New issue launch Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor #35 (2024-2025)
Articles in Workplace #35 address a variety of labour issues on campus and beyond, including the first in a series of articles by graduate student participants in the Global Labour Research Centre Symposium at York University.
Find the Workplace #35 here: https://ices.library.ubc.ca/index.php/workplace/index
Posted in Academic freedom, Academic Labor, Contingent labor, Corporate University, Critical University Studies, Diversity, Employment rights, Equity, Ethics, Faculty, Publications, Research, Solidarity, Strikes, Strikes & Labor Disputes
Tagged global labor supply, Global Labour Research Centre Symposium, migration
You are invited to submit proposals for a special issue of Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor focusing on Third Space labor in higher education. Despite most colleges and universities’ equity and inclusion commitments, labor in higher education is organized, valued, and supported along a false and exclusionary dichotomy. On one side, the “academic” domain — occupied by faculty — is the site of expertise, critical nuance, and knowledge production. On the other, the “non-academic” domain — occupied by staff — is the site of non-intellectual and largely replaceable managerial activity. This labor binary underpins most aspects of university life, radiating into a culture of exclusion regarding professional support systems, agency in governance structures, labor contracts, and policy environments.
Although this dichotomy pervades almost all college campuses, the nature of academic labor is far more complex (Stoller, 2021). Since the late 1960s and early 1970s, colleges and universities have increasingly depended upon what Whitchurch terms Third Space academic labor (Whitchurch, 2013).
Working through problems of division and exploitation between so-called First and Third Worlds, Bhabha (1990; 2004) introduced the concept of Third Space as a creative, disruptive space of cultural production. Following Bhabha, in social theory Third Space has been used to resolve a range of binaries through the conceptualization of identities that trouble conventional ways of being and behaving. Scholars have used Third Space to examine disability, race, gender, and sexuality, where fluid identities disrupt rigid social categorizations and the cultural hierarchies that inevitably follow. Third Space identities are risky and dangerous because they span and complicate defined cultural categories. They are also spaces of creativity and innovation that open new cultural possibilities (Soja and Hooper, 1993).
Whitchurch uses Third Space to identify a non-binary social class within higher education: emerging groups of professionals who disrupt the false distinction between “academic” and “non-academic.” Third Space professionals work in diverse areas of the institution, such as academic advising, writing programs and centers, quantitative reasoning centers, honors programs, first-year experience and transitions programs, women’s and LGBTQ centers, accessibility resources, and teaching and learning centers among others.
By spanning, interweaving, and disrupting traditional notions of academic labor, Third Space professionals bring tremendous value to their institutions and students. They hold deep academic expertise in teaching and learning, increasing the university’s capacity for immersive and engaged pedagogies (Ho, 2000; Gibbs and Coffey, 2004). They also support the DEI missions of colleges and universities. Almost all Third Space professions developed in response to traditional faculty being unable or unwilling to serve students from marginalized, minoritized, and under-resourced backgrounds (Astin, 1971; Boquet, 1999; Carino, 1996; Groark and McCall, 2018). Because of their organizational positionality and academic expertise, they uniquely understand the student learning experience, and they are positioned to advocate for policy, structural, or curricular changes needed to create more equitable learning environments. Third Space professionals work across departmental lines and can identify and develop opportunities for cross-campus partnerships and interdisciplinary collaborations (Bickford & Whisnant, 2010). They create new forms of scholarship (Eatman, 2012, 2014) and have pluralistic forms of scholarly impact (Arguinis, Shapiro, Antonacopoulou, & Cummings, 2014). They advance multiple university goals, often using scholarly approaches to improve a campus’s understanding of an issue and use their knowledge to develop praxis-based scholarship that shapes national and international change movements (Janke, 2019). Because they have advanced degrees and often teach and conduct research, they also enhance the college’s portfolio and can enrich its curriculum.
Like other non-binary identities, Third Space professionals fall outside normative social categories and therefore face interpersonal, cultural, and structural challenges specific to their work and professional identities. Their work is consistently miscategorized within the academy’s false labor binary, resulting in it being reduced to a “mere” administrative activity (Stefani & Matthew, 2002; Green & Little, 2017), or an “illegitimate” form of scholarship (Rowland et al., 1998; Harland & Staniforth, 2003). Faculty often frame Third Space professional contributions in oppositional (rather than complementary) terms (Handal, 2008). Because they are coded as “non-academic” and not tied to “home” departments, their expertise is rendered invisible in the epistemic economy of the university (Solomon et al., 2006). They rarely have access to institutional support structures for their academic work (e.g., teaching, research, grants, and fellowships), although their contracts often include these activities as part of their professional duties (Bickford and Whisnant, 2010). Third Space professionals are often barred from receiving institutional recognition, such as institutional designations, named professorships, and teaching and research awards, simply because of their class category (Post, Ward, Longo, & Saltmarsh, 2016). Despite their academic expertise and connection to the teaching and research mission of the university, they are systematically excluded from university governance structures (Bessette, 2020a). They also have no clear pathways for professional growth (Kim, 2020; Bessette, 2020b) and yet are often criticized for “abandoning” their institutions for professional gain. Because their labor often performs a “helping” function, it is often coded as “feminine” and devalued as a result (Tipper, 1999; Leit et al., 2007; Bernhagen & Gravett, 2017). Conversely, because traditional academic labor is culturally assumed to be more desired and desirable, Third Space professionals are often coded as “failed” academics (Whitchurch, 2015, p. 86).
This cultural denigration of their labor means they are frequently the subject of bullying and micro- aggressions by traditional faculty, but because faculty enjoy the protections of tenure there is no possibility of accountability for workplace abuses suffered by Third Space professionals (Henderson, 2005; Perry, 2020).
This issue seeks articles that identify and conceptualize problems cutting across the diverse forms of Third Space labor, and articles that propose pathways forward. Questions addressed by articles might include but are not limited to:
For inquiries or to submit proposals, contact Aaron Stoller at astoller@coloradocollege.edu. Prospective contributors should submit a proposal of 1-2 pages plus bibliography and a 1-paragraph author bio to Aaron Stoller astoller@coloradocollege.edu. Final contributions should be between 5,000 – 8,000 words and follow APA style.
Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor is a refereed, open access journal published by the Institute for Critical Education Studies (ICES) and a collective of scholars in critical university studies, or critical higher education, promoting dignity and integrity in academic work. Contributions are aimed at higher education workplace scholar-activism and dialogue on all issues of academic labor.
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Posted in Academic Labor, CFPs, Contingent labor, Corporate University, Critical University Studies, Research, Staff
Tagged CFPs, Third space academic labor, Workplace, Workplace Journal
*Archiving, as this Search has been deleted from the UBC Faculty of Education’s announcements, deleted from the UBC Provost’s announcements, and in effect deleted from the historical record– as if it never happened, which does not sit well with historians or critical university analysts or journalists or anti-racist activists or …!!!
The President’s Advisory Committee has invited three finalist candidates for the role of Dean, Faculty of Education [screen capture 2021] for full-day finalist interviews, to take place November 9, 10 and 12, 2021. Each of the finalist interviews will feature a candidate forum, to which all faculty, staff and students in the Faculty of Education are invited. Registration closes Tuesday, November 9th at 9:00 am. Learn more [screen capture 2021]
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Posted in Academic freedom, Accountability, Administration, Critical University Studies, Equity, Governance, Job market, Race, Shared governance, UBC Dean Search
Tagged Academic freedom, Administration, Equity, Governance, mismanagement, UBC Dean Search, University presidents
Here’s a summary of the article: UBC faculty, staff, and students commonly question senior managers’ assertions that “diversity is our strength.” If, counter to the cliche, diversity is not our strength, then what is it? This type of assertion may play well for a political audience but with insider knowledge, the reality is quite different. Insider knowledge is an effective antidote to confusions of audience and duplicitous speech. With this in mind, we analyzed UBC managers’ messaging and optics in matters of anti-Black racism. In conclusion, we don’t buy it and provide dozens of examples of where the rhetoric falls short of reality. We suggest that without action and real results, the optics seem insincere. Hence, senior managers are complicit in anti-Black racism at UBC.
Here’s the argument: What Robyn Maynard (2017) infers from history education practices in Canada sums up the case of UBC: “a discernable lack of awareness surrounding the widespread anti-Blackness that continues to hide in plain sight, obscured behind a nominal commitment to liberalism, multiculturalism and equality” (p. 30). Hence, in this case of UBC, we provide various examples of how the institution functions through racial bias and prejudice but argue that leaving the explanation to structural or systemic racism makes it too easy to deny elite individual and everyday racism, especially racist attitudes and decisions of the managers and their means of employment discrimination (i.e., blocking and undermining racial minorities’ access to career advancement and opportunities).
Here’s the conclusion: Anti-Black racism in higher education requires specific attention to history and action, whether affirmative or equitable. We argued that elite racism and everyday racism experienced by African ethnic and diasporic faculty, staff, and students and made visible through demographic data can no longer be dismissed or overlooked. Through the case of UBC, we demonstrated various ways in which the higher racism of managers works to maintain individual and systemic discrimination. Preferences of managers for image and optics over action— surface over substance— is especially shallow in this era of Black Lives Matter. We also raised questions of the logic of popular shortcuts to intersectionality (e.g., IBPOC) and stand with scholars explaining that therein, equity claims of African ethnic and diasporic faculty, staff, and students are readily deprioritized or marginalized. Code-switching has its limits. At UBC is an established record of defending middle and senior managers’ inequitable, and often enough for concern, racist, practices. Cases introduced by racial equity seeking individuals are routinely deferred, dismissed, or misdirected to external agencies, where again senior managers agitate to request dismissal of the complaints. Finally, we articulated concerns that managers are preferring to isolate and shield themselves from critical conversation and critique. Critics of problematic and racist practices risk disciplinary measures as managers grow increasingly intolerant of commentaries on mismanagement and whistleblowing.
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Posted in Academic freedom, Administration, Advocacy, BC Education, Critical University Studies, Diversity, Equity, Ethics, Governance, Race, Working conditions
Tagged Academic freedom, Administration, Equity, Governance, mismanagement, Race, Working conditions
Responding to a Petition and attached Letter (below) questioning the decision to exclude an extremely competitive African Canadian applicant from the shortlist in the search for a new Dean of Education at UBC, President Ono shut down the search and dissolved the Advisory Committee. The UBC President also indicated that Provost and Committee co-Chair Ananya Mukherjee Reed resigned from the Committee, seemingly in support of the conclusions and questions raised by the Petition and its 150 signatories.
On 9 December 2020, the UBC President wrote to faculty, staff, and students:
Yesterday, I received Prof. Ananya Mukherjee Reed’s resignation as co-chair from the President’s Advisory Committee for the Recruitment of a Dean for the Faculty of Education. This is effective immediately. I met with the PAC Committee yesterday and heard from members regarding the viability of the search moving forward, and they felt that the search could not proceed. After careful consideration and consultation with the Committee, I have decided to end the current search for a new Dean at this time.
Of course, it is extremely rare for a Dean search to be cancelled in response to grass roots efforts. It is certainly a step in the right direction of accountability. A next step is answering the various questions raised about this Advisory Committee: Why did they do what they did? In the midst of Black Lives Matter, why did they exclude a competitive African Canadian applicant?
November 26, 2020
Dear President Ono,
This Letter and attached Petition are in response to the President’s Advisory Committee for the Selection of the next Dean of the Faculty of Education’s decision to exclude Dr. Samson Nashon from its shortlist. I write on behalf of the 150 faculty, students, staff, alumni, emeriti, and community members who signed this Petition to add Dr. Nashon to the shortlist. The Petition identifies flawed procedures underwriting the President’s Advisory Committee’s decision. For example, the Committee excluded African Canadian faculty, staff, and students
The University of British Columbia’s Strategic Plan, Shaping UBC’s Next Century, emphasizes “our intention to be a leader in diversity and equity” (Strategy 1: Great People, p. 41). Leadership in diversity and equity entails fighting against racism at all levels of administration, research, service, and teaching.
