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Tag: Faculty

Not Mutually Exclusive

One often hears university administrators say things like: “if we don’t reduce growth in salary mass, we’re all in trouble”.  Sometimes, the word “academic” gets thrown in front of salaries, for good measure.  In response, one often hears faculty unions say: “but academic salaries are down as a proportion of operating spending since 1992”, or “salaries as a proportion of the budget have remained constant in recent years”, and conclude from this that salaries can’t possibly be the problem. How

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April 7, 2015 9 Comments

Some Thoughts on TA Strikes

At the time of writing (Thursday PM), Teaching Assistant Unions at both the University of Toronto and York University are on strike, as is the union representing sessionals at York.  Since Toronto is indeed “The Centre of the Universe”, I’m sure everyone across the country is just riveted by this news.  At the risk of irritating those readers still further, I thought I’d jot down a few thoughts on the matter. 1)      A lot of people seem to be wondering “why

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March 6, 2015 4 Comments

CAUT on Foreign Professors

Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) Executive Director, David Robinson, made some interesting statements recently about the way universities hire foreign professors.  He made them in response to an announcement that the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada (AUCC) had negotiated an agreement to be exempted from certain rules of the new Temporary Foreign Worker program.  To quote in full from CAUT’s press release: The national organization representing Canada’s professors says that special exemptions from the temporary foreign worker

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March 5, 2015 No Comments

Offices

Here’s a stat I’d really like to see: how much time do professors spend in their offices? There’s been an enormous shift in the way people work over the past thirty years.  Digitization of documents and the availability of remote access computing, the growth of email, the explosion of doctoral students available to do the research grunt work, the decreasing importance of collaborating with local colleagues, and increasing importance of collaborating with people around the world – it’s all given

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February 24, 2015 10 Comments

Meetings vs. Management

It’s always difficult to make accurate observations about differences in national higher education cultures.  But one thing I can tell you that is absolutely not true is the perception that Canadian universities are suffering under some kind of unprecedented managerialist regime.  If anything, Canadian academics are among the least managed employees in the entire world; When academics complain of over-management, they aren’t using that term in a way that workers in other fields would recognize.  They are not, for instance,

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February 13, 2015 7 Comments

One Thought to Start Your Day

One Thought to Start Your Day is our founder and CEO Alex Usher’s popular daily blog, brimming with up-to-the-minute insights and informed opinions on today’s higher education industry.

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