements Confront a
   Globalised, Informatised Capitalism
   <http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/under-against-beyond/>(2011) (c. 1,000
   pages of Working Papers, free, from the 1980's-90's).


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Sid Shniad <shniad at gmail.com>
Date: Tue, Mar 31, 2015 at 8:16 PM
Subject: York strikers show the way — now let’s build a truly public
university
To:











*https://ricochet.media/en/373/york-strikers-show-the-way-now-lets-build-a-truly-public-university
<https://ricochet.media/en/373/york-strikers-show-the-way-now-lets-build-a-truly-public-university>Ricochet
      March 30, 2015York strikers show the way — now let’s build a truly
public universityProtracted labour dispute raises questions of
post-secondary governance and fundingBy Justin Podur*

The strikes at York University the University of Toronto, and elsewhere
have opened a long overdue debate about student debt, precarious labour in
the academy, rising tuition, and, to a lesser extent, university
governance. The York University strike offers an opportunity to argue for
the continuing relevance of universities as public institutions. The
importance of the public in the public university is especially true for
York, which, if it embraced its role as such, could tackle a new list of
issues and lead the way for other educational institutions.
*Precarity, debt, and defensive struggle*

York's contract faculty are the precarious academic labourers whose
difficulties have been brought into some public light by the York strike
and other labour actions in North America. The contract faculty settled
earlier in March. The teaching assistants and graduate assistants had to
battle on until the end of the month to win their objectives.

Although the strike ended in a victory, the struggle was mainly defensive.
In previous contracts, the union on strike at York, CUPE 3903, won a
funding package that includes work as a TA (or, for work outside the
classroom, as a GA). The total package offered to a student is usually in
the range of $12,000 to $18,000 for the year. Out of this, a domestic
student has to pay around $6,500 tuition. International students might get
the same package, but their tuition is much higher — somewhere around the
size of their whole funding package.

Students are eligible for such funding only if they have full-time status.
If they work more than 10 hours per week outside of their studies and
on-campus jobs as TAs or GAs, they are ineligible. So, when the
administration presented the claim that TAs were getting paid $52/hour,
they neglected to add that this was up to a hard limit of about $9,000 for
a year. In order to get this $52/hour, students had to figure out how to
live on about $30/day (or, for international students, $0/day). Of course,
students could take on additional debt, the implicit solution that
university administrations continuously try to impose on students.

The union did not go on strike trying to get its members out of this
low-wage situation. The union went on strike because management was trying
to assert its right to raise tuition while maintaining the funding package
at the same rate.

This is the indexation issue that management avoided discussion of for a
month, the gain won by the union in previous strikes that management tried
and failed to roll back. Indexation means that if the university wants to
take more from TAs and GAs in tuition, it also has to pay TAs and GAs more
money so that they can pay the university. Losing indexation would have
meant that, rather than helping TAs and GAs subsist, their work on campus
would merely give them the slightest reduction in the massive debt they
would incur while studying. The U.S. and U.K. systems, in which students at
all levels incur ever more massive debt while receiving less and less, and
with fewer and worse prospects after graduation, seems to be the model. The
striking workers successfully held the line against that erosion.


*The academic and the administrative*
The York strike also highlighted the problem of a university no longer
under academic control. This issue is of more public importance than it may
seem on the surface.

Unlike most workplaces that are under the uncontested control of managers,
at universities the struggle for academic freedom has been linked to
another struggle, that for collegial governance, the idea that academic
matters should be under the control of academics (faculty and also
students) and not under the control of managers.

Defending collegial governance involves constant battles over policies and
procedures, careful readings and debates, and can seem arcane and obscure
to the non-university public. But collegial governance, like academic
freedom, is an important thing for society to have, and it deserves some
public attention — and protection. Let us look at it in the context of
York's strike.

The first way that the administration has strengthened itself has been by
moving money. The erosion of the university's teaching budget has been
accompanied by an expansion in the administrative share of the budget.
Budgets are contentious and political, and university administrations
contest the notion that they are bloated at the expense of the university's
core activities. The analyses are worth looking at: Benjamin Ginsburg
describes the growth of university administration at U.S. universities in
his book The Fall of the Faculty, and scientist Bjorn Brembs tackles the
issue in Germany in a blog post.