The 150 signatories to this Petition expect action to back up the commitments. We hope that you will address our collective concerns, convey them to the President’s Advisory Committee, and consider what can be done to redress the problem and rectify the injustice. This raises a serious procedural question of how a Committee that excluded Dr. Nashon from the shortlist can now fairly include and consider his candidacy?
The Petition with signatories is attached. On behalf of this groundswell of support for Dr. Nashon’s candidacy, thank you very much for addressing our concerns and request.
Respectfully, the [150] signatories of the Petition.
cc. Dr. Andrew Szeri, Provost and Vice-President Academic, UBC Vancouver (Co-chair)
Dr. Ananya Mukherjee Reed, Provost and Vice-President Academic, UBC Okanagan (Co-chair)
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Posted in Academic freedom, Academic Labor, Accountability, Administration, BC Education, Black Lives Matter, Campus Life, Critical University Studies, Diversity, Equity, Ethics, Faculty, Governance, Organizing, Race, Shared governance, Staff, Students, Working conditions
In a show of solidarity today, 150 signatories submitted a petition to University of British Columbia President Ono to account for a decision to disregard Dr. Samson Nashon‘s application for Dean of the Faculty of Education. The petition calls for the UBC President to correct procedural and evaluative oversights of an Advisory Committee (16 members):
Petition for addition of Dr. Samson Nashon to the Shortlist for Dean of the Faculty of Education
(November 21-25, 2020)
As the Black Lives Matter movement called higher education practices into question, President Ono communicated to faculty, staff, and students on June 1st, 2020: “I encourage you to think about the role you can play in fighting racism.” This petition is in the spirit of that fight.
We are concerned with the process of finding a new Dean of the UBC Faculty of Education. The President’s Advisory Committee charged with this task seems not to have taken into account the groundswell of support for Dr. Samson Nashon. Apparently, the Committee ignored the overwhelming evidence in his support from the process of shortlisting. Up through a communication indicating Dr. Nashon’s exclusion from the shortlist on November 20, over five months have passed since the Advisory Committee’s last communication to the faculty, staff, and students (on June 9, 2020). Short of a problematic election for faculty members on the Committee (only 4 Committee members out of 11 were voted in by the faculty members), faculty and staff had little input into the Committee’s composition. Consequently, the President’s Advisory Committee excluded ALL African Canadian faculty, staff, and students.
Colleagues reviewing Professor Nashon’s application for this search for a Dean of the Faculty of Education and faculty, staff, and students recommending him to the Advisory Committee via Boyden Vancouver know full well his competitive qualifications. They meet and exceed those of many Education Deans across Canada, including UBC. Why were these qualifications seemingly overlooked? Dr. Nashon was encouraged to apply by Boyden, but was then excluded from the shortlist. What does the recruitment of an African Canadian applicant mean, if the goal is merely to enrich the pool of applicants for the sake of optics?
For too long and in too many instances, UBC senior managers have created Advisory Committees that excluded and under-valued well qualified African ethnic and diasporic applicants, who are internal to the university, for leadership positions across UBC campuses. These practices account for the lack of diversity in the demographic of senior and middle management ranks in Education and elsewhere on the two campuses.
Given this, we submit this petition requesting Professor Samson Nashon be added to the shortlist for the Dean of the Faculty of Education Search.
Signed: 150 Signatories
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Posted in Academic freedom, Academics, Administration, Advocacy, BC Education, Black Lives Matter, Critical University Studies, Diversity, Faculty, Governance, Organizing, Race, Shared governance, Solidarity, Student Movement, Working conditions
Tagged Academic freedom, Administration, Faculty, Governance, mismanagement, Strikes & Labor Disputes, University presidents, Working conditions
*Apologies to the medievalists once again. Customized below is our semi-annual appeal to UBC managers to Lay Down the Mace:
As we count down to and roll through graduation, can we please remove the mace from convocation and governance at the University of British Columbia? The mace may have had its day in the first 100 years of this esteemed University but that day has gone.
The “ceremonial mace used at convocation ceremonies is out of step with contemporary values.” Dalhousie University now uses what it designed and calls the New Dawn Staff instead of a mace.
Indigenous peoples and advocates have said plenty about this already but the managers, well…
Currently, for instance, #UBC managers gleefully delight in the gravity and weight of their mace, entirely remiss that in addition to blunt power and violence, UBC’s mace signifies greed– the chainsaw and excavator– real estate development— digging for gold– as the University feverishly exploits its Endowment Lands (esp. Areas A, B, & D). Some traditions just aren’t worth maintaining…
Oh, and at the Nexo Knights’ Graduation Day,
Jestro grabbed a sword, a mace, and a spear and began to juggle them… The unimpressed crowd started to boo… Sweat broke out on his forehead…. He let go of the mace, and it flew across the arena. The crowd gasped and ducked… Then … bam! It hit the power grid on the arena wall. The area lights flickered, then turned off. Soon the power outage surged throughout the city.
Meanwhile again in England, Bradford College faculty members called the admin’s decision to spend £24,000 on a new mace for graduation ceremonies a “crass bit of judgement.”
The days of the mace in Convocation and governance are of the past and that part of the past is no longer worth reenacting.
It’s difficult to know where this University now stands or what it stands for.
It is time to retire the mace, symbol of aggression, authority, and war. It’s time to march to graduation ceremonies in late May and November with open and empty hands as symbolic of peace and reconciliation of controversies and roles of the President’s Office.
UBC’s mace is a relic but a relic of what? The mace is symbolic speech but what is it saying about us now?
From ancient times, this club, this weapon of assault and offence, the mace was gradually adorned until the late twelfth century when it doubled as a symbol of civil office. Queen Elizabeth I granted her royal mace to Oxford in 1589. From military and civil power derives academic authority. The rest is history and it is not all good.
Stephen Heatley wields the mace at the 2018 convocation.
It is time to retire the macebearer, whose importance is inflated every year by the image’s presence on UBC’s graduation pages leading to Convocation. In pragmatic terms, if the mace falls into the hands of the wrong macebearer or manager at this point, someone’s liable to get clocked with it.
