Faculty bargaining is going to get nasty over the next few years. Provinces appear to be in a mood neither for increasing grants to institutions nor for allowing domestic tuition to rise. Since that’s 85-90% of most institutions’ budgets, that makes overall revenue increases very difficult. The solution from the 90s – that is, packing in more domestic students – is tougher this time out because of demographics. International students are the only significant potential source of new revenue, but attracting them may require significant adjustments to institutional structures.

Meanwhile, faculty and staff unions are asking for more money. Fair enough: that is their chief function, after all. But when overall budgets are stable, it becomes a zero-sum game. An increase in staff costs means cuts elsewhere – libraries, student services, maintenance, etc. Universities are really bad about making trade-offs like this explicit. Collective agreements are always presented as if they have no consequences whatsoever for the rest of the budget, when the opposite is in fact the case.

What I’d love is a truth-in-bargaining rule, where both sides had to not only make offers public, but also calculate the amount of offsetting cuts required to make their proposals a reality. You want that 3% salary hike? OK, where’s the necessary $5 million going to come from? A hiring freeze? Reduced library hours?

What if we took a page or two from professional sports and found ways to align salaries with institutional income? Collective agreements in both hockey and basketball tie player salary mass to a percentage of league-wide income (a part of players’ salaries are held in escrow until the end of the season to ensure the cap isn’t busted). This gives owners some labour cost certainty and aligns players’ and owners’ interests in terms of expanding league-wide income.

So, how about a world where university management and faculty unions bargained not in terms of annual percentage increases but in terms of giving professors a certain share of institutional income? By forcing both sides to argue over percentages of the overall budget (rather than annual salary increments), the budget implications to other university activities would be more transparent. Even if the percentage were to stay stable, salary rises would still be possible, of course, but only if the institution succeeds in raising more revenue (by, for instance, being more market-focused) or if staff numbers fall but are balanced by heavier workloads.

Probably too many people have a stake in the opacity of the status quo for this to happen. But it would sure go a long way to making for a more rational system of institutional budgeting. And that’s something everyone will be wishing for in the years ahead.