York's faculty union, YUFA, did some interesting analysis of York's
financial statements. While not discussing academic and administrative
budgets in detail, it does deal with how to think about the financial
statements of a public institution. YUFA also produced a report that
described the growth of managerialism.

The growth of the university's administration at the expense of its
academic mission is not solely a matter of money, as Ginsburg's Fall of the
Faculty documents. The growth of "student life" programs under the control
of the administrative apparatus has seen students offered more programs in
things like time management and study skills, while academic programs in
languages, literature, or history are starved of resources. York University
has a Senate that is the ultimate authority on academic matters, but the
Senate does not have the power to decide what is and is not an academic
matter — that is the prerogative of the administration.

Before the current strike, the York community was presented with
apocalyptic budget projections (which have since been challenged by YUFA
and CUPE) as well as warnings about low enrolments.

York's administration imposed a process called the Academic and
Administrative Prioritization and Review, or AAPR — another management tool
that was imposed on other Canadian universities, such as Guelph and the
University of Saskatchewan, to destructive effect. Several faculty councils
at York repudiated the AAPR and rejected its use in academic planning. Like
the strike, the AAPR ended up opening an overdue debate on administrative
attacks on the academic mission of the university (see Michael Ornstein's
presentation for a fine example of applying academic criteria to a
managerial exercise and Craig Heron's essay on the consultant Robert
Dickeson, whose methodology is used in AAPRs across North America).

Amazingly, in a context of enrolment and budget fears, the York
administration walked into negotiations with CUPE 3903 seeking concessions
that the union could not accept, and took over a month to make any movement
towards an acceptable offer.

As an alternative to bargaining, the administration used a reading of the
university's policy on remediation — intended to provide guidance on how to
restart the university after a disruption is over — to start remediating
during the strike. The “remediation” ended up making students more
uncertain, increasing physical pressure and fear of violence on the picket
lines as thousands of drivers tried to cross daily to attend classes that
may or may not have been proceeding. For an administration worried about
enrolment, it is difficult to imagine how this could have been anything
other than a nightmare scenario – unless low enrolments themselves might
provide another tool that administrators could use to discipline the
academics?

*York, a public university*

Like every public institution, universities are changing. They are becoming
more hierarchical, more corporate, less accessible, and less free.
Defending their role, even expanding it, may not be possible from within
their walls alone. But should the non-university-going public care?

Universities cost society massive amounts of resources, and everyone within
them, from the administration to the student body, has some relative
privilege compared to the many people who never get the chance to go.
Scholars' reputations for obscurity and detachment from the real world
doesn't make it easy for these same scholars to ask the public for
resources or for help defending the institution. But public indifference to
what is happening at universities only serves the administrators who are
eroding them.

And truly public universities could be extremely socially beneficial. Take
York again, and consider some 2006 figures that will not have changed much
in the decade since. Located in North Toronto, York's students come from
families with a median household income of $55,881, compared to an average
of $74,093 for all Ontario university families. The median household income
for York students in 2006 was actually lower than the median household
income for Ontario in 2005, which, at $72,734, was only slightly lower than
the average for Ontario university-going families. Ryerson students came
from slightly more affluent families ($56,733) and University of Toronto
from slightly more affluent than that ($58,895). The contrast with
universities such as Western and Queen’s, with median family incomes above
$100,000, is striking.

More than 50 per cent of York's students commute for more than 40 minutes,
and 57 per cent of York's first-year students rely on public transit to get
to school, compared to 32 per cent of Ontario students. Of first-year York
students, 60 per cent are female, compared to 55 per cent for Ontario. Of
senior-year York students, 72 per cent work for pay off campus, compared to
46 per cent for Ontario; 43 per cent are from a visible minority compared
to 29 per cent for Ontario. Where 70 per cent of Ontario students had a
parent with post-secondary education, 65 per cent of York students could
say the same.

York’s demographics present a picture of that kind of public university, a
place whose student body looks like the population and not like the rulers.

