I’ve been saying for awhile now that falling government revenue and rising faculty salary expectations have made a really knock-down drag-em-out faculty strike somewhere in Canada – the kind that knocks out an entire semester – almost inevitable.  The one that started Monday at Nova Scotia’s St. Francis Xavier University may not last that long, but boy does it look ugly.

Basically, the dispute appears to be as follows: Management is offering somewhere between a 6 and 7% salary increase over four years, but wants some kind of right to eliminate programs, based on financial exigency.  The union is asking for something in the region of a 10-11% increase over four years, plus benefits enhancements, and wants management to jump off a cliff when it comes to financial exigency.

The union demands aren’t unreasonable in principle (assistant profs at X are paid well below the regional average, though the more senior ones do fine), but Nova Scotia universities are getting hit with both grant cuts and tuition caps these days, and revenue is down as a result.  Personally, I’m amazed the university is even able to offer 6%, and one suspects they can only afford this because they expect to cut faculty positions either by attrition, or through using some type of exigency clause.  This would explain why the union isn’t biting on the exigency clause; it would also suggest that the two sides are significantly further apart than the $3 million figure the university is putting out in the press.

The union seems to be trying to turn this into a fight about governance.  They keeping pointing to “unnecessary” capital projects gone bad, implying that, but for cost overruns, money for salaries would be plentiful (even though they presumably know that capital and operating budgets are separate).  There also seems to be some personal animus towards President Sean Riley, which I suppose is par for the course if you’re a President somewhere for 16 years; still, it’s not going to make a settlement any easier.  As I say, it seems nasty.

Here’s a proposal: given the state of public finance in Nova Scotia, the entire burden of this settlement is going to fall on students: either they’re going to get charged more, or they’ll receive fewer services in order to pay for the final deal.  So, why not let the union make its case directly to students? Why not require the union to be explicit about the necessary fee hikes and service cuts that would be needed in order to pay profs what they want?  Then let the students vote up or down on the whole thing.

Hey, it’s their money.  If they want to trade shorter library hours and higher fees to keep profs happy, let them do so.