Is UBC’s mace still a respectable appendage to Convocation?
Remember, since that fateful November day in 1997, just five months into Martha Piper’s Presidency, when student activists put their bodies and minds on the line at the APEC protest, Tuum Est adorns both the can of mace sprayed in their eyes and the ceremonial mace that the President’s Office is eager to carry across campus every November and May.
Is it not time to retire the mace and mace bearer?
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Posted in Academic freedom, Accountability, Administration, Advocacy, Budgets & Funding, Bullying & Mobbing, Censorship, Critical University Studies, Culture, Equity, Ethics, Faculty, Free speech, Governance, Maces, Organizing, Politics, Regalia, Solidarity, Students, Violence
Peter Wylie
Associate Professor, Economics
University of British Columbia
Paper Presented at The 8th International Seminar for Local Public Economics,
University Of Guanajuato, Mexico, Nov 10-11, 2016
This paper analyzes the establishment in 2005 and subsequent evolution of a new university campus in the interior region of British Columbia, Canada, until then under-serviced with regard to university provision and with one of the lowest rates of participation of its population in post-secondary education in the province of British Columbia (BC). The paper considers the founding vision of the campus, situated in the city of Kelowna, represented by the original Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between the University of British Columbia (UBC) and the Government of BC in relation to its subsequent evolution to today.
To anticipate the results, we find that almost none of the original vision for the campus has been realized, and it has evolved in a way fundamentally opposed to the Government’s expressed intention. This is largely due to the fact that universities are autonomous institutions in Canada largely free of political influence and hence need only follow their own goals rather than those of the Government and/or electorate. It might also be that the Government’s stated vision was political posturing and it fully intended to leave the evolution of the campus entirely to the University and not hold it to account to the MoU. That the campus was left to UBC, one of the world’s top 40 universities in international ranking, and top 20 public universities, to develop as a second, smaller campus in Kelowna than its much larger main campus in Vancouver, a 4-hour drive away, has had important implications for its subsequent development away from the original expressed goals. The paper discusses issues of academic planning, accountability and oversight in the provision of this local public good by the Government funders/taxpayers.
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Posted in Academic freedom, Academic Labor, Accountability, Administration, BC Education, Budgets & Funding, Critical University Studies, Governance, Government, Politics, Shared governance, Student Movement, Students, Unions, Working conditions
Tagged Academic freedom, Administration, Budgets & Funding, Governance, Government, Students, Unions, Working conditions
There have been questions about what we mean by “mismanagement” at the University of British Columbia? What is meant by claims that at key moments in the past two years, there was evident mismanagement by the Board of Governors? Some faculty members juxtaposed the BoG’s failures against the University Act and best practices or Nolan Principles.
What do we mean by suggesting that UBC’s Committee of Deans establishes a bad model for the campus (i.e., mismanagement, e.g., no agendas, minutes, etc.)? What is meant by mismanagement by omission of a policy to regulate the appointment of Associate Deans?
Or, what is meant by charges that specific programs, such as UBC’s Master of Educational Technology program, a proverbial digital diploma mill, are mismanaged? What is meant by the mismanagement of a Career Advancement Plan?
So here’s a clarification and why good management matters:
Workers tend to have a keen sense of mismanagement when they experience it and academic workers are no different. Academics have a keen sense of academic mismanagement when they see it.
The sense used here is not the common legal definition of gross mismanagement, e.g., “a continuous pattern of managerial abuses, wrongful or arbitrary and capricious actions…” Nor is it used in the sense of financial mismanagement (e.g., p. 274).
Rather, mismanagement in most UBC cases refers to simply a failure to adhere to best practices (of accountability, equity, governance, hiring, etc.). The concern is with omissions. Of course, omissions may be intentional and this does not preclude arbitrariness, deception, or a destitution of integrity, etc.
In Dignity at Work, the key text on the topic, Hodson (2004) articulates in detail the short and long-term effects of mismanagement. The basic thesis is this: “Working with dignity is a fundamental part of achieving a life well-lived, yet the workplace often poses challenging obstacles because of mismanagement or managerial abuse” (frontispiece).
In the first paragraph then, Hodson prefaces: “Even where abuse is commonplace and chaos and mismanagement make pride in accomplishment difficult, workers still find ways to create meaning in work and to work with dignity” (p. 3). We see this in the most exploited workers at UBC: Sessional Lecturers.
“The first hurdle in the quest for dignity at work, Hodson says, “is thus the possibility of mismanagement and abuse” (p. 83). Indeed, “mismanagement and abuse have a central role in generating resistance and undermining citizenship in the workplace.” And he emphasizes, the buck stops at the top:
Chaotic and mismanaged workplaces undercut workers’ pride and erect barriers to quality work. The consequences of poorly organized workplaces can also spill over to coworker relations, further undermining organizational effectiveness. (p. 109)
Hodson concludes: “significant denials of dignity remain in the workplace. Chief among these are mismanagement and abuse” (p. 273).
Helps explain the state of working conditions in various programs and units at UBC, doesn’t it?
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Posted in Academic freedom, Accountability, Administration, Budgets & Funding, Corporate University, Corruption, Critical University Studies, Governance, Students, Unions, Working conditions
Tagged Academic freedom, Administration, Budgets & Funding, Ethics, Governance, mismanagement, Unions, Working conditions
Dear UBC diary,
Year 100: Does anyone at the University of British Columbia remember last year, when on the day of the institution’s 100th birthday party Arvind resigned? If memory serves me right, Martha waltzed in, blew out the candles, and made the wish. Does anyone recall this happening? Like a dream, there are some vague memories of documents and decisions being hidden from access and scrutiny. Speculation. Secret meetings and the like…
I vaguely remember a resignation of the Chair of the Board of Governors and an academic freedom complaint. I kind of remember a Freedom of Information bungle in UBC’s Office of the University Counsel. My memory is incomplete but I sense that I signed a few petitions, went to meetings, protests, and rallies, and voted No Confidence in the BoG. Who doesn’t remember the Deans being made to reappear? And the pablum in the sun? That was a good Houdini trick! There are traces of the Faculty Association sabre-rattling with a few PDFs.
Anybody remember any of this at UBC?
I think I remember some brouhaha over an Advisory Committee for the appointment of a new President and a resignation from said Committee. I remember hearing that President Gupta phoned the Committee but was left on hold! I don’t remember candidates meeting with faculty, staff, and students. Was busy and may have missed that part.
Year 101: Santa is here! I think some other new people were hired on campus but irrelevant, Santa is here! And then Dave came back to set the birthday year right again. Just in time.
The UBC year at glance confirms that we were dreaming! Nothing that we vaguely remember happening in year 100 actually happened! None of those memories made it onto UBC’s 2015-2016 highlight reel or appear in Dave’s yearbook!
Alas, we were finally ordered to “cease using the UBC 100 logo and revert back” to, well, you know, this was like an order to cease thinking about last year and revert back to, well, you know…
Summer and fall 2016 at UBC, back to business as usual… restoration… so calming, like an aromatherapeutic misty spritz on the wrist…
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Posted in Academic freedom, Accountability, Administration, BC Education, Corporate University, Critical University Studies, Governance, Students, Unions, Working conditions
Tagged Academic freedom, Administration, Governance, Santa, Students, University presidents, Working conditions
Special Issue of Workplace
Edited by
Karen Lynn Gregory & Joss Winn
Articles in Workplace have repeatedly called for increased collective organisation in opposition to a disturbing trajectory in the contemporary university… we suggest that there is one response to the transformation of the university that has yet to be adequately explored: A thoroughgoing and reflexive critique of academic labor.
Table of Contents
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Posted in Academic freedom, Academic Labor, Accountability, Adjuncts & Sessionals, Administration, Contingent labor, Critical University Studies, Equity, Ethics, Governance, Institute for Critical Education Studies, Solidarity, Strikes & Labor Disputes, Student Movement, Technology, Unions, Working conditions
Tagged Academic freedom, academic labor, Contingent labor, Governance, Strikes & Labor Disputes, Unions, Working conditions
Robert Kerrey–Like Drowning Cats
By Rich Gibson
Professor Emeritus
San Diego State University
Robert Kerrey is now appointed to be the top at a new US-sponsored university in Vietnam.
Former Senator Robert Kerrey admitted that as leader of a Navy Seal unit he participated in the murder of civilians in Vietnam. The Seal unit was part of an assassination squad, operating under the guidance of Operation Phoenix which, in the course of the war, killed more than 30,000 Vietnamese, using what its leader, William Colby, called a “scatter-gun approach,” in later congressional hearings. Villagers on the scene say Kerrey’s Seals not only shot more than 100 women and children with automatic fire, but slit the throats of five people, all considered less than human: Gooks, Slants, Slopes, Cong, Charlie, VC.
Kerrey’s admissions came in The New York Times Magazine, a story initially quashed by the television networks. Clearly indictable under existing war crime statutes, Kerrey participated in a cover-up of his unit’s killings for nearly three decades while he used his claims to valour to promote his political career.
Following The New York Times revelations, though, two interesting things happened, both relating to how history is constructed, not only as a vision of the past, but as a call to action in the future. In that context, Kerrey’s thinking about his experience in Vietnam, written not too long after he returned, is instructive.
As the Times article developed, Kerrey and his friends first began to commiserate with one another about the tough times they had, the strain on their consciences, the difficulty they had in living with dirty secrets, how their reputations of valour may be imperfect. Besides, what were we to do when everyone was an enemy? This experience traces the path of many convicted fascist war criminals in Germany who, exposed long after WWII closed, said the same thing.
Second, the debate shifted to who we shall call heroic. The mainstream outlook is now at least two-fold: perhaps nobody, or maybe people like Kerrey since war is hell. Three kinds of heroes are missed altogether.
Certainly those working-class US youth who found themselves enmeshed in a web that led directly to the front lines of battle in Vietnam, those of them who refused to go on burn-all kill-all missions, those who shot their own officers and blew them up in their tents, creating a new word in the lexicon, fragging; those who returned to the US, joined the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and, denouncing the war, threw their Medals of Honor back at Congress; those young men and women, black and white, like Bill Marshall and Scott Camil, wounded and decorated heroes who rejected the war, are mostly unnoticed.
The working class anti-war movement is almost equally opaque, as if the resistance emanated from Harvard and Columbia, behind the cavalier lead of rich liberal children with bombs like Billy Ayers whose contempt for people sought to substitute explosives for a mass conscious movement. In fact the blue-collar student movements at Wayne State in Detroit, San Francisco State, Kent State, and related schools seriously took up the issues of people who had a lot to lose, whose draft deferments were not coming from counsel with connected pals in the medical school, and who could wield real power by exerting their natural influence in their birth-class. Often under the leadership of Black and Latin youth, those people then led the mass sit-down strikes in auto in Detroit, and the community uprisings throughout the US, while the terrorists hid in million-dollar homes, returning to academic prominence after legal wrist slaps a few years later–now rich liberals without bombs.
Further outside the imperial gaze, even today, is the heroism of the Vietnamese, not only those who Kerrey and many other US officers caught up in the genocidal invasion sought to exterminate, but those who defeated the empire, politically, militarily, and morally, causing imperial troops to run away in their helicopters, pushing their allies off the struts as they ran. Despite every effort to reconstruct that piece of history, whether through relentless Hollywood endeavors to recapture the good old days of World War II, or the repositioning of responsibility to suggest that all US troops in Southeast Asia were war criminals, and hence none of them were, nothing ever will be the same.
At the end of the wars on Vietnam, when the US fled at the end of April, 1975, the US military was in utter collapse, the economy a shambles, the presidency upended by Watergate and the Pentagon Papers, and the campuses in full uproar. Reversing all of that has been a 40 year project, with some success, especially the project to eradicate the memory of the facts of the war itself.
There are no Vietnamese victors on Vietnam Wall, yet millions of them died–and changed the world.