For many decades in North America, universities were designed to train and
prepare the ruling class and the professionals who serviced them. But
starting after WWII, public universities started to open up and transform
into places that potentially everyone could go. York’s demographics present
a picture of that kind of public university, a place whose student body
looks like the population and not like the rulers.

It may not be coincidental that at the most public of universities, there
is a strong emphasis on humanities and social sciences — 53 per cent of
first-year students compared to 38 per cent in Ontario, 51 per cent of
senior-year students compared to 42 per cent in Ontario. I love science,
technology, engineering, and mathematics, and I think this type of
education is both vitally important and under attack, especially under the
Harper government. But social sciences and humanities — philosophy,
literature, history, political science, geography, sociology, linguistics,
economics - are fields that help students understand power and understand
the world they live in. They are fields that give students a chance of
shaping the future.

In his 2008 book Unmaking the Public University, English professor Chris
Newfield of the University of California, Santa Barbara, argues that the
attack on the social sciences and humanities — the devaluing of cultural
knowledge — was a part of the assault on public universities and part of
the assault on the North American middle class.

The idea of a public university open to everyone, where the cultural
knowledge to shape and change society is taught and developed, is a
dangerous idea for those who fear the public.

*Who is subsidizing, and who is subsidized?*

Newfield's book is full of insights, many of which are highly relevant to
Canadian universities and especially to York. One in particular relates to
university budgets. Part of a professor's job, especially in the natural
sciences, is to seek external research funding. The grants that professors
win in competitions bring prestige to their universities and make it
possible to do research. Many believe that these grants help subsidize
other parts of the university, but Newfield points out that the grants
never cover the full costs of the research, and the university has to
provide some matching funds for every grant.

Where do these matching funds come from? From the teaching budget from
where most of the students are: the social sciences and the humanities. So,
here again, what most people believe is the reverse of reality: it turns
out that teaching in the social sciences and humanities subsidizes research
in the natural sciences, not the other way around.

In the background of the York strike is the provincial funding formula,
which has continued to erode the public part of university budgets.
Universities in Ontario responded by following what was done in the United
States: they have sought to squeeze more tuition out of students and more
funds from private donors. York’s administration has also sought to expand
its science, technology, engineering and mathematics profile and reduce, in
relative terms, its social sciences and humanities profile. The fact that
the social sciences and humanities faculty and students are among the most
“unruly,” the most likely to insist on collegial governance, and highly
active in unions, may not be lost on the administration.

But none of these strategies will work to the competitive advantage of
York, many of whose students will either receive a public education or no
education at all. This puts York in an interesting position, as it makes
the public option the most strategic one for the institution to survive and
thrive. Unfortunately university administrations are all alike, and there
are no models for creatively managing public institutions. There are only
corporate models of total top-down control, privilege, and power at the
top, and obedience and fear at the bottom. York's social sciences and
humanities programs, which attract huge numbers of students and probably
subsidize the rest of the university, will never be shut down.

But an administrative vision would see these programs carefully controlled,
delivered by insecure teachers with no union protections or academic
freedom, and students who pay huge amounts to shut up and study like their
instructors, who gratefully accept a tiny share of the budget for the
chance to shut up and teach.

It doesn't have to be this way, especially at York. We could try, instead,
to be who we are, instead of trying to be something we are not.

What if York were to lead other universities in the aggressive pursuit of
the public option? Embracing its progressive traditions, embracing its
diverse and in many cases oppressed student body, and working on a whole
new list of problems. What would it take to achieve free tuition? How could
we speed up and open up the peer review process? How could we run the
university on free software and free information? How could we ensure that
everyone who works at the university has a good job at a living wage and
the freedom to contribute creatively to the community and to say what they
think? How could we have a totally seamless relationship with the
non-university public, in which the university becomes a source of
knowledge and not a place where knowledge is locked up to be accessed only
by those who pay to be within its walls? These are the more interesting
problems that we could work on at places such as York.

The alternative is to become another all-administrative university with
cowed, indebted students taught by cowed, temporary faculty. York's TAs,
GAs, and contract faculty have shown the way, but the struggle for a truly
public university will be a long one.


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