However, for purposes of clarity, it is worthwhile to look back on what Robert Kerrey wrote after he returned from Vietnam, more than twelve years ago, perhaps when his recollections were sharper, less opportunistically censored by the polish of electoral success. This is what Nebraska’s Robert Kerrey said in the opening paragraph of an article titled, “On Remembering the Vietnam War:”
“Around the farm, there is an activity that no one likes to do. Yet it is sometimes necessary. When a cat gives birth to kittens that aren’t needed, the kittens must be destroyed. And there is a moment when you are holding the kitten under the water when you know that if you bring that kitten back above the water it will live, and if you don’t bring it back above in that instant the kitten will be dead. This, for me, is a perfect metaphor for those dreadful moments in war when you do not quite do what you previously thought you would do.”*
Such is the choice, drowning cats or universal solidarity against despotism–and the perversion of academic life.
*The Vietnam Reader, edited by Walter Capps, Routledge, New York (1990)
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Posted in Academics, Administration, Critical University Studies, Student Movement, Violence
Tagged essays, Rich Gibson, Robert Kerry, University presidents, Vietnam
If there is anything learned at the University of British Columbia since the announcement of President Gupta’s resignation on 7 August 2015, it is that patronage is the institution’s greatest threat to reversing its spiraling downfall.
Of course we hear a lot these days about the gated communities in Vancouver and Kelowna where the 1% enjoy their luxuries without annoying distractions and questions from the 99%. Chip Wilson’s gated and walled $64m waterfront home makes the old Casa Mia on Marine Drive look like a quaint tiny house. And if trends have their way at UBC, Chip, valued at $2.2b, will soon run the Board of Governors (i.e., Lululemon U), following Stuart Belkin, valued at a comparatively mere $900m with a modest hobby farm in Southlands.
In the midst of its administrative and legitimacy crises, on 25 November Belkin was appointed Chair of UBC’s BoG. In 1938, Stuart’s father, Morris, led students on a protest against the BoG’s proposal to increase fees by $25. At his first meeting as Chair on 15 February 2016, Stuart presided over the approval of huge tuition increases across the University, no questions asked. Morris, the consummate contributor to student media, saved The Ubyssey by buying the printing house, which eventually became College Printers and core to Belkin’s packaging corporation. Stuart has an aversion to the media.
Following Morris’s death in 1987, the family donated to UBC $1m+ and by 1992 established itself as an art patron with a $1.5m endowment as ground was broken for the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery on campus (opened 17 June 1995). Stuart commands UBC’s BoG in the midst of sieges on privilege and patronage.
Philanthropic patronage is common at UBC but it’s the managerial form that is perhaps much more entrenched and dangerous at this point.
In Moral Mazes: The World of Corporate Managers, Jackall explains that patronage reduces to “alliances that give one ‘clout’”
by the systematic collection of information damaging to others and particularly about deals struck and favors won in order to argue more effectively the propriety and legitimacy of one’s own claims; and, on the part of those in power, by pervasive secrecy, called confidentiality, that attempts to cordon off the knowledge of deals already made lest the demands on the system escalate unduly. (pp. 197-198)
Drawn from frontier tactics of circling the wagons, the practice of protecting managers at all cost for favours and perks, or patronage, has generated a crisis at UBC. Indicative of this crisis of patronage was the deans’ endorsement of the BoG and Central senior managers on 9 February 2016.
Rarely at UBC is administrative patronage, characterized by this process of encircling and turning inward, exposed in such a raw, visible form, as if under siege by faculty, staff, and students.
The deans, along with vice, assistant, and associate appointees, owe their capital, in large, to a system of patronage that keeps gates and walls to protect privilege. Gated management, suppressing and distrusting shared governance, relies extensively on patronage.
Acting as if through Gupta’s resignation ‘to the victors go the spoils’, the deans are gambling that circling the wagons around the BoG and Central, however much it exposes patronage, delivers payoffs come reappointment time and invariable sieges on gates and gatekeepers within their own Faculties.
Patronage delivers payoffs at UBC, as Central looks the other way when accountability is due. For example, Central has been unwilling to find either fact or fault with administrators perennially running up deficits, suppressing academic freedom, mismanaging academic portfolios, playing favouritism, breaching privacy, biasing student votes, bloating admin ranks and offices, etc.
The fact that no one—not a single administrator– has been held accountable, canned, denied reappointment, or moved back to faculty ranks, etc. in the midst of the University’s most serious administrative crisis in fifty years is increasingly suspicious.
Yet this nagging suspicion of the BoG and Central, “perceptions of pervasive mediocrity” (Jackall, p. 197), and faculty members’ current No Confidence vote call the entire system of gated management and patronage at UBC into question.
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Posted in Academic freedom, Accountability, Administration, BC Education, Critical University Studies, Ethics, Governance, Patronage, Philanthropy, Scandals, Shared governance, Students, Unions, Working conditions
Tagged Academic freedom, Administration, Budgets & Funding, Governance, Unions, University presidents, Working conditions
It has been an emotional year for the University of British Columbia. As budgets moved from Central, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada launched Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future. The residential university and college take on new meaning. As we launched the celebration of our Centennial at UBC 100, our President resigned under a cloak of secrecy. As we began to party, we launched an investigation to discover the lengths to which a Chair of the Board of Governors and administrators might go to suppress academic freedom. Now, as we march to Convocation, students and alumni launch evidence that UBC is failing to properly respond to sexual assaults on campus.
In the meantime, terrorists and terror struck Sharm el-Sheikh, Beirut and Paris while the dogs of war howl for bombers and drones to command from the skies above. Increasingly larger regions of the world live in a state of emergency.
It’s difficult to know where this University now stands or what it stands for.
To take a stand symbolic of peace and reconciliation, please lay down the mace for ceremonies and Convocation. Please put away the coat of arms and lay down the mace. If not for good, then how about for peace?
It is time to retire this symbol of aggression, authority and war. It’s time to march to graduation ceremonies this week with open and empty hands as symbolic of peace and reconciliation of controversies and roles of the President’s Office.
UBC’s mace is a relic but a relic of what? The mace is symbolic speech but what is it saying about us now?
From ancient times, this club, this weapon of assault and offence, the mace was gradually adorned until the late twelfth century when it doubled as a symbol of civil office. Queen Elizabeth I granted her royal mace to Oxford in 1589. From military and civil power derives academic authority. The rest is history and it is not all good.
Dr. Thomas Lemieux, School of Economics, with UBC’s Mace at the May 2015 Convocation.
It is time to retire the macebearer, whose importance is inflated every year by the image’s presence on UBC’s graduation pages leading to Convocation. In pragmatic terms, if the mace falls into the hands of the wrong macebearer or manager at this point, someone’s liable to get clocked with it.
Is UBC’s mace still a respectable appendage to Convocation?
Remember, since that fateful November day in 1997, just five months into your Presidency, when student activists put their bodies and minds on the line at the APEC protest, Tuum Est adorns both the can of mace sprayed in their eyes and the ceremonial mace that the President’s Office is eager to carry across campus every November and May. That’s “too messed,” as the students say.
Is it not time to retire both?
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Posted in Academic freedom, Accountability, Administration, BC Education, Campus Life, Commentary, Critical University Studies, Faculty, Free speech, Governance, Government, Maces, Regalia, Scandals, Students
Tagged Academic freedom, Administration, Ethics, Faculty, Free speech, Governance, Government, Students, University presidents
As a result of this communication, we had earlier in the day decided to call for Mr. Montalbano to step aside during an investigation of the allegations against him.
By late afternoon, we became aware Mr. Montalbano was giving a series of interviews on radio and television, entirely in contradiction to the August 17th press release signed by Provost pro tem Anji Redish and Interim President Martha Piper in which it was affirmed that: “it would entirely be inappropriate to comment further on the allegations until this process has been concluded.”
Indeed, even though we had initiated our usual informal processes with the University in a way that made it clear that there were serious allegations against Mr. Montalbano, Mr. Montalbano did not step aside as Chair pending the conclusion of a full investigation.
We have lost confidence that there can be an internal investigation process uninfluenced by Mr. Montalbano, either within our usual labour relations processes or through a Board-driven process.
Consequently, we are calling for Mr. Montalbano’s immediate resignation as Chair of the Board of Governors. He has shown an inability to allow proper procedures to proceed and has used his office as Chair of the Board to engage personally and publicly with the issues under investigation. This behaviour is ill judged and threatens the integrity of ongoing processes.
We did not take this decision to request Mr. Montalbano’s resignation lightly. His handling of Professor Gupta’s resignation and his mismanagement of subsequent events are now compounded by breaches of standard protocols, and lead us to believe that his resignation will be in the best interests of the University and the public.
Please read our letter carefully.
Sincerely,
Mark Mac Lean
President
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Posted in Academic freedom, Accountability, Corporate University, Critical University Studies, Faculty, Governance
Tagged Administration, Faculty, University presidents, Working conditions
Stephen Petrina, Sandra Mathison & E. Wayne Ross
The convergence of the casualization, fragmentation, intensification, segmentation, shifting and creep of academic work with the post-9/11 gentrificaton of criticism and dissent is arguably one of the greatest threats to academic freedom since the Nazi elimination of the Jewish professoriate and critique in 1933, Bantu Education Act’s reinforcement of apartheid in South Africa in 1952, and McCarthyism in Canada and the US in the 1950s and 1960s. In the history of education, this would be quite the claim yet the evidence seems to speak for itself. Academic work has been fragmented into piecemeal modes and intensified as academics absorbed, through amalgamation, traditional clerical staff and counseling work. The balance of the academic workforce has been reduced and casualized or segmented to an “at whim,” insecure, unsalaried part-time labor pool, the 8-hour workday and 40-hour academic workweek collapsed to 60-80 hours, and the primary locus of academic work shifted off-campus as the workplace crept into the home and its communal establishments. Academic stress— manifested as burnout through amalgamation and creep of work, and as distress through bullying, mobbing and victimization— underwrites increases in leaves of absence. Non-tenure track faculty are hit particularly hard, indicating “contingency or the precariousness of their position” as relentless stressors.
Nowadays, it’s whimsical to reminisce about work-life balance and promises that the academic workforce will be renewed as boomers retire with baited expectations, or that the workweek and workplace for salaried full-timers could be contained within the seduction of flextime and telecommuting. In many ways, the flexible workplace is the plan for boomers by boomers with both nest eggs and limits on retirement age breaking. As currency values, retirement portfolios, and savings spiral downward while dependent children and grandchildren and inflation spiral upward, incentives to retire erode. Precariously unemployed, underemployed and part-time academics aside, boomers still in the academic system are trended to face the biggest losses. As economic incentives to retire decrease, incentives for intellectual immortality and legacy management flourish with the boomers’ political leanings moving toward the center. One can hardly blame them.
Enthusiasts of anything “flexible” (learning, space, time, work, etc.) and everything “tele” (commuting, conference, learning, phone, work, etc.), academics readily workshift with additional liability but no additional remuneration— instead is an unquestioned acceptance of the “overtime exemption”— while the employer saves about $6,500 per year per worker in the tradeoff as worksite or workspace shifts from campus to home. The academic workweek is now conservatively 60 hours with many PT and FT reporting persistent 70-80 hour weeks. Perhaps academic women can finally have it all after putting in the 120 hour workweek. One reason institutions now cope with many fewer FT hires is that academics are all too willing to do the work of two. As Gina Anderson found a decade ago, “with apparently unconscious irony, many academics reported that they particularly valued the flexibility of their working week, in terms of both time and space… in the same breath as reporting working weeks in the order of 60 hours.” For most academic workers, the cost of flexibility is effectively a salary cut as overheads of electricity, heat, water, communication and consumables are shifted to the home. Carbon footprint reductions are a net benefit and for a minority, the savings of commuting and parking offset the costs of this homework or housework. What is the nature or implications of this increasing domestication of academic work and displacement of the academic workplace? For academic couples with or without children, the dynamics of housecohabitry, househusbandry or housewifery necessarily change as the academic workplace shifts and labor creeps into the home. With temptations to procrastinate on deluges of academic deadlines, academic homes have never been cleaner and more organized. Nevermind the technocreep of remote monitoring. Over the long run, although some administrators cling to the digital punch card and time stamp with Hivedesk, Worksnaps or MySammy, “smashing the clock” in the name of flextime and telework is about the best thing that ever happened to academic capitalism.
This is not exactly a SWOT analysis, where Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats are given due treatment. Rather, the focus is on this threat convergence as it resolves through historic displacements of the academic workplace and work. To what degree are the new policies for academic speech inscribed in academic work, regardless of where it’s done? As the academic workplace is increasingly displaced and distributed, are academic policies displaced and distributed as well? Observed at work, monitored at home and tracked in between—these are not so much choices as the cold reality of 21st century academic work.
Read More: Threat Convergence
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Posted in Academic freedom, Academic Labor, Academics, Accountability, Adjuncts & Sessionals, Administration, Bullying & Mobbing, Critical University Studies, Free speech, Government, Institute for Critical Education Studies, Students, Technology, Working conditions
Tagged Academic freedom, adjuncts, Faculty, Free speech, Research, Students, Working conditions
New Workplace Issue #24
Workplace and Critical Education are published by the Institute for Critical Education Studies. Please consider participating as author or reviewer. Thank you.
Comments Off on New Workplace Issue: Academic Bullying & Mobbing #highered #ubc #caut
Posted in Academic freedom, Academic Labor, Academics, Accountability, Adjuncts & Sessionals, Bullying & Mobbing, Critical University Studies, Diversity, Equity, Ethics, Free speech, Government, Institute for Critical Education Studies, Organizing, Publications, Solidarity, Student Movement, Students, Technology, Unions, Working conditions
Tagged Academic freedom, Academics, adjuncts, Legal issues, Unions, Working conditions
New Workplace Issue #25
Workplace and Critical Education are published by the Institute for Critical Education Studies. Please consider participating as author or reviewer. Thank you.
Comments Off on New Workplace Issue: Reforming Academic Labor, Resisting Imposition, K12 and #HigherEd #criticaled
Posted in Academic freedom, Academic Labor, Adjuncts & Sessionals, Critical University Studies, Faculty, Government, Institute for Critical Education Studies, Research, Solidarity, Students, Unions, Working conditions
Tagged Academic freedom, adjuncts, Unions, Working conditions
Critical Education is proud to be the sponsor journal for Critical Theories in the 21st Century
4th annual:
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Posted in CFPs, Conferences, Corporate University, Critical University Studies, Economics, Equity, Events, For Profit Universities, Politics, Publications, Research
Tagged anarchism, anti-capitalism, capitalism, CFP, CFPs, Conferences, Critical pedagogy, post-structuralism, postmodernism, West Chester University
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#UBC time to lay down the mace in graduation and governance #ubcnews #bced #highered
*Apologies to the medievalists again. Customized below is our semi-annual appeal to UBC managers to Lay Down the Mace:
As we count down to and roll through graduation, can we please remove the mace from convocation and governance at the University of British Columbia? The mace had its day in the first 100 years of this esteemed University but that day has gone.
Dalhousie University is currently embroiled in controversy over its mace, decorated as it is to demonstrate racial supremacy (“the rose, thistle, fieur-de-lys, and shamrock, depicting the major racial groups of our country”). Indigenous peoples and advocates have said enough already.
Some traditions just aren’t worth maintaining…
At the Nexo Knights’ Graduation Day,
Jestro grabbed a sword, a mace, and a spear and began to juggle them… The unimpressed crowd started to boo… Sweat broke out on his forehead…. He let go of the mace, and it flew across the arena. The crowd gasped and ducked… Then … bam! It hit the power grid on the arena wall. The area lights flickered, then turned off. Soon the power outage surged throughout the city.
Yes, this really did happen in a Lego story! And in England, Bradford College faculty members called the admin’s decision to spend £24,000 on a new mace for graduation ceremonies a “crass bit of judgement.”
At UBC, things were questionable again this past year. With an opportunity to follow faculty and staff members’ and students’ proposal to divest from fossil fuel investments, in mid February UBC chose to continue to be a part of the problem of climate change instead of the solution. Still heavily invested. And after chalking up a $22m budget surplus, in April & May UBC jumped the line at Wholefoods to draw $7,230 in grocery bag donations. On 24 April an Open Letter signed by 110 faculty members was submitted to the UBC Chancellor Reappointment Committee questioning the process.
The days of the mace in Convocation and governance are of the past and that part of the past is no longer worth reenacting.
It’s difficult to know where this University now stands or what it stands for.
It is time to retire the mace, symbol of aggression, authority, and war. It’s time to march to graduation ceremonies in late May and November with open and empty hands as symbolic of peace and reconciliation of controversies and roles of the President’s Office.
UBC’s mace is a relic but a relic of what? The mace is symbolic speech but what is it saying about us now?
From ancient times, this club, this weapon of assault and offence, the mace was gradually adorned until the late twelfth century when it doubled as a symbol of civil office. Queen Elizabeth I granted her royal mace to Oxford in 1589. From military and civil power derives academic authority. The rest is history and it is not all good.
Dr. Thomas Lemieux, School of Economics, with UBC’s Mace at the May 2015 Convocation.
It is time to retire the macebearer, whose importance is inflated every year by the image’s presence on UBC’s graduation pages leading to Convocation. In pragmatic terms, if the mace falls into the hands of the wrong macebearer or manager at this point, someone’s liable to get clocked with it.
Is UBC’s mace still a respectable appendage to Convocation?
Remember, since that fateful November day in 1997, just five months into Martha Piper’s Presidency, when student activists put their bodies and minds on the line at the APEC protest, Tuum Est adorns both the can of mace sprayed in their eyes and the ceremonial mace that the President’s Office is eager to carry across campus every November and May.
Is it not time to retire the mace?
Comments Off on #UBC time to lay down the mace in graduation and governance #ubcnews #bced #highered
Posted in Academic freedom, Academic Labor, Accountability, BC Education, Budgets, Commentary, Critical University Studies, Faculty, Governance, Maces, Shared governance, Students, Working conditions
Tagged Academic freedom, Faculty, Global Warming, Governance, Protests, Students, University presidents, Working